Refuting the Fine-Tuning Argument

Over the years I've put up numerous posts on what's called cosmic fine-tuning, i.e. the idea that the forces, parameters and constants that make up the fabric of our universe must be exquisitely fine-tuned to unimaginable precision in order for the universe to be life-permitting.

The fact of fine-tuning is such strong support for the belief that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer that those who wish to evade that conclusion have been forced to come up with some pretty desperate counter hypotheses to rebut it.

One of these is the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinity of other universes, all different from each other. Given the assumption then a universe like ours, no matter how improbable, must exist. See here and here)

Another response to the fine-tuning phenomenon is what's called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP).

WAP proponents argue that the fine-tuning of the cosmos isn't anything to marvel at since if the cosmos wasn't fine-tuned no life would exist and we wouldn't be here to observe it. This argument sounds very peculiar, but it may be difficult to see exactly what's wrong with it. In fact, a number of very bright people have embraced it, but its popularity began to wane once philosophers began to give it some thought.

This eight minute video by Inspiring Philosophy explains why the WAP is more like a scientific card trick than a plausible scientific theory:

It does seem fair to say the WAP has faded in popularity over the past decade and other objections to the cosmic fine-tuning argument haven't fared much better. After watching the video you can see why.

Could the Universe Have Come from Nothing?

It turns out that the answer to the question posed above is no and yes.

This 12 minute video from Inspiring Philosophy addresses two questions about the origin of the universe. The first is whether the universe could've arisen out of nothing naturalistically, that is without any input from anything non-spatial and immaterial. The second is whether there's a reality more fundamental than the space-time cosmos we find ourselves in.

Most philosophers find the first claim as proposed by physicist Lawrence Krauss to be incoherent since Krauss' "nothing" is not really nothing.

The second question is leading a lot of philosophers and scientists to the same conclusion that George Berkeley arrived at, namely, ontological idealism. These thinkers believe that the fundamental reality is not matter but information, but if that's so, then that would presuppose a pre-existent mind.

Watch the video and see what you think:

The Singularity and Model Collapse

Casey Luskin has an interesting piece on artificial intelligence at Evolution News.

Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, futurist, top Google engineer, and arguably the greatest prophet of AI to ever span the mainstream academic and tech worlds.

At a recent conference Kurzweil predicted that by 2029 AI will pass the Turing test, and by 2045 it will reach a “singularity.” If you’re not familiar with AI, both concepts probably require a little explaining.

The Turing Test is a test developed by Alan Turing that would show whether an artificial intelligence had reached human levels of intelligence.

The "singularity" is the point at which AI becomes so powerful that it acquires superhuman intelligence, and is capable of growing and expanding on its own. This is “runaway” AI where we lose control and AI begins to train itself and act as a truly sentient, independent entity.

This sounds frightening but Luskin says that Kurzweil isn’t worried:

In Kurzweil’s future, “as medicine continues to merge with AI, it will progress exponentially” and potentially help us solve “every possible human disease.” If Kurzweil is right, by 2029 AI will give humanity the gift of “longevity escape velocity,” where AI-based medicine adds months to our lives faster than time is going by.

While Kurzweil promised that AI will effectively cure aging, he cautioned that doesn’t mean we’ll live forever because you could still die in a freak accident.

But even here AI might come to our rescue, with AI guiding autonomous vehicles that will reduce crash fatalities by 99 percent. AI will further yield breakthroughs in manufacturing, energy, farming, and education that could help us end poverty.

In the coming decades, he predicts that everyone will live in what we currently consider “luxury.”

We’ll also be living in the luxury of our minds. In the coming decades, he expects our brains will “merge with the technology” so we can “master all skills that every human being has created.”

For those hesitant to plug technology into your skull, Kurzweil claims AI to enhance our brains will be no different, ethically speaking, from using a smartphone. At this point, Kurzweil proclaimed AI will be “evolving from within us, not separate from us.”

In other words, under Kurzweil’s transhumanist vision of the future, AI promises us superhuman capabilities complete with heaven on earth and eternal life — what science historian Michael Keas has termed the “AI enlightenment myth.” While Kurzweil framed everything in terms of scientific advancement, it’s easy to envision how this could inspire new religions.

There are skeptics. The power AI would give to whomever could seize it would be enormous and human nature being what it is the people most likely to saeize it are precisely the people we wouldn't want to have it.

Moreover, some experts predict what they call "model collapse."

In short, AI works because humans are real creative beings, and AIs are built using gigantic amounts of diverse and creative datasets made by humans on which they can train and start to think and reason like a human. Until now, this has been possible because human beings have created almost everything we see on the Internet.

As AIs scour the entire Internet, they can trust that virtually everything they find was originally made by intelligent and creative beings (i.e., humans). Train AI on that stuff, and it begins to appear intelligent and creative (even if it really isn’t).

But what will happen as humans become more reliant on AI, and more and more of the Internet becomes populated with AI-generated material? If AI continues to train on whatever it finds on the Internet, but the web is increasingly an AI-generated landscape, then AI will end up training on itself.

We know what happens when AIs train on themselves rather than the products of real intelligent humans — and it isn’t pretty. This is model collapse.

Some experts in AI have warned that we’re at the edge of available training data for AI — essentially we’re hitting the limits of what we can feed AI to make it smart. Once AI runs out of training data, what will it do? Will it implode?

As one put it, "After we’ve scraped the web of all human training data” then “it starts to scrape AI-generated data” because “that’s all you have.” That’s when you get model collapse, and we might be getting close to it.

2029 is only a few years off so we should soon know whether Kurzweil or the skeptics are correct. Meanwhile, there's a lot more on this at the links given above. Checkj them out if you're interested in your technological future.

Israel's Tunnel Strategy

Israel is facing a daunting challenge in defeating and eliminating Hamas in Gaza. In addition to the terrorists' use of hospitals and schools as cover for their operations they have over the years constructed hundreds of underground tunnels with the financial support that Western nations have sent to be used for humanitarian relief of the Gazan people.

A piece at Strategy Page discusses the difficulty the tunnels pose and the strategy the Israelis will probably employ to neutralize them:

Urban fighting is bad enough, especially in Gaza with scores of thousands of booby traps in buildings and tunnels, but the tunnels particularly will make it far worse than any urban combat in history.

Israel casualties could easily exceed the 11,000 of the Yom Kippur War but for one particular innovation – the “sponge bomb”, a variety of rapidly expanding foam plastic that hardens to concrete consistency, and is delivered by anything from a man-portable grenade or an engineering-type large foam sprayer.

The grenade-type device would create a temporary tunnel barrier a meter thick while the engineering devices could form 5-10 meters thick semi-permanent barriers.

These almost instantly effective sprayable tunnel barriers, if they work, will be crucial because they allow the Israelis to use standard urban combat tactics of slow, methodical advances to isolate small chunks of areas, clear those, and do this repeatedly.

