What Exactly Is Matter?

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe - including our bodies, our brains, our thoughts, our sensations - all of it is reducible in principle to material "stuff." There's no mental substance, no mind, just brains and the functions the brain performs. But if that's so, then what is the material stuff everything is made of? What, exactly, is matter?

Physicists, many of whom are materialists, tell us that matter is made up of particles which are themselves simply a "wave function," but then what's a wave function? What's it made of? No one seems to have an answer.

This video takes the viewer down to the smallest bits of matter, but when we ask what these smallest bits are comprised of the only reply from physicists is a shrug of the shoulders.

At some point matter just seems to dissolve into energy, forces, and fields which are themselves inscrutable. They can be measured, but if we ask what it is, precisely, that we're measuring we just get another shrug for an answer. The fundamental nature of matter is a riddle:

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor helps us understand the provenience of the idea that everything is made of matter. He writes:

The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.

Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia [our sensory experience of, for instance, pain or color] and intentionality [the fact that something like ink on paper can be about something, can have meaning], were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?

In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right. Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.

Modern materialists have discarded Descartes’ mental substance, and have tried to explain nature and consciousness via matter alone. Modern materialists are Descartes’ descendants: although they have discarded Cartesian dualism, they retain Cartesian materialism. To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter. Hence the bizarre cornucopia of materialist theories of mind, such as philosophical behaviorism, identity theory, computer functionalism, and eliminative materialism.

Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:

How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?

The nature of matter is a profound mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.

Naturalism holds that there are no supernatural entities. If there were supernatural entities they'd be immaterial, thus naturalism cannot allow something like an immaterial mind into its ontology because that would lead to the conclusion that humans, at least, have souls. And once souls are allowed to exist then the naturalist fears he will have stepped onto a slippery slope leading to an affirmation of the existence of God and other things supernatural.

In other words, naturalism is heavily reliant for support upon materialism. Without it naturalism loses much of its ability to persuade.

Nevertheless, there's no reason not to believe that the fundamental stuff of the universe isn't material at all but rather mental. Indeed, this is the direction in which modern physics has been moving since the early years of the twentieth century.

Perhaps, so far from mind arising from matter, our perception of matter actually is a product of mind.

Just as Copernicus sparked a revolution in science by getting us to look at the solar system from a different perspective - a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective - looking at the world from the perspective of mental substance rather than material substance could spark an analogous revolution not only in science but also in metaphysics.

Can Russia Continue to Fight Beyond This Year?

There's been some dreary news lately regarding the Ukrainians' war of self-defense against the morally abhorrent Russian invasion so I thought I'd share some good news. At least it's good news if you hope Ukraine repulses Vladimir Putin's military.

The analysis comes from Tom Holsinger, a military expert who writes for Strategy Page. Holsinger claims that Russia may well be unable to continue their war of aggression beyond the end of this year.

Holsinger writes:

Hard limits are appearing on Russia’s ability to continue the Ukraine war. It has begun running out of tube artillery (as opposed to rocket artillery) and light armored fighting vehicles (AFVs).

The artillery shortage is because tube artillery barrels are wearing out, while the light AFV shortage is because so many have been lost in combat.

Russia’s stocks of self-propelled tube artillery pieces were eliminated by combat losses in the Ukraine, worn-out barrels or exploded from firing with worn-out barrels, and were replaced by towed artillery from its reserve stocks.

Now the Russians have lost, worn out or almost worn out everything but their oldest reserve tube artillery, 50+ year-old 122mm towed guns of which they allegedly had about 4,000 in 2021.

These are Russia’s last artillery reserve, are being put into service now and, when those are worn out this year, Russia’s tube artillery park will be reduced to their current production of about 200 yearly tube artillery pieces. At that point Russia can no longer continue the war unless their 2024 production increases to at least 2000 a year.

Russia cannot sustain the fight without artillary. If they can't replace their losses they'll simply have to retreat.

Holsinger goes on to explain why these artillery barrels wear out and why it'll be so hard for Russia to replace them. He also discusses the significance of the loss of armored fighting vehicles.

It's an interesting article and it allows for a glimmer of optimism that if Ukraine can hold out for the next nine months, and if the West supplies the Ukrainians with weaponry, ammunition and other necessities, Russia will be in a militarily untenable position.

For Millenials and Gen Zers

In a column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Mary Eberstadt claims that Millennials and Generation Zers have been robbed. They've been bamboozled by our progressive elites into believing that their country is "an irredeemable cesspool of racism and bigotry."

Consequently, only a third of Millenials and Gen Zers will acknowledge that they're "extremely proud" of their country. She invites these Americans to ask themselves why.

Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our families. Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our neighborhoods. Think about that the next time someone trash-talks your national home and neighborhood, your country.

One such figure, impresario of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” says she has never regarded herself as “particularly patriotic.”

Another, whose sulfurous racialism permeates elite education, says that he has never felt free in the U.S., even as his every grievance is celebrated and subsidized. If they have such a low opinion of America, what makes you think they care about Americans—including you?

This is particularly ironic given that the United States is by almost any measure not only the greatest country in the history of civilization, but it's the greatest country in history in which to be a minority. There's never been any other place in the world where minorities have more opportunity to flourish than they do here.

It's why tens of thousands of Central Americans, Haitians and others from around the globe risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.

Eberstadt continues, arguing that today's younger Americans have also been robbed of two great sources of immaterial wealth, "the consolations and joys of family life" and the rich benefits that accompany religious belief:

Generations of thinkers have disparaged the family as the enemy of utopian schemes. In their depictions, home and hearth amount to a slaughterhouse of dreams and aspirations, especially for women.

To the contrary: Unprecedented rates of abortion, fatherlessness and divorce, far from liberating you, have subtracted actual and potential loved ones from your lives. No wonder surveys show that young people are the loneliest Americans....

...[Moreover, religious belief has inspired] the greatest art and science, architecture and music and human creation at large that our species has ever devised. Permanent membership in “none of the above” secularism risks relinquishing your own cultural inheritance: Western civilization.

"This brings us," she declares, "to the political choice before you. Today’s neo-Marxism and identity politics seek to co-opt your youthful energies into a lifetime of performative rancor. Is that what you want?"

Good question. To be permanently angry, to be permanently focused on racial, sexual or LGBTQ identity is to dissipate one's human potential by expending it on relative trifles. It's to spend one's life judging books by their dust jackets.

Eberstadt concludes with this:

Young people are designed by nature to love and to be loved with energy and magnanimity.

Today’s misanthropes tell you the opposite: that humanity is a toxin on the planet, unworthy of reproduction. This counsel couldn’t be more wrong—especially for you. If loneliness is the problem, putting more people in your lives with marriage and children is the self-evident solution.

The left tells you that your fellow citizens are racists, fascists, sexists, bigots and haters. This relentless negativity obliterates youthful hopes. It shrivels the youthful imagination. Worst of all, it shrinks your hearts.

When young people have it constantly drilled into them that their fellow Americans are in fact odious individuals it makes despising them seem appropriate. So far from treating them with dignity, respect and kindness it becomes much easier to treat them with self-righteous contempt and hatred. Sadly, though, people who choose to live this way will find that Eberstadt is right.

