Eighteen Facts (Pt. VI)

Today's post concludes the series on the eighteen facts that I believe are better explained by theism than by naturalism (i.e. atheism). In some cases the fact is much better explained by theism than by any materialistic, naturalistic ontology.

Here's the eighteenth fact:

18. Our desire to survive our own death

Human beings want desperately to live and yet we know we're going to die. In a Godless universe, the fate of each of us is annihilation.

There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever "see" them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, they must acknowledge that their bravery serves to mask an inner despair.

Many still harbor a profound wish, and hope, that their deceased loved ones still exist and that they'll someday be reunited with them. But if death is the end of our existence our life truly is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," as Shakespeare put it.

If death is the end human existence is completely absurd. But, of course, death is the end if the atheistic materialist is correct.

Only if God exists is there a realistic basis for hope of something beyond this life. Only if God exists can we have a reasonable hope that our longing for life will be fulfilled.

So, to sum up, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we have those yearnings because they point us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God.

In other words, the existence of God is, I believe, the best explanation for the human condition. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings, nor for the other facts we've discussed in this series, and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair toward which her worldview pushes her.

She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists implicitly repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.

I've sought in this series of posts to briefly suggest why the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of their satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God.

If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice.

We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the nature of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence.

The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled.

How, then, do we come to have these yearnings? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the atheist should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence.

Nevertheless, of all the atheist writers I've ever read there are few who've expressed such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to desiring, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke.

Nagel writes in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me at least, to understand.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. V)

Today's post continues our series on theism as an inference to the best explanation for eighteen facts about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.

I'd like today to discuss the following three existential traits of human beings:

15. Our desire for justice
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self

Human persons long for justice, but it's a longing for which there's no fulfillment if death is the end of our existence. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives filled with terrible fear, pain and grief and then they die.

Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering come to the end of their lives peacefully and content after many years of pleasure. In a world without God everybody comes to the same end, everyone vanishes, and there's no reward or punishment - just nothingness. In the world of the atheist, it doesn't matter ultimately whether you're Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, and there's no hope that justice will ever be done.

Only if there's a transcendent moral authority, like God, who has the power to hold us accountable for how we treat others is justice in any ultimate sense possible.

Humans also crave meaning to our existence. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but in the absence of God death nullifies everything and renders it all meaningless. There's no fixed purpose or value to anything we do.

Everything we strive for is destined to perish either after we die or eventually in a solar explosion that will incinerate the earth, after which there'll be not a trace that humans ever existed. What will all of our efforts and achievements matter then?

The universe has no meaning or significance and neither does anything in the universe. On atheism it's all just atoms bouncing around pointlessly, and all our struggles are like the furious running of a gerbil in its treadmill.

Our lives are just a footprint in the sand at the edge of a space-time surf. When all is washed away and the cosmos is left as though we were never here, the greatest acts of heroism, charity, and scientific discovery will mean absolutely nothing.

If the atheist is correct, if our existence is simply a temporary fluke of nature, a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to think that anything we do actually matters in any permanent sense. If, on the other hand, we've been created by God we may assume that He had some purpose for making us. We may not know what that purpose is, but we have a reason for thinking there is one.

Indeed, if there is a God then we have reason to hope that what we do is not ephemeral, it's eternal, and that each life has an everlasting meaning.

Another point: In a Godless world the concept of soul becomes problematic and with it the notion of a self other than the physical body. Since our body is constantly changing, however, we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year.

There's nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I," only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who I really am.

As T.S. Eliot put it in The Cocktail Party, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests, however, that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet, unless there is a God physical flux is all there is.

If there is a God, then it's possible that our self, our identity, persists through time because He constantly holds us, our individual essence, in His mind. So, while in one sense we're constantly morphing into someone different, in another sense we remain the same person we've always been.

We'll conclude this series of posts tomorrow.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. IV)

The theme of the last three posts has been that if we employ the principle of inference to the best explanation to the question of the existence of God it's reasonable to conclude that the best explanation for a host of facts about the world and human existence is that there is an intelligent mind, a God, that accounts for them.

In today's post I'd like to briefly examine six facts of human existence and explain why I think theism accounts for them more seamlessly than does naturalism. The six facts are these:

9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
10. Our sense of moral obligation
11. Our sense of guilt
12. Our belief in human dignity
13. Our belief in human worth
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights

Since these are facts about the human condition they comprise what might be called an existential case for the existence of God:

Consider the first of these. It's part of the human psyche to desire answers to life's most profound questions. As human beings we want answers to the deepest, most perplexing questions raised by our existence, but in the world as the atheist sees it there are no answers, there's no assurance about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die.

We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Why do we want from life what we cannot have? - but in a Godless universe there's no reply, only silence. The cosmos is indifferent to our desire for answers. We are alone, forlorn, as Sartre put it, and our quest for answers is absurd.

If there are no answers to these questions it's a puzzle as to why we would've evolved in such a way as to feel such an urgency for answers to them. If, on the other hand, God exists then it's possible that each of those questions has an answer, and if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire their answers makes sense. We may not know what the answer is, but we have a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there is a reason why they gnaw at us.

The atheist must counsel acquiescence to the disconnect between our deep need and the impossibility of fulfilling that need. The theist is in a position to counsel hope.

Another aspect of the human condition is that we are burdened with a deep sense that we are obligated to act morally. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base them. In a purely material world morality is nothing more than whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right in any objective sense. There simply is no objective moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what non-theists deny. Consider these two quotes from some well-known atheists:

"In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. The way our biology forces its codes is by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject." Philosopher Michael Ruse.

"Life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins.

For the atheist moral judgments can be little more than expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state.

Whatever those who possess power do is neither right or wrong, even if they commit torture or genocide, it just is.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is nothing whatsoever which obligates us to act in one way rather than another. What could possibly obligate me, in a moral sense, to act in the interest of others rather than in what I perceive to be my own interest? Given naturalism, there is nothing which obligates us to care for the poor, nothing which makes kindness better than cruelty, nothing to tell us why the holocaust was morally wrong.