Gaza’s network of tunnels (people can probably move underground from any 3+ story Gaza building to any other 3+ story building) would allow Hamas to constantly infiltrate more fighters behind the Israelis. Sprayable tunnel barriers will prevent that. Israel can take small bites above and below ground simultaneously.

While Hamas does have engineers who can clear such barriers, they simply don’t have anywhere near enough, while the required explosives would be so noisy that the Israelis would know when and where the clearing was being done, and kill the Hamas engineers.

With that in mind, and the fact that Israel has obviously prepared years for such an offensive, the conquest of northern Gaza, including its tunnels, might take 9 Israeli infantry brigades, with lots of engineers, as little as 10-14 days @ 300 casualties a day. Assuming 1500 infantry in the rifle companies of each brigade totaling 13,500, that would be 3000-4200 casualties or about 22-31% of the force involved. That’s enough to put them out of action for months.

Nine more, fresh infantry brigades would be required to conquer Gaza’s second half, so Israel is looking at 6-8 thousand casualties total.

When Israel is ready to conquer Gaza’s southern half, they will order civilians there to move to tent cities in adjacent areas of southern Israel. An Israeli general announced this several weeks ago.

Hamas is unlikely to allow this, which will be tough for the civilians but some will probably survive and be cared for by Israeli medics and civil affairs personnel. The US did the same concerning stay-behind German civilians in the 1945 Battle of Aachen, and stay-behind Sunni Arab civilians in the 2004 second battle of Fallujah.

All of the bloodshed and destruction that is, and will be, taking place in Gaza has been brought on the Palestinian Arabs by Hamas whose sole reason for being is to kill Israelis. They're a death cult and their own deaths are condign punishment for their murderous savagery over the last fifteen years.

No one except American leftists will miss them.

Eternal Life, After a Fashion

David Goldman, writing at PJ Media, makes an interesting point. Some of the same secular folk who scoff at the Judeo-Christian concept of a God-granted immortality of the soul nevertheless believe that such immortality is possible through technology, and they're excited by the prospect.

He introduces his thoughts by referencing the belief of ancient elites, particularly in Egypt, that they'd live forever:

What was the upshot of Egyptian idolatry? The ruling elite wanted to live forever, and enslaved my ancestors to build grand tombs in which their mummified bodies would migrate to another life, surrounded by their wealth and some conveniently dead servants. A remarkably large part of Egypt’s economic output fed the fantasies of the pharaohs, at which we laugh today.

The desire for eternal life is not new, and hardly unique to Jews or Christians. Neanderthals buried their dead with grave gifts. Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero, set out to find eternal life. The pharaohs built pyramids with [Jewish] sweat and blood.

Contemporary secular elites are too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Their belief in eternal life relies on advances in technology, but it turns out to be at least as "faith-based" as some traditional views:

Today our progressive opinion-makers ridicule the concept of an eternal God and a world to come, but they believe that we soon will upload our minds to the Internet where our consciousness will continue intact.

We laugh at the idea that the blessed would spend eternity strumming harps while seated on clouds, but enlightened opinion now believes that we shall maintain our conscious minds in Google’s cloud. Add to this a robotic body, and supposedly we can live forever. A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires take this seriously, apparently.

According to Wikipedia, mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: Copy-and-transfer or gradual replacement of neurons. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by copying, transferring, and storing that information state into a computer system or another computational device.

The biological brain may not survive the copying process. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively the simulated mind could reside in a computer that is inside (or connected to) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological body.

That is not science, but science fiction. The urge to escape death, though, remains as powerful today as it was when Moses confronted Ramses.

A tech startup now offers a method to preserve the chemical arrangement of your brain until such time as it can be uploaded, with the minor side-effect that you will have to die in the process.

It's not uncommon to hear materialists declare that they're satisfied with the one life they have and have no desire to live on forever. What they apparently mean is that they have no desire to live forever if that means that they must come to terms with God. If eternal life can be accomplished otherwise, then they're all in.

If they're promised that they can bypass God and find eternal life through technological advances they'll grab hold of that shred of possibility like a drowning man grasping at a piece of flotsam.

There's more in Goldman's article, but this, I think, is noteworthy. Comparing our modern elites to the ancient pharaohs who expended huge quantities of both money and human life to achieve immortality for themselves he writes:

Our new pharaohs believe in methods to achieve immortality as silly as the old ones. And they entertain such fantasies for the same reason: They want to make themselves into immortal gods who have no more constraint on the satisfaction of their appetites than the rapacious, concupiscent and murderous gods of ancient paganism.

Yes, as long as none of it involves the God of Judeo-Christian belief.

How Does a Brain Understand?

One major controversy in the philosophy of mind is driven by the claim that computers can think, or will soon be able to. If that claim is true then it makes it a lot easier to assume that the brain is a kind of computer and that what we call mind is simply a word we use to describe the way the brain functions.

Or put another way, mind is to brain what computer software is to the computer's hardware. This view is called "functionalism."

In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to our cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and neuroscientist Michael Egnor has a helpful discussion of it at Evolution News. Egnor describes the argument as follows:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You've moved to China and you get a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth with you is a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to the algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to and from the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing. As Egnor says: "Thought is about understanding the process, not merely about mechanically carrying out the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm."

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and do understand, either our brains are not computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

This leads to the question of how a material chunk of meat, the brain, can generate something as mysterious as understanding. If all the material that makes up a brain were placed in a laboratory flask would the flask understand? Would it be conscious?

If you could peer into someone's brain while they were thinking would you see "understanding" somewhere in the brain or would you see only electrochemical reactions occurring along neurons? And if the latter is what you would observe how do these reactions produce an understanding? What exactly is understanding anyway?

That human beings are capable of such marvels as conscious understanding is evidence that there's more to our cognitive abilities than just our material brain. Perhaps that something more is an immaterial mind or soul that's cognitively integrated with the material brain and which the brain cannot function without.

Journey Inside the Cell

A three and a half minute video titled Journey Inside the Cell, narrated by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis, gives us a glimpse of a very small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell.

As Meyer's Signature in the Cell makes clear the process is much more complex than what the video shows, but even so, the video does a nice job of illustrating why so many people today have trouble believing the materialist dogma that the astonishing complexity of the cell is solely a product of blind chance and natural selection.

If you don't know the biology the video illustrates, don't worry. Just get a sense of how complex the process is and bear in mind that, if naturalism is true, it's a process that must have emerged almost instantaneously early on in the history of life. It can't be the product of gradual evolution since until this process or one like it was in place evolution couldn't even get underway.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be produced by intelligent minds. To think that such information could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that some bright people are convinced that that's what happened.

Nevertheless, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this:

• Only material, physical processes can be considered in science.
• Enormously complex structures like cells exist.
• Therefore these complex structures must have been produced solely by material, physical processes.