A life spent judging others on the basis of what one perceives to be their politically incorrect sins, a life lived in a semi-permanent state of anger, bitterness, hostility, and contempt, is a life in which happiness will prove very elusive.

Lift Weights and Run

Want to live longer? Lift weights. At least that's the gravamen of this article. According to a research team at Indiana University there's a link between strength, muscle mass, and mortality, although mass isn't as important as strength.

The team assessed 4,440 adults ages 50 or up who had their strength and muscle mass assessed between 1999 and 2002. The researchers checked back in 2011 to see who had died.

The results, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, found that those with low muscle strength were more than twice as likely to have died during the follow-up period than those with normal muscle strength. In contrast, having low muscle mass didn’t seem to matter as much.

This may seem counterintuitive but it's common for individuals to have good strength levels without having bulging muscles. You can get details of the study at the link, but even though strength is more important than mass....

That doesn’t mean you can afford to let your muscle melt away as you age; having a good reserve of muscle mass may be important, for example, if you end up having to spend time in the hospital at some point. But it’s good news for those of us who struggle to put on muscle but persist in slogging through a reasonable number of pull-ups and other strength exercises.

A second study reinforced the idea that we should get at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week, but also suggested that the weekly workouts should include some sort of strength-building exercise at least twice. The benefits not only improve the quality of one's life but also extend it.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Researchers in Australia analyzed data from 80,000 adults in England and Scotland who completed surveys about their physical activity patterns starting in the 1990s. The headline result was that those who reported doing any strength training were 23 percent less likely to die during the study period and 31 percent less likely to die of cancer.

Meeting the guidelines by strength training twice a week offered a little extra benefit.

One interesting detail: Strength training in a gym and doing bodyweight exercises seemed to confer roughly equivalent benefits. So you don’t necessarily need to heave around large quantities of iron.

In this particular cohort .... the best outcomes of all—a 29 percent reduction in mortality risk during the study—accrued to those who met both the aerobic and strength-training guidelines.

These studies should be of interest to anyone who works in the health and/or fitness industries or who works with older people. Get in the gym and get with a personal trainer who will push you to develop more strength and get more aerobic exercise.

How They've Changed

To get an idea of how much the Democratic party has changed in just two decades watch this two-minute excerpt from then President Clinton's 1995 State of the Union speech. The party has changed radically, not only on immigration which is unchecked under the Biden administration, but also on abortion, same-sex marriage, and freedom of speech.

Compare what President Clinton said with our current open border with Mexico:

The Queen of the Problems

An article by Jonathan McLatchie at Evolution News describes sexual reproduction as "The Queen of the Problems" for evolutionary accounts of biological origins. McLatchie writes:

The origin of sexually reproducing organisms from asexually reproducing ancestors is a profound mystery which has baffled many an evolutionary biologist. The origin and subsequent maintenance of sex and recombination is a phenomenon not easily explained by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, there are several substantive, well-known reasons why the origin of sex presents a serious problem for conventional evolutionary explanations.

There are several reasons why the origin of sex presents a problem. For starters, there is the waste of resources in producing males. Assuming a sexually-reproducing female gives birth to an equal number of male and female offspring, only half of the progeny will be able to go on to have more offspring (in contrast to the asexually reproducing species, all the offspring of which can subsequently reproduce).

Thus, it is to be expected that the asexual female will proliferate, on average, at twice the rate of the sexual species. Given the disadvantage thereby confronting the sexually-reproducing species, one would expect them to be quickly outcompeted by the asexual species.

Moreover, it must be borne in mind that, in contrast to the asexual species, the females of the sexually-reproducing species perpetuate only half of their successful genotype. To transition, therefore, from a state of asexuality to sexual reproduction is, in effect, to gamble with 50% of one’s successful genotype.

Given that the whole purpose of natural selection is the preservation of those organisms which pass on their successful genes, this strikes at the heart of evolutionary rationale.

Since evolution is theorized to proceed as genetic mutations occuring over vast stretches of time confer some sort of advantage on a population of organisms, it's a mystery as to how sexual reproduction would've ever arisen from asexually reproducing organisms. But the problems extend even deeper than this.

There is, of course, the additional conundrum related to the fact that gametes (i.e. sex cells) undergo a fundamentally different type of cell division (i.e. meiosis rather than mitosis). Meiosis entails the copying of only half of the chromosomal material. In similar fashion to mitosis (which occurs in somatic cells), each chromosome is duplicated to yield two chromatids.

In contrast to mitosis, however, the homologous chromosomes are also associated. So, at the start of meiosis, each visible ‘chromosome’ possesses four chromatids. At the first division, these homologous chromosomes are separated such that each daughter nucleus has exactly half the chromosome number.

At this stage, each is present as two copies (chromatids). These chromatids are hence separated at the second division such that each new nucleus only has a single copy.

In order for sexual reproduction to work, it is essential that the process of meiosis evolve to halve the chromosome number. And this ability must also only occur in the gametes and not in the somatic cells. This difficulty is accentuated by the multitude of novel elements which are found in meiosis, rendering it unlikely to be explicable in terms of single mutational steps.

For those who'd like a refresher of their high school biology on cell reproduction here's a relatively brief video on the difference between meiosis and mitosis. And then there is the added problem of male and female complementarity. Many physical and physiological structures as well as many chemical reactions that enable the whole process to work must develop in male and female virtually simultaneously, even though these structures and reactions are completely different in the two sexes.

One example is sperm capacitation. Chemicals in the head of the sperm have to be modified while on the way through the female reproductive tract in order to prepare the sperm for penetration of the ovum.

There are numerous such chemical reactions that occur in the process of sexual reproduction that occur in no other bodily process and which must have all evolved almost simultaneously and in both males and females for sexual reproduction to work.

This video illustrates just a few of them:

One wonders whether Darwin, if he had been aware of all the problems that sexual reproduction entails, would have ever gone ahead with his theory of natural selection as the engine of evolution.

What Do the Democrats Want from Israel?

Democrat leaders from President Joe Biden to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have been strongly critical recently of Israel's conduct of the war against Hamas.

Mr. Biden has warned Israel not to do what has to be done to eliminate Hamas in their last stronghold in Rafah and Chuck Schumer has called for the Israelis to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Their indictment of the Israelis has to do with what they see as unjustifiable casualty levels among Palestinian civilians. According to Gazan authorities some 30,000 Palestinians have been killed so far by IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) operations, mostly bombings.