Given atheism, morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, our conviction that it does exist is simply self-deception. If God exists, however, then, and only then, does our intuition that objective moral value and obligation also exist make sense.

Related to the preceding point, we experience feelings of guilt, and have a sense that guilt is not just an illusion, but without an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there can be no real guilt. Human beings are no more guilty in a moral sense than is a cat which has caught and tortured a bird. The feeling of guilt is merely an evolutionary epiphenomenon which arose to fit us for life in the stone age and which, like our tonsils, we no longer need. Indeed, it's a vestige of our past that we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

On the other hand, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good Creator of the universe, then our sense that we are actually guilty has an explanation. We feel guilt because we have transgressed the moral law instituted by the Creator before whom we stand and to whom we must give an account.

It is this Creator who imposes upon us moral obligation. Take away God and there's no moral law, there's no moral duty, there's no transgression, and no guilt. As the great 19th century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it, "If God is dead everything is permitted."

An additional fact about our existence is that we profess a belief in human dignity but modern atheism tells us that we are little more than machines made of flesh - sacks of blood, bone and excrement. There is no soul; there's nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We are more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout.

In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit the rest of us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he might profit from so doing. The universe reminds us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

If, however, we are made in the image of God and personally and specifically loved by Him then we have a basis for believing that we are more than a machine. We have a ground for human dignity that is simply unavailable on the assumption of naturalistic atheism.

Related to the previous point is the further truth that most of us have a belief in human worth, but if all we are is an ephemeral pattern of atoms, a flesh and bone mechanism, then in what does our worth as human beings consist? We have value only insofar as others, particularly those who wield power, arbitrarily choose to value us.

If atheism is true there is no inherent value in being human. Only if theism is true and we are valued by the Creator of the universe can human beings have any objective worth at all. There is no other non-arbitrary ground for it.

Similarly, we have a belief that human beings have certain fundamental rights. Unfortunately, if there is no God there's nothing at all upon which to base those rights save our own prejudices and predilections. As Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, we have the right to life and liberty only because we are children of the Creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us and in whose eyes we are precious.

If there is no Creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules, mere words on paper, which some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked.

When atheists talk about human rights someone might ask them where those rights come from. Who confers them? Who guarantees them? If it is not God then it must be the state, but if so, our rights are not inalienable. If the state decides what rights we shall have then the state can determine that we have no rights at all.

The fact is that if atheism is true human rights are no more substantial or real than the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

More tomorrow.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. III)

Continuing the case for theism as the best explanation for the evidence available to us, let's consider the next four examples of that evidence:

5. The fact of human consciousness
6. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
7. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
8. Our sense that we have free will

One quality of the world that sits better on the assumption of theism than atheism, particularly atheistic materialism, is the existence of human consciousness.

How does it happen, for instance, that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or pain or the taste of sweet)? How do electrochemical reactions in our neurons produce a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, expectation, or frustration, boredom, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book)? How does it want, worry, or have intentions?

How do the chemicals that make up the matter of the brain happen to make that matter aware of itself and its surroundings? How does matter come to hold beliefs or understand what it believes? How does pure matter impose a meaning on a text that one reads or a lecture to which one listens?

These are vexing questions for a materialist view of the world. It may be that if we put the proper chemicals in a flask under the appropriate conditions the flask would become conscious or feel pain, but we have no idea how it could do so, and the belief that it could is simply an article of materialist faith.

In other words, on the assumption that human beings are solely material beings consciousness is inexplicable. After all, a robot could function pretty well without experiencing any conscious phenomena at all, so why did consciousness evolve in humans?

The existence of consciousness suggests that material substance is not the only constituent of reality, which may be one reason why some materialists (called eliminative materialists) pretty much deny the existence of consciousness.

If there is, in addition to the material substance in our world, also mental substance, how could such a thing have arisen in a purely physical/material universe? The hypothesis that there is an intelligent Creator of the universe who is itself pure mind presents us with an explanation where naturalism must just shrug its shoulders.

Related to the matter of consciousness is the question of beauty, or more precisely, why it is that gazing at, or listening to, something beautiful should fill us with delight, or even rapture. It's possible, I suppose, to formulate some convoluted ad hoc hypothesis in terms of purposeless physical forces acting over billions of years on dozens of fortuitous mutations to produce response mechanisms to certain stimuli in our neuronal architecture. But why?

Why should a sunset fill us with wonder and a mountain range fill us with awe? Why and how would blind, unintentional processes produce such responses? What urgency would such seemingly gratuitous responses have in the struggle for survival that the whole panoply of mutations and selective pressures would be brought to bear to cultivate them?

A simpler explanation for such phenomena, perhaps, is that our encounters with beauty, like our encounters with good, are intimations of God. Beauty is one means by which God reveals Himself to us in the world. Our encounters with beauty are glimpses He gives us of Himself, and the delight we feel in them is a prelude to heaven.

Another aspect of the world that is better explained in terms of a theistic rather than an atheistic or naturalistic worldview is our sense that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. 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 is not likely itself to be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, can be trusted to be rational or true, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and the reliability of scientific investigation, like "truth," is chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist is in the awkward position of having 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 as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any such justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

The next characteristic of human beings that makes more sense given the existence of God than given the truth of atheism is our sense that we are free to make genuine choices and that the future is open. In the absence of God our sense that we are free to choose and are responsible for those choices is problematic.

In a Godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to physical laws. There is no free will, there is only an inexorable determinism. At any given moment there is only one possible future, and our belief that we can freely create a future is pure sophistry and illusion.

Thus an atheist who faults me for writing this post is acting inconsistently with his own assumptions. If there is no God I am compelled to write and express these ideas by causes beyond my control and for which I am not responsible. Indeed, if there is no God, it's hard to see how anyone could ultimately be responsible for anything they do.

More tomorrow.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post introduced the concept of inference to the best explanation and eighteen facts about the world and our existential human condition, the best explanation for which, I argue, is God, or something very much like God. Today we'll consider the first four of those facts:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact that life's origin is inexplicable on naturalism
   
4. The fact of biological information
   

The first of these facts is our conviction that the universe must have had a cause and didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that its existence depends upon something beyond itself. It's possible, perhaps, that it somehow created itself, but that seems counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator Itself requires an explanation. As philosopher Del Ratzsch points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider an analogy to the discovery on Mars of a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium .

Most people would think that the cube was produced by some kind of intelligent beings, aliens, and would regard the cube as virtual proof that such beings existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of alien beings, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation of the cube, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the mysterious structure and therefore their belief in intelligent aliens is groundless.

Such a reply would certainly sound odd.

The inability to say anything much about who the aliens were or where they came from doesn't count at all against the theory that intelligent agents were responsible for the cube, nor does it mean that the alien theory is no better than the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube, as well as the existence of an intelligent cause of the cosmos, is surely an inference to the best explanation.

The second fact about the world that is easier to explain on the theistic rather than the atheistic hypothesis is that the parameters, forces and constants which govern the cosmos are exquisitely fine-tuned. Here is one example of the dozens which could serve:

If the initial density of matter in the universe had deviated by as little as one part in 10^60 (a value referred to by scientists as the "density parameter"), the universe would have either fallen back on itself or expanded too quickly for stars to form. This is an unimaginably fine tolerance.

Imagine a stack of dimes stretching across 10^30 universes like our own. Let the dimes represent calibrations on a gauge displaying every possible value for the density parameter. Imagine, too, that a needle points to the dime representing the critical value. If the initial density of our cosmos deviated from that critical value by a single dime our universe, if it formed at all, would not be suitable for life.

Or imagine a console featuring dials and gauges for each of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of constants, parameters, and other cosmic contingencies which define the structure of our world. Imagine that each dial face shows trillions upon trillions of possible values. Each of those dials has to be calibrated to precisely the value to which it is actually set in our world in order for a universe to exist and/or for life to thrive.

Of course, it could be an astonishing coincidence that all the dials are set with such mind-boggling precision. Or it could be that there are a near infinite number of universes having all possible values and that ours just happens to be one that is perfectly calibrated for life. But not only is this an extraordinarily unparsimonious hypothesis, it also elicits the question of what it is that's generating these universes and what evidence we have that they even exist.

It's much simpler to bow to Ockham and assume that there is just one universe and that its structure manifests a level of engineering of breath-taking precision, a conclusion perfectly compatible with the idea that there's an intelligent agent behind it all. "It's crazy," as philosopher Richard Swinburne says, "to postulate a trillion universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job."

One further point: Scientists assume as they study the universe that it is rational, that it lends itself to rational inquiry, but if so, then an entirely non-rational explanation for it seems less likely than an explanation which incorporates rational causes.

The third fact is that it has proven exceedingly difficult to explain how the first living unit, a cell able to metabolize, reproduce, eliminate waste, manufacture proteins, etc., could have ever arisen solely by chance. The odds against a chance origin of life, with no input from an intelligent agent, are so improbable as to make belief that it happened a matter of extraordinary blind faith.

It's somewhat like insisting that a very complex, fully functional and self-replicating pocket calculator could have arisen by dumping a mixture of aluminum, silicon, carbon and water into a mixing bowl and stirring it with an egg beater for a couple million years until a pocket calculator that could replicate itself emerged.

It's important to note that none of the scientists who work in the Origin of Life field have been able to come up with a sound theory as to how a living cell could've been produced by natural, unguided and unintelligent processes.

A fourth fact about the world from which we might infer that there is an intelligent agent involved somehow in its development is the existence of biological information. The biosphere is information-rich, a fact which raises the question where this information came from and how it ever came about.

The naturalist's answer is that the information, such as we find in DNA and cellular processes, resulted from blind mechanistic forces acting purposelessly and randomly over eons of time. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, of course, but if we're going to limit ourselves to the lessons of experience we must acknowledge that information whose provenience we can ascertain is always the product of an intelligent mind.

Random processes can produce highly improbable patterns (like the particular pattern of craters on the moon) and they can produce very specific recognizable patterns (like the repetition of a single letter typed by a monkey), but what we've never observed a random, non-teleological process do is generate both (such as we find in a computer program). Yet that is precisely what we have in the genetic code.

The genetic code and the complex of proteins and transcription molecules necessary to decipher that code, must've arisen prior to the ability to replicate and thus prior to the action of any selection mechanism, in other words, by sheer chance. Believing it happened is somewhat analogous to believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could leave in its wake a fully assembled and functional jet airplane.

There may someday be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information, but until that day arrives the obvious existence of that information suggests an intelligent agent lurks somewhere in its history.

More tomorrow.

Eighteen Facts (Pt.I)

Among the indictments of religious believers registered by skeptics is that belief in God is at best irrational and at worst pernicious. Theism, the skeptic often argues, is all blind faith and no evidence, but should a theist try to pin a critic down by asking exactly what he means by "evidence," it often turns out that the word is used as a synonym for "proof."

Well, perhaps there's no proof that a personal God exists, but that's hardly a reason not to believe that one does. After all, we can prove very little of what we believe about the world, yet we don't hold our convictions less firmly for that.

A materialist, for example, would have a very difficult time proving that the world exists objectively, outside his own mind, yet he believes it very firmly.

The skeptic's claim that there's no evidence for God and that theistic belief is thus irrational is, ironically, the reverse of the truth. In my view, it's actually more rational to believe that a personal transcendent creator of the universe exists than to disbelieve it. Moreover, if what I'll argue over the next few days is correct, the logical consequences of atheism turn out to be psychically, morally and politically toxic.

Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests more comfortably on the side of the believer. This is because almost every relevant fact about the world, and every existential characteristic of the human condition, makes more sense when viewed in the light of the hypothesis of theism than it does on the assumption of atheism.

Put differently, the conclusion of theism is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation.

I don't mean to suggest that there are no facts about the world that militate against the existence of God - there are, of course. The existence of suffering being the most troubling example.

Nor do I mean to suggest that atheism can offer no account at all of the facts of human existence that I discuss in what follows. Perhaps it can. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism the facts are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism.

If that is the case, it follows that it's more reasonable to believe that the best explanation for these facts is the existence of a personal God.