The error here, of course, is in the first premise. It imposes an arbitrary limitation on scientific explanation that potentially rules out explanations for biological complexity which might be true. Just because some people think that scientific explanations should be restricted to physical causes it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

Nor does any scientist who insists on dealing exclusively with physical causes - and not all scientists think this is wise - have any business ruling out intelligent causes.

The most a materialist scientist can say is that he chooses not to theorize about causes that can't be observed or measured. He cannot say that such causes don't exist or haven't operated in the world or can't be inferred from what we are able to observe and measure.

Yet many scientists do say this, but when they do they're not speaking as scientists, they're speaking as philosophers making metaphysical pronouncements that go well beyond what a materialist scientist can affirm.

Boycott Jews?

There's a piece making the rounds on the internet which highlights the problematic nature of BDS campaigns and recent calls for Muslims in Philadelphia to boycott anything Jewish.

In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:

Any Muslim who has syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.

A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube. Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.

If a Muslim has diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun pyramidon and antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.

Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of chloral hydrate.

Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.

Should a Muslim child get diphtheria, he must refrain from the “Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.

Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.

They should continue to die or remain crippled by infantile paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.

Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.

Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world-renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.

In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with syphilis, gonorrhea, heart disease, headaches, typhus, diabetes, mental disorders, polio convulsions and tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott.

And don't call for a doctor on your cell phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a Jewish engineer.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of these claims but readers are welcome to check them out and email me. I'll be happy to post any corrections.

Proving Chesterton Right

Mind Matters has an interesting piece that addresses an article at Scientific American written by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Loeb states that all the theories which seek to explain the origin of our universe without positing an intelligence are inadequate.

In his Sci Am article Loeb writes:

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

Loeb's objection to each of these explanations is that they simply push the problem back a step or two or are otherwise unsatisfactory. He argues that the best explanation is that our universe resulted from the intentional efforts of an intelligent agent or agents:

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

There's more to Loeb's hypothesis at the link, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on what he's proposing in what's been quoted above. He's arguing that intelligent beings of some sort created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, and designed it to produce civilizations driven by Darwinian natural selection:

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

This hypothesis is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian creation story except that Loeb substitutes some sort of hypothetical superintelligent, superpowerful extra-cosmic aliens for a creator God, but these aliens seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace.

Why this puzzling aversion to identifying the designer as God? What is it about the concept of God that repels our naturalist friends like Dracula from a crucifix? One gets the feeling that were it to be somehow discovered that there really was a heaven and a hell awaiting the departed that our contemporary secularists would insist that these had in fact been established by aliens and that there's no reason to suppose that a God had anything at all to do with it.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that when men no longer believe in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Loeb’s suggestion is a confirming instance of Chesterton’s claim. Unwilling to attribute the universe to God, he posits creatures whose existence not only lacks any unwelcome religious implications and overtones, but also lacks any supporting evidence.

The universe, Loeb acknowledges, is the product of intelligent design, but the designer need not be anything so rebarbative as the God of traditional theism. Yet the unobservable aliens hypothesis is not in any way testable or scientific, so what advantage does one gain by positing such beings?

What's the practical difference, after all, between a transcendent superpowerful, superintelligent alien who brings about the creation of the cosmos out of nothing and a God who does the same?

It seems like a scientist can offer any explanation for the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. We might well ask why that is.

Israel Must Be Allowed to Win

Writing in the Washington Free Beacon Matthew Continetti lays out the case for ignoring, and denouncing, the many calls for "pause" and "cease-fire" coming from the left and letting Israel win their war with Hamas. He argues that calls for a ceasefire reward barbarism, and he's right.

The world imposes a double standard on Israel. Israel is expected to act with "restraint", but no such expectation attaches to the Arab Muslims. Here's Continetti:

The usual double standard is hard at work: Hamas terrorists spent years planning the murder of more than 1,400 Jews on October 7, and Hamas terrorists continue to hold hundreds of captives, including Americans, while shelling Israel with indiscriminate rocket fire. Yet it is somehow Israel's responsibility to exercise self-restraint.

This interpretation of the situation is entirely backward. Hamas could end all this tomorrow if it released the hostages, put down its arms, and surrendered. Hamas, not Israel, is the aggressor. Hamas, not Israel, is the "occupier" of the Gaza Strip. Hamas, not Israel, rejects international law. Hamas, not Israel, steals food, fuel, and water from civilians. And the fact that these words need to be written at all is evidence that the culture-producing institutions of the West—the media, the universities, cultural and political celebrities—are irreparably broken.

A ceasefire would be worse than useless. If Israel were to end combat operations now, with Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and captives hidden in the maze of tunnels known as the Gaza Metro, then the terrorists will score a remarkable victory. Harassment and attacks on Jews worldwide will surge.

The West has flooded Gaza with millions of dollars in aid but Hamas steals it from the Palestinian people for whom it's intended and uses it to build hundreds of miles of underground tunnels in which to launch their terror attacks against Israel.

Continetti points out that if Israel halts its campaign to destroy these tunnels and Hamas' organization with them then the terrorists will just reorganize and rebuild:

Hamas will regroup. Its strategy of using civilians as pawns in a chess match for global opinion will have proven effective once again. Its ranks will swell. It will plot its next move.

"The Al-Aqsa Deluge"—Hamas's name for its October 7 crime against humanity—"is just the first time," Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas factotum, said on Lebanese television the other day. "And there will be a second, a third, a fourth [until Israel is annihilated]."

Hamad's words reinforce the lesson of October 7: You cannot maintain a ceasefire against homicidal maniacs with genocidal intent. Since 2007, Israel believed that Hamas could be bought off, that the price of détente was rocket fire and intermittent conflict to "mow the lawn" of terrorists.

Détente was an illusion. Hamas used the pause between wars to plan the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history. Hamas will do so again if given the chance.

Someone once noted the truth that if the Arabs would lay down their arms there'd be no more violence in the Middle East. If the Israelis were to lay down their arms they'd cease to exist.

The pressure on Israel to abandon its war of survival is global and intense and the pressure on President Biden to force Israel into a cease-fire is causing him to waver:

The cretins at the United Nations want a ceasefire. So-called peace activists have similar demands. American campuses are rife with pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic voices. The socialist "Squad" of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives defame AIPAC and the pro-Israel community while regurgitating Hamas propaganda.

Bureaucrats in the State Department and the White House are livid at President Biden for supporting a democratic nation's right to self-defense. Democratic strategists worry that Biden's commitment to Israel might cost him votes in Michigan, throwing the election to Donald Trump.

And Biden is starting to crack.

At an event in Minnesota on Wednesday, a deranged heckler screamed at Biden to impose a ceasefire. Biden could have stayed silent. He could have told off the heckler by detailing Hamas's evil—yes, evil—acts and by saying America will stand with Israel in this existential struggle. Instead he told the crowd that "I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out."

Continetti points out what should be obvious to anyone who has observed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over the past fifty years - a pause simply won't work.

