Naturalism Excludes a Trustworthy Reason

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

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

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

Moreover, naturalism is dependent upon evolution as an explanation for the origin of our cognitive faculties, but evolution is, theoretically, a process whi ch leads to survival, not truth.

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

And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. - Atheist philosopher John Gray

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.- Atheist biologist Francis Crick

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

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought.

But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

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

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E.

The naturalist is faced with a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false.

On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out:

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

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

Fantastic Design (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper one gets into it.

Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here are some further questions: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Moreover, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

And how is all of that produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution?

Finally, given all we know about the marvels discussed in yesterday's post and today's, why is there so much resistance to the hypothesis that living things are not the product of chance mutations and serendipitous selection, but rather the product of intentional engineering?

Fantastic Design (Pt. I)

A couple of years ago I read the book Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD and was truly dazzled by the amazing degree of engineering that the human body displays.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents over a billion or so years of genetic mutation and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's more probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's an excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.

CRT and Historical Inversion

Why do so many people oppose the teaching of Critical Race Theory? I've offered a number of reasons here, but a historian and literature professor emeritus at the University of California Santa Cruz named John Ellis offers a rather different take. Ellis has a piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which he asserts that:

The Biden administration had quietly implemented policies throughout the federal government based on this theory, and it is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It has overrun much of the corporate world, and it has even secured a place in the training of many professions.

The accusations made in closed training sessions are astonishingly venomous: Arrogant white supremacy is ubiquitous; white rage results when that supremacy is challenged; whites hold money and power because they stole it from other races; systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going.

Ellis declares that all of this is based on historically false assumptions and that Critical Race Theory (CRT) has actually inverted the history of global interactions between the races. He says that, "the thinkers and engineers of the Anglosphere, principally England and the U.S., are the heroes, not the villains, of this story, while the rest were laggards, not leaders."

For most of recorded history, neighboring peoples regarded each other with apprehension if not outright fear and loathing. Tribal and racial attitudes were universal. That’s a long way from the orthodoxy of our own time, which holds that we are all one human family. Before that consensus arose, a charge of racism made no sense. By today’s standards, everyone was racist.

It’s not hard to understand why tribalism once reigned everywhere. Without modern transportation and communication, most people knew nothing about other societies. What contact there was between different peoples often involved warfare, and that made everyone fear strangers. The insecurity of life in earlier times added to this anxiety.

Protections we now enjoy didn’t exist: policing, banking, competent medical care, social safety nets. The supply of food was uncertain before trucks and refrigeration. In a dangerous world people clung to their own kind for safety, and that was a natural and even necessary attitude.

So, what was the impetus that led to the belief that we are all one common humanity? Ellis gives the credit to British and American engineers:

They invented the steam engine, then used it to develop the first railways. They followed this by inventing and mass-producing cars, trucks and finally airplanes. They pioneered radio, television, films, newspapers and the internet. The result was that ignorance of other peoples was turned around.

But in the 18th century the British did something even more important: They began to develop our contemporary attitudes toward race. How? By being the first modern state to foster individual liberty. Liberty fostered prosperity, and prosperity led to widespread literacy:

Widespread literacy created the first large reading public: By the beginning of the 18th century, dozens of newspapers and periodicals were being published in Britain. An extensive reading public allowed public opinion to become a powerful force, and that set the stage for manifestos and petitions, even campaigns about matters that offended the public’s conscience.

A series of British writers began to promote ideas about the conduct of life and the role of government. Among the most important was John Locke, who argued that every human life had its own rationale, none being created for the use of another. Another was David Hume, who wrote that all men are nearly equal “in their mental power and faculties, till cultivated by education.”

These and many others were launching what would become the modern consensus that we are all one human family. The idea gained ground so quickly that in Britain, and there alone, a powerful campaign to abolish slavery arose. By the end of the 18th century that campaign was leading to prohibitions in many parts of the Anglosphere, while Africa and Asia remained as tribalist and racist as ever.

As this idea took hold it made the British see their empire differently. Like other European countries, Britain had initially sought empire to strengthen its position in the world—others would add territory if Britain didn’t, and Britain would be weakened. But if the peoples of the British Empire were one human family, how could some be subordinate to others?

The British began to consider themselves responsible for the welfare and development of their subject peoples, and for giving them competent administration before they had learned to provide it themselves. That change inevitably led to the dissolution of empire, and to a consensus that the time for empires (of which there had been hundreds) was over. The world’s most influential anti-imperialists were British.