So, here are eighteen facts about the world and human experience that, over the course of this week, I will argue are easier to explain on the assumption that traditional Judeo-Christian theism is true than on the assumption that metaphysical naturalism (atheism) is true:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact that life's origin is inexplicable on naturalism
   
4. The fact of biological information
   
5. The fact of human consciousness
   
6. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
   
7. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
   
8. Our sense that we have free will
   
9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
   
10. Our sense of moral obligation
    
11. Our sense of guilt
    
12. Our belief in human dignity
    
13. Our belief in human worth
    
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights
    
15. Our desire for justice
    
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
    
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self
    
18. Our desire to survive our own death
    

In what follows it will be argued that theism provides an easier, more comfortable explanation for each of the above than does atheism. Some of the phenomena may seem to be more compelling evidence of God than others, but when folded together they amount to a powerful cumulative case for the proposition that it's reasonable to believe that a personal mind, a mind similar to that imputed to the God of Christian theism, undergirds the world.

I claim no originality for the arguments. Others have called attention to these facts with more eloquence and brilliance than I can summon. What may perhaps be helpful, however, is to have these premises gathered into a single cumulative case for the reasonableness of theistic belief.

Tomorrow we'll discuss briefly how each of the first four facts listed above points to the existence of God or something very much like God.

What Jews Have Contributed to the World

I recently posted on the absurdity of calls for a boycott of anything connected to American or global Jewry. Today I want to continue excerpting from the internet email from which that post was taken.

The above title of this post should not be understood to imply that the following exhausts Jewish (or Muslim) contributions to humanity, but it's certainly an impressive statistic. Nor do I vouch for the accuracy of these claims, but anyone who's skeptical should be able to check them out easily enough.

In today's excerpt the anonymous author points out the disparity between the world's population of Muslims and Jews along with an indicator of their relative achievements:

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is one billion two hundred million or 20% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat, 1990 - Elias James Corey, 1994 - Yaser Arafat, 1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:(none)

Physics:(none)

Medicine:1960 - Peter Brian Medawar, 1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is fourteen million or about 0.02% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1910 - Paul Heyse, 1927 - Henri Bergson, 1958 - Boris Pasternak, 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1966 - Nelly Sachs, 1976 - Saul Bellow, 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1981 - Elias Canetti, 1987 - Joseph Brodsky, 1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:1911 - Alfred Fried, 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser, 1968 - Rene Cassin, 1973 - Henry Kissinger, 1978 - Menachem Begin, 1986 - Elie Wiesel, 1994 - Shimon Peres, 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer, 1906 - Henri Moissan, 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson, 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann, 1910 - Otto Wallach, 1915 - Richard Willstaetter, 1918 - Fritz Haber, 1921 - Albert Einstein, 1922 - Niels Bohr, 1925 - James Franck, 1925 - Gustav Hertz, 1943 - Gustav Stern, 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy, 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi, 1952 - Felix Bloch, 1954 - Max Born, 1958 - Igor Tamm, 1959 - Emilio Segre, 1960 - Donald A. Glaser, 1961 - Robert Hofstadter, 1961 - Melvin Calvin, 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau, 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz, 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman, 1965 - Julian Schwinger, 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann, 1971 - Dennis Gabor, 1972 - William Howard Stein, 1973 - Brian David Josephson, 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson, 1976 - Burton Richter, 1977 - Ilya Prigogine, 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias, 1978 - Peter L Kapitza, 1979 - Stephen Weinberg, 1979 - Sheldon Glashow, 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown, 1980 - Paul Berg, 1980 - Walter Gilbert, 1981 - Roald Hoffmann, 1982 - Aaron Klug, 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman, 1985 - Jerome Karle, 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach, 1988 - Robert Huber, 1988 - Leon Lehman, 1988 - Melvin Schwartz, 1988 - Jack Steinberger, 1989 - Sidney Altman, 1990 - Jerome Friedman, 1992 - Rudolph Marcus, 1995 - Martin Perl, 2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson, 1971 - Simon Kuznets, 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow, 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich, 1976 - Milton Friedman, 1978 - Herbert A. Simon, 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein, 1985 - Franco Modigliani, 1987 - Robert M. Solow, 1990 - Harry Markowitz, 1990 - Merton Miller, 1992 - Gary Becker, 1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:1908 - Elie Metchnikoff, 1908 - Paul Erlich, 1914 - Robert Barany, 1922 - Otto Meyerhof, 1930 - Karl Landsteiner, 1931 - Otto Warburg, 1936 - Otto Loewi, 1944 - Joseph Erlanger, 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser, 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain, 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller, 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein, 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman, 1953 - Hans Krebs, 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann, 1958 - Joshua Lederberg, 1959 - Arthur Kornberg, 1964 - Konrad Bloch, 1965 - Francois Jacob, 1965 - Andre Lwoff, 1967 - George Wald, 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg, 1969 - Salvador Luria, 1970 - Julius Axelrod, 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz, 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman, 1975 - Howard Martin Temin, 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg, 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow, 1978 - Daniel Nathans, 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf, 1984 - Cesar Milstein, 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown, 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein, 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini], 1988 - Gertrude Elion, 1989 - Harold Varmus, 1991 - Erwin Neher, 1991 - Bert Sakmann, 1993 - Richard J. Roberts, 1993 - Phillip Sharp, 1994 - Alfred Gilman, 1995 - Edward B. Lewis, 1996 - Lu Rose Iacovino

TOTAL: 129!

The author goes on to note that,

The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, nor blow themselves up in German restaurants.

There is not one single Jew who has destroyed a church.

There is not a single Jew who protests by killing people. The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor do they have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before they demand that humankind respects them.

Whether one agrees with the foregoing or not one has to wonder if there's not a connection between the last few sentences and what preceded them.

Proper Disagreement

Reading about Wednesday night's GOP debates in which the candidates vied for the privilege of being the runner-up to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, I was disappointed in some of the exchanges that occurred between a couple of the candidates.

I understand that political campaigns are often ugly, disputatious, ornery and gratuitously insulting, but they shouldn't be.