There are a number of things wrong with the criticisms leveled by Messrs. Biden and Schumer, however:

• The Gaza Health Ministry which released these casualty figures is controlled by Hamas, the same organization that launched the murders of over 1200 Israeli civilians on October 7th. It'd be foolish to believe them.
• The 30,000 dead figure does not distinguish between non-combatants and Hamas militants. As many as 20,000 of the dead could be Hamas fighters.
• We're told that many of the 30,000 are children, but anyone under 18 is counted as a child. Many of the Hamas fighters are teenagers between 15 and 18 years of age and would be considered to be child casualties.
• Many civilians either participated in or abetted the atrocities of October 7th or cheered for them, they overwhelmingly voted for the people who carried them out. It's ironic that the critics of Israel are often believers in the notion of the collective guilt of whites when it comes to the history of racism in this country, but draw a sharp distinction between the "innocent" Palestinians who live in Gaza and the terrorists of Hamas whom they've elected to govern them.
• The ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths in Gaza is historically low for any urban combat. The U.N. calculates that the ratio in modern warfare is 9:1 - nine civilians killed for every soldier who's slain. The ratio in Gaza is 1.5:1.
• For perspective, during World War II 100,000 civilians were killed in the battle for Manila and nearly 20,000 French citizens were killed by allied bombs in the run-up to the Normandy invasion.
• Usually absent from the criticisms of Israel is any suggestion as to what the Israelis should do differently from what they actually are doing. The complaints are often very general laments that Israel is just killing too many people, but we're never told what the magic number of acceptable deaths is nor how the IDF is to avoid killing civilians when Hamas uses them as shields to hide among and uses schools hospitals and residences from which to launch their attacks. Unless people can offer constructive recommendations as to how the Israelis should go about destroying Hamas it'd be best if they'd simply not say anything.
• Nor is there much, if any, pressure put on Hamas to end the killing by surrendering and releasing all Israeli hostages. Much of the world community, however, is demanding that Israel stop fighting. This makes no sense. Why are there so few calls for Hamas to surrender both themselves and the hostages? It is Hamas, after all, who started this war on October 7th when they barbarously slaughtered over 1200 Israeli civilians.

It's neither wise nor charitable to speculate on people's motives but, nevertheless, that so many are placing the onus on the Israelis to impose a cease-fire rather than demanding that Hamas surrender, leads one to wonder whether these folks don't really want Hamas to surrender and don't really want to see the terrorists defeated.

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day this weekend. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

Irish scriptoria

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write, and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Racial Realignment

Andrew Stiles at the Washington Free Beacon draws attention to a notable trend among Democrat voters - many non-white Democrats no longer feel they belong in the Democrat party.

Stiles cites an article by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times (paywall) in which Burn-Murdoch "analyzed political polling data to explain why current trends among minority voters are 'bad news for Democrats,' " and notes that,

According to the numbers, the Democratic Party's historical advantage with non-white voters has declined significantly in recent years. A New York Times poll published earlier this month found that President Joe Biden led presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump by just 12 percentage points among non-white voters, a group he won by nearly 50 percentage points in 2020.

Democrats must be deeply alarmed by this statistic. Democrats need minority voters since according to a piece at Axios Democrats comprise only 38% of the white vote.

One reason for the shift...

...is that Democrats have become the party of the rich. They represent the policy views of Ivy League-educated professionals who use terms such as "Latinx" and "people of color," as opposed to the views of working-class voters who happen to be black or Latino.

These voters tend to be far more conservative politically but have supported Democrats in the past based on social pressures that are rapidly eroding, Burn-Murdoch argued.

This is an interesting point. The reason many minorities voted Democrat in in the past is not because the candidates aligned with the voter's own outlook on the world but because there was strong social pressure to do so. As Joe Biden infamously declared in a 2020 interview, if an African-American votes Republican then he or she "ain't black."

Stiles adds that,

In 2012, for example, roughly 80 percent of black voters who described themselves as "conservative" also identified as Democrats. That number is closer to 40 percent in 2024. Latinos and Asians who identify as conservative have also shifted away from the Democratic Party in recent election cycles as their votes become more aligned with their policy preferences.

"The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising [sic] they’ve been voting for the wrong party," Burn-Murdoch wrote.

Democrats can't win presidential elections without the minority vote, and if more blacks and Latinos realize that their conservative worldview is not being reflected in the Democrat party, the political strength of that party is going to be substantially weakened.

There's more on this at the Axios article linked to above.

Whether the realignment of minority voters will proceed to the extent that it affects November's election is unknowable, but perhaps Trump's vice-presidential pick will have considerable bearing on that question.

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. II)

Yesterday I laid out an argument to the effect that one is not rational to believe that naturalism, i.e. atheism, is true and finished with some quotes, mostly from naturalists themselves, acknowledging that, in the words of J.B.S. Haldane, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

Nor, if one's mental processes are in fact the result solely of an evolutionary process that selects for survival rather than truth, does one have epistemic justification for believing that naturalism is true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richards concludes,

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

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

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. I)

One of the major difficulties with the naturalistic worldview is that it must explain how belief that naturalism is true is not self-refuting. For the purposes of this discussion naturalism, atheism, and materialism may all be considered synonyms. The argument which concludes that naturalism is self-refuting goes something like this:

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

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

So, although atheism may be true, one cannot rationally believe that it is. This is ironic since most atheists argue that atheistic materialism is rational and theism is irrational, but, in fact, the opposite is actually the case.

Theism is a rational worldview since the belief that we are endowed with a trustworthy reasoning faculty which can reliably lead us to truth only makes sense if theism is true. Thus, the theist has grounds for believing that reason is trustworthy and is therefore rational in trusting his reason to lead him to truth, whereas the naturalist is irrational to believe that naturalism is true since she has no grounds for trusting her reason to lead her to truth.

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

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

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

Hell

Some thoughts penned by Lance Morrow on the topic of hell appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required). Here's his lede:

Pope Francis was asked earlier this year what he thinks about hell. “It’s difficult to imagine it,” he replied. “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty. I hope it is.”

It was a pastoral pleasantry, kindly meant but theologically sloppy. It raised interesting questions: Has the traditional hell—fire and brimstone through all eternity—gone out of business, either because, as the pope hopes, there are no longer enough customers, or because hell has become an atavism: medieval, lurid, and not credible to the 21st-century mind? Is the eternal fire a metaphor? If so, what does it mean? Is hell a physical place or a state of mind? Is there such a thing as eternal life—and if God’s verdict goes against you, does that mean a life of everlasting torment? Is it possible to believe in hell if you don’t believe in God, or is hell the terrible solitude of living without God?

Pope Francis himself has defined hell as “eternal solitude.” By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pontiff of existentialism, wrote that “hell is other people.” Which is it?

Morrow says more, but I'd like to focus this post on the questions he asks above. Does hell exist and, if so, what is it like?

If one accepts that a personal God exists and if one believes that God is both perfectly good and completely just, then there must be a hell or something very much like it. If justice will ultimately prevail then there has to be accountability for how people have treated other people in this life. Otherwise, human life is incomprehensibly absurd.

So, if the God of Christian theism exists then there must be a hell, but what is it like? The writer C.S. Lewis maintains that hell is an existence that people actually choose for themselves. He writes that,

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.

He also says this:

Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.

In his novel, The Great Divorce, from which the above quotes were taken, Lewis pictures matters somewhat like this:

Ultimately every person must stand before God, and God will ask them just one question - 'Do you love me.' Each person's whole life will stand as his or her answer. There will be some whose hearts are so blackened by evil and hardened by hate that the prospect of spending an eternity with the source of all goodness and love would be nauseating and repugnant.

They no more wish to be in the presence of God than a person sick with a stomach virus wishes to sit down to a delicious feast. They wish to be delivered from the presence of God and thus God grants their wish.

He forces no one to love Him or to desire to be with Him. They find themselves separated from God. They find themselves isolated from all that's good, an existence devoid of love, only hate, devoid of pleasure, only boredom and pain, devoid of beauty, only ugliness.

