Beauty Requires Meaning

Michael Baruzzini writing at First Things recalls an exchange between Richard Dawkins and Archbishop Rowan Williams in which Dawkins admitted that he was an agnostic about God, and was not, strictly speaking, an atheist. Much was made of the admission in the media despite the fact that it was a trivial distinction as Baruzzini explains:

This admission, though it caught the notice of the media, was not really anything new for Dawkins, who has made similar concessions in the past. Dawkins’ approach to all knowledge is strictly scientific.

And since scientific knowledge is always technically tentative, so too must his ostensibly scientific opinion of the non-existence of God. Dawkins dismisses God because he finds no scientific evidence for God, but he must make allowances for the fact that scientific knowledge is always expanding.

Dawkins is still an atheist, after all, because agnosticism is simply a species of the genus atheism. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God and agnostics lack a belief in God. They are what might be called soft atheists because, unlike the hard atheist, they don't make the very strong and undemonstrable claim that God doesn't exist. They simply hold that the evidence is insufficient to justify believing that He does.

It was another comment that Dawkins made in the same discussion that I found much more interesting:

Speaking to his believing conversational companion, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Dawkins said, “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing—that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”

I don't think Dawkins is quite right about this. Beauty ultimately depends upon meaning. Meaningless form and color may please the senses, it may be pretty, but it doesn't rise to the level of beauty unless there's meaning to it. Just as a meaningless sexual experience, though it may afford some degree of pleasure, is hardly beautiful, a world full of things for which we've evolved an aesthetic appreciation may be intriguing, but it's ultimately beautiful because it exudes meaning from every nook, cranny, and pore.

Baruzzini puts the point somewhat differently:

The archbishop, rather than disputing, agreed with Dawkins about the beauty of the scientific description of the development of life. But he then explained that God was not an extra that was “shoehorned” onto the scientific explanation.

Dawkins’ mistake, the archbishop attempted to show, was to suppose that the scientific explanation suffices, and the religious one is an unnecessary complication. The beauty that Dawkins finds in science is not challenged by belief in God; it presupposes it.

The beauty of scientific explanation comes from seeing that the arrangement of things is so ordered to produce the phenomena we observe. The scientist begins with a mess of clues and an unfinished puzzle. He begins with a mystery. He seeks that moment when the pieces fall into place....

But where creation presents a unified theme returning, finally, to reason, atheistic scientism must insist that at bottom [there] is only unreason.

If it all has no meaning, no purpose, if it's all simply the effluent of a cosmic belch, the beauty drains out of it.

Baruzzini goes on to make a further point about Dawkins' views that should be emphasized. He asserts that:

Dawkins supposes that the doctrine of creation requires a Divine Tinkerer, interfering with or co-opting the natural beauty present in the workings of the natural world. Whether or not God tinkered with creation in the manner envisioned by creationism or some versions of intelligent design, such tinkering is neither necessary to the doctrine of creation nor is it the source of the beauty seen by the believer.

To use an analogy previously developed by Stephen Barr, to ask whether God or evolution created life is like asking whether Shakespeare or Hamlet killed Polonius. If there is no Shakespeare, Hamlet’s act is meaningless. It is merely the accidental arrangement of ink on a page. If there is a Shakespeare, however, his existence as the creator of the literary Denmark does not obviate the drama of the play. It is rather a necessary prerequisite for it.

Shakespeare, as a playwright, is not a competitor with the drama of the play.

There's more at the link, but I want to return for a moment to the matter of beauty: Philosophers going back to Plato have affirmed that the highest ideals are the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, but if the world is nothing more than atoms spinning in the void then there really is no Good, no Truth that matters, and no Beauty.

The awe we feel when we look at mountains or a sunset or a galaxy is just the perturbations of chemicals in our brains triggered by a particular visual pattern.

It's when we somehow see meaning in what we observe that we experience its beauty, but there can only be meaning if behind the experience there is a mind that has intentionally created it. Take away the author, the painter, the composer, the architect and there is no meaning and thus no beauty for us to enjoy.

A novel filled with eloquently turned phrases and well-crafted sentences nevertheless lacks beauty if the story makes no sense. The world and life are beautiful because they're filled by it's composer/author with deep, profound meaning. Just as the beauty of a work of art reflects the style, personality, and genius of the artist, the beauty of the world reflects the style, personality, and genius of the Creator.

The Problem Is the Policies

We're living in very interesting times. We had, for a time, a presidential campaign in which both candidates have served as president and now may have a campaign in which one candidate has never received a vote in his or her party's primaries. We've witnessed an unprecedented use of the law to seek to eliminate one of the candidates, which has only increased that candidate's popularity and cash resources, and we were horrified by an assassination attempt on that candidate.

Then we saw a decision by the other candidate, based upon his obviously failing cognitive abilities, to discontinue his campaign for a second term, but to nevertheless continue serving out the remaining six months of his first term. If his cognitive health precludes a second term why does it not preclude leading the country for the next six months?

Anyway, now there'll be a lot of drama as a successor for that candidate is selected.

The Democrats pressured President Biden to drop out of the race because he appears too unpopular to win, but, contrary to what they'd have us believe, his unpopularity is not due to his debilities, which have been apparent to everyone who has been paying attention almost since the beginning of his presidency, but to his and his party's policies and behavior.

For example, the lies Americans were persistently told by sundry Democrats about Trump's Charlottesville remark, the lies by the media and former government officials about Trump having colluded with Russia in 2016, and the attempt to impeach him over it are repugnant to a lot of Americans. So are the aforementioned attempts to have Trump thrown in jail on charges that no other American citizen would ever prosecuted on.

Many Americans are also repelled by credible reports of corrupt use by Mr. Biden of his office to benefit his family.

Furthermore, a majority of Americans are bewildered by the Democrats' failure to secure the border, opening it up to a flood of immigrants, including among them violent criminals and potential terrorists. The lies the nation has been told by administration officials like Alejandro Mayorkis about the border being secure are offensive and outrageous.

Americans were stunned, too, by the incompetence of the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan, the loss of American lives, the betrayal of thousands of Afghanis who had helped us over the years, and the lies we've been told about that debacle. Americans' lack of confidence in the Democrats' ability to navigate foreign policy has been exacerbated by the administration's tepid, on again/off again policies toward Ukraine and Israel, the latter despite Hamas holding five Americans hostage.

They're dismayed by the exorbitant spending and the resulting inflation that prevents them from buying a home, putting food on the table or gas in the car. They're puzzled by the assumption that we have to upend our economy in order to mitigate climate change, as if it's been proven beyond doubt that whatever change that's occurring in the climate can be arrested by anything we do.

They're appalled by the sexualization of our children in schools and the Democrats' support for compelling our daughters to compete athletically against men and to shower with them. They're shocked by the Democrats' support for gender transition surgeries that permanently mutilate a child confused about who he or she really is. They're outraged that Democrats pass laws requiring schools to hide a child's gender confusion from the child's parents, and they mock the Democrat fetish of pronoun usage and laugh about the crime of "misgendering" and other "microaggressions."

Many Americans are disgusted by the emphasis in almost all of our governmental and educational institutions on DEI rather than competence, and disgusted, too, with the failure of Democrat prosecutors to enforce the law, to punish criminals, and to make our cities safe. The disgust extends to judges and SCOTUS justices, appointed by Democrats, who believe that the law should be interpreted according to the jurist's feelings and not according to an objective reading of the relevant statutes or the Constitution.

They're disgusted, moreover, with the Democrat tolerance of antisemitism and anti-white racism in our culture and on our campuses, as well as the religious zeal with which Democrats reverence abortion, cherishing it as sacramental and demanding its legalization up to and even after birth.