As we enter this period in our nation's political life it would be good for those of us who engage in the to and fro of political discussion with friends, family and acquaintances to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good in the months ahead to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree in any discussion is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are debating. A winsome approach, seasoned with humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with rhetorical body blows.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we respect the individuals we're engaged in conversation with than that we win an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing it under those circumstances anyway?

If we can respect and love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining them a hearing.

Political differences, as well as religious and philosophical differences, are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Our politicians probably won't treat each other that way, but we should.

Most of the Money Stays Here

There are a lot of people who are upset about all the aid we're giving to Ukraine, especially in as much as the war effort against the Russians seems to have stalled. Even so, Marc Thiessen, writing in the Washington Post, takes a contrarian view, arguing that,in fact, most of the money we're spending on Ukraine stays in this country and is going into the pockets of American workers.

He writes:

Funds that lawmakers approve to arm Ukraine are not going directly to Ukraine but are being used stateside to build new weapons or to replace weapons sent to Kyiv from U.S. stockpiles. Of the $68 billion in military and related assistance Congress has approved since Russia invaded Ukraine, almost 90 percent is going to Americans, one analysis found.

But you wouldn’t know that from the actions of some U.S. lawmakers...It’s not just them. In all, 31 senators and House members whose states or districts benefit from funding for Ukraine have voted to oppose or restrict that aid.

At a time when both major parties are competing to win working-class votes and strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base, our military aid to Ukraine does exactly that — it is providing a major cash infusion into factories across the country that directly benefits American workers. It is also creating jobs and opportunities for local suppliers, shops, restaurants and other businesses that support the factories rolling out weapons.

We have identified 117 production lines in at least 31 states and 71 cities where American workers are producing major weapons systems for Ukraine. For example, aid that Congress has already approved is going to, among many other places....

Many other weapons systems are being built for Ukraine in factories around our country. Nor does this list count the suppliers that provide these contractors with parts, such as plastic and computer chips, or produce smaller items for Ukraine, such as cold-weather and night-vision gear, medical supplies, spare parts and millions of rounds of small-arms ammunition. As one Ukrainian official told me, “Every single state in the U.S. contributes to this effort.”

Even more importantly, perhaps, all this money being spent on weapons is reinvigorating an American defense industrial base that had become dangerously moribund:

[Senator J.D. Vance] said in October that “the condition of the American defense industrial base is a national scandal. Repairing it is among our most urgent priorities.” Well, our aid to Ukraine is doing exactly that.

For example, the United States had not built a single new Stinger antiaircraft missile since 2005. The terrorists we were fighting in recent decades did not have jet fighters, so production faltered. Now, thanks to the Ukraine aid...the Pentagon signed a $624.6 million contract last year to build Stinger missiles in Tucson, to replace about 1,400 sent to Ukraine.

Without our Ukraine resupply effort, the Stinger production line likely would have remained dormant — perhaps until bombs started dropping in a conflict over Taiwan.

Or take the $600 million being used to build two weapons systems for Ukraine in St. Charles, Mo. One is the Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range (JDAM ER), an air-launched GPS-guided weapon that converts dumb bombs into precision-guided glide bombs with a range of up to 45 miles (triple the range of the original weapon).

The other is the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), a weapon system newly developed for Ukraine that can be launched from High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and can travel 93 miles, almost double the range of current ground-launched precision munition systems.

If we were not aiding Ukraine, the United States would not be producing either of these weapons. The funding Congress has provided to manufacture both systems injects many millions of dollars into Missouri’s economy and is busying production lines for these advanced capabilities.

Those systems will now be available for the United States and Taiwan should a conflict erupt with China, as well as available for Israel.

There's much more to Thiessen's column at the link. He closes with this observation:

It is in the United States’ vital interests to arm Ukraine in its fight to defeat Russian aggression. Our support for Ukraine is decimating the Russian military threat to NATO, restoring deterrence with China, dissuading other nuclear powers from launching wars of aggression and improving American military preparedness for other adversaries. The “America First” case for helping Ukraine is clear.

But if those arguments are not persuasive, then this should be: Our military aid to Ukraine is revitalizing manufacturing communities across the United States, creating good jobs here at home and restoring the United States’ capacity to produce weapons for our national defense. Helping Ukraine is the right thing to do for U.S. national security. It is also the right thing to do for American workers.

Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism

The recent protests against Israel in general and specific Jews in particular raises once again the question of the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

One often hears that one can be a critic of Israel without being anti-Semitic. That's true. One also hears that one can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. That's not true.

Dennis Prager gives us a very helpful explanation of the nature of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at PJ Media and why the latter really amounts to the former.

His essay opens with a thought experiment:

Imagine a group of people who work to destroy Italy because, they claim, Italy's origins are illegitimate. Imagine further that these people maintain that of all the countries in the world, only Italy is illegitimate. And then imagine that these people vigorously deny they are in any way anti-Italian. Would you believe them? Or would you dismiss their argument as not only dishonest but absurd?

Substitute "Israel" for "Italy" and "Jew" for "Italian" and you'll understand the dishonesty and absurdity of the argument that one can be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.

But that is precisely what anti-Zionists say. They argue that the very existence of a Jewish state in the geographic area known as Palestine -- there was never an independent country known as Palestine -- is illegitimate. They do not believe any other country in the world is illegitimate, no matter how bloody its origins. And then they get offended when they're accused of being anti-Semitic.

Prager then goes on to respond to five arguments commonly employed by anti-Semites, like those student protestors and others, who wish to mask their anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. Here they are:

Zionism is the movement for the return of Jews to their ancient homeland, Israel. Over the past 3,000 years, there were two independent Jewish states located in what is called Israel. Both were destroyed by invaders, and no Arab or Muslim or any other independent country ever existed in that land, which was only named Palestine by the Romans in an attempt to remove all memory of the Jewish state they destroyed in the year A.D. 70.

Second, anti-Zionists claim they can’t be anti-Jewish because Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. That, too, is equally false. It is the same as saying that Italy has nothing to do with being Italian. Judaism has always consisted of three components: God, Torah and Israel. If Israel isn’t part of Judaism, neither is the Bible or God.