And being so depraved and corrupt they actually prefer this to the existence they rejected.

Is this hell eternal? Is there no way out? Maybe the safest response is to say that as long as the individual chooses it they'll remain in it. Whether God's love and grace extends even to the depths of hell and that repentance is possible even there, I can't say.

I can only say that I wouldn't want to put any limitations on God's love and grace.

Extremely Tiny Life-Permitting Range

I've frequently referred on VP to the phenomenon of cosmic fine-tuning as a powerful argument in support of the claim that the universe was intelligently engineered by a transcendent mind, but have often felt the difficulty of conveying how amazing this phenomenon is.

However, back in 2015 Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes wrote an article for the New Atlantis in which he gives an excellent explanation of what scientists mean when they talk about fine-tuning and what the implications and possible explanations for it are.

His column is a little long, but it does a wonderful job of making the ideas comprehensible to readers with a modest understanding of physics. If this is a topic that interests you I urge you to read Barnes' entire column, since I can only give you a slight taste of it here.

He talks about how the universe consists of numerous physical constants which are numbers which must be plugged into equations in order for the equations to accurately describe phenomena. For example, the gravitational attraction between the earth and the moon can only be calculated if we insert into the equation which describes this attraction a number called the gravitational constant.

There are dozens of such constants that comprise the fabric of the universe. Barnes writes:

Since physicists have not discovered a deep underlying reason for why these constants are what they are, we might well ask the seemingly simple question: What if they were different? What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?

There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life. Or even the complexity upon which life relies to store information, gather nutrients, and reproduce.

A universe that has just small tweaks in the fundamental constants might not have any of the chemical bonds that give us molecules, so say farewell to DNA, and also to rocks, water, and planets.

Other tweaks could make the formation of stars or even atoms impossible. And with some values for the physical constants, the universe would have flickered out of existence in a fraction of a second.

That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.

He goes on to give us some examples:

Let’s consider a few examples of the many and varied consequences of messing with the fundamental constants of nature, the initial conditions of the universe, and the mathematical form of the laws themselves.

You are made of cells; cells are made of molecules; molecules of atoms; and atoms of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, are made of quarks. We have not seen any evidence that electrons and quarks are made of anything more fundamental.

The results of all our investigations into the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy are summarized in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is essentially one long, imposing equation. Within this equation, there are twenty-six constants, describing the masses of the fifteen fundamental particles, along with values needed for calculating the forces between them, and a few others.

We have measured the mass of an electron to be about 9.1 x 10-28 grams, which is really very small — if each electron in an apple weighed as much as a grain of sand, the apple would weigh more than Mount Everest. The other two fundamental constituents of atoms, the up and down quarks, are a bit bigger, coming in at 4.1 x 10-27 and 8.6 x 10-27 grams, respectively.

These numbers, relative to each other and to the other constants of the Standard Model, are a mystery to physics....we don’t know why they are what they are.

However, we can calculate all the ways the universe could be disastrously ill-suited for life if the masses of these particles were different. For example, if the down quark’s mass were 2.6 x 10-26 grams or more, then adios, periodic table! There would be just one chemical element and no chemical compounds, in stark contrast to the approximately 60 million known chemical compounds in our universe.

With even smaller adjustments to these masses, we can make universes in which the only stable element is hydrogen-like. Once again, kiss your chemistry textbook goodbye, as we would be left with one type of atom and one chemical reaction. If the up quark weighed 2.4 x 10-26 grams, things would be even worse — a universe of only neutrons, with no elements, no atoms, and no chemistry whatsoever.

Considering that we know of no reason why the masses of these particles couldn't have had a broad range of values these are incomprehensibly tiny differences - on the order of a decimal point followed by 25 zeroes and a 1. To give us an idea of how narrow the range of masses these particles must reside in if they're to build a universe that would have chemistry, Barnes invites us to,

Imagine a huge chalkboard, with each point on the board representing a possible value for the up and down quark masses. If we wanted to color the parts of the board that support the chemistry that underpins life, and have our handiwork visible to the human eye, the chalkboard would have to be about ten light years (a hundred trillion kilometers) high.

And that's for the masses of just two fundamental particles:

There are also the fundamental forces that account for the interactions between the particles. The strong nuclear force, for example, is the glue that holds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms. If, in a hypothetical universe, this force is too weak, then nuclei are not stable and the periodic table disappears again.

If it is too strong, then the intense heat of the early universe could convert all hydrogen into helium — meaning that there could be no water, and that 99.97 percent of the 24 million carbon compounds we have discovered would be impossible, too.

And... these forces, like the masses, must be in the right balance. If the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for the attraction and repulsion of charged particles, is too strong or too weak compared to the strong nuclear force, anything from stars to chemical compounds would be impossible.

Stars are particularly finicky when it comes to fundamental constants. If the masses of the fundamental particles are not extremely small, then stars burn out very quickly. Stars in our universe also have the remarkable ability to produce both carbon and oxygen, two of the most important elements to biology. But, a change of just a few percent in the up and down quarks’ masses, or in the forces that hold atoms together, is enough to upset this ability — stars would make either carbon or oxygen, but not both.

Here's a chart that shows the delicate balance that must exist between just two fundamental forces in order for carbon-based life to exist.

Barnes is himself persuaded that cosmic fine-tuning points to the conclusion that our universe has been designed by an intelligent agent, although many other physicists resist that conclusion. They hold out hope that some other explanation for this amazingly precise calibration of constants and forces will emerge.

Maybe so, but what we know right now about the universe does not engender optimism that their hope will ever be satisfied.

Spooky Forest Ecology

Any readers interested in ecology or who just enjoy an occasional walk in the woods will find this beautiful ten-minute video from Illustra Media fascinating.

It's titled "Wood Wide Web" and it describes the amazing underground communication web that exists between tree roots and fungi mycelia in every forest. It's almost spooky the nature of the communication between these plants and associated fungi and the way they communicate among themselves.

Check it out:

Longing for Auschwitz

As time removes us from the horror of October 7th it's easy for those of us living in relative peace and comfort in the U.S. to lose track of exactly why the Israelis are at war with Palestinians in Gaza. We know that the Palestinian military arm, Hamas, and not a few Palestinian civilians perpetrated an attack on Israeli towns, but the sheer savagery and barbarism of the attack gradually recedes from our memories.

Alvin Rosenfeld, writing for Tablet, gives us a vivid reminder in an essay titled "Longing for Auschwitz." He writes:

Hamas’ assault on Israelis on Oct. 7 was not an act of war as we normally think of it but something far worse. We don’t have an adequate term for what occurred on that day, so people use words like “terrorism,” “barbarism,” “atrocity,” “depravity,” “massacre,” and so on.

All are correct, and yet all fall short of capturing the annihilationist fury set loose at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim and small towns of southern Israel. The people attacked in those places were not only to die, but to die in torment. In addition to the merciless torture, killings, slashings, burnings, beheadings, mutilations, dismemberments, and kidnappings, there were gang-rapes and other forms of sadistic sexual assault, including, according to some reports, the cutting off of women’s breasts, nails driven into women’s thighs and groins, bullets fired into their vaginas, and even intercourse with female corpses.