These Americans are puzzled as to how January 6th could be plausibly labeled an "insurrection" when it was obviously a riot by a motley mob of confused goofballs, but the riots in the wake of the George Floyd death, riots which took the lives of dozens and caused billions of dollars of property damage, were "mostly peaceful" expressions of discontent.

They're dismayed by the hostility the current administration has displayed toward Christians and Christianity, labeling traditional Catholics as terrorists, using the courts to punish business persons who simply wish to peacefully remain true to their consciences, and seeking to delegitimize religious expression in the public square.

They're disturbed, too, by the authoritarian approach to governing resorted to by the Democrats whose president has frequently imposed policy by executive fiat, regardless of its legality. Last weekend the party that has campaigned on "saving Democracy" has simply overridden the will of millions of voters and executed a coup d'etat to remove their party's presumptive nominee because they believe he can't win.

Finally, many Americans are fed up with a corrupt media that distorts, lies and covers for all of this, abandoning traditional journalistic principles in order to refashion itself as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats may come up with a candidate who'll appear a bit more reasonable and moderate than Joe Bidenand his administration have been, but the appearance will not be the reality. Whoever the Democrats pick - and if it's not Kamala Harris there'll be a civil war in the Democratic party - will be at least as far left as Mr. Biden and do nothing to end the policies that resulted in Mr. Biden's unpopularity.

Only a thorough political housecleaning will do that.

Doubting Darwin

For most of my adult life, any skepticism toward the reigning dogma in biology, Darwinian evolution, was considered a form of either heresy or idiocy or both. Darwinism was beyond doubt and for a biologist to question it was to imperil his or her career. That state of affairs, however, seems to be changing.

Challenges to the Darwinian orthodoxy are arising almost daily in labs across the country as an increasing number of biologists are growing increasingly doubtful that the standard neo-Darwinian model of unguided, naturalistic evolution can explain either the origin or the complexity of living things.

Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science who has written several books that raise perplexing questions for the standard Darwinian model. His first book, Signature in the Cell (2010), dealt with the difficulties posed to Darwinian evolution by our current understanding of the structure and function of DNA.

The second, Darwin's Doubt (2014), explained how the fossil record, specifically the fossils found in the Canadian Burgess shale deposits, points to an extremely sudden (in evolutionary time) appearance of almost all the major animal body plans with no evolutionary precursors, a finding that confutes all Darwinian expectations.

His most recent book Return of the God Hypothesis (2021), is a compelling case for the existence of God based on discoveries in three areas of scientific research - the origin of the universe, the extreme fine-tuning of the universe, and the origin of life.

Meyer summarizes the arguments presented by the first two of these books in this six minute video for Prager U.:

It's important to note that, as far as I know, none of the science that Meyer adduces in this video is in dispute. Indeed, it's arguments like these that are generating a great deal of the current rethinking among evolutionary biologists and workers in related fields.

Vance's Conversion

Donald Trump has named Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the November election. Vance has a great resume, although it's thin on the kind of experience necessary for a chief executive of a huge organization like the American government. Nevertheless, his biography as told in the book and movie Hillbilly Elegy is a remarkable rags to riches story and has been much discussed in the last week.

What's not so well-known about Vance is his account of his gradual conversion from atheism to Roman Catholicism in the period between 2016, when he first announced that he was thinking of adopting the Catholic faith, to his eventual baptism into the Church in 2019.

A piece at TheBlaze.com by Joseph MacKinnon fills in a lot of the details. MacKinnon writes:

President Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), is now a practicing Catholic, but that was not always so.

Years before his baptism and reception into the Catholic Church, Vance told Deseret News he grew up in a "pretty chaotic and hopeless world. Faith gave me the belief that there was somebody looking out for me, that there was a hopeful future on the other side of all the things I was going through."

Vance's Pentecostal father would occasionally take him to church.

"Going to church showed me a lot of really positive traits that I hadn’t seen before. I saw people of different races and classes worshiping together," said Vance. "I saw that there were certain moral expectations from my peers of what I should do."

The future Marine, venture capitalist, and senator indicated that unlike the other children on his block in Middletown, Ohio, the kids his age at the evangelical church he would occasionally attend expected him "not [to] do drugs or have premarital sex or drink alcohol."

Although he found a supportive community through church that could serve as a check against the negative influences he encountered elsewhere, he felt that the particular kind of evangelical Christianity he practiced with his father encouraged "a cultural paranoia where you don't trust and want to withdraw from a lot of parts of the world."

Years later, when he entered Yale Law School, he indicated he "would have called [himself] an atheist." He elsewhere indicated that his reading Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris corresponded with this turn away from faith.

One wonders how many intelligent young people who are searching for answers to the questions they're beginning to have about life and the world, have been influenced by people like Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins. It's really a shame that anyone has been taken in by them since their anti-theistic arguments are usually superficial and unconvincing unless the reader is eager to be convinced of them.

I did a series of VP posts on Dawkins's book The God Delusion which you can find in the archives starting here (2/1/2023) and running through 2/15/23.

MacKinnon continues:

By the time of his graduation, however, he began exploring his faith again.

"Back home, kids who grew up to be relatively successful tended to abandon their faith," Vance told Deseret News. "All of my close friends growing up were all really religious but, with the exception of one of us, we all considered ourselves nonreligious by age 25."

At Yale, I was exposed to faith groups in which that didn't seem to be happening. Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. There was a moment when I was like, 'Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.' You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That's not the world I grew up in, but maybe that's true.

Vance hypothesized at the time that the practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Catholicism, contra the variety of Evangelicalism he was exposed to early on, did not apply the same type of "isolating pressures."

Months prior to the 2016 election, he indicated that he was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism."

You'll have to go to the link for the rest of MacKinnon's account. It's a quite interesting look into a side of Vance that hasn't been prominent in stories about him since his selection by Trump as his running mate.

Karl Marx and the American Left

In recent years the Democrats have moved so far to the left that it's increasingly difficult to distinguish them from Marxists. At Townhall.com Mark Lewis provides us with a number of quotes from Karl Marx himself, many of which sound like they've been lifted from a contemporary academic journal or Democratic party memos.

Not all Democrats would subscribe to the sentiments Marx expresses, but many would and certainly almost all leftists would.

I list the quotes here. The amplifications are mine. You'll have to go to the link to see Lewis' explanations:

1. “Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled.”

2. “Take away a nation’s heritage, and they are more easily persuaded.”

3. “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.”
I.e. don't teach kids history or if it's to be taught only stress the disgraceful aspects of Western and U.S. history.

4. “The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.”
Resist granting parents the right to send their children to private schools, especially Christian schools.

5. “Communism begins where atheism begins.”
Communism is incompatible with belief in a God. For the communist the state is God.

6. “My object is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.”

7. “The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.”

8. “As socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.”
Nothing that carries any religious overtones, and no one who holds ideas that have positive religious implications, should be permitted anywhere near the public square or near children.

9. “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”
All morals are subjective to the individual or relative to the culture in which people live. There are no objective moral truths. The closest thing to an objective moral principle is whatever the government declares to be right at any given time.

10. “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.”
For the left compromise means agreeing with them.Those who resist socialism are engaging in some sort of quixotic culture war. They're resisting the inevitable progress of humanity.

11. “Democracy is the road to socialism.”
Once people realize they can vote into office people who will raid the public purse on their behalf it's just a short step to a socialist economy.

12. “A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.”
Tax the rich. Who cares whether it makes good economic sense to do so?

13. “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
Well, that's probably true. Our corporations are eager to do business with China and lots of other countries that would happily destroy us as soon as they could.

14. “We have no compassion, and we ask for no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
Sounds just like Antifa and a lot of those who've been lamenting that Trump wasn't felled by the would-be assassin in Butler, PA.