As the influence of Britain grew the belief in human rights and equality spread across the world. Ellis concludes with this:

There’s a simple explanation for what critical race theory calls “white privilege.” Because the Anglosphere developed prosperous modernity and gave it to the world, English-speakers were naturally the first to enjoy it. People initially outside that culture of innovation are still catching up.

Asians and Asian-Americans have done this with great success, but critical race theory impedes the progress of other groups by persuading them to demonize the people who created the modern values they have adopted. It betrays those values by stoking racial hatred.

Critical race theory tells us that all was racial harmony until racist Europeans disturbed it, but the truth is rather that all was tribal hostility until the Anglosphere rescued us.

I would add to Ellis' column that the spread of the idea of racial equality across the globe was facilitated by the work of countless thousands of missionaries from the Anglosphere, supported by countless thousands more Christians in the home country, who carried the message everywhere that all people are created in the image of God, loved by Him, and are His children.

People who truly believe this proposition have a hard time thinking that one race of people is inferior in any significant respect to another.

Scientists Leave Atheist Organization Over Transgender Ideology

John Sexton has an interesting piece up at HotAir.com. It seems that several prominent atheists are resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) because of a split over the biological reality, or unreality, of transgenderism.

The latest to resign is Richard Dawkins who served on FFRF's board. Dawkins and the other resignees are scientists who reject the left's contemporary infatuation with transgender ideology whereas FFRF is evidently totally committed to it to the point that they actually unpublished an article written by one of their members rebutting a previous article which argued that the only way one can define what, or who, a woman is is by what the individual in question tells you.

Here's Dawkins's letter of resignation:

It is with real sadness, because of my personal regard for you both, that I feel obliged to resign from the Honorary Board of FFRF. Publishing the silly and unscientific “What is a Woman” article by Kat Grant was a minor error of judgment, redeemed by the decision to publish a rebuttal by a distinguished scientist from the relevant field, namely Biology, Jerry Coyne. But alas, the sequel was an act of unseemly panic when you caved in to hysterical squeals from predictable quarters and retrospectively censored that excellent rebuttal.

Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own Honorary Board. A Board which I now leave with regret.

You can read an excerpt from the article which triggered Jerry Coyne's rebuttal at the above link (the entire article is also linked to there). It was written by a lawyer named Kat Grant and she appears to argue that the existence of intersex individuals makes any attempt to define "woman" problematic. Intersex individuals are people born with some sex characteristics such as chromosomes, genitals, reproductive organs, secondary sex traits, and/or hormonal patterns that don't align with their other sex characteristics.

I was particularly interested in Coyne's rebuttal which was originally published by FFRF and then yanked when members complained that Coyne was committing heresy by refuting Grant's argument. Sexton writes that "[Coyne's] basic response is that a) biology doesn't care about your feelings and b) a tiny number of exceptions to these universal categories of male and female does not mean the categories are useless or unscientific."

Here's a part of Coyne's argument:

In the Freethought Now article “What is a woman?” author Kat Grant struggles at length to define the word, rejecting one definition after another as flawed or incomplete. Grant finally settles on a definition based on self-identity: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”

This of course is a tautology, and still leaves open the question of what a woman really is. And the remarkable redefinition of a term with a long biological history can be seen only as an attempt to force ideology onto nature. Because some nonbinary people—or men who identify as women (“transwomen”)—feel that their identity is not adequately recognized by biology, they choose to impose ideology onto biology and concoct a new definition of “woman.”

Further, there are plenty of problems with the claim that self-identification maps directly onto empirical reality. You are not always fat if you feel fat (the problem with anorexia), not a horse if you feel you’re a horse (a class of people called “therians” psychologically identify as animals), and do not become Asian simply become you feel Asian (the issue of “transracialism”). But sex, Grant tells us, is different: It is the one biological feature of humans that can be changed solely by psychology.

But why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality.

Instead, in biology “sex” is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (“gametes”). Males have small, mobile gametes (sperm in animals and pollen in plants); females have large, immobile gametes (ova in plants and eggs in animals). In all animals and vascular plants there are exactly two sexes and no more. Though a fair number of plants and a few species of animals combine both functions in a single individual (“hermaphrodites”), these are not a third sex because they produce the typical two gametes.

It’s important to recognize that, although this gametic idea is called a “definition” of sex, it is really a generalization—and thus a concept—based on a vast number of observations of diverse organisms. We know that, except for a few algae and fungi, all multicellular organisms and vertebrates, including us, adhere to this generalization. It is, then, nearly universal...

Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary.

Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly—without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)

Sexton adds that that's not even half of Coyne's essay:

[Coyne] closes by saying, "One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights." But apparently the FFRF disagreed. After a backlash, they pulled Coyne's response down. He responded in an email, calling the decision "quasi-religious."