There have been pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Hamas steals the aid and uses it for its war machine. There have been pauses to let civilians in Gaza evacuate to the southern part of the Strip or, in select cases, transit the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Hamas won't let people leave. Since October 7, Hamas has released five hostages. Hundreds are still in captivity—including 32 children. The youngest is nine months old. Nine months.

Hamas doesn't need a pause to "get the prisoners out." It needs a conscience. And it needs to pay.

Read the rest of his column at the link. He closes with this:

Why not try a different strategy? Why not say that Israel has every right to protect itself, that Hamas is responsible for every life lost, and that America will stand with Israel until the job is done? No more equivocation. No more dithering. No more obedience to the politically correct. Let Israel win.

If Naturalism Is True We Have No Reason to Trust Our Reason

In past VP posts (see here for example) I've written that the metaphysical doctrine of Naturalism and the biological doctrine of Evolution cannot both be true. It may be that one or the other is true, but they can't both be true.

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist has no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in his book Where the Conflict really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” - Atheist philosopher 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. - Atheist philosopher 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.- Atheist biologist Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them in his book On Miracles where he writes:

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.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E. This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out.

The naturalist is faced with a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false. On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

To loosely cite Craig again:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet, despite all this, the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.

Two State Solution?

President Biden recently declared that once Israel has completed its war against Hamas there must be a "Two State Solution" to the situation in the region.

Perhaps the President, as well as many of the Pro-Palestinian antisemites protesting in our streets against the "Occupiers" and "Colonizers," i.e. the Israelis, aren't aware that throughout the last seventy years or so, Israel has tried five times to give the Palestinian Arabs their own state and each time the Arabs refused.

The Arabs don't want a Two State Solution. They've not hidden the fact that they don't just yearn for their own state, they're obsessed with getting Israel out of the Middle East altogether. In other words, the Arabs and their allies among Western university professors and students demand that Israel commit national suicide.

The attacks against Israel will continue until either Israelis judst leave or they're all slaughtered, as this Hamas spokesman makes crystal clear. This short Prager U. clip reviews the attempts that Israel has made to help the Palestinians achieve their own state and the Arab responses to each attempt. It's quite informative:

The Koch/Chalmers Wager

Back in 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch had wagered philosopher of mind David Chalmers a case of fine wine that within the next twenty-five years a specific “signature of consciousness” would be found in the brain. Koch is a materialist and believes that whatever consciousness is, it's a product of the physical brain.

Chalmers, the author of the so-called "Hard Problem of Consciousness" bet that no such connection to the brain would be found. Chalmers won.

Chalmers is a dualist although he doesn't believe that the mind or soul is immortal as most dualists do. He does, however, believe that mind is a fundamentally different substance than matter and that it exists independently of matter.

You can read the details of the wager and see an interview with Chalmers at Mind Matters.

Denyse O'Leary who has written a lot on the debate between dualism and materialism in the philosophy of mind, discusses the wager between Koch and Chalmers and some related matters in a piece at Evolution News.

Here's an excerpt:

Materialists who insist that science will somehow “crack” the problem of consciousness often sound as though they are missing the point. The most recent attempt, the wager between Christof Koch and David Chalmers, ended not only with the materialist losing the wager but with broad recriminations within the discipline. It’s sensitive [within that discipline] because never far below the surface is the thought that all theories of consciousness are pseudoscientific.

As a result, the proponents of various theories are not always held to a rigid ideological standard.

Philosopher of mind David Chalmers, who coined the term “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” also spoke to Kuhn at Closer to Truth. He told him that he accepts dualism, the idea that the mind or soul has a real existence, but he does not believe in the immortality of the soul — though he would like to.

Presumably, he believes that the soul, though real, dies with the body.

He said something else too, that dualism did not come easily to him: “Every week I had a different physical theory of consciousness. None of them worked and eventually I came to see this is for systematic reasons.

"There are reasons why no purely physical theory will ever give you consciousness. It’ll always be an objective theory of objective functions. None of that ever gives you subjective experience.”

In other words, sensations, beliefs, desires, intentions and acts of will are all subjective and defy material explanation. Yet explanation in terms of the material brain is the only option open to the materialist.

The Middle East's Perpetual War

Given the current state of things in Israel and Gaza I thought it appropriate to rerun this post from 5/30/2019:

Ever since its founding in 1948 the Israelis have been fighting a defensive war against their neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. Their neighbors attack and Israel responds until the attack is repulsed and their enemies are too weakened to continue.

Then the world prevails upon Israel to relent, to show restraint, and retreat from the field which, of course, allows their enemy to recover, regroup, resupply, and at some future date restart the whole cycle all over again.

It seems like an exercise in endless futility, but this is the status quo in the Middle East, and it will continue until Israel's foes, who have sworn its destruction, ultimately wear it down and destroy it. It often seems that this would not bother the West overmuch, which perversely views the stronger more civilized side in a dispute to be ipso facto the evil aggressor and oppressor.

Nevertheless, the prospect of their ultimate destruction should at least bother Israel, one would think, unless, like the rest of the West, they've succumbed to the notion, promoted by the left for the last eighty years or so, that the civilized nations of the world just don't deserve to survive.

Roger Simon at PJ Media once made a shocking suggestion as to how perpetual war in the Middle East might be ended. He opined that perhaps it's time for Israel to create a new status quo. Perhaps it's time to eliminate Hamas in Gaza:

A permanent truce, i.e., genuine peace, does not seem part of the vocabulary of jihadists whose sworn goal is to make the world Islamic, sooner or later, like it or not. They just take a time out when it looks as if they could be in trouble, like a hockey player with a twisted ankle.

As an example, Hamas is known for its hudnas, cooling down (or pretending to) and then heating up again as soon as possible to do what the beginning of its charter always promised it would do — destroy Israel.

For years the bien pensant of the West (Europe, the U.S.) have urged, actually put strong pressure on, Israel to play the hudna game with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the sociopathic Islamofascist crew. The Israelis, from a humanistic tradition and anxious to be thought well of, have acquiesced, even when they have the extreme whip hand.

The results have been as one would predict: another war, another hudna and on and on. This has been going on since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 - even before that really. In other words, for a long while.

Maybe it’s time for a different approach. How about just...winning?

Whether one agrees with Simon or not it's true enough that what many Israelis realize but many other Westerners seemingly don't is that radical Islam is in a state of permanent war with the world. It's a war that's been raging since the 7th century and will continue until Islam is the only religion in the world (actually it will continue beyond that as Muslims will be killing each other to decide which sect of Islam will be the only sect in the world).

We will never be safe from this threat. To think that it's at an end, or that we have somehow made peace with the Islamists, is to confuse their temporary tactic of hudna with a genuine desire for peace.

The world shouts "peace, peace" but there is no peace. The Islamists don't want peace, they want total victory. That's why it often seems that there's no peaceful or lasting solution to the conflict in the Middle East and no realistic prospect of compromise.