Why They're Leaving

Ryan Burge is a sociologist who specializes in analyzing survey data related to religion. On one of his recent posts he discusses some data gleaned from asking "nones" (those who acknowledge no religious affiliation or belief) who grew up in a religious environment, why they left.

You can read his entire post here, but a couple of items that interested me - because they confirmed what I think most people already suspect - were that most nones who abandon religion do so between the ages of 15 and 25 and most of them had a father who was not religious.

The latter point is crucially important in a culture in which fatherlessness is so common and also because the importance of a father's example in a child's life simply cannot be overstated.

Here's a graph that Burge published showing the distribution of reasons "Nones" gave for leaving religion behind:

Notice how many chose religious hypocrisy, religion doesn't make sense, science, and lack of evidence as among the reasons why they left. This tells me that churches need to do a much better job of teaching their young people the reasons why their faith is far more reasonable than any secular alternative.

It's unfortunate that so many Christian young people, even among those who never walk away from the faith, reach adulthood without having gained a solid understanding of the basis of the Christian faith. It's as if the church expects kids to somehow absorb that understanding osmotically just by sitting in a pew.

With all the resources that are available to churches today on the internet and elsewhere this is really an inexcusable failing.

Building a Bird

As you view the following video ask yourself how each part of the embryo "knows" what body part to develop into and how and when to do it. Then ask yourself how such an astonishing process could've evolved solely through natural processes - blind, purposeless, and unguided.

No fair replying that nature just waved a magic wand, intoned "abracadabra," and poof, we see embryogenesis happening. That rejoinder only works if natural processes are the only possible explanation for the development of an embryo, but, of course, they're not.

Another much more adequate possibility is intelligent agency - an intentional design by an intelligent engineer.

Watch:

It's Been Worse. Will it Get Better?

The events of the last few days have caused some people, especially younger people, to think that things have never been worse, but they have as Jim Geraghty reminds us:

It may feel like our political rhetoric has never been so heated — that’s debatable — but within living memory, we’ve had periods of much more widespread political violence. Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence is the most complete history of the political violence perpetrated by groups such as the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, FALN, and the Black Liberation Army.

Early on, Burrough quotes retired FBI agent Max Noel:

People have completely forgotten that in 1972, we had over 1900 domestic bombings in the United States. People don’t want to listen to that. They can’t believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.

All true, and the above doesn't even mention the multiple riots in our cities every summer with hundreds of dead and millions in property loss.

Extremists have, throughout the last century or so, constantly probed for weaknesses in our polity. When they've found them they exploit their advantage by launching spasms of vitriol and violence in an attempt to destabilize and wear down resistance until citizens tire of the struggle and finally yield to those who would make themselves our masters.

Every presidential candidate, Republican and Democrat, runs on the promise of bringing us together, uniting us, but unity today between progressives and conservatives seems out of reach. In any case, as Jonah Goldberg has said recently, it's not what we need anyway. He wrote:

We don't need this country to be more unified - we need this country to be better at disagreeing with each other.

I think he's right, but we'll only get better at disagreeing with each other if we share some common core values. Right now, I don't know that we do.

Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly explains why few conservatives are inclined to be lectured to by Democrats about turning down the rhetoric. She delivers a real stemwinder after her guest, Dennis Prager, is done speaking.

A Moral Sickness

People have been warning for some time that the rhetoric of violence, particularly on the left, would at some point provide the psychological justification in the mind of some already unstable individual to actually carry out an attempt to vent his hatred in a notorious act of violence.

We can't marinate our politics in constant expressions of hate for our opponents without eventually having that hatred boil over in horrible violence.

The hateful rhetoric on the left, from our president on down, has now issued in the death of at least one man, serious injury to a couple of others, and the near assassination of a political candidate.

RedState's Mike Miller quotes Georgetown Law Professor Jonathan Turley who wrote that:

The assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump left a nation stunned. But the most shocking aspect was that it was not nearly as surprising as it should have been. For months, politicians, the press and pundits have escalated reckless rhetoric in this campaign on both sides. That includes claims that Trump was set to kill democracy, unleash “death squads” and make homosexuals and reporters "disappear."

Turley continued:

President Biden has stoked this rage rhetoric. In 2022, Biden held his controversial speech before Independence Hall where he denounced Trump supporters as enemies of the people. Biden recently referenced the speech and has embraced the claims that this could be our last democratic election.

Some of us have been objecting for years that this rage rhetoric is a dangerous political pitch for the nation. While most people reject the hyperbolic claims, others take it as true. They believe that homosexuals are going to be “disappeared” as claimed on ABC’s “The View” or that the Trump "death squads" are now green lighted by a conservative Supreme Court as claimed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Here are a few more examples from Turley:

As soon as Trump was elected, unhinged rage became the norm as with Kathy Griffin featuring herself holding the bloody severed head of Trump.

Just recently, another celebrity, actress Lea DeLaria, begged Biden to “blow [Trump] up” after the recent presidential immunity decision. DeLaria explained that “this is a f*****g war. This is a war now, and we are fighting for our f*****g country. And these a**holes are going to take it away. They’re going to take it away.”

For months, people have heard politicians and the press call Trump “Hitler” and the GOP a Nazi movement. Some compared stopping Trump to stopping Hitler in 1933. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) declared Trump “is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy and he has to be eliminated.” He later apologized.

Others say that Trump “will destroy the world” unless he is stopped.

Matt Margolis at PJ Media reminds us that President Biden's violent rhetoric has been over the top as well.

“Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation,” Joe Biden said a couple of weeks ago. “He's a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He's literally a threat to everything America stands for.”

Just last week, he said, “It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.”

When Sarah Palin used bullseyes on a map the left used that as an excuse to blame her rhetoric for the attempted murder of congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Why do they not hold Joe Biden to the same standard?

Margolis adds this:

Madonna threatened to blow up the White House during the Women's March on Washington after Trump took office. Mere months into Trump's presidency, Kathy Griffin staged a photo with a severed, bloodied head of Trump, and actor Johnny Depp asked the crowd at the annual Glastonbury Festival, "When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?"

Essentially, they normalized and trivialized political violence. Heck, they even consider it justifiable.

Consider the countless instances where Trump was compared to Hitler or labeled as a tyrant. Such comparisons are not merely hyperbolic; they are dangerous. They suggest that Trump is not just a political opponent but an enemy who must be stopped at any cost.

One Biden megadonor "joked" about making Trump an actual martyr.

A Democrat politician compared the outpouring of prayers for Trump to "sympathy for the devil."

Jaqueline Marsaw, a staff person for January 6th Committee Chair Bennie Thompson urged would-be Trump assassins to get some shooting lessons.

Libs of Tik Tok has a two and a half minute montage of lefties condoning political violence.

The leftwing hoi polloi, as one might expect, have been no better, celebrating the attempt on Trump's life, calling the would-be assassin a "hero," lamenting that he missed, etc.

There's a sickness in our politics, and the worst cases afflict many of those on the political left. If there's anything comparable to this on the right I'd appreciate readers sending me the links, because I'm sincerely unaware of it.

Metaphors and Faith

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without this tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved very early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this complex sequence of chemical reactions occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It's at least logically possible that it did, and lots of very intelligent people assure us that it did even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known paper from 1996:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents.

In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists, perhaps unintentionally, serves the purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this pathway and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature had no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version of it, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow retained and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it takes a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input than to believe that it arose through the agency of a biochemical genius.

The Democrats' Least Bad Option

Far be it from me to give advice to political professionals, but I think the Democrats have one option that I haven't heard anyone mention and which I think would be their best play given the mess they're in.

President Biden's poll numbers look very bad, Democrats are demoralized and despondent, they can't persuade Biden to drop out of the race, and they can't force him out without destroying the party. So what can they do?