“That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”

“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”

Coyne left FFRF as did psychologist and author Steven Pinker. Dawkins was the third person to leave the group.

I'd add that the argument that one cannot define what a woman is because the boundary between male and female is indistinct is like arguing that we cannot define the color red because in a color spectrum the boundary between red and orange is indistinct. Though there may be a very small number of instances in which an observer cannot really tell where orange ends and red begins it does not follow that red cannot be defined or that we cannot accurately discern the color red in the overwhelming number of cases.

Who Designed the Designer?

Philosopher of science Jay Richards is a proponent of intelligent design, i.e. the view that the universe and life show evidence (lots of it) of having been intelligently engineered. Richards asserts that one of the most frequent objections he encounters, one raised in fact by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion is, "If the universe and life are designed then who designed the designer?"

Laypeople can be forgiven for asking the question because it seems common-sensical, but someone of Dawkins' stature should know better, and he took a lot of heat from philosophers, even philosophers sympathetic to his metaphysical naturalism, for his evident lack of philosophical sophistication.

Here's a short video in which Richards addresses the question:

It's worth noting, I think, that the attempt to use this question as an indictment of the intelligent design hypothesis is misguided for other reasons besides those Richards gives.

Let's look at the first part of the question: "If the universe and life are designed...." implies a willingness to accept for the sake of argument that the universe is designed, but as soon as he's granted that the universe is designed the naturalist has gotten himself into trouble.

Once it's conceded by the naturalist, even if only hypothetically, that the universe is designed, then whether there's just one designer or an indefinite number doesn't much matter. Naturalism would stand refuted since naturalism holds that the universe is self-existent.

Moreover, to posit more designers than what's necessary to explain the universe is a violation of the principle that our explanations should contain the minimum number of entities necessary to explain what we're trying to explain - in this case, the universe. So the simplest, and therefore the best, explanation is that there's only a single designer of the universe.

There's no good reason to think that anyone who believes there's a designer of the universe must allow for an infinite regress of designers.

We might also point out that the universe is a contingent entity. Contingent entities require a necessary being as their ultimate cause, and a necessary being is, by definition, not itself dependent upon anything else for its existence. Necessary beings are self-existent.

So, if the universe was ultimately the product of a non-contingent, necessary being then it makes no sense to ask what designed that being. Nothing designed it. If it were designed it would be a contingent being dependent upon whatever designed it.

Finally, it should be noted that if there is an intelligent designer it must not only be a necessary being, but it must also transcend space and time because these are aspects of the designed universe. Therefore, the designer must be non-spatial and non-temporal. It must also be very intelligent and very powerful. In other words, it must be something very much like God.

Given all this, naturalists would be better off resisting the temptation to ask "who designed the designer?" It's a question which carries far less polemical punch than they think it does.

Inconvenient Truth

Robert Spencer is a scholar who specializes on Islam. He claims that the authorities have been either willingly or unknowingly missing the real explanation of the radicalization of the New Orleans terrorist, Shamsud-Din Jabbar. He writes:

NBC News reported Saturday that unnamed “experts” ...have said that “the details that have emerged about Jabbar align with the typical pattern of how a veteran can be radicalized to violence.” It seems that it all comes from a downturn in Jabbar’s fortunes: “In the years leading up to Wednesday’s attack, Jabbar experienced his third divorce, accumulated significant debt and lost his corporate job.

Divorce court records from January 2022 reveal he was facing business losses and credit card debt in the tens of thousands of dollars, along with more than $27,000 in overdue mortgage payments. By August of that year, his bank accounts held just $2,012, according to filings in the case.”

Yeah, that may be it. But there are important ways in which this doesn’t explain a thing.

The most obvious problem with this is that there are numerous people in America today who are thrice-divorced and in debt, and in worse situations than that, and it never once occurs to them to drive a truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers.

There are, moreover, aspects of Jabbar’s behavior that just don’t fit into the scenario of a man driven to despair by personal and professional downturns.

So to what does Spencer think Jabbar's behavior should be imputed?

In a video he recorded shortly before his attack, Jabbar told his family that he had originally planned to kill them instead. “I wanted to record this message for my family,” the killer said. “I wanted you to know that I joined ISIS earlier this year.” He added with chilling directness: “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly.”

He explained that he had initially intended to hold a “celebration” for them so that those attending could “witness the killing of the apostates.” NBC helpfully adds that is “an apparent reference to killing them,” but doesn’t bother to pause to explain the significance of his reference to “apostates.”