Tragically, any clear-eyed American foreign policy must take that as its starting point. To do otherwise is to substitute wishful thinking and self-delusion for objective reality.

Human Language, Animal Communication

An interesting short article by Michael Egnor at Mind Matters explores the difference between human language and the vocalizations of other animals. Despite having much of the hearing and vocal apparatus necessary for speech, animals are not capable of language.

He begins by quoting science writer Tom Seigfried who states that: It’s true that humans, and humans alone, evolved the complex set of voice, hearing and brain-processing skills enabling full-scale sophisticated vocal communication. Yet animals can make complicated sounds; parrots can mimic human speech and cats can clearly convey that it’s time for a treat.

Many animals possess an acute sense of hearing and are able to distinguish random noises from intentional communication.

Much of the physiological apparatus for hearing and speaking is found in all land-dwelling vertebrates — the tetrapods — including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. “Humans share a significant proportion of our basic machinery of hearing and vocal production with other tetrapods,” Fitch writes in the Annual Review of Linguistics. Even so, only humans have language, Egnor argues. Here's part of his reasoning:

[Animals] can make and respond to signs—gestures, grunts and the like. A dog, for example, can respond appropriately to simple words directed at him (“Sit!” “Fetch!”). But all animal communication is symbols, that is, signals that point directly to an object. In this case, the object is a simple expected action the animal is to perform immediately.

What animals cannot do is communicate using abstractions. They cannot use designators, — words employed abstractly as language. For example, a dog can be trained, by reward and punishment, to stay when told, “Stay!”

He associates the sound “s-t-a-y” with a behavior and performs the behavior. But he doesn’t know what you mean when you say “Let’s stay a bit longer on the beach,” “He extended his stay in Peru,” or “The judge issued a stay of the eviction order.”

Animals can only think concretely. Their thought is of particulars—the particular bowl of food, thrown stick, or warm bed. They don’t contemplate nutrition, exercise, or rest. Humans can think abstractly, without any particular physical object in mind. For example, a vet might tell her client during an office visit, “Tuffy here needs to lose about 1.5 kg. I suggest a lower calorie kibble and more exercise—if possible, before bedtime.”

She can explain it to her client but not to the dog because it’s all abstractions about times, places, things, and concepts. Of course, he might recognize his name, “Tuffy,” and raise his ears slightly to see if he is being told to do something concrete.

Concrete thought needs no language because the concrete thinker focuses on a perceived object. Tuffy thinks of his bowl of food. If he were to think of nutrition, an abstract concept, he would need abstract designators as objects, not only to express his thought but even to think it.

In short, animals don’t have language because they don’t have abstract thought and thus have neither the capacity nor the need for abstract designators—words as language.

Language is a tool for abstract thinking and only human beings can think abstractly. Despite what some Darwinians aver, the gap between animals and humans is not just a narrow evolutionary jump. It's a chasm, a chasm the bridging of which has eluded evolutionary explanation for 160 years.

Mind-Boggling Numbers

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.

Enjoy:

After Death

I've written about NDEs (Near Death Experiences) before and have said that I used to be skeptical about them (although a character in my 2015 novel Bridging the Abyss has one), but the scientific and philosophical literature has become so large regarding these phenomena and the experiences people report have been documented by so many medical professionals, that I've come to believe that these reports, or at least some of them, are very likely to be veridical.

I'm still a bit leery of reports that the individual experienced heaven or hell. Those reports are, by their nature, not confirmable, since, with a couple of notable exceptions, the person who makes them can provide no details that can lead to a verification of the truth of what they recount.

So I'm generally withholding final judgment on those, but reports that contain details that the person could not have known apart from having an Out of the Body Experience (OBE) and which can actually be confirmed are another matter.

If those reports are indeed true they must count as very powerful evidence against philosophical materialism, a view which says that our conscious experience is the product solely of our physical brain. After all, if individuals who show no brain activity are having conscious experience then there's something else involved in producing that experience besides the material brain.

I recently came across a podcast that features an interview with a cardiac physician named Dr. Jeffrey Long who has investigated thousands of these reports and who is featured in the forthcoming documentary titled After Death (see the trailer below). The information discussed in the podcast is fascinating, and I commend it to anyone who's interested in NDEs.

I did have a couple of questions, though, about the podcast. For example, according to the trailer, 23% of those who report an experience of either heaven or hell describe something that sounds hellish, but Dr. Long says several times that the experience is wonderful for everyone who has had it. I'm not sure how to reconcile those two claims.

At any rate, here's the podcast:

Here's the trailer for After Death which is being released to theaters tonight (Oct. 27th):

The Marvelous Hummingbird

From time to time I've done posts on hummingbirds which are surely one of the most fascinating creatures in the natural world. From their unique tongues to their amazing acrobatics and from their gorgeous coloration to the tiny size of some species they're just amazing birds.

This short but beautiful video, put out by the John 10:10 Project, explains how the hummingbird's anatomy allows them to fly both forward and backward as well as upside down.

Check it out and ask yourself as you watch how blind, purposeless processes could've produced such a marvel:

Peaceful Palestinians?

One of the myths that circulates whenever Hamas does something barbaric is that Hamas doesn't really represent the Palestinian people in Gaza, that Hamas may be savage but the Palestinians just want to live in peace. Our president perpetuated this myth in his Oval Office speech of October 20th when he said that “The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”

Of course if this is so it's hard to explain why Hamas consistently gets over 50% of the vote in the Gazan "elections", but set that aside. No doubt there are some Palestinian Arabs who just want to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors, but this story by Andrew Tobin in the Washington Free Beacon makes one wonder how many of them there are.

Tobin begins by noting that the attackers of Israeli civilians on October 7th weren't just Hamas fighters. These terrorists were joined by a large mob of Palestinian civilians in their massacre. Here are some excerpts:

Whereas the Hamas terrorists wore uniforms and carried military-grade weapons, the Gazans who followed them into the Jewish state were dressed as civilians and mostly unarmed, two officials from Israel's devastated Gaza border region said. Young men with knives, overweight dads, and at least one elderly man on crutches were among those who exploited Hamas's rampage to create a second wave of carnage that rivaled the barbarism of the professional terrorists....

"The second wave of Arabs who came into the country were just as cruel as the terrorists of the first wave," Gadi Yarkoni, the mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, which encompasses most of the Gaza border communities, told the Free Beacon. "We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim....the people of Gaza, who we once thought were good, are responsible. It’s not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Ordinary people from Gaza took [our citizens]."

Yarkoni, who survived Oct. 7 in the safe room of his house in Kibbutz Nirim, estimated that 3,000 Gazans were involved in the attack, about half of them "civilians." The IDF has put the total number of terrorists at 2,500 to 3,500 but declined to specify whether that figure includes non-Hamas members.....

"I saw a scene [in the video footage] where a Gazan civilian chopped off a man's head. It took him several attempts to detach the head from the body," he said.