I think their best move is to persuade Mr. Biden to replace Kamala Harris as his running mate. This would cause a firestorm of protest in much of the Democrat party who would be outraged that an "African-American" female is being shunted aside, even though she's failed to demonstrate that she has the wherewithal to assume the presidency should, as seems exceedingly likely, Mr. Biden be unable to complete a second term.

The solution to this vexatious problem is to pick a replacement for her who would appease the identity politics crowd and energize Democratic voters to come out in November. The pick would be someone who would be eager for the job, knowing that he or she would likely be president within a year or so.

Harris' replacement couldn't be a white male, not in the Democrat party, but it could be someone like Hillary Clinton.

If Biden were to drop Harris and pick Clinton as his running mate Democrats would understand that they were voting for Hillary for president. This might appease the donors, energize the feminists, encourage down-ballot candidates, and perhaps mollify those who chafe at seeing an African-American dissed.

A better choice would be Michelle Obama but she doesn't want it. Hillary doubtless does.

Of course, this move might not be enough to defeat Trump, but it would be better than the status quo and seems to be the Democrats' least bad option.

I hope they don't do it.

A Modest Proposal

As much of the country swelters in high heat and humidity I'd like to advance a modest proposal. I propose that we discard Columbus Day, MLK Day, Presidents' Day, etc. and replace them all with a national holiday in honor of Willis Carrier. Carrier invented air conditioning in 1902 and thereby made life more endurable for more people than all the other folks we celebrate with our national holidays combined.

Willis H. Carrier was Chief Engineer of the Buffalo Forge Company from 1902 to 1915. The company was subsequently acquired by Howden in 1993. The following is a paraphrase of an article at chartindustries.com:

Willis H. Carrier

Carrier was assigned the task of improving the manufacturing process in a printing plant that suffered from excessive humidity, which wreaked havoc on the inks used to print.

To remedy this Carrier submitted drawings of a system that would control temperature, control humidity, control the air circulation and ventilation, and cleanse the air - not bad for a 25 year old fresh out of college.

Using his knowledge of heating objects with steam, he simply reversed the process. Instead of sending air through hot coils, he sent it through coils filled with cold water instead. As the air cooled, moisture in the air condensed on the coils, decreasing both the temperature and the humidity in the room.

Thus was the modern air conditioner born.

In 1906 while exploring ways to add moisture to the air in his textile mill, Stuart Cramer invented a ventilating device that combined moisture with ventilation that “conditioned” the air in his factories. By adding water vapor to the air he was able to control the humidity making the textiles easier to work with.

He called this process “air conditioning” and Willis Carrier liked the term so much he adopted it and even incorporated it into the name of his company.

So, try to imagine what these last couple of weeks would've been like before Carrier's invention, especially if you live in the American southwest, where temperatures have been in triple digits, and see if you don't agree that the failure to give Carrier a national holiday has been a grievous oversight.

Why Do They Support the Palestinians?

A family member texted me recently and asked if I could explain why people would be on the side of the Palestinians. She wrote that one of her co-workers said that he thinks most people their age (Millenials) are on the side of Palestinians and she didn’t know how to respond because she was "a little surprised."

Here’s my response, slightly edited:

There are a number of answers to your question. First, pro-Palestinians are of course either Muslims or non-Muslims. If they're Muslim they've been taught from childhood on up to hate Jews (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Christians).

Many Muslims also believe that Allah wants them to dominate the world, by the sword if necessary, and the existence of a Western, non-Muslim island, no matter how tiny, in the midst of a Muslim sea is intolerable to them. It’s made even more insufferable by the amazing success of the Jewish people and the miserable failures of Muslims living all around them in the Middle East.

Muslims have waged a war of conquest against the non-Muslim world for 1300 yrs. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is just one battle in an unending war to spread Islam across the entire globe.

But if the Gen Z/Millenial pro-Palestinian folks are not Muslims then they often have other reasons for their pro-Palestinian bias.

One is that they don’t know the history of the region. They think that the Jews just took the land away from the Palestinians like Europeans took land away from the Indians in North America. This is not true, of course, but in our postmodern society objective truth doesn’t exist. What’s true for many of your contemporaries is whatever "works" for them, whatever confirms their desires and biases, whatever makes them feel good, or whatever just seems right. Actual historical facts are not really relevant to them. What matters is that they read news reports about suffering Palestinians and they react emotionally against those they think are causing the suffering.

A second related reason is that many just don't know the facts about Oct. 7th or what has happened in the war since. They often believe the propaganda put out by the Palestinian news agency or health ministry which are both controlled by Hamas, the terrorist organization that perpetrated the horrific atrocities on October 7th. They think that the Israelis are indiscriminately killing innocent Palestinians, but that's false. The Israelis have tried harder to limit civilian casualties than any nation in history has done in any previous war. Meanwhile, Hamas uses their own people as human shields and even shoots them in order to prevent them from fleeing combat zones.

A third reason is that your generation has been steeped in Marxist Critical Theory whether most of your generational cohort realize it or not. CT teaches that the world is comprised of oppressors and oppressed. White-skinned people are inherently oppressive and brown-skinned people are invariably their oppressed victims. This paradigm serves as a lens through which many young people view the world, so by definition the Palestinians are the oppressed and the Israelis are the oppressors, regardless of the objective facts, and a desire for justice requires them, they think, to side with the oppressed against the oppressors.

This is why when the Muslim Syrian president slaughters tens of thousands of other Syrian Muslims hardly anyone cares because that’s brown-skinned Muslims killing other brown-skinned Muslims. Or when white-skinned Russians bomb a children’s hospital in Ukraine full of white-skinned children no one on the left says much of anything because that’s just whites killing whites, but if white Jews kill brown Palestinians the world is outraged. We see this same script play out between our own police and criminals. If a black cop shoots an unarmed black man the story dies in a day, but if a white cop kills an unarmed black man we have summer-long riots with dozens dead and billions in property damage.

An interpretive framework like CT is very convenient because it saves people the trouble of doing the hard work of researching the facts. All they need do to see who the good guys and bad guys are is look at their skin color and/or ethnicity. It's like a litmus test.

A fourth reason is anti-semitism, the hatred of Jews because they're Jews. Anti-semitism keeps popping up in our society every other generation or so and the recent demonstrations on our university campuses shows that Gen Z and possibly a lot of Millenials are deeply afflicted with this disease. Anti-semitism is completely irrational, but tragically enough, it's also historically ubiquitous.

There's more that could be said in response to your colleague's remark, but this is probably already more of a reply than what you wanted. If someone tells you that they support the Palestinians in the Gaza war you might ask them their reason and very likely it'll be one of those, or a combination of those, mentioned above.

Threats to Democracy

One of the major themes in the Democrats' attack on Donald Trump is that he's "a threat to democracy." Very little convincing evidence is ever adduced in support of the accusation, but most people who are inclined to think the worst of Trump don't require evidence anyway. Their aversion is often visceral, not rational.

The allegation is, in any case, an apparent instance of projection. The current threats to democracy appear to be coming almost exclusively from the left as Rob Schneider points out in a post on X.

He writes:

Be careful of Political parties that warn of a threat to Democracy while they themselves arrest their political opponents, work with Tech companies to censor those that disagree with them, allow men in women’s sports & bathrooms, encourage child mutilation surgeries, fire Federal workers & nurses for not getting experimental gene therapies, threaten to expand the Supreme Court and eliminate the Electoral College, cause rampant inflation, increase the cost of groceries by 26 percent, allow 11 million people to illegally cross the border, and push the entire World close to World War III.

He might also have mentioned the suppression of free speech on campus and attempts to purge religion from the public square. Moreover, the current desire of many Democrats to remove Joe Biden from the ballot after millions of their voters chose him in the primaries over Dean Phillips and Jason Palmer seems inconsistent with the spirit of democracy.