Jabbar apparently considered his family to be apostates from Islam, whether formally by declaring that they had left the religion, or functionally, by having ceased to practice it. Either way, leaving Islam carries the death penalty in Islamic law, in accord with the Qur’an: “If they turn renegade, then take them and kill them wherever you find them” (4:89).

Also, a hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

Jabbar didn't kill his family, Spencer states, because he was afraid that that would've obscured the more important message that there's a war being waged by believers upon the unbelievers.

There's more at the link, but the reluctance of our authorities and our media to call attention to the fact that Muslims who strictly follow the Qur'an believe they're duty-bound to Allah to kill infidels, if it's a deliberate decision to withhold such information, is a dereliction of their responsibility to clearly state the truth about threats to our society, even if that truth is politically inconvenient.

The Unending War

The terrible terrorist attack in New Orleans should awaken Americans to a very uncomfortable fact: Islam's struggle against the West is an unending war. We may think we don't have to fight it, but radical Muslims believe they're doing the will of Allah in waging a war that has waxed and waned for over 1300 years.

Groups like al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian government, the Houthis, the Taliban are all permutations of the same belief system that has been slaughtering unbelievers in the Middle East, North Africa, and everywhere else they've had the ability ever since the time of Mohammad in the seventh century.

Matthew Continetti at the Free Beacon writes that the horrific attack in New Orleans was just the latest atrocity perpetrated against Westerners in the name of "a sick ideology," and goes on to point out that the jihadist worldview exemplified by ISIS is resurgent.

There was a terrible attack in Moscow last April, and last month's Christmas market attack in Germany killed four women and a nine-year-old boy. Radical Islamism is growing in, and fuels violence throughout, Africa. ISIS rages in Syria and Iraq as its Sunni compatriots in Hamas fight to the death in Gaza. Shiite radicals in Hezbollah and among the Houthis sow terror at the direction of their Iranian masters.

Above all, ISIS has embedded in Afghanistan, where its leaders issue communiques to an international following, plot against the West, and attack both the Taliban government and neighboring Pakistan.

As President Trump demonstrated by all but destroying ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the Israelis have shown in their response to the October 7th horrors, the only way to diminish this enemy - they will never be defeated forever as long as there are people who believe that it's God's will that they slay the Jews and the infidels - is by the application of military force.

Here's Continetti:

Terrorist movements wax strong when they believe that history is on their side. And there is no better way to rid the terrorists of that notion than to deny them haven and reduce their leaders to ash. America forgot this lesson. Our leaders reduced commitments in Iraq and Syria. Federal law enforcement shifted its attention to domestic extremism and white nationalism.

Worst of all, President Biden beat a hasty retreat from Afghanistan that left 13 U.S. servicemen killed, U.S. citizens and visa-holders stranded, Afghan allies abandoned, the Afghan people in hock to a jihadist militia that calls itself a government, and Afghanistan's ungoverned spaces in the hands of ISIS.

At the time, Biden pledged continued surveillance of the enemy, "over-the-horizon" military capabilities, and support for Afghan women and girls. None of this was true. Retired general Frank McKenzie, former CENTCOM commander, said last spring that "in Afghanistan, we have almost no ability to see into that country and almost no ability to strike into that country."

The Taliban resumed public executions, imposed dress and behavioral codes on women, and deprived girls of schooling. The other day, the Taliban said it would shutter NGOs that employ women.

Our current political leadership seems to believe that the way to defeat the Islamists is by means of carrot and stick half-measures. Continetti invites us to consider the contrast between Israel and the United States.

Israel possesses the will to strike its enemies, establish facts on the ground favorable to its security, and restore deterrence in a dangerous neighborhood.

The United States, meanwhile, has been tossed about by a whirlwind of events that it believes are beyond its control: an open southern border, a passive-aggressive desire to renew the nuclear agreement with Iran, disaster in Afghanistan, war between Russia and Ukraine that is lessening weapons stockpiles, virulent anti-Semitism on campuses and in city streets, and long-running operations against the Houthis that have led nowhere.

This aimlessness and passivity create openings for terrorists. It gives them the sense of impending victory.

Continetti concludes with this:

I am not arguing that we re-invade Afghanistan tomorrow. Nor am I saying that a more assertive U.S. foreign policy would end every threat to the homeland.

My argument is that the way to reduce the ISIS threat, foreign and domestic, is to take the fight to the evildoers. Don't pretend jihadists can be left to their own devices. Put them on the defensive. Thin out their ranks, dry up their finances, keep them on the run.

Then ISIS's ability to inspire will wane. And justice will be done for the people of New Orleans.