According to a video that was posted online, Gazans used a bulldozer to tear down a section of Israel's border fence, and hundreds of unarmed men and boys—wearing T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers, and flip-flops—crossed into the country. They came mostly on foot but also by bicycle, scooter, and motorcycle. Someone appears to have brought a donkey.

Other online videos show ordinary Gazans taking selfies on and around Israeli tanks and ransacking a military base on the border. All the while, cries of "Allahu Akbar" rang out.

The mob soon arrived in nearby Israeli communities that Hamas was already terrorizing. Security footage and Hamas videos from Be'eri, Nir Oz, and other kibbutzim capture dozens of ordinary-looking Gazans looting and taking part in killings and kidnappings, including of women and children....

Meanwhile, in the streets of Gaza, crowds greeted the returning kidnappers as conquering heroes, online videos show. Some Gazans taunted the Israeli hostages and defiled the dead as they were paraded through the streets.

Raz Cohen, a 24-year-old former Israeli commando, saw both Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans kill and rape revelers at the Nova music festival in Re'im, where at least 260 people were slaughtered. After escaping the Hamas terrorists, Cohen hid in a bush with a group of friends for almost seven hours. He watched as a gang of Gazan civilians—men wearing Adidas and armed only with knives and axes—raped and murdered a young Jewish woman.

"While they were raping and killing, they always laughed. I can't forget how they laughed," Cohen told the Free Beacon.

Several members of Cohen's group later ran from the bush and were caught by the same gang of Gazans. He said he heard his friends' screams as they were tortured and stabbed to death. "You know when you hear the screams of someone who is dying," said Cohen, who was eventually rescued by Israeli soldiers.

A young couple who were abducted at the Nova festival also appear to have been victims of ordinary Gazans. Footage shows that Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or were taken away by a group of about a dozen young men, some of them teenagers. As Or's brother told Israel's Channel 99, the kidnappers did not look to be armed. Minutes before Or was captured, he texted friends that 20 "people" were hunting down and lynching Jews, according to screenshots published by Israel's Ynet news site....

Daniel Meir, Nirim's security chief, said, "The civilians went into houses and turned them upside down. They took phones, computers, jewelry, whatever they could find," he recalled. "From what I know, they also took most of the hostages."

Even though Nirim suffered less than some of its neighbors, Meir said the attack—and particularly the role of ordinary Gazans—shattered his community's faith in coexistence. Many of the kibbutzniks were longtime peace activists, and there was widespread support among them for a program that allowed thousands of Gazans to work in Israel....

"Today we understand that [the Palestinians] are educated differently. They are educated for something else. Just as we crave peace, they crave jihad," Meir said. "They are raising monsters. And it is impossible to make peace with monsters."

There are additional details at the link. It's hard to believe, perhaps, but there are a lot of Americans on the left who are denying that any of this happened or that it's as bad as the reports indicate. Because the number of deniers is so large the Israeli Defense Force is planning to release captured video taken by Hamas and other Gazans that documents the atrocities.

No doubt the deniers will claim that those nefarious Israelis photo-shopped the videos, but for those who are still unblinded by anti-semitic hatred, the reports of the thousands of Palestinians who joined in the slaughter should put an end to the myth that the Palestinian Gazans are not sympathetic to Hamas.

What Dostoevsky Knew

Much of the civilized world looked on in horror at the videos of the Hamas savages murdering and torturing whole families on October 7th and, to the shock and surprise of much of the civilized world, a significant portion of those who are supposed to be the "best and the brightest," American college students, actually defended and even revelled in the butchery.

Northwestern University professor Gary Saul Morson tells us in the Wall Street Journal (subscription) that the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wouldn't have been surprised and we shouldn't either.

Morson opens with Dostoevsky's description of atrocities committed by Turkish Muslims in the 19th century including one episode where a young girl was forced to watch her father being flayed alive and then continues,

For the time being, “people are simply intimidated by some sort of habit,” Dostoevsky continues, but if some progressive expert were to come up with a theory showing that sometimes flaying skins can benefit the right cause because “the end justifies any means,” and if that expert were to express his view “using the appropriate style,” then, “believe me,” there would be respectable people among us “willing to carry out the idea.”

Despite our sophistication and professions of compassion, “all that’s needed is for some new fad to appear and people would be instantly transformed.”

Not everyone, of course, but the number of adherents of the new fad would grow while others would be afraid, or embarrassed, to cling to old ideas. And then, “where would we find ourselves: among the flayed or among the flayers?”

There's little doubt which group would be populated by a lot of those university students chanting for the elimination of Israel, the gassing of Jews, and insisting that whatever barbarisms Hamas inflicted upon those people in their kibbutzes, it was justified.

Morson again:

Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principles—“and this after Rousseau and Voltaire!”

We know, as Dostoevsky could only suppose, that during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured in the most degrading way possible; and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine and take bits of food away from bloated children.

In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism and anti-imperialism.

Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. “Believe me,” Dostoevsky addresses his readers, “the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.”

It's a mistake, Morson writes, to imagine that thuggish deeds are performed only by thugs, and he's right. As Alexander Solzhnitsyn famously wrote:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Every human being is capable of doing evil given sufficient motivation, which is why we need to believe that some behaviors are wrong and that we'll be held accountable for what we do. If we don't believe that then there are no guardrails to our behavior.

Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, imprisoned and tortured in communist Romania in the late 40s and early 50s for being a Christian, wrote in his book Tortured for Christ, that,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint fromn the depths of evil that is in man.

The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

The only adequate guardrail for the perfidy in the human heart is the belief that God commands us to love our neighbor, that our neighbor is whoever crosses our path and that we'll ultimately be held accountable for how we treat others.

Morson adds that, "If it seems that only uncivilized people could be such sadists, Dostoevsky cautions, know that the same thing could happen among civilized Europeans as well. 'For the moment it is still against the law,' he writes, 'but were it to depend on us, perhaps, nothing would stop us despite all our civilization.' "

Mathematician David Berlinski, in his book Devil's Delusion, recounts an illustrative episode from WWII:

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe...Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

Some people insist that human beings are basically good, but to believe that one has to ignore much of the history of the last two centuries.

Four Questions About Free Will

An article at Mind Matters lists and discusses four questions concerning free will that often arise in conversations on the topic.

Here are the four with a brief summary of the discussion. For the complete discussion see the article:

1. Has psychology shown that free will does not really exist? No, in fact the experiments of Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) show just the opposite. We've discussed these experiments on VP in the past, for instance here.

2. Is free will a logical idea? Yes, in fact denying it is often illogical. If all our decisions and beliefs are determined then our denial of free will is the inevitable product of our genes and childhood influences of which we may be only dimly, if at all, aware. We may think we have good reasons to disbelieve in free will, but whatever those reasons are they likely play a very minor role in our disbelief.