Unimaginable? For most normal people, yes. But before going into Israel, the Hamas assassins were instructed to “dirty them” and “whore them.” And that’s precisely what many of them faithfully did.

If it were possible to encapsulate all the evil of that day in a single image, it would be that of the violent seizure of a young Israeli woman, Naama Levy, 19, barefoot, beaten, and bloodied, her hands tied behind her back, the crotch of her sweatpants heavily soiled, possibly from being raped, dragged by her hair at gunpoint into a Hamas car, and driven off to Gaza to suffer an unspeakable fate among her captors there.

Her assailants filmed every second of her ordeal; and as one watches the clips of her being taken away, one sees crowds nearby loudly shouting “Allahu Akbar”—“Allah is the greatest”—a victory cry that offers religious sanction to the malign treatment of Naama Levy and countless others seized, slaughtered, and abducted on that horrific day.

All wars cause human suffering, but the cruelties visited upon Israelis on Oct. 7 far surpass what normally happens when armies go to war. Hamas’ actions had a different aim: not conquest but the purposeful humiliation of Jews by people who detest them and were sworn to degrade and dehumanize them before murdering them.

Our media has largely downplayed the religious nature of this inhuman, demonic attack - although had the attackers been Christian or Jewish there would doubtless be much less reticence about making the connection - but Rosenfeld makes it clear:

The carnage carried out on that day, far from being a by-product of war, was a religiously sanctioned, orgiastic display of unrestrained Jew-hatred. One cannot begin to understand it if one ignores the Hamas Charter and other Islamist teachings that make Hamas the organization it is and inspires it to do what it does.

The cruelties inflicted by Hamas have been the standard Muslim manner of dealing with "infidels" ever since the days of Mohammad. It shocks us largely because we're ignorant of the history of Islam's 1300-year-long war against the West, a history in which atrocities such as Hamas inflicted on October 7th were unexceptional.

Rosenfeld continues:

Hamas originates as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is and always has been a jihadist organization, which sees the existence of the State of Israel as an intolerable intrusion into the Domain of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and is committed to removing Israel by whatever means necessary.

The preamble to the Hamas Charter declares that “Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The “Palestinian problem,” it affirms, “is a religious problem” and is not amenable to a negotiated political settlement.

The only way to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” is through “jihad,” a holy war that is a “duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.”

And once they've destroyed Israel they'll resume the assault on Europe that ended temporarily with the failed siege of Vienna in 1683. The imperative to do so is ingrained in their religion, and the West ignores this uncomfortable fact at our peril.

There's more in Rosenfeld's important column at the link.

Unbridgeable Divide

Dennis Prager has a fine article at HotAir.com in which he argues that the divide between the left and the right in this country is unbridgeable.

If he's correct, and I think he is, then "compromise" is pretty much impossible and our politics will continue to be a struggle to acquire the power to impose one side's will on the other side.

Here's part of his column:

How are we to bridge the gap between those who believe men can become women and women can become men and those who don't believe this? Between those who believe men menstruate and those who believe only women menstruate?

How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe "colorblind" is a racist notion and those who believe "colorblind" is the antidote to racism?

How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe Israel is the villain and Hamas is the victim and those who believe Israel is the victim and Hamas, which openly states its dedication to annihilating Israel and its Jewish inhabitants, is the villain, morally indistinguishable from the Nazis?

How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe young children should be brought to drag queen shows and those who believe this sexualization -- and sexual confusion -- of children is morally detestable?

How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe reducing the number of police will reduce violent crime and those who believe reducing the number of police will increase violent crime?

How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe in suppressing free speech if they deem any given speech "hateful" or "misinformation" and those who believe in free speech?

Every one of these positions is mutually contradictory. And this is just a partial list.

Prager goes on to lament how our political conversation has been corrupted by the tactic of simplistically smearing the other side. An example is how one who is a conservative Christian is reflexively labeled a "Christian nationalist." No definition of exactly what a Christian nationalist might be is ever provided, but we're to understand that whatever it is, it must be bad.

Other examples include calling those who disagree with one on various social issues "fascists," "racists," or "homophobes," etc.

As we read about how people are comporting themselves in this election season it'd be helpful, perhaps, to keep in mind this general rule: The rationality of one's opinions is inversely proportional to the amount of name-calling they indulge in and the vehemence with which they indulge it.

I commend Prager's column to you. It's very good.

Our Immune System

Aside perhaps from the brain there's no system in the human body as complex as the immune system.

The 10 minute animation below gives an overview of just some aspects of the system, but there's so much complexity involved in our immune responses that it would take more than 10 minutes to cover it all.

The immune system is an astonishing feature of our bodies, one that we largely take for granted and don't think much about until something in it goes awry. It's so amazingly complex and so dependent upon massive inputs of information that to believe it somehow arose through blind mechanistic processes requires a herculean exertion of one's will and a suspension of every ounce of skepticism.

In fact, the case could easily be made that it takes far more credulity, far more blind faith, to believe that the immune system is a fortuitous accident than to believe that it was designed by a mind.

After all, we have abundant experience of minds developing information-rich and complex systems, but we have no experience of such systems being produced by unguided processes and purposeless, goalless forces.

Between two possible competing causes, whichever one is the best explanation of a particular phenomenon is the cause we should accept.

In the case of the immune system the cause of this beautifully organized, highly complex, information-rich system is either a very long sequence of extremely improbable, unguided genetic "accidents," or it's a mind.

Given that all of our experience makes mind the more rational explanation it seems that the only reason anyone could have for choosing unguided, natural processes as the cause of our immune systems is that they've a priori ruled out mind as an explanation, but that's an irrational, question-begging move.

It's like saying that the immune system must be the product of blind natural processes because the alternative, mind, simply cannot be the cause. But how do we know that it can't be the cause?

Here's the video:

Alexi Navalny (June 4, 1976 - Feb. 16, 2024)

Here's the kind of man Russian President Vladimir Putin recently had murdered:

Here's the rest of his statement:

“I think about things less. There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation. It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am actually trying. And so, as I said, it’s easier for me, probably, than for many others, to engage in politics....

'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.'

I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity. And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back, or about what I’m doing. It’s fine, because I did the right thing. On the contrary, I feel a real kind of satisfaction. Because at some difficult moment I did as required by the instructions, and did not betray the commandment.” ~ Alexei Navalny, 2021

Navalny didn't have to return to Russia once he was in the West. He knew he'd be arrested and probably knew he'd be tortured and killed if he went back, but he did it anyway.

Such courage is as breathtaking as is the evil of men like Putin who would kill men like Navalny purely for political advantage.

Navalny grounded his decision in his assurance of an eternal reward. Putin no doubt hopes there is no eternal reward.

The Tyranny of the "Tolerant"

The Wall Street Journal ran a column a couple of years ago by Joseph Epstein which was headlined "The Tyranny of the 'Tolerant.'" In his column Epstein argued that tolerance, once a reasonable virtue among liberals, has been transformed by the contemporary left into an oppressive form of tyranny.

Epstein starts off with this question:

[I]n the current day, who is more intolerant, more close-minded and unforgiving, more malicious than those who officially pride themselves on their tolerance for sexual difference, minority mores, protest in all its forms—namely, those who march under the banners of the woke, the politically correct, the progressive?