I'd add that we have to secure the border, more thoroughly vet immigrants coming into the country, and clearly expose the hate that's emanating from some of our schools and mosques. Put simply we need people in the Washington who have a clear understanding of the nature of the struggle we're in and who know that this enemy can't be bought off.

The world can't afford any more decisions like the inexplicable and astonishingly foolish decision of President Biden to release 16 billion dollars to Iran, the most brutal state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, at a time they were all but bankrupt and impotent.

That decision guaranteed that there will be more bloodshed, suffering, and grief in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S.

Mt. Rushmore and the Design Filter

How do we recognize intentional, intelligent design? How do we distinguish things that are designed from things that occur naturally? Back in the 1990s mathematician William Dembski explained that consciously or unconsciously we employ what he called an explanatory filter that helps us to immediately intuit that something is intentionally designed. What follows is a simplification of Dembski's work.

His filter consists of three steps.

When considering whether any object or event was designed we first ask whether it's the sort of thing that physical laws like the laws of electricity or gravity could've produced. If so, then it's intellectually prudent to ascribe the object or event to natural causes rather than intelligent agency. Phenomena that happen as a result of physical law have a high probability of occurring. So the first node in the filter is to ask, does this phenomenon have a high probability of occurring naturally.

If the answer is yes we impute it's occurrence to non-agential causes and rule out design.

For example, is there any physical law that makes the creation of the operating software of a computer highly probable? There doesn't seem to be, so design of the software is still a live option.

The second node is to ask whether the phenomenon has a plausible likelihood of occurring by chance. If it does then we generally attribute it to chance rather than intelligent agency.

For instance, if a poker player is dealt a royal flush (approx. 1 chance in 650,000 attempts) we'd be amazed but such good fortune can be expected to happen from time to time purely by chance, apart from any finagling by an intelligent agent. In such a case we can again rule out design.

Is it probable, though, that a poker player be dealt three consecutive royal flushes or that a computer operating system came about by chance without the input of an intelligent agent? It seems astronomically improbable.

If neither law nor chance are plausible explanations then we're left with design as the most likely alternative. Given an intelligent programmer complex arrangements of zeroes and ones that specify a meaningful computer operation are not improbable at all and given a skilled card cheat neither are three consecutive royal flushes unlikely.

We can apply the same reasoning to the origin of life and the very first DNA sequence. DNA is much like a computer program, it specifies the construction of an entire organism whether a protist or an elephant. The simplest strand of DNA, one long enough to specify a single protein necessary for the functioning of a living cell, is unimaginably complex and the probability it arose by chance makes the belief that it did akin to an extraordinary act of blind faith.

There's no law that governs the formation of DNA and the chance formation of a sufficiently long strand of meaningful DNA, a strand that specifies a necessary protein, is so improbable as to be well beyond plausibility.

Thus, the alternative that DNA was designed by an intelligent mind is the default. The only reason anyone has for refusing to accept that alternative is that they have an a priori commitment to naturalism which rules out the existence of any mind that can't be explained in terms of natural, material causes.

In other words, the rejection of an intelligent designer is an act of blind faith in the power of nature to accomplish the equivalent of writing Windows 10 purely by chance not just once but numerous times.

The following video elaborates on a simple illustration of the design filter:

God and the Intellectuals

Peter Savodnik's recent column on Substack is titled How Intellectuals Found God. It's a compilation of a number of interviews he did with writers, artists, techies, etc., and it causes one to wonder if perhaps there's a spiritual awakening happening in our culture.

Savodnik writes:

For more than a century, the people at the apex of the so-called thinking classes had insisted that, post-Enlightenment, it was impossible to believe in God. Not all of them put it as bluntly as Friedrich Nietzsche did in his 1882 work The Gay Science, in which he declared that “God is dead.” Nor did they attempt to dismantle the whole religious project the way philosopher Bertrand Russell did in his 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” arguing that religion is based “mainly upon fear.”

But that’s what it amounted to.

The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022.

By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States.

[But now] something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

What follows are excerpts from some of his interviews. For example, best-selling author Matthew Crawford after describing his own conversion says:

A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more. There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us. It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.

Here's an excerpt from the interview with Niall Ferguson:

You can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism. It’s fine for a small group of people to say, "We’re atheist, we’re opting out,” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart.

"The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Comedian Russel Brand comments:

I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.

Savodnik also quotes tech mogul Peter Thiel:

“God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

Even Elon Musk is included in Savodnik's essay:

“I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

Psychologist Jordan Peterson said this:

“I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting [his new] book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

Savodnik asks the question that others have been wondering about since these conversions, if that's what they are, started to become known to the public: Were these moves toward God, whether total or partial, genuine? Were these men and women genuine converts to Christianity, or at least to Theism, or was their embrace of the religious life a temporary blip in their otherwise secular lives?