Third, anti-Zionists claim that Judaism is only a religion; therefore, Jews are only members of a religion, not a nation. But the Jews are called the “nation of Israel” repeatedly in the Bible. That is why there are irreligious, secular and even atheist Jews — because Jews are not only a religion. There are no atheist Christians because Christianity is only a religion.

Fourth, the anti-Zionists claim that Israel is illegitimate because it is racist. This is the charge Israel- and America-haters make against two of the least racist societies in the world. In the case of Israel, it is fraudulent because:

a) Half of Israel’s Jews are not white.
b) Anyone, of any race or ethnicity, can become a Jew.
c) One out of every 5 Israelis is not a Jew. And these Israeli citizens — mostly Arab Muslims — have the same rights as Jewish Israelis.
d) Israel’s control of the West Bank has nothing to do with “race.” Israel does not control the West Bank because Palestinians are of another race but because Palestinians tried to destroy Israel in 1967, and they lost the war. The only reason Palestinians do not have their own state has nothing to do with race: They rejected offers to found their own state on five separate occasions since 1948. They have always rejected building a Palestinian state because they have always been more interested in destroying Israel.

Fifth, the anti-Zionists claim that Israel’s origins are illegitimate.

The fact that, of all the world’s 200-plus countries, the only country anti-Zionists declare illegitimate is also the only Jewish country is pretty much all you need to know about their motives. Why, for example, don’t they make this claim about Pakistan? In 1947, nine months before the establishment of Israel, India was partitioned into a Muslim state — Pakistan — and a Hindu state — India.

Read the rest at the link. Prager's arguments are based on facts and reason, but sadly, for most people on the left facts and reason don't matter. After all, if facts mattered to them they wouldn't be leftists.

One more thought: Many leftist/progressives support the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) directed against Israel. The tacit purpose of the BDS effort is to so weaken Israel economically that it can no longer resist those who would destroy it. That goal is both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.

The kind of hatred that drives the BDS movement should have no home in any country but especially not a country like the United States of America.

Brilliant Feats of Micro-Engineering

I show this video to some of my classes because it's so well done. Drew Berry is an animator who creates computer generated animations of cellular processes. The processes he depicts here are occurring all the time in each of the trillions of cells in your body. As you watch it keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

And notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did they evolve in the first place?

Perhaps we'll eventually discover naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible naturalistic explanations sound to all but the irrevocably committed and the more it looks like the living cell has been intelligently engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

Two Amazing Animals

It's been said that the fact that someone cannot imagine how nature can accomplish some amazing feat or other is not a reason to think that nature cannot do it. Those who doubt the theory of Darwinian evolution, for example, on the grounds that the anatomy, physiology and behaviors of living things are so intricate and complex that its unimaginable that they evolved by unguided chance processes are often derided for employing what's called an argument from incredulity.

The argument from incredulity occurs when someone disbelieves something because it's just so hard for them to believe.

Of course, it's not just Darwin skeptics who employ this argument. Materialists also do it when they argue that because we can't imagine how minds and brains can interact with each other that therefore belief that we have an immaterial mind is unwarranted. Or when their inability to imagine why a good God would allow suffering is given as a justification for their belief that a good God doesn't exist.

Or when they doubt that we have free will because they can't imagine how free choices could exist in a world governed down to the tiniest particle by the inexorable laws of physics. Or when they scoff at the possibility of miracles for the same reason.

In fact, materialistic naturalists (atheists) are probably the most frequent invokers of incredulity as a legitimate epistemic criterion among those who think about topics like those just mentioned, and indeed there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with doubting some claim because its implausibility intuitively renders it deeply suspect. We do it all the time.

For that reason, it seems to me completely appropriate when watching the following short video to be deeply skeptical that the Darwinian explanation of how these creatures came to possess the food gathering mechanisms they do is correct. One attempt at a Darwinian explanation, in which this video was featured, is discussed here.

Notwithstanding materialists' attempts to wave the magic wand of natural selection and throw the pixie dust of Science! in our eyes it seems completely appropriate and rational, unless presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, to believe that the likelihood that a mindless, unguided process created and synchronized all the adaptations these animals exhibit, from the molecular level on up, is much lower than the likelihood that these marvels are the result of intelligent engineering and foresight.

But watch the video and come to your own conclusion:

How the Left Actually Supports Bombing Civilians

A lot of people are outraged that the Israeli military operation in Gaza has reportedly killed thousands of civilians. Many on the left are using these civilian casualties as grounds for their demands for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, but there's an irony in this that I'll get to in a moment.

First, it should be agreed that Hamas, by virtue of their mass slaughter of over 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of hundreds more, has made themselves a legitimate target. Moreover, anyone who supports Hamas is morally complicit in their crimes and most of the Palestinian people and many leftists in the U.S. are supportive of Hamas.

That support makes them an enemy of Israel, just as any supporters of the German Holocaust or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would've been seen as morally complicit in these crimes had those supporters marched in our streets in 1943.

Many Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas and joined the terrorists on Oct. 7th. in committing atrocities. They cheered the slaughter, spit on kidnap victims, held Israeli victims captive in their homes, returned an escapee to Hamas, and they jeered and deliberately frightened kidnapped children who were being released.

Even the leftist protestors in the U.S. who claim to distinguish between the average Palestinian and Hamas unintentionally blur the distinction in practice.

When they chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" they're calling for the eradication of Israel. When they wear the keffiyeh they're identifying with the terrorists who raped, tortured and murdered children and their parents on Oct. 7th.

And the irony I mentioned above is this: When they go on social media and declare their sympathy for Osama bin Laden and his view of the collective guilt of the American people, they're tacitly endorsing the concept that a people bear collective responsibility for the actions of their government.

If that's so, however, if many on the left really do endorse the concept of collective guilt, then how do they avoid the conclusion that the Palestinian people must bear the brunt of the consequences of the actions of those who govern them, i.e. Hamas?