3. Would a world without free will be a better place? No, it'd be a dystopia in which there's no guilt, no moral obligation, no human dignity and in which people would inevitably come under the tyranny of totalitarian "controllers."

4. Are there science concepts that support free will? Yes, the concept of information is one. Check out the original article to see why.

It's interesting that the conviction that we're free seems almost inescapable. Even determinists can't shake it.

Philosopher John Searle, for example, writes that, "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."

John Horgan, a writer for Scientific American, states that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will."

So why do many people deny that we're free? Perhaps the overriding reason is that they've embraced a metaphysical materialism that eliminates from their ontology anything that cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics. Since those laws are strictly deterministic our intuition that we're free must be an illusion.

Another question we might ponder is why anyone should embrace materialism. Perhaps the answer to that is that the alternative, the belief that there are immaterial substances like minds, puts one on a slippery slope to belief in God and that belief is just not tolerable for many moderns.

Better to deny that we have free will, the thinking goes, than to open the door of our ontology to supernatural entities.

A University Student's Disillusionment

If you're a college student, planning to go to college or the parent of someone in either of these groups, you might be interested in the following 5 minute video featuring a young woman by the name of Jay Stephens. Ms. Stephens explains how as an idealistic university freshman she thought she'd learn how to change the world but was totally disillusioned by the education she received:

It's almost criminal that universities keep raising student costs in part to pay a burgeoning administrative staff comprised of people who often serve no real educational purpose, or any purpose at all.

At the same time universities and colleges enroll students who would probably be better off not going to college in the first place and who, after running up debt for a couple of years, ultimately drop out or flunk out.

Then, too, schools entice other students to take boutique courses and majors which eventually result in a useless degree that'll be of no help in enabling them to pay off their debt.

As if that weren't bad enough, a lot of schools have anandoned the goal of educating their students in favor of indoctrinating them in left-wing ideologies that cause them to despise people unlike themselves and to despise the country that has given them the opportunity to attend university in the first place.

Anyway, check out the video. Hopefully, Ms. Stephens' experience won't be your experience, but it is, unfortunately, the experience of thousands of young students in today's academy.

What Is Social Justice?

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.

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 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 entire life to attain and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.

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 GPAs and awarded to students who didn't do as well so that everyone gets a C. 

I'll bet not many. Anyway, check out the Goldberg video. It's illuminating.

The Folly of Jumping to Conclusions

It would certainly be helpful to the cause of clarity if people, both at home and abroad, and especially in our media, would refrain from jumping to conclusions about events in the current war in Gaza based on what seems to be the expectation that the Israeli military and government are a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters and instead wait until the evidence is in.

If they would've done that this past week they would've spared themselves considerable embarrassment.

Twice in recent days Hamas claimed that the Israelis deliberately targeted civilians for death. The first instance was on a highway where civilians were fleeing south away from Israeli artillery and air bombardment. Just "by coincidence" someone in the traffic caught an explosion in a car ahead of them on the highway and the occupants of the car were killed.

Many were quick to condemn Israel for attacking civilians, but subsequent analysis of the video showed that the explosion originated from inside the vehicle.

The second instance was an allegation of an Israeli missile attack on a hospital in Gaza in which an indeterminate number of people were killed (Hamas put the number of dead at almost 500 but it appears that this was clearly an exagerration). The Arab world went into a frenzy as the news spread around the globe. Massive protests against Israel erupted even in Western cities and on American campuses.

But as the forensic evidence accumulated it became clear to objective observers, if not to those for whom facts don't matter, that the hospital explosion was due to the failure of a rocket launched by Hamas' ally Islamic Jihad. The rocket, intended for Israel, crashed into the hospital parking lot which should've raised some questions in the minds of fair-minded folks everywhere, even in our media.

For example, if the blast had been caused by an Israeli weapon, does anyone think that the Israeli government would deliberately target a hospital? What on earth would they stand to gain from doing so? And if they did target a hospital does anyone think they would've missed? And if it was indeed an errant Israeli munition why was there no crater or damage done to surrounding buildings?

There's still more reason for doubting Hamas' account that it was an Israeli attack, aside from the fact that Hamas is a very unreliable source of information about anything having to do with Israel. There's audio of Hamas operatives discussing the blast and saying that it was one of their rockets that malfunctioned, and there's also video of rockets being fired in Gaza toward Israel and one of them blowing up in the sky and plummeting to earth in the vicinity of the hospital.

Finally, there's no record of any Israeli military activity in the area that could've caused the explosion, but none of this matters to those whose hatred for Israel and the Jews is so virulent that, as one young woman declared in a spasm of outrage, whatever Hamas did to the Jews on October 7th was justified.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Independent analysts poring over publicly available images of Tuesday’s explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza and its aftermath say the blast site doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a strike with a bomb or missile of the types usually used by Israel.

The amount of damage also appears inconsistent with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry’s assertion that 471 people were killed, experts said.

“We have none of the indicators of an airstrike—none,” said Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an expert on military and security issues. The U.S. has collected “high confidence” signals intelligence, which includes electronic surveillance, indicating that the blast at the hospital in Gaza was caused by the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, U.S. officials said, buttressing Israel’s contention that it wasn’t responsible for the blast.

Washington’s assessment that Israel wasn’t behind the blast at the hospital drew, in part, on communications intercepts and other intelligence gathered by the U.S., defense officials said. Independent analysts poring over publicly available images of Tuesday’s explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza and its aftermath say the blast site doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a strike with a bomb or missile of the types usually used by Israel.

The amount of damage also appears inconsistent with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry’s assertion that 471 people were killed, experts said.

“Our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said, adding that the U.S. continues to collect information on the incident.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees said they had been briefed on the intelligence related to the blast, and concluded it wasn’t the result of an Israeli military action.

The small size of the open area where the explosion occurred, coupled with limited shock-wave damage, was inconsistent with the death toll claimed by the Palestinian Health Ministry, several open-source intelligence analysts said.

Those, like many in our media, who don't hold off their judgments of blame until the evidence is in are either very unwise or very iniquitous, or both.

The Myth of Israeli Occupation

Robert Spencer argues that the idea that Israel is occupying Palestinian lands is a myth. He writes:

[Those who call for an end to the "occupation"] all likely assume that there was a previous Palestinian state that the Israelis occupied and destroyed, but in reality, there has never been a Palestinian state of any kind, ever, at any point in history. There has been a region known as “Palestine” since 134AD, when the Romans applied that name to the land that had previously been known as Judea, that is, land of the Jews.

But “Palestine” was akin to “Staten Island” — it was only the name of a region, never of a people or a nation.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire had sovereignty over the territory that is now Israel and the supposedly occupied land as well. The Ottoman Empire was, however, known by this time as “The Sick Man of Europe.” In the early 1920s, just before the empire fell altogether, it conceded control of Palestine and the land that came to be known as Transjordan, and now as Jordan, to the League of Nations.