Of course, it's just too soon to tell. Most of them have not been believers for more than a couple of years which makes it hard to assess how permanent the impact on their lives will be. Even so, it's remarkable that so many from among our "cultural elite" are openly turning to God and traditional expressions of religion to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

Here are a few more excerpts from Savodnik's essay.

Paul Kingsnorth: "When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a 'rational choice.' If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that. How does that happen?'"

He added that, “The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

Kingsnorth said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali told Savodnik that: “It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.... “I’m actually very grateful for whatever it was that was ailing me,” because it led her to God. “My life now is much richer, more fulfilling, than before.”

About tech billionaire Jordan Hall, Savodnik wrote: "That was when Hall knew his frantic casting about for meaning was finally over. He didn’t expect it. His mother was Jewish; his father, Catholic, but only technically.

"The emptiness he’d spent years fleeing was not just his emptiness, as far as he could tell. It was society-wide.

“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger. It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”

Savodnik says that Hall was referring to "plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. 'The horrifying brokenness of people.'”

What these and so many others are discovering is that if we're just the product of blind, impersonal forces that have somehow raised us up out of the primordial soup and that our lives are not much different, biologically speaking, than those of ants, then our existence is just a Shakespearean "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Some people, evidently, can live with the awareness that their existence is pointless, empty, and meaningless, but many other very thoughtful people are finding that they cannot.

A Historian Discusses Christianity

I recently came across a couple of interesting pieces on Substack. The first is a discussion with historian Tom Holland who had been an atheist but whose study of history was a catalyst for his return, or at least partial return, to Christianity. The interview is conducted by Bari Weiss who's a secular, lesbian Jew, but who seems not unsympathetic with what Holland has to say.

Here are a few excerpts from the conversation:

Bari Weiss: Your book opens with the crucifixion. Your argument is that the turning point is not Jesus’s birth, but his death, at 33 years old, at the hands of the Roman authorities. Why is this the pivotal moment?

Tom Holland: It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God. In the opinion of the Romans, crucifixion is the fate that should properly be visited on slaves. Not just because it is protracted and agonizing, but also because it is deeply humiliating.

When you die, you will hang there like a lump of meat. This is a demonstration, in the opinion of the Romans, that essentially their might is right. That if a slave rebels against his master, this is what happens.

I think what is radical about what Christians come to believe is not the fact that a man can become a god. Because for most people in the Mediterranean that is a given. What is radical is that the man Christians believe was divine was someone who had ended up suffering the worst fate imaginable—death by crucifixion—which, in the opinion of the Romans, was the fate visited on a slave.

The reason that Jesus suffers that fate is that he is part of a conquered people. He’s not even from Judea. He’s from Galilee. Galilee is not properly under the rule of the Romans. It’s franchised out to a client king. He is the lowest of the low. Even the Judeans look down on him.

The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all.

The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last....

BW: I've always been so interested in how Christianity goes from being the bane of the powerful to being the faith of the emperor. Constantine, the emperor who could have been a god, instead converts to the faith whose god died on a cross. How does that happen?

TH: Christianity spreads through most of the major cities of the empire. It’s not difficult to see what the appeal is. In a society without any hint of a welfare state, a state in which no value at all is put upon the weak or the poor or the sick, what the church offers is the first functioning welfare state.

If you are a widow or an orphan or in prison or hungry, the likelihood is that you will be able to find relief from the church. And that offers a kind of power because bishop literally means an overseer—the figure of a bishop who has charity to dispense. That’s quite something. You are in a position of authority that even your pagan neighbors might come to respect.

BW: To join a community not based on the lineage of your family or where you are born, but based on a belief—that still feels so radical to me, even in 2024.

TH: To the Romans, it’s bewildering. They are very puzzled. Who do the Christians think they are? They don’t have a land. They don’t have a mother city. Because they claim a universal identity, to the Romans, it seems they have no identity at all. This is a tension that runs throughout Christianity.

There's much more at Substack. The next to the last question Weiss asks is what brought Holland back to Christianity. You can read his answer at the link.

I'll discuss the second article tomorrow.

The Soul (Pt. III)

There are two more questions about the soul that I want to address in this series of posts (scroll down for the first two posts on this topic). The first is the question of how two completely disparate substances, one material (the brain) can interact with another that's immaterial (the mind or soul).

In philosophy this is called the Interaction Problem, and has been said by some philosophers to be the most overrated problem in all of philosophy.