If we're concerned, as we very well should be, about threats to our democratic polity we'd be wise to scrutinize the behavior of the left much more closely than many who are blinded by their distaste for Donald Trump seem inclined to do.

Random Thoughts

A couple of days ago I put up a post titled Truth and Mr. Biden. A friend liked it and put it on his Facebook page. It lasted 45 seconds before the censors took it down. I suppose I should be honored that I've joined a long list of worthies whose posts have been deemed unfit to be read by the exquisitely delicate psyches of some of those who frequent Facebook.

Anyway, if you missed the post you can read it at the link and perhaps re-post it on your own social media.

Meanwhile, here's part of a note I sent to another friend recently:

Well, if I'd have bet money a couple of months ago when I speculated that Biden wouldn't be the nominee come November I'd be feeling pretty good right now.

It was either a stunning lack of self-awareness or a symptom of deep-seated egomaniacism when Biden told George Stephanopoulis on Friday that he could accept a Trump victory as long as he knew he gave it his all. Does Biden really think, after the Dems have tried to convince us for eight years that Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, that the election is all about him? How could he sincerely think that Trump is Satan's spawn and still think that it'd be okay if Trump won as long as he gave a good effort? Doesn't he care about the country, for heaven's sake?

It was also amusing in a sad way that Mr. Biden claimed to be proud of being the first black female vice president. I suppose if Bill Clinton can be the first black president, Joe Biden can be the first black female vice president. We are what we feel we are after all.

There was a funny post on Twitter: "Last week liberals pretended to be shocked Biden is senile. This week they're pretending to be shocked Biden is a selfish, corrupt, pathological liar. What'll they be pretending about next week?"

Another writer pointed out that we now have an answer to the 2000 yr. old mystery as to when the Second Coming will arrive. Biden said that only if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells him to get out of the race will he do so. Well, that'll probably happen within about a week or so. I guess we should all get ready for the Lord's arrival.

Why Tyrants Ban the Bible

Eric Metaxas, wrote a column at USA Today several years back in which he suggested some answers to a couple of interesting questions: Why do tyrants almost always ban the Bible, and why do so many secular folks fear it?

Whether one believes that the Bible is the authoritative word of God or is convinced that it's merely a compilation of the literary and historical musings from a long dead civilization, the questions should have resonance, in fact they should have special piquancy for those who hold the latter view.

After all, why would a book of ancient legends and superstitions be feared by those who seek to exercise mind-control over the people? Why not treat it like they would treat Aesop's Fables?

Anyway, here are some excerpts from what Metaxas says:

Every single year the Bible is the world’s best-selling book. In fact, it’s the number one best-selling book in history. But recently it made another, less-coveted list: the American Library Association’s “top 10 most-challenged books of 2015.” This means the Bible is among the most frequently requested to be removed from public libraries.

But what’s so threatening about it? Why could owning one in Stalin’s Russia get you sent to the Gulag, and why is owning one today in North Korea punishable by death? What makes it scarier to some people than anything by Stephen King?

We could start with the radical notion that all human beings are created by God in His image, and are equal in His eyes. This means every human being should be accorded equal dignity and respect. If the wrong people read that, trouble will be sure to follow. And some real troublemakers have read it.

One of them was George Whitefield, who discovered the Bible as a teenager and began preaching the ideas in it all across England. Then he crossed the Atlantic and preached it up and down the thirteen colonies until 80 percent of Americans had heard him in person. They came to see that all authority comes from God, not from any King, and saw it was their right and duty to resist being governed by a tyrant, which led to something we call the American Revolution.

Another historical troublemaker was the British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce. When he read the Bible, he saw that the African slave trade — which was a great boon to the British economy — was nonetheless evil. He spent decades trying to stop it. Slave traders threatened to have him killed, but in 1807, he won his battle and the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire. In 1833, slavery itself was abolished.

In the 20th century, an Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi picked up some ideas from the Bible about non-violent resistance that influenced his views as he led the Indian people to independence. And who could deny the Bible’s impact on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said the Bible led him to choose love and peaceful protest over hatred and violence?

He cited the Sermon on the Mount as his inspiration for the Civil Rights movement, and his concept of the "creative suffering," endured by activists who withstood persecution and police brutality, came from his knowledge of Jesus’ trials and tribulations.

It could be added to these examples that a book that teaches that no earthly authority is ultimate, that men must obey God's law when it conflicts with man's law, that tyrants who abuse their power, which they all do, will answer for their evil, a book that says all that is not going to find favor with dictators.

But why is it often banned from public libraries in countries which ostensibly have freedom of speech? Perhaps one reason is that the Bible defies the secularist orthodoxy that "the cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be" to quote Carl Sagan.

Any book that claims to be divinely inspired and which which asserts that the physical world is just a shadow of the really real, is simply not to be tolerated, even by those who claim to make a virtue of tolerance. These folks may not be tyrants of the sort who rule North Korea, but they share some aspects of the tyrannical spirit all the same.

To paraphrase the French polymath Blaise Pascal, they despise the Bible, they hate it and fear it may be true.

Truth and Mr. Biden

One of the more amusing themes adopted by the Democrats in the wake of President Biden's dismal performance in last week's debate is the notion that despite his struggles that evening, at least Mr. Biden, unlike Mr. Trump, is a man of integrity who tells the truth.

That claim, which has appeared in a number of different variations, is humorous in its brazen dishonesty.

Shawn Fleetwood at The Federalist lists twenty different whoppers Mr. Biden foisted on the audience during the debate, few of which the Democrat damage control teams in the legacy media felt impelled to remark upon.

Townhall's Larry Elder explains that the Democrats strategy from here on out will be to,

Make sure Biden never again gets caught without a teleprompter and a speechwriter. Praise Harris and "put her out there more" so she can pick up the baton if Biden declines even more. Repeatedly chant "Abortion and our democracy are on the ballot."

And triple down on calling Trump a lying, election-denying, racist Nazi who "threatens our democracy."

They rely on the Democrats/media to ignore the strategy's defects and contradictions. As to Trump's so-called election denying/refusal to accept results, the Dems/media have consigned to the memory hole the time Biden preemptively questioned the results of the 2022 midterms.

At the time, most Democrats and Republicans expected a "red wave." Asked if he'd accept the results, Biden said: "It easily could be illegitimate. I'm not going to say it's going to be legit.... The increase of the prospect of it being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these (voting) reforms passed."

That sounds like it could've been lifted right out of a Trump campaign speech. Elder takes things a step further and considers Mr. Biden's asseverations that Mr. Trump is a liar whereas he is himself a slave to the truth. Elder demurs:

As to Biden's lies, they include, but are not limited to: how, why, and where his son Beau contracted brain cancer; that Biden desegregated movie theaters and restaurants; that he finished in the top half of his law school class; that he got arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela during apartheid; was "raised in the black church"; played football for the University of Delaware; claimed the driver who accidentally struck and killed his first wife and daughter was drunk; intentionally misstating what Trump said about Charlottesville; that Trump said to drink/inject bleach; that Biden didn't pressure Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma; that Biden never discussed son Hunter's business dealings; that a small kitchen fire "almost killed" his wife; that he was "shot at" in Iraq; that inflation was "9%" when he became president; the Border Patrol endorses him; the NAACP endorsed him in "all" of his elections; World War II's Uncle Bosie was eaten by cannibals; that "no one" advised him the Afghan government would quickly collapse and the Taliban would return if he abruptly pulled out of Afghanistan; that Trump referred to World War I American vets who lost their lives as "suckers and losers"; that Trump praised Hitler; among others.

Mr. Trump may play fast and loose with the truth, but Mr. Biden is almost in a class by himself. Whenever the president says, which he often does, "I give you my word as a Biden," it takes great effort to not spit out my coffee.