Israel has traditionally done everything that could be reasonably expected of a nation fighting to survive to minimize civilian casualties, but when the enemy insists on using their own people as human shields, when many of those people support Hamas's the stated goal of annihilating Israel and Israelis, then their suffering, as tragic as it may be, is on their own heads and those of their leadership.

What Is a Soul?

Usually when people talk about the soul and life beyond the death of the physical body they draw looks of incredulity and even scorn from fashionably skeptical materialists, but when a scientist as prominent as physicist Roger Penrose talks about it, well, then the skeptics should at least listen.

Penrose's theory is that the soul consists of information stored at the sub-atomic level in microtubules in the body's cells. At death this information somehow escapes the confines of the microtubules and drifts off into the universe. He claims to have evidence to support this hypothesis, and perhaps he does.

I haven't seen the evidence, but I'd like to know how the information "knows" that the body has died and what mechanism controls it. I'd also like to know what the information is about, how it functions without a physical body, and what disembodied information leaking out into the universe "looks" like.

Anyway, I'm not altogether skeptical of Penrose's theory. I've long advocated the view that, if we do have a soul (as a substance that's neither physical nor mental - neither body nor mind), that it consists of information. In this I'm in agreement with Penrose.

Where I differ from him is that in my view the soul is the totality of true propositions about a person - an exhaustive description of the person at every moment of his or her existence. It's the essence of the person. But whereas Penrose locates the information in cellular microtubules I posit that the information is located in a vast database, i.e. the mind of God. In God's mind there is, so to speak, a "file" containing a complete description of every person who has ever lived.

Since the information is located in the mind of God it's indestructible - immortal - unless God chooses to destroy it. Each of us is therefore potentially eternal.

To take this line of thinking one more step, perhaps when our physical bodies die our "file" is "downloaded," in whole or in part, into another body situated in a different world, or at least in a different set of dimensions than what we experience in this world, somewhat like the characters in Star Trek were teleported from the starship to the surface of a planet. It would be a different kind of body, perhaps, but a body all the same.

On this view, the soul is not something wraith-like that's contained in us, but rather it's "in" God. As with a computer file, God could choose to delete it altogether or to express it in any "format" he sees fit.

In any case, if this hypothesis is at all close to describing the way things are, then we are souls and we have bodies. Moreover, the death of our bodies is not the death of us, and, if physical death is not the end of our existence, we're each confronted with some pretty serious philosophical and theological questions.

Theism, Naturalism and Universals

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems fairly clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It seems, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be.

For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed? In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God.

If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems to be the case that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would or could exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me.

If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing.

Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left.

Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

A Philosopher Considers Cosmic Fine-Tuning

The physicist Bernard Carr once declared that "if you don't want God you better have a multiverse." What he meant is that the fine-tuning of the force strengths and constants that comprise the fabric of our universe have to be calibrated with an astonishing precision or else life could not exist.

That dozens of these values should be so exquisitely fine-tuned as to permit life is such an astronomically improbable state of affairs if our universe is the only one that exists that the only way to avoid the conclusion that it was intentionally designed to be this way is to accept the idea that there are an incomprehensibly vast number of other universes beyond our own that are all different.

If that's so, then the existence of one as fine-tuned for life as is ours becomes almost inevitable, just as the odds of getting a royal flush if one is dealt enough hands of cards becomes inevitable.

Yet the multiverse hypothesis seems to be foundering, and Phillip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University, explains why in a recent article at The Conversation. Goff writes:

One of the most startling scientific discoveries of recent decades is that physics appears to be fine-tuned for life. This means that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall within a certain, very narrow range.

One of the examples of fine-tuning which has most baffled physicists is the strength of dark energy, the force that powers the accelerating expansion of the universe. If that force had been just a little stronger, matter couldn’t clump together. No two particles would have ever combined, meaning no stars, planets, or any kind of structural complexity, and therefore no life.

If that force had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity. This means the universe would have collapsed back on itself within the first split-second – again meaning no stars or planets or life. To allow for the possibility of life, the strength of dark energy had to be, like Goldilocks’s porridge, “just right”.

This is just one example, and there are many others.

The strength of dark energy is said to be fine-tuned to within one part in 10^123. For a point of comparison there are "only" 10^80 atoms in the entire known universe. Goff continues:

The most popular explanation for the fine-tuning of physics is that we live in one universe among a multiverse. If enough people buy lottery tickets, it becomes probable that somebody is going to have the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with different numbers in their physics, it becomes likely that some universe is going to have the right numbers for life.

Goff, though formerly a believer in the multiverse, has been persuaded that the multiverse hypothesis is based on a fallacy:

Suppose Betty is the only person playing in her local bingo hall one night, and in an incredible run of luck, all of her numbers come up in the first minute.

Betty thinks to herself: “Wow, there must be lots of people playing bingo in other bingo halls tonight!” Her reasoning is: if there are lots of people playing throughout the country, then it’s not so improbable that somebody would get all their numbers called out in the first minute.

But this is an instance of the inverse gambler’s fallacy. No matter how many people are or are not playing in other bingo halls throughout the land, probability theory says it is no more likely that Betty herself would have such a run of luck.

It’s like playing dice. If we get several sixes in a row, we wrongly assume that we are less likely to get sixes in the next few throws. And if we don’t get any sixes for a while, we wrongly assume that there must have been loads of sixes in the past.

But in reality, each throw has an exact and equal probability of one in six of getting a specific number.

Multiverse theorists commit the same fallacy. They think: “Wow, how improbable that our universe has the right numbers for life; there must be many other universes out there with the wrong numbers!” But this is just like Betty thinking she can explain her run of luck in terms of other people playing bingo.

When this particular universe was created, as in a die throw, it still had a specific, low chance of getting the right numbers.

Betty would be wrong to infer that many people are playing bingo. Likewise, multiverse theorists are wrong to infer from fine-tuning to many universes.

Goff then looks at the question whether there is scientific evidence for a multiverse and also examines a hypothesis called the "anthropic principle" which is another attempt to avoid the conclusion that fine-tuning points to an intelligent creator. You can read about that peculiar argument and also why there's only very tenuous scientific evidence for a multiverse at the link.