The first thing to say about it is that the fact that we cannot explain how something happens is not a reason to think that it does not happen. Isaac Newton could not explain how gravity worked but that didn't deter him from believing that it did.

Likewise, contemporary physicists may not be able to explain certain quantum phenomena like superposition or quantum entanglement, but they can show in their labs that these phenomena occur.

In the same way, the difficulty in explaining mind/brain interaction is not a sound reason for rejecting the claim that these substances do interact.

Perhaps an analogy can be found in the interaction between the information stored on a hard drive and the image on your monitor. Although information is stored in a pattern of zeroes and ones, the information is not the pattern, nor is it material. Yet somehow the material computer is able to convert this immaterial information into a physical image - which is material - on the screen that has meaning - which is immaterial - to the viewer.

Another analogy: When you inadvertently stub your toe an electrical (material) impulse travels along the nerve fibers in your leg to the brain. In the brain this electricity generates a series of electrochemical reactions (material) that result in the sensation of pain (immaterial). How the immaterial sensation arises from molecules of chemical compounds reacting with each other no one knows, but it's obvious that it happens.

The second question I'd like to consider is this: What difference does it make in my life or yours whether we believe we have souls or not?

One way to approach this question is to point out that if we believe that we are fundamentally an immaterial soul or mind it makes several other beliefs much easier to hold. For example:

It's very difficult to maintain a belief that we have free will if all we are is matter. Matter is subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, and if we're solely material beings then our choices are all the product of those laws. Any control we think we have over them is an illusion.

Furthermore, if we have no free will, if all our choices are determined by our brain chemistry, then there's really no moral right or wrong. Morality depends upon the ability to make genuine choices, and if we can't make genuine choices, if our choices are determined for us by factors over which we have no control, then we're not much different than animals and the concept of human dignity has no purchase.

If, though, we are an immaterial soul, then perhaps it's this soul that's the seat of our free choice.

If we have a mind we not only have an answer to the question of why we believe we're a self but also an answer to the further question of what makes us the same self over time.

If we're just matter then there's nothing significant about us that does not change with time. Our appearance, our personality, our memories all change, so if our material bodies make us who we are we're confronted with the fact that we're in a state of constant flux, we're a different person from year to year.

If that's so, how can I be held responsible for things someone else who had my name but was not me said or did a decade ago? On the other hand, if we are an immaterial soul, then perhaps it's this soul that gives us continuity and makes us the same person over time.

Moreover, if we believe that we are a soul that possesses a body it's much easier to also believe that we survive the death of our bodies. If our bodies are all there is to us then life after bodily death becomes much harder, if not impossible, to account for. If there is life after death then this life takes on meaning and significance that it would not otherwise have if we are simply annihilated at the conclusion of this existence.

And, of course, if in the world there are immaterial substances like mind or soul then it's easier to believe that other immaterial minds, such as God, exist.

So, ideas have consequences. The consequences of believing that we are souls are profound.

The Soul (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post concluded with this series of questions:

"But why think we have a soul or mind in the first place? Why not apply Occam's razor and assume that we are merely physical beings made of matter and that there's nothing non-physical about us? Why not assume that our brain accounts for the entirety of our cognitive experience and that what we call a mind is simply the functioning of the brain, much like what we call digestion is simply the functioning of the stomach? And how would an immaterial substance like soul or mind interact with the material substance of the physical world, anyway?"

I'll tackle the question of evidence for the soul today and hold the question of how disparate substances like mind and matter can interact with each other for later.

One evidence for the existence of the soul is that we have a sense of being a self, of being something other than our body. My body is not me. I have a body. So who or what is this me that has a body?

A person could theoretically lose much of his or her body, but still have a sense of being the same self. Persons retain that sense of personal identity even though their body changes, perhaps drastically. Someone who undergoes a sex change operation emerges from it with a sense of being the same self with a different body. So if our body can change while our sense of self remains, the self is not the same as the body.

Further evidence for the soul is found in Near Death Experiences (NDEs). As the ability to resuscitate patients who have flat-lined has improved over the last three decades, credible accounts by medical personnel of patients who describe having had verifiable out of the body experiences have rapidly increased. There are hundreds of such reports in the medical literature.

I've given some examples of these in other posts two of which can be read here and here.

A third group of evidences for a soul (or mind) are the phenomena of consciousness. Those who believe that we are just material beings, i.e. materialists, usually argue that our brains can account for all of our cognitive experience, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

On materialism, the brain is like an advanced computer made of neurons which converts electro-chemical inputs into the outputs of thought, memories, and sensations like pain and pleasure. This analogy to a computer, however, fails to fully capture what's going on in human experience. There are a host of cognitive capabilities and experiences of which humans are capable but computers are not.