So, what about Mr. Trump's other moral failures?

Biden, during the debate, accused Trump of having "the morals of an alley cat" and that Trump's alleged affair with Stormy Daniels occurred "when (Trump's wife) was pregnant." Does Biden really want to go there?

The ex-husband of Jill Biden claims Biden met the married couple when they worked on his Senate campaign, and not on a "blind date" as Biden claims. Jill's ex says Jill cheated on him with Biden.

Biden ex-staffer Tara Reade claims the then-senator sexually assaulted her.

When this accusation surfaced during the 2020 campaign, as well as allegations by other women who accused Biden of unwanted touching and kissing, then-Sen. Kamala Harris said, "I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it."

The media were completely uncurious about the Reade allegations because Mr. Biden, as everyone knows, would never have done such a thing. He's not Donald Trump, after all.

Anyway, all this makes risible the claims that Joe Biden is a virtuous, moral straight-shooter who the public can count on to always tell them the truth. In fact, we can count on the truth neither from Mr. Biden nor from an obsequious legacy media which has misled and lied to us about him for at least four years.

Happy Birthday America (Whatever's Left of You)

Is a Philosophy Degree Worth It?

I thought this was funny even if it's not quite true:

I say it's not quite true because an undergraduate degree in philosophy is often a gateway to graduate degrees in law, medicine, theology, and a host of other careers. Even if a student doesn't wish to take a degree in philosophy, taking philosophy courses can be, depending on how they're taught, a richly rewarding experience.

About eight years ago I wrote a post for VP in which I discussed the value of an undergrad philosophy degree, either major or minor, for anyone who has the intellectual interest and is strongly attracted to the life of the mind.

You can read that post here. If you're a high school student who enjoys ideas and is wrestling with whether you should go to college and, if so, what you should take when you're there, check it out.

Vultures

There are two species of vultures commonly seen in eastern North America: the turkey vulture and the black vulture. California condors are a third species of vulture that are found in the American west.

Vultures are aesthetically unattractive to look at up close, but they're marvelous to see soaring on thermal updrafts in large groups called "kettles." They're also environmentally important carrion-eaters as this lovely video explains:

The next time you look up and see one of these birds wheeling in the sky overhead, remember that you're watching an aeronautical and biological marvel.

One of the Two Most Important SCOTUS Decisions in Decades

Last Thursday night's disastrous debate performance by our president has consumed most of the attention of news commentators in the days since but maybe an even more gratifying development for conservatives was the SCOTUS ruling that overturned the infamous 1984 Chevron decision.

In a nutshell, Chevron had deferred to federal agencies the authority to determine what regulations should be imposed on businesses when the actual law was ambiguous. This has resulted in a massive increase in federal power over the last forty years.

The Supreme Court has now taken that authority from the federal government and given it to the courts where it belongs. Courts, not bureaucrats, are to interpret the law. Courts are more likely to be disinterested and objective; unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats are more likely to have ideological agendas.

Paula Bolyard writes at PJ Media:

Today, the Supreme Court voted to overrule the so-called Chevron deference in a 6-3 decision. The ruling is a HUGE victory for those who hate the massive power the administrative state has amassed in recent decades.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded: "The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled."

In the most basic terms, the Chevron deference (also called the Chevron doctrine) allows the courts, through a two-step process, to defer to "reasonable" administrative agency interpretations if a federal statute is unclear or ambiguous. It was essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card for presidents and agency hacks who liked to claim that a law says whatever they want it to say.

It gave federal agencies broad authority to regulate everything from health care to immigration to women's sports to COVID jabs.

Bolyard has much more information on this decision and the rationale for it at the link.

Tossing Chevron into the dumpster was a necessary first step in cutting big government down to size and returning government to its constitutional role as a servant of the people, not our master. This decision stands with Dobbs as perhaps the two most important decisions SCOTUS has made in decades.

C.S.Lewis on Naturalistic Ethics

A student linked me to a post by historian Alan Snyder who highlights some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on metaphysical naturalism in his famous book Miracles. Snyder writes:

In his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis takes aim at “naturalists” who say that there is no “outside” reference [i.e., God] for calling anything good or evil.

When men use the words, “I ought,” Lewis notes, they are saying something about the essence of right and wrong that is built into the universe. In fact, naturalists should never use such terminology: “But if naturalism is true,” he writes, “‘I ought’ is the same sort of statement as ‘I itch’ or ‘I’m going to be sick.'”

On naturalism there are no moral obligations and thus the word "ought" has no moral significance. If there are no moral duties then there's nothing anyone "ought" to do, at least not in the moral sense of the word "ought."

Lewis explains,

The naturalist can, if he chooses, brazen it out. He can say . . . “all ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer world by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many naturalists are delighted to say this.

There’s a problem, though, for those who attempt to explain good and evil in this way:

But then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though inconsistently) most real naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusions, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. . . . They write with indignation like men proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like men recording that they personally like mild beer but some people prefer bitter.

Of course, if good and evil are illusions then there's certainly no reason why we should be concerned with either the illusion of good or the illusion of evil.

To use such terms when the user knows they don't refer to anything is a form of social coercion. Naturalists who employ the rhetoric of good and evil are simply attempting to compel, or trick, others into behaving in ways the naturalists prefer by calling their actions good or evil when in fact they're neither good nor evil - no more than are the actions of a wolf or falcon or any other predator.

When one gull steals a morsel of food from another we don't call the gull or its behavior evil. Likewise, if we're just animals, if there's no transcendent moral order, why do we call an act like robbing an elderly lady evil?

Lewis adds:

Do they remember while they [naturalists] are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better world” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn?

Yet, as Snyder points out, the naturalist, unless he's also a nihilist, doesn't live consistently with his own professed ideology. Snyder concludes with another quote from Lewis:

My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their naturalism to the winds and speak like men.

Yes, they do, but when they do they admit the failure of their naturalism. A worldview that people can't live with consistently is seriously flawed.

Can't Have Both (Pt. II)

Yesterday I wrote that naturalists, i.e. those who deny that the ultimate reality is a personal intelligent being, are in an intellectually untenable position. They want to maintain a belief in moral responsibility, objective moral duties, human equality, objective human rights, free will, consciousness, and so on even though their fundamental assumption, that material nature is all there is, reduces all of these to illusions.

Here are some quotes, all from philosophical naturalists, to illustrate the point:

• "Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused...[yet] the world as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events."
• "The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe ...[but] when those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."
• "A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion." Steven Pinker MIT in How the Mind Works.
• "The physical world provides no room for freedom of the will...[yet] that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. {So] We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false." Marvin Minsky MIT in The Society of Mind.
• "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom even though there's no ground for it." John Searle
• "We cannot live adequately with ...a complete awareness of the absence of free will ...[thus] we ought to hold on to those central but incoherent or contradictory beliefs in the free will case." Philosopher Paul Smilansky
• "Free will is a very persistent illusion. It keeps coming back." Harvard Psychologist Daniel Wegner
• "Consciousness has to be an illusion." Cambridge Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
• "Common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist." Philosophers Paul and 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." Philosopher John Gray

If free will and consciousness are illusions then there simply can be no objective moral duties or truth, thus no responsibility for anything we do no matter how cruel or harmful to others. There can be no human rights beyond what one powerful group of human beings arbitrarily confer upon another, nor can there be any grounds for trusting our sense perceptions or even our reason.

If truth is subjective, if beliefs aren't true in an objective sense, then the belief that naturalism is true is simply an expression of a subjective preference. It can't be objectively true.

Naturalists (i.e. atheists) have to live in two contradictory worlds. In their everyday lives with family and friends they live like everyone else, behaving as if the common sense view is obviously correct, but in their professional or intellectual lives they live as if human beings are machines with no free will, consciousness or dignity.