Epstein is correct in declaring that the left is home today for the least tolerant people in our society, but how did we come to this sorry pass? He explains that the genesis of the left's contemporary intolerance, like most of our cultural dysfunctions, traces back to the 60s:

Herbert Marcuse, of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, published an essay in 1965 with the provocative title “Repressive Tolerance,” in which he argued that “liberating tolerance” would entail “the withdrawal of toleration of groups and assembly from groups and movements” on the right, while encouraging all aggressive movements on the left.

Marcuse's recommendation has been embraced by the modern left and enjoys a prominent place in their field operations manual.

Here's how the current tyranny of the "tolerant" manifests itself in our culture:

Use the wrong word, have a political flaw in your past, fail to line up for the next obviously good cause, and the tolerant will be the first to come after you. They may not be able to burn you at the stake...but they will make sure you don't get the job, promotion, prize or leg up. They will instead see you castigated, fired, consigned for life among the mean, ignorant and lumpen.

He goes on to list five opinions and views — one could add many more — that the "tolerant" absolutely won’t tolerate:

• That abortion is, somehow, anti-life and thus might just be wrong.
• That the final word isn’t in on climate change, let alone what, if it exists, ought to be done about it.
• That racism isn’t systemic but the absence of fathers in African-American families is, with 70% of black births being out of wedlock.
• That sexual reassignment surgery and transgendering generally is a ghastly solution to what possibly isn’t truly a problem.
• That most government programs for the improvement of the human condition are unlikely to be effective and in many cases exacerbate the illnesses they set out to cure.

Anyone reckless enough to openly express any of these opinions publicly is at best regarded as a stupid rube - "deplorable" in Ms. Clinton's felicitous formulation - and at worst an evil, dangerous enemy of society in need of being shamed, prosecuted, persecuted, shouted down, fired from their jobs and personally and financially ruined.

The self-righteousness, judgmentalism and cruelty of these folks would make the religious inquisitors of the Middle Ages envious. Epstein states that they are possessed of a "strong sense of their own virtue."

They are convinced they are on the right side: the side of social justice, of generosity of spirit, of sensitivity, of goodness and large-heartedness generally. They think themselves the cognoscenti, in the know, superior in every way. They are the best people, and they darn well know it.

Of course, so did the inquisitors. It's one thing, Epstein notes, to laud oneself for the superiority of one’s own opinions and quite another to want to destroy others for what one deems the moral inadequacy of theirs.

In the current political climate this is what those who pride themselves on their tolerance are all too happy to do. What is unprecedented, and unhappily becoming a contemporary condition, is the intolerance of the ostensibly tolerant for even the slightest disagreement.

Hence the refusal of our once most august universities to allow speakers whose views their students and faculties find uncongenial. Hence the organization of what are in effect lynch parties devoted to tearing down statues and insisting on the renaming of schools and institutions. Hence the McCarthy-like search through people’s pasts for unfashionable opinions with which to destroy their reputations.

It is profoundly ironic that a political ideology, progressive liberalism, that started out in the 19th century encouraging open-mindedness, personal autonomy and freedom of speech and thought has morphed into something out of George Orwell's 1984.

In fact, the story of the evolution of modern "progressives" from classical liberals to tyrannical neo-Marxists and fascists sounds very much like the story Orwell narrates in his other famous novel, Animal Farm. Both books should be required reading for every college student in today's America.

A Christian Atheist

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, and he's penned an interesting defense of both the concept of natural rights and what's called Christian nationalism.

One thing that makes Harsanyi's column interesting is that he defends these ideas despite himself being an atheist. This seems to me to be a very tenuous philosophical position to place oneself in. In fact, I think it's incoherent.

Toward the end of his essay he writes:

As a nonbeliever myself, I’ve been asked by Christians many times how I can square my skepticism of the Almighty with a belief in natural rights. My answer is simple: I choose to.

Natural rights such as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of liberty are either grounded in a transcendent moral authority or they're grounded in nothing. We can applaud Harsanyi's decision to embrace natural rights, while at the same time insisting that rights can't just be plucked from thin air. They must be based in something more than arbitrary human preferences or conventions.

He goes on:

“This is the bind post-Christian America finds itself in,” tweeted historian Tom Holland. “It can no longer appeal to a Creator as the author of its citizens’ rights, so [he] has to pretend that these rights somehow have an inherent existence: a notion requiring no less of a leap of faith than does belief in God.”

No less but no more. Just as an atheist or agnostic or irreligious secular American accepts that it’s wrong to steal and murder and cheat, they can accept that man has an inherent right to speak freely and the right to defend himself, his family, and his property. History, experience, and an innate sense of the world tell me that such rights benefit individuals as well as mankind. It is rational.

Well, no. Just because something benefits individuals and mankind doesn't mean that its a "right" inherent in our humanity. Governments may codify these things and make them legal rights, but governments that don't care about what works to the benefit of individuals or mankind could as easily dispense with these legal "rights" and they wouldn't be violating any cosmic law or norm in doing so.

Harsanyi adds this:

The liberties borne out of thousands of years of tradition are more vital than the vagaries of democracy or the diktats of the state. That’s clear to me. We still debate the extent of rights, obviously. I don’t need a Ph.D. in philosophy, however, to understand that preserving life or expression are self-evident universal rights in a way that compelling taxpayers to pay for your “reproductive justice” is not.

Of course, thousands of years of tradition may predispose us to believe that something is good, like marriage, but good traditions don't make something a "right," much less an inalienable right. Only an intelligent, personal God can do that. Harsanyi almost acknowledges this in his next few sentences:

John Locke, as far as I understand it, argued as much, though he believed that the decree of God made all of it binding. Which is why, even though I don’t believe my rights were handed down by a superbeing, I act like they are. It’s really the only way for the Constitution to work.

In other words, Harsanyi seems to confess to basing his belief in rights in a fiction. He chooses to live as if God exists even though he believes that He doesn't.

It's very difficult to understand how one can see that their most deeply held beliefs can only make sense if there's a God and yet refuse to believe that God exists and then insist that this position is rational, as Harsanyi does a few paragraphs above.

He closes with this:

The question is: How can a contemporary leftist who treats the state as the source of all decency– a tool of compulsion that can make the world “fair” — accept that mankind has been bequeathed a set of individual liberties by God, regardless of race or class or political disposition? I’m not sure they can anymore.

I'm not sure what he means by this, but what I think he means is that our rights are either handed down by God, in which case they're genuine rights, or they're granted by the state in which case they're just words on paper, arbitrary and relative to time and culture. Leftists believe the latter which means that they cannot hold that our liberties are genuine rights appertaining to all persons regardless of race, class or political disposition.

The problem is, neither can he.

Visceral, Irrational Hatred

Douglas Murray is an author and columnist for the British Spectator who's unimpressed by accusations from the left that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In a recent column (subscription may be required) he makes the case that what's happening in Gaza, given the standards of the region, so far from being genocide, is not even remarkable.

Here are some excerpts:

I find it curious. By every measure, what is happening in Gaza is not genocide. More than that – it’s not even regionally remarkable.

Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians.

In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza.

Then there are the more than 9,000 Hamas terrorists who have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces. As Lord Roberts of Belgravia recently pointed out, that means there is fewer than a two to one ratio of civilians to terrorists killed: ‘An astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields.’

Most Western armies would dream of such a low civilian casualty count. But because Israel is involved (‘Jews are news’) the libellous hyperbole is everywhere.

About a month ago I noted on Viewpoint that British Colonel Richard Kemp stated in a tweet that the UN calculates that the civilian to combatant death ratio in conflicts around the globe is 9:1. In Gaza the IDF seems to have achieved a ratio of only 1.5:1, a fact which evinces remarkable restraint.

In the same post I pointed out that in the run-up to the Normandy invasion in WWII the allies bombed German-occupied French villages and towns, killing 50,000 French. In the campaign to take the Philippines back from the Japanese, 100,000 Filipinos were killed in Manila alone by allied shelling.

These were casualties of Allied civilians. They weren't even supporters of the enemy, as most of the Gazans are, but they were the tragic consequence of the need to defeat an aggressor enemy.

Anyway, Murray continues:

For almost 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza, we have heard the same allegations. Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza during exchanges with Hamas in 2009, 2012 and 2014. As a claim it is demonstrably, obviously false.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. Today it is more than two million, with a male life expectancy higher than in parts of Scotland. During the same period, the Palestinian population in the West Bank grew by a million.

Either the Israelis weren’t committing genocide, or they tried to commit genocide but are uniquely bad at it. Which is it? Well, when it comes to Israel it seems people don’t have to choose. Everything and anything can be true at once.

Murray totes up all the deaths in the three wars (1948, 1967, 1973) in which Israel's Arab neighbors attacked it with the goal of destroying the young Jewish state. He arrives at a figure of 60,000 people killed.

Although you may not have heard about it from our media, in the past decade Bashar al-Assad in Syria has killed over ten times that number. Why is there no outrage over this horrifying statistic?

There are lots of reasons you might give to explain this: that people don’t care when Muslims kill Muslims; that people don’t care when Arabs kill Arabs; that they only care if Israel is involved....

I often wonder why this obsession arises when the war involves Israel. Why don’t people trawl along our streets and scream by their thousands about Syria, Yemen, China’s Uighurs or a hundred other terrible things?....

But I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.

Perhaps so. It certainly seems undeniable that a visceral, irrational hatred of Jews has infected humanity for much of recorded history, and it's difficult to explain on naturalistic grounds why this particular hatred exists. The only explanation that seems capable of adequately accounting for it is that it's demonic.

Suicide and Martyrdom

On Sunday a mentally troubled anarchist named Aaron Bushnell, who also happened to be currently serving in the U.S. Air Force, burned himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. as a protest against Israel's ongoing war against the Hamas terror organization.

Since the man's suicide some left-wing media outlets have tried to portray his action as somehow noble and have gone so far as to claim that the early Christian martyrs did something similar to protest Rome's treatment of them.

They wish to make Bushnell into a martyr, but a martyr is murdered for his beliefs. A martyr is not someone who commits suicide as an act of protest.

Time magazine gets it all wrong when it writes that,

Self-immolation was also seen as a sacrificial act committed by Christian devotees who chose to be burned alive when they were being persecuted for their religion by Roman emperor Diocletian around 300 A.D.

This is false. The Christians Time is talking about did not "choose" to be burned alive.

The Time article's claim is based on a New Yorker piece from 2012 which asserted that the early Christian historian Eusebius recorded an "interesting instance of auto-cremation in antiquity."

Here's what the New Yorker writers said:

...around 300 A.D., Christians persecuted by Diocletian set fire to his palace in Nicodemia and then threw themselves onto it—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.

Is this what Eusebius actually wrote? Well, no. Here's his statement concerning the relevant events in Nicomedia in 304 A.D.:

...a conflagration having broken out in those very days in the palace at Nicomedia, I know not how, which through a false suspicion was laid to our people.... Entire families of the pious in that place were put to death in masses at the royal command, some by the sword, and others by fire. It is reported that with a certain divine and indescribable eagerness men and women rushed into the fire.

In other words, It's not clear how the fire originated. Indeed, some historians suggest it was set on orders from Diocletian's second in command, Galerius, who wanted a pretense to carry out a more vigorous persecution of Christians.

More to the point, the Christians didn't willingly immolate themselves. They were being forced into the flames by the authorities and chose to embrace an unavoidable death. The comparison with what Aaron Bushnell did is completely inapt.

It took me about fifteen minutes to dig out these details. One would think that a professional journalist would've invested at least that much time in ensuring that he or she had the story correct.

Unfortunately, getting the story correct doesn't seem to be a high priority for many journalists today. It's no wonder so few people trust them to tell us the truth.

We Don't Need No Education

No doubt that in some precincts of some universities the best that has been thought and written, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, is still being taught by scholars who love the life of the mind and love teaching the great ideas and works of western civilization. In some campus alcoves the free exchange of ideas is still encouraged and vigorous debate and disagreement is relished, but one wonders how long these archipelagos of learning can survive, especially in the humanities, given the current climate in many of our institutions of higher learning.

Traditionally, courses in logic, mathematics and physics trained students to think clearly. History, literature and politics taught students that the world didn't come into being on their birthday and that there's much to be gained from studying the experience of those who went before.

Alas, Gone are the days when university students could expect as a matter of course to be immersed in Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant and other dead white males in order to imbibe their wisdom and learn from their errors.

Thinking clearly is unfortunately dismissed as an artifact of white supremacy, and the disparity in the racial composition of students in courses like logic, math and physics is "proof" that these courses are inherently racist. Moreover, the only history, literature and politics that matter today in some departments at some schools are those which highlight the history of racial and gender oppression.

Students nowadays can expect to be taught all about trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, transgender, cisgender, critical theory, their "right" not to be exposed to speech they find hurtful or insulting, their "right" not to be offended or made uncomfortable, their "right" not to be confronted with ideas that challenge their own fervently, if often inchoately, held orthodoxies, their "right" not to be disagreed with, the need to intimidate and suppress those who dissent, and the evils of privilege, patriarchy, and other horrors of our corrupt and evil society.

As a consequence it sometimes seems, as philosopher J. Budziszewski puts it in his book Written on the Heart, that the educated in some ways know less than the completely uneducated.

This video, via Hot Air, takes a satirical look at the sad state of affairs that prevails in at least some of our contemporary universities.

Trigger warning: Some progressives may be offended by having their postmodern pedagogical eccentricities skewered:

Free Will Deniers

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor offers a rebuttal to those who wish to maintain that human beings do not have free will. He begins the rebuttal with a question: “What does it mean to believe we don’t have free will?”

He then adds the following:

Belief is behavior....Belief is what you do, not merely what you say. Consider the statement by a serial adulterer “I believe in fidelity and chastity.” Of course, such a claim is not credible, because his behavior makes a mockery of that belief.

Serial adulterers believe in serial adultery (otherwise, they wouldn’t do it), just as embezzlers believe in embezzlement and philanthropists believe in philanthropy. Belief is much more than words ....Belief is a way of living.