So, does Goff accept Bernard Carr's other option, that the universe we live in was created by God. Well, no. Instead he embraces the pantheistic idea that the cosmos is itself the intelligent, purposeful agent of its own creation:

[We] face a choice. Either it’s an incredible fluke that our universe happened to have the right numbers. Or the numbers are as they are because nature is somehow driven or directed to develop complexity and life by some invisible, inbuilt principle.

In my opinion, the first option is too improbable to take seriously. My book presents a theory of the second option – cosmic purpose – and discusses its implications for human meaning and purpose.

Evidently, any theory, no matter how bizarre or lacking in evidential support, is preferable to having to accept that the universe is the creation of an intelligent, personal and transcendent God. Why?

A Question Concerning Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators

Given that the official, elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza is Hamas, and given that it is Hamas's stated purpose to annihilate Jews and the nation of Israel, and given that the keffiyeh is worn as a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, how is parading in keffiyehs in support of the Palestinians, and thus Hamas, any different than Klansmen parading in white hoods in support of racial purity?

Both are symbols of hatred, the keffiyeh for Jews, the hood for minorities of any kind. Yet, although our media would be outraged if the Klan displayed their hatred for minorities by demonstrating on university campuses and in our cities, flaunting their hoods and robes, they seem to applaud Palestinian sympathizers displaying their hatred for Jews and Israel by flaunting their keffiyehs as they demonstrate in these same venues.

Someone may respond that support for the Palestinian people is not the same as support for Hamas, but that won't work. The Palestinian people have repeatedly elected Hamas to represent them and many of them cheered Hamas's barbaric butchery on October 7th. Indeed, many Palestinian citizens of Gaza participated in the slaughter, gleefully recording their atrocities on their cell phones, and even caught an escaped kidnap victim and returned him to Hamas.

Anyone who sports the keffiyeh today is choosing to identify with the perpetration of that horror. They're on the same moral plane, or lower, actually, as those who prance about in white robes and hoods applauding the lynchings of blacks and other minorities, and they're both a national disgrace.

The Limits of Free Speech

Steven Hayward at PowerLineblog argues that free speech is not an absolute right. The founding fathers never intended that speech that aims to destroy the nation should be granted the freedom to promote that cause.

Hayward writes that:

....it is perfectly reasonable to shut down Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on college campuses purely on the grounds that they abuse the principle of free speech because their success as a movement would end the right of free speech for Jews (not to mention end the lives of Jews). Any SJP support for Hamas is a secondary question.

... the principle is seldom better expressed than by David Lowenthal in his 1998 book No Liberty for License: The Forgotten Logic of the First Amendment:

Citizens may ... find themselves asking whether our founding fathers, known for their prescience and realism, meant the First Amendment to protect those who would use freedom for the destruction of freedom. Was this keystone of the Bill of Rights really intended to guarantee the freedom of expression and organization to the enemies of freedom? . . .

Some will protest that the First Amendment guarantees freedom even to those who would destroy freedom, that it guarantees freedom to those who would counsel, urge, or even incite to the violation of the law. Such cannot be the case if the First Amendment is intended, above all, as an instrument of republican government, a way of ensuring that the national government is responsive to citizens, so that their rights may be kept secure.

Only if it can be shown that a [violent organization] contributes to republican ends can a case be made through the First Amendment for permitting it legal status. Otherwise, such groups are all legally and prudently shorn of this status from the outset, and not only without violating any part of the Constitution, but in keeping with its positive injunctions.

Does the First Amendment guarantee a right to promote the death and destruction of others? Does it guarantee the right to express public hatred for a particular group?

Isn't it ironic that we make hateful thoughts an exacerbating circumstance when committing a crime, but public manifestations of hate are supposed to be acceptable?

If someone chose to burn the Quran would those demonstrating on behalf of Hamas see the act as a legitimate expression of free speech? Are not those who protest in favor of an organization like Hamas, whose sole purpose is the eradication of Israel and the Jews who live there, doing the same thing as one who burns a Quran? Why do such people have any more right to free speech than does someone who publicly advocates political assassination or public lynchings?

It's a bit perverse that free speech is granted to those who hate this country, who hate Jews and Christians, who even hate the idea of free speech itself. It's astonishing that we grant free speech to the haters who deny the same right, via "cancel culture", to those who love this country and wish to see its people thrive and prosper by returning to the principles that made the U.S. the greatest nation in human history.

Maybe it's time to rethink the meaning and limits of freedom of speech.

A Follow-up Christmas Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out three years later.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century ….

They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.

A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look.

They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon.

A Modest Christmas Gift Proposal

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a tense crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our nineteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars.

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

The Pilgrims' Voyage

Every year since 1961 the Wall Street Journal has been running an account of the departure of the Pilgrims from Holland for the New World where they believed they could be free to worship without being threatened by an oppressive state church.

The recorder was a man named Nathaniel Morton, and he introduces his history with these words:

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

What follows is Morton's recollection of the Pilgrims' departure:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them.

One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears.

But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

They originally departed in two ships but one leaked badly and they had to turn back to England.

The leaking ship was found to be unseaworthy so some of the pilgrims abandoned the idea of trekking the ocean and returned to Holland. The rest, plus some others who wanted to accompany the pilgrims, boarded the one remaining ship, the Mayflower, and finally set sail six weeks after leaving Leyden.

One hundred and two men, women and children plus 30 crew made the voyage. They originally intended to land in northern Virginia and make their way to the Hudson river valley, but landed first near Provincetown on Cape Cod and later moved inland to establish their colony.

Morton goes on to write about what the company found upon their arrival in the New World:

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

These were doughty men and women. It's hard to imagine what must have gone through their minds when they faced the prospect of winter in a land where they had to start a civilization almost from scratch.

The hardships they endured seem almost unimaginable to those of us accustomed to the comforts of modern life, comforts which we take for granted and for which we should be thankful to God.

On Gratitude

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans observe tomorrow is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to God, family, friends, neighbors, and country.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true. One of the most unpleasant aspects of critical theories and cancel culture is the complete lack of any trace of gratitude and grace.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) tomorrow will be a day filled with gratitude, love and joy.