In other words, in their daily lives they live as though theism were true while in their intellectual lives they adamantly deny it.

They oscillate back and forth between these two irreconcilable worlds, unable to give up the common sense entailments of theism yet unable to live consistently with what the logic of naturalism, the philosophical worldview they embrace, tells them is the case.

It makes one wonder if perhaps naturalism is a mental illness.

Can't Have Both (Pt.I)

There's a fascinating struggle going on today for the hearts and minds of American youth, a struggle between two very different philosophical views of reality.

It's a struggle being waged primarily in our institutions of higher education and in our entertainment media.

Currently, the prevailing view in those institutions is naturalistic materialism - the idea that nature and matter are all there is and that there's no supernatural nor immaterial substance.

This view stands in diametric opposition to its rival, theism, which predominates, of course, among Christians, Jews and Muslims. In its broad outlines this view of the world (worldview) holds that human beings are the intentional product of a personal, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient Mind which both created, and thus transcends, space, time and mass/energy.

One of the criticisms that philosophical naturalists level at theists is that theism, they claim, is irrational - it's irrational to believe in the existence of entities that are undetectable by the human senses.

There's much that could be said in response to this particular criticism, but in this post I want to ask which of the two views is really most at odds with reason and which conforms best to our own personal experience of the world.

Here's the problem for the naturalist: In order to embrace it one must, if one is to be rational, either give up believing in a host of things that most naturalists don't want to give up believing in, or come up with some secondary or ad hoc explanation for them.

For instance, on naturalism there's no basis for believing in human equality, objective human rights, or human dignity. Nor is there any basis for believing in objective moral obligation, moral responsibility, free will, the existence of the self, human consciousness or the trustworthiness of our reason.

None of these can be accommodated by a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, except by forcing them, Procrustus-like, into it. Yet they all fit quite comfortably in theism.

Moreover, on naturalism one must hold that human beings are simply machines made of meat, that the universe came into being uncaused and out of nothing, that the fine-tuning of the parameters and constants of the universe which permit life are just a fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, that the origin of life is another fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, and that the amazing ability of mathematics to describe the world and the ability of humans to not only comprehend it but to articulate it in language are even more fortuitous accidents.

Either one believes all that or one must believe, despite the lack of any evidence, that there's an infinity of different universes and/or that we're really living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix.

If one claims to be a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) and yet believes that there are some things that are wrong for anyone to do (like torture children), if they believe that people are responsible for their actions, that we all have a conscious mind, that our beliefs and sense experiences are not illusions, that our reason can be generally trusted and that the notion that we're living in a multiverse or a computer simulation is extremely far-fetched, then one is simply not thinking consistently with one's worldview, and is therefore being irrational and they're certainly not a very good naturalist.

Naturalists, to be consistent, must confront this choice: Either give up all (or most) of the beliefs enumerated above or give up naturalism. One simply can't hold on to both and be rational.

It's an interesting fact that when facing this choice many people would rather cling to naturalism than hold on to the belief in moral responsibility or in the existence of conscious minds. They know that abandoning naturalism means accepting the unpleasant fact that theism is true, and they'd apparently prefer to continue to live irrationally than accept that they've been wrong about God.

Why that is would make for an interesting psychological study.

The First Presidential Debate

Donald Trump and Joe Biden will square off against each other tomorrow night in the first of two presidential debates this campaign season. There are at least two outcomes, both quite possible, that could doom either candidate.

If Mr. Trump blows himself up on stage and comes across as a raging narcissist obsessed with the 2020 election and the attempts by Democrats to destroy him through legal machinations, he will probably forfeit his early lead in the battleground states and lose once again to Joe Biden regardless of how well or poorly Mr. Biden performs.

If Mr. Biden wilts after an hour or so on the stage, begins to exhibit all the symptoms of cognitive debility that he has frequently displayed in public appearances, and generally gives the appearance of a man who belongs in a rest home rather than in the White House, while Mr. Trump maintains an uncharacteristically placid demeanor, I suspect that the Democrats will find a way to ease Mr. Biden out of the race and replace him with someone else. To leave him in the campaign after a disastrous performance in the debate would likely be political suicide for the Democrats in November.

If Mr. Trump does well and Mr. Biden manages to finish the evening without committing any fatal gaffes, nothing much will change in the polls, and we'll probably be making these same observations prior to the second debate. In other words, the debate, and the election, seem at this point to be Mr. Trump's to lose.

Gender Identity Disorder Is Largely Transitory

A piece at HotAir.com cites a German study that shows that Gender Identity Disorder fades after about five years in at least half of the young people who are diagnosed with it. If this is so it makes the surgical disfigurement of the thousands of children who've undergone the procedures all the more tragic.

A new long-term study from Germany suggests that the majority of young people diagnosed with gender identity disorders do not continue to identify as such over time.

The study examined insurance data over five years, revealing that more than half of young people aged 5-24 across every age subgroup diagnosed with "gender identity disorder" no longer had the diagnosis after five years.

Specifically, the desistance rate was 72.7% in 15- to 19-year-old females and 50.3% in 20- to 24-year-old males. Among the whole group of 5- to 24-year-olds, only about 36.4% of those diagnosed in 2017 still had the diagnosis five years later, indicating that more than 63% desisted.

The research also noted a dramatic rise in the number of young people being diagnosed with gender identity disorders. In 2013, there were 22.5 cases per 100,000 insured young people, but by 2022, this had increased to 175.7 cases per 100,000, representing an increase of nearly 681%.

Is it just a coincidence that 2013 is about the time that young people began having widespread access to smartphones and social media? Is the much higher incidence of gender dysphoria in young females a function of the toxic effect of social media on young girls' self-image? Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, claims it's no coincidence at all.

The study highlighted that, in almost all years, the highest prevalence of gender identity disorder diagnoses was found in 15- to 19-year-old females. In 2022, this age group had a prevalence rate of 452.6 cases per 100,000.

Three thoughts: 1) The sooner parents and schools act to limit online access to social media in their children the healthier those children will be. 2) I can't imagine the guilt thousands of parents who pushed their children into gender transition surgeries and puberty blockers will be feeling when their children realize what a horrible mistake this all was and blame their parents for it for the rest of their lives. 3) How many medical institutions and personnel will be the subject of lawsuits in the coming years, initiated by people who were radically disfigured by people and organizations eager to financially capitalize on the transgender insanity of our current cultural moment?

Could Life Have Arisen by Chance?

One of the strongest arguments against any naturalistic theory of the origin of life is the enormous difficulty inherent in the attempt to give a plausible account of how the first cells could have ever been formed.

One of the problems for origin of life researchers is that even the simplest cell is immensely complex, consisting of thousands of molecular machines that must all be present and functioning in a coordinated manner in order for any cell to survive. And of course until there are living cells there could be no evolution of the sort described in high school and college biology textbooks.

This short video gives just a glimpse of the intractable nature of the problem. Don't be put off by the cartoonish graphics. The content is very sophisticated but also easily understood by anyone with a high school science education.

Check it out:

Completely Predictable

A report in the Daily Mail describing the effects of raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers in California should come as no surprise to anyone with even a modest IQ:

Fast food chains in California are slashing jobs - as a way to cut costs after the minimum wage in the state was hiked to $20-an-hour.

Almost 10,000 positions across chains from Pizza Hut to Burger King have been cut since the law came into effect on April 1, according to a report from a trade group in the state.

On top of that, chains have been shuttering restaurants - including beloved Mexican chain Rubio's Coastal Grill, which this week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed 48 locations in the state.

When the minimum wage is raised for entry level workers those with more experience who had already been getting $20 an hour must have their pay raised as well, and this is just unsustainable for businesses working on thin profit margins.