In other words, we can tell what a person believes not by what they say but by the way they live.

If you want to know what a free will denier really believes, steal his laptop or dent his fender and see if he holds you morally accountable.

The fact that people who claim to be determinists blame others for their behavior is an indication that the determinist does in fact believe that the other person is responsible and blameworthy, but if determinism is true there really is no responsibility and no one is really blameworthy.

No one can be responsible or blameworthy unless they made a genuine choice to do what they did, but a genuine choice is precisely what determinists believe we can't make.

So what are free will deniers really doing when they say that they don’t believe in free will, but never act like free will isn’t real? Free will denial is determinist signaling, in which materialists flaunt their bona fides. It is analogous to a political yard sign or a cross worn around the neck.

It’s a way of announcing to the world who you are — whether or not you really believe (i.e., behave in accordance with) your politics or your faith. The difference between a political belief expressed on a sign or faith expressed via a pendant and free will denial is that sometimes the sign or cross do correspond to a way of life, and thus are real expressions of belief. Free will denial, on the other hand, never constitutes genuine belief, because it is not possible to live as if free will isn’t real.

There's much more to Egnor's argument at the link. He closes by noting that "What you do is immeasurably louder than what you say. You don’t really believe that free will isn’t real unless you live like it isn’t real.”

To live as if free will isn't real, though, is to live as a complete and utter nihilist, and no one can pull that off.

Contemporary Slavery

I'm currently finishing up a book by Grove City College historian Paul Kengor, the title of which is The Worst of Indignities. It's a history of the Catholic Church's opposition to slavery, an opposition which was the first ever to emerge anywhere in the world and which remained almost completely consistent for over 1600 years.

In the final section of the work, Kengor discusses slavery as it exists today. What follows focuses on chattel slavery although sex slavery and other forms of bondage are also rampant in the contemporary world.

The chattel slavery practiced today is extremely cruel and largely a Muslim enterprise endorsed in the Koran. The victims of this barbaric practice are often Christians, especially black African Christians.

An article by journalist David Aikman on slavery in Sudan that Kengor discusses revealed that in the mid-1990s Christian slaves could be bought for as little as $15 but young women brought much higher prices.

Aikman writes that,

Many slave-owners would subject their human chattel to forcible genital mutilation. Slaves who tried to escape or displeased their owners were either beaten savagely, tied down in the sun without water, or subjected to what some escapees called "the insect treatment." This involved stuffing tiny insects into the victims ears, then sealing them with wax or small stones, and a scarf tied tightly around the head. Some victims ... simply went insane.

The skin of some ex-slaves was completely worn off their legs after being led along for days by ropes tied to camels.

Christians in the Middle East suffered horribly under the ISIS caliphate, especially in 2014 when ISIS was at its most powerful. During that time Islamists killed or enslaved about 10,000 Yazidi Christians in Iraq, subjecting the women and girls to systematic rape.

It's believed that more than 2,700 Yazidi women and children remain in ISIS captivity even though ISIS has been largely obliterated since 2019.

Tel Aviv University Professor Ehud Toledano, an expert on Islamic slavery, states that Muslims who engage in this horrific practice are "in full compliance with Koranic understanding....and that which the Prophet (Muhammad) has permitted, Muslims cannot forbid."

Kengor quotes black economist Thomas Sowell who writes of the seeming

inexplicable contrast between the fiery rhetoric about past slavery in the United States used by those who pass over in utter silence the traumas of slavery that still exist in Mauritania, the Sudan, and parts of Nigeria and Benin....Why so much concern for dead people who are now beyond our help than for living human beings suffering the burdens and humiliations of slavery today? Why does a verbal picture of the abuses of slaves in centuries past arouse far more response than contemporary photographs of present-day slaves....?

It causes one to wonder how much our contemporary justice warriors really care about those who are enslaved and how much they just want to use the historical issue to bash white America.

Christian Nationalism

There's much talk in our contemporary culture about the rise of "Christian nationalism" with seven books on the topic having been released in the last few years.

This has become controversial because, fairly or unfairly, Christian nationalism has become conflated in the popular mind with "far-right" ideologies like that of the Proud Boys or the extreme reaches of the MAGA movement. As such it has about it the odor of the disreputable.

The controversy has prompted sociologist of religion Ryan Burge to examine some data from a Baylor study to see if Christian nationalism is rising or fading.

The reader is invited to go to the link to see a list of the seven books and also to see a breakdown of the Baylor data. My concern in this post is not with the books or the data so much as it is with two other aspects of the study.

First, as Burge acknowledges, there's a lot of debate over exactly how to define Christian nationalism. For the purposes of his discussion, Burge sets that concern aside, but I'm not so sure how meaningful the data he cites are if we don't know what we're talking about when we use the term.

My second concern is that the Baylor study seeks to pin down the status of Christian nationalism by means of a series of statements, with which the respondent is asked if he or she agrees, disagrees, or is unsure. Agreement is considered indicative of an affinity for Christian nationalism, but the statements Baylor uses are just too imprecise.

The questions are as follows:

1. The federal government should advocate Christian values
2. The federal government should allow prayer in public schools
3. The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces
4. The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation
5. The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state
6. The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.

If a respondent answers "yes" to #1 that indicates a predilection toward Christian nationalism, but it seems to me that "yes" is the only answer many reasonable persons could give to #1. After all, what are Christian values but the mandate to help the poor and the needy, to serve others, to seek peace, to speak the truth, to love our neighbor, and so on.

There's nothing in ancient Roman or Greek paganism that mandates these, nor is there anything in Islam, Hinduism, or secularism. To the extent that others have adopted these values they've borrowed them from Christianity, or Judeo-Christianity. So why should almost all Americans not answer "yes" to question #1?

If a respondent answers "yes" to #2 that also suggests that the respondent leans toward Christian nationalism, but what is meant by the word "allow"? Does it mean that the federal government should permit students to pray in school? If so, then of course, they should. How can they stop them?

One might very well think regarding #3 that Christmas creches, for example, should be permitted in public spaces and that individuals in public schools should be allowed to wear a cross on a necklace or a shirt with a religious message without having such symbols banned by the authorities.

Such opinions don't make one a "Christian nationalist," whatever that is.

Again, the problem with #4 lies in what is meant by the word "declare." If the word is taken to mean that the government implicitly or explicitly should acknowledge that the nation was founded by men, Christian or otherwise, who were steeped in Christian values then such an acknowledgement is only stating the obvious. It hardly makes one an extremist of some sort to recognize that.

The ambiguity in #5 arises from the word "strict." How strict should the separation of church and state be? One might believe that there should be a separation of the two without believing that the state should use its power to completely banish religion from the public square. Does that belief make one a "Christian nationalist"?

Finally, #6 prompts the question of what's meant by the word "success"? Is success defined here as economic? Military? Cultural hegemony? Suppose someone were to believe, as some of my liberal Christian friends do, that "success" should be understood as achieving racial harmony and socio-economic justice. If these left-leaning friends believe that this is God's plan does that make them "Christian nationalists"?

The fact is that Christians who are politically middle of the road could answer "yes" to each of these statements and thus be considered Christian nationalists. That being so, studies like the Baylor study that employ such vague indicators don't really tell us much.