On July 24, 1922, the League granted administrative control over these territories to Britain with specific instructions to create a “national home for the Jewish people.”

Spencer doesn't say this but it was during this period that many Jews were settling Palestine and taming the desert. Thousands of Arabs thus migrated to Palestine to find work. They came from countries all over North Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. It's their descendants who make up the bulk of today's Palestinian Arabs. Relatively few Palestinians have been in the land for more than a few generations.

When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, it immediately had to fight a war for its survival against the surrounding Arab nations that had vowed to destroy it. Then there was finally an occupation — in fact, two: Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria (which it renamed the West Bank).

Israel won back those territories in the Six-Day War of 1967, but that was actually ending an occupation, not starting one: the only international law governing sovereignty over those territories stipulated that they were to be part of a national home for the Jewish people.

Prior to the 1948 war the Arab nations advised the Palestinian Arabs to leave the country so that they wouldn't be caught in the cross-fire. They were promised that after the war when the Arab nations had destroyed the new nation of Israel these "refugees" could return and plunder the property of the Jews. Israel, however, won the war and the "refugees" were stuck in refugee camps.

So from whom was the land stolen? Not from the Ottomans, who had ceded it to the League of Nations. Not from the league, which had granted administrative powers over it to the British. Not from the British, who only had it in order to help create a Jewish state there. And not from the Palestinians, who didn’t even exist until the 1960s, when the KGB and Yasir Arafat bestowed Palestinian nationality upon a group of Levantine Arabs as a rhetorical weapon to use against Israel.....

A Palestinian state, if it is ever created, would be the first-ever such entity in the history of the world.

Never Again?

There was a time when people in the U.S. were sickened and appalled by the images they were seeing from the Nazi extermination camps. How could this happen in one of the most culturally advanced nations in the history of the world, Americans wondered. Except perhaps for some fringe types, Americans were united in declaring with the Jews "Never again."

Disgusted by what had happened to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, we even supported the establishment of a Jewish state carved out of the desert in British-run Palestine.

Well, that was then. From what we've witnessed on our campuses this week there are lots of young people who are perfectly willing to see it happen again. There are lots of our children who have no qualms about aligning themselves in solidarity with those who raped, tortured and murdered 1300 people last weekend.

This act of almost incomprehensible savagery was, in their depraved minds, justified "resistance."

And those who think this way are not just on our campuses. There's been an effort in the progressive media to draw a kind of moral equivalence between the Israelis and those who slaughtered them, an effort to actually blame Israel for what the Hamas butchers did. There's also been a strange reluctance to identify those butchers as "terrorists" or to demand the release of the hostages held by Hamas.

We're now seeing the left for who they really are and the picture is not pretty. If anyone wonders how the holocaust in Germany could have ever happened all they need do is look at our elite campuses and left-wing media. Our contemporary brownshirts are crawling out into the sunlight and showing themselves to be cut from the same fabric as the hate-filled architects of the Nazis' Final Solution.

But we should be glad, in a way, that they are. It's instructive to see exactly what progressives in this country really believe as opposed to what they've wanted us, for the last two generations, to think they believed.

Destroying Hamas Is a Moral Duty

In a Wall Street Journal column (subscription required) Walter Block and Alan Futerman declare that Israel has a moral duty to destroy Hamas. They begin by pointing out that Muslim hatred of Israel is not contingent upon any of the usual excuses offered up by the apologists for Hamas' atrocities:

A mob of Islamist Arabs incited by Jew-hatred entered the town and killed as many Jews as they could find. They went door to door, broke into the homes of their victims, and slaughtered innocent men, women and children. These gangs raped, mutilated and tortured them while screaming “Kill the Jews!”

That was 94 years ago, on Saturday, Aug. 24, 1929, in Hebron. The picture is essentially the same, only that then the Arab riots that included this massacre ended with 133 Jews murdered. This time, it is several times as many, and we don’t know the final figure.

Given that the events are virtually the same, the question is: Why? There was no state of Israel in 1929. There were no “occupied” territories, no “settlers.” There was no “blockade.” No security fence, no checkpoints, nothing.

If the excuses of today’s murderers did not exist at that time, what did exist? A deep, maniacal, murderous and utterly destructive hatred of Jews—the same essential factor operating today, to which all other excuses are subservient.

They go on to point out that the ghastly videos of the weekend's raid showing the horrors perpetrated by Hamas were posted online by Hamas members themselves and they ask,

What does it say of a society that these monsters think this type of “propaganda” is a “good” way to mobilize the population? It screams of a deeply perverse and murderous culture, in love with death and destruction.

It is the same culture that teaches toddlers to hate. The same society that pays wages to mass murderers and celebrates on the streets with sweets and shootings when Jews get killed. It is the culture that creates the types of monsters capable of the evil they themselves proudly show to the world through social media.

The authors then turn their attention from Hamas and their supporters and enablers in the rest of the world to their morally depraved sympathizers in the West and they highlight the irony of who these sympathizers are and what exactly they're sympathizing with:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West.

Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building.

They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

And what do the enemies of Israel want? Block and Futerman write that,

The enemies of Israel aren’t in favor of a Palestinian state. They aren’t in favor of anything positive, but only of a negative: the denial of life, especially of Jewish life. The goal is genocide. The method is mass murder of the type Jews haven’t experienced since the Holocaust.

There's no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas. The people who burn babies to death, who murder children in front of their parents, who rape defenseless women before killing them, who butcher both the living and the already dead are a modern incarnation of the Orcs in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The authors of the WSJ piece conclude:

[T]he West needs to understand that to defend human life and dignity, it isn’t enough to claim to side with Israel. It needs to understand what this means: total, unrestrictive support. That is nothing less than allowing this beleaguered country to defend itself fully.

To recognize that Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were. Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil residing next to it. And, more important, that once it begins to proceed in that direction, it won’t be demonized for defending that which is the core of Western civilization and which its enemies hate the most: the love of everyone’s right to human life, dignity and happiness.

In other words, it needs to support a complete, total and decisive Israeli victory. If this implies an overwhelming, unprecedented use of military force, so be it. Hamas is and will be responsible for any civilian casualties. Cause and effect. They created their own destruction, and its consequences.

Israel has a moral right to finish the job, and the West has a moral duty to support it. Let Israel do what it must to finish this war in the fastest way possible, with the minimum civilian and military casualties on its side.

I want to emphasize that the authors are referring here to "minimum civilian casualties" among Palestinian civilians which Israel has always tried very hard to protect despite Hamas' repeated use of their own people as human shields. In any case, if the Israelis allow Hamas to survive then the grisly horror we witnessed unfold last weekend will be reprised just as soon as Hamas feels strong enough to carry out such an attack again.

Whatever consequences befall the long-suffering Gazan Palestinians in the weeks ahead, they are the result of the evil decisions made by their own political leadership whose depraved hatreds have brought upon their people all of the misery and grief entailed by the Israeli response.