The solution for employers is to raise prices, which means less business which means workers will eventually get laid off, or keep prices stable and lay off workers more quickly. Either way, it's hard to see how raising the minimum wage helps most workers.

The California Business and Industrial Alliance (CABIA) slammed Governor Gavin Newsom for pushing the law through, which has also meant businesses in the state have had to raise prices.

To highlight the impact of the law, the trade group created out an advert in Thursday's edition of USA Today with mock 'obituaries' of popular brands.

The tongue-in-cheek advert (which can be seen at the link above), titled 'In Memoriam: Victims of Newsom's minimum wage', highlighted the issues faced by smaller brands including Rubio's, and fast food giants including Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway and McDonald's.

It features news clips documenting the changes made by companies in response to the wage increase.

This includes raising prices, letting go of workers to cut labor costs - and in some cases shutting down locations.

One says: 'A McDonald's franchisee who owns 18 outposts in California is considering reducing store hours, hiking menu prices and delaying renovations to offset the impact of the state's $20 hourly minimum wage for fast-food workers.'

Even before the law was made official earlier this year, chains including Pizza Hut and Round Table let go of more than a thousand delivery workers to brace for the financial ramifications of the change.

A worker's worth is based on how difficult it would be to replace him or her. If a job takes no particular skill politicians can't artificially inflate the worker's value to his or her employer simply by raising the worker's salary by legislation. This placebo may make the politicians popular with the uneducated, but it guarantees that the workers who are supposed to be helped will only suffer in the long run.

One of the details in the article at the link explains that many franchises are planning to replace workers with digital kiosks, a trend that has already started in many restaurants. The kiosks cost money and would've been slow to displace workers had politicians, ignorant of basic economics, not made kiosks more attractive than training and paying workers more than they're worth to their employer.

Worse Than WWII Germans

Dennis Prager makes an interesting claim in a piece at HotAir.com. He states that, "Morally speaking, it would be difficult to name a less impressive people than the Palestinians over the past century."

Why does he say this? Here's his answer:

Immediately after the burnings, rapes, mutilations and murders of Jews on Oct. 7, I was not alone in noting the one moral difference between Hamas and the Nazis: The Nazis tried to hide their crimes against the Jews from the German people (and the world) while Hamas proudly publicized their crimes against the Jews to the Palestinian people (and didn't mind that the world would inevitably see them bragging about killing Jews).

In addition to videoing their atrocities, Hamas paraded captured Jews -- dead and alive, clothed and naked -- in front of cheering Palestinian crowds in Gaza.

This leads to a sobering realization.

Hamas boasting to their fellow Palestinians about what they did to Jews while the Nazis tried to hide what they did from fellow Germans means there is not only a moral difference between Hamas and the Nazis but a moral difference between the German people during the Nazi era and the Palestinian people today -- and for nearly the last hundred years.

Prager adds that the "cumulative Palestinian record of evil over the last century has few peers," and proceeds to make an impressive case in support of that assessment, a case that he states is "nowhere near" as exhaustive as it could've been.

He concludes with these thoughts:

According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, as of 2022, a majority of Palestinians support terror attacks against Israeli Jews. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank has been paying more than $300 million annually -- about 8% of the Palestinian budget -- to the families of imprisoned terrorists and of terrorists killed while engaging in an act of terror against Jews.

Another Palestinian poll states that the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank -- over 75% -- support Hamas at this time.

The Palestinian people love killing Jews and have loved doing so for nearly a century. Palestinian women routinely pass out candy in the streets in celebration of terror attacks against Jews. Compare this to Israel, which has many human rights organizations holding Israel to account regarding its treatment of Palestinians.

Compare this to Israelis, who for years had volunteered to drive Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.

To be "pro-Palestinian" today means being pro-Hamas just as to be "pro-German" during World War II was the same as being pro-Nazi. The only difference is that the Germans as a whole were a better people than the Palestinians. If you support the Palestinians, you should know whom you support.

It's difficult to grasp, given the horrific record of Palestinian atrocities Prager adumbrates, that there would still be people in this country cheering them on and demanding that the Israelis cease protecting themselves from those who implacably seek their deaths.

There are some who insist that they demonstrate not in support of the terrorists of Hamas but on behalf of the long-suffering Palestinian people, but this is sophistry. Prager's essay shows that the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people is pretty much a distinction without a difference.

Hamas is simply doing what the Palestinian people, or at least a large majority of them, want them to do.

For Juneteenth

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a day set aside to celebrate the end of slavery in America, so it's appropriate to honor two African-Americans who played major roles in abolition.

Most school students learn, or at least used to learn, that opposition to slavery mushroomed in the northern states with the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, but the details surrounding that infamous ruling are often less well known.

The details are very interesting however, and David Hackett Fischer recounts them, and the stories of many other slaves in the antebellum years, in his magisterial work African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of this "peculiar institution."

Fischer tells us that Dred (short for Etheldred) Scott was born a slave in Southampton Co. Virginia in 1799. His owner, a man named Ben Blow, moved his slaves first to Huntsville, Alabama and then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830.

There Scott was sold to an army surgeon named John Emerson who took him to free states and territories where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In 1837 Scott was living in free Wisconsin territory near what is today Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he met another Virginia slave named Harriet Robinson. The two decided to marry and they were joined in a formal matrimonial service by Harriet's master, a justice of the peace named, Lawrence Taliaferro. The formal service was permitted only to free people. Taliaferro then sold Harriet to John Emerson so that the couple could live together.

Emerson was subsequently ordered to southern military posts, but he left Dred and Harriet in the north where they were leased as servants to other officers. They lived in virtual freedom and the first of their four children was born in free territory.

In 1837 the Scotts returned to Missouri, a slave state. Dred was hired out to numerous people but continued to live in virtual freedom while his new owner, the widow of John Emerson, continued to hire him out as a source of income for herself.

While working for a law firm he learned that, under Missouri's judicial principle of "once free, always free," slaves who lived in free territory became free themselves, so Dred and Harriet sued for their freedom.

In 1848 a Missouri court nevertheless ruled against them, so they began a series of appeals in 1850, all of which they lost. Even so, with the help of people who knew them, including members of Ben Blow's family, the case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.

Dred and Harriet Scott

 

The case was heard by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Fischer writes:

[Taney was] an odd character, a Maryland Federalist who had become a Jacksonian Democrat. He was also a Maryland planter who had freed his own slaves in early life, but became a strong defender of slavery as an institution. On March 6, 1857 a majority of the court rejected Scott's suit.

Chief Justice Taney went further. He asserted that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 could not extend freedom or citizenship to any person of color. And the court ruled that the Missouri Compromise ...was unconstitutional in excluding slavery, depriving masters of their property, and extending freedom and citizenship to people of African ancestry....

Further, Taney and other justices added obiter dicta that went far beyond the case itself.They ruled that no slave or descendant of a slave could ever be free, or become a citizen, or bring a freedom suit in any court of the United States; that Congress could never abolish slavery anywhere; and that no federal or state court could deprive an owner of his property in a slave.

The Scotts lost the case, but were manumitted by their owners anyway. Unfortunately, Dred didn't live to see the consequence of his perseverance, dying in 1858 of tuberculosis.

The ruling seemed at first to be a great victory for southern slave owners, but it proved their undoing. Many northerners who were indifferent to the cause of abolition were outraged by the case, and as a result, slave owners and their northern allies lost control of Congress in 1858.

They then lost the presidency in 1860, and ultimately were devastated by a civil war that produced emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which abolished slavery throughout the United States and affirmed the rights of citizenship without limits of race, ethnicity, or previous condition of bondage.

Doubtless, abolition would've happened eventually, but it was accelerated by the determination of Dred and Harriet Scott and the foolish bigotry of Roger Taney.