For example: Human beings are aware, they know, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, warmth, compassion, guilt, grief, disgust, pride, and embarrassment. None of these, as far as we can tell, are possible of machines made of silicon.

In addition, humans appreciate beauty, humor, meaning, and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math. They’re creative.

They have, as we mentioned above, a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas. Computers do none of this.

There's a vast chasm separating physical matter and conscious human experience. The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel. A computer can be programmed to tell you it loves you but it doesn’t feel love.

And, we might point out that there's a vast chasm between the capabilities of a living human being and a dead brain. If the brain is like a computer, a dead brain is like a computer with the power cord unplugged. It has no capabilities at all. What fires up the computer is electricity. What fires up a brain is mind.

Moreover, if the brain were all that's involved in thinking and our sensations of color, sound, fragrance, pain, etc. it should be theoretically possible for a researcher to peer into a subject's brain and witness the subject's thoughts and sensations. Yet no matter how thoroughly a brain is examined all that a researcher would find are electro-chemical reactions occurring along neurons, but electrical pulses moving along a nerve fiber are not the same thing as a memory, or the sensation of red, or of pain, or the thought of sending a text to a friend.

In order to get from the electro-chemical phenomena to the experience of a particular thought or sensation something else must be involved, just as something else must be involved besides just the television in producing the visual image on the screen. The television is somewhat like the material brain. What's done to the television - changing the channel, adjusting the volume, etc. - affects the visual and auditory experience of the viewer, but the television alone cannot produce those experiences. In addition to the tv there has to be an electromagnetic signal for the tv to interpret, and altering the television does nothing to alter the signal.

Furthermore, if there's no signal there won't be anything on the television screen, but even if the television is destroyed, the signal, with the information it carries, still exists.

In a somewhat analogous way the mind or soul is a necessary component of the thoughts and sensations we experience. Our brains would be dead without the mind, yet the mind continues to exist even if our brains do not.

But what difference does it make in my life or yours whether we believe we have a soul or don't believe it? I'll address that question and the question of how a soul could interact with a material body tomorrow.

The Soul (Pt. I)

People speak of having a soul, but often their concept of the soul - what it is, what it does, etc. - is vague. In what follows I lay out how I think of the soul. I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself and I recognize that some of these ideas may not be entirely consistent or orthodox. I'm also not sure how much clarity this will bring to the concept, but even so, here goes:

First, I use "soul" and "mind" synonymously. We are souls, we have bodies (cf. I Cor. 15:45). The soul is immaterial. It's not just a gossamer substance like cartoonish depictions of ghosts. Only material substances have parts so the soul, being immaterial, has no parts, it's what's called a simple substance.

Being immaterial, souls are invisible, non-spatial, and non-localizable. They may not actually be within us in any ordinary sense.

Evidence from Near Death Experiences (NDEs) suggests that souls can exist and function to some extent independently of bodies. They can think, perceive, and perhaps communicate with each other, but to fully interact in a causal way with the physical world they must be embodied.

Moreover, souls can be thought of as the essence of a person. A person's essence is an exhaustive description of that person consisting of every true proposition about that person. Thus, the soul is information, but information must be stored in some medium like a data base, hard drive, book, or a mind. The only data base which could adequately contain all true propositions about every person who has ever lived is the mind of God, so we might think of every individual soul as a discrete "file" in the Divine "database."

If this is correct, if each soul exists as a person's essence in the mind of God, then we can assume that that person is indestructible, immortal, unless God were to choose to "delete" the file, in which case the person would be annihilated and cease to exist.

Since souls must be embodied to function fully they must interface with a physical body.Thus, at some point after the death of our present body God "uploads" the file of information or rather a portion of it, into another body (I Cor. 15:40-42).

Perhaps God withholds that portion of the description of us which would diminish our experience of this new condition so that we are not, for example, beset by chronic illness or certain physical limitations or unsettling memories.

But why think we have a soul or mind in the first place? Why not apply Occam's razor and assume that we are merely physical beings made of matter and that there's nothing non-physical about us? Why not assume that our brain accounts for the entirety of our cognitive experience and that what we call a mind is simply the functioning of the brain, much like what we call digestion is simply the functioning of the stomach? And how would an immaterial substance like soul or mind interact with the material substance of the physical world, anyway?

I'll attempt to answer these questions over the next two days.

O Holy Night

I thought it fitting as we approach Christmas Eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

After you watch, I highly recommend listening to the Bonner family sing O Holy Night. It's spectacular:

An Incomprehensible Birth

If Christians are correct about what happened on that first Christmas day it's an event of such magnitude as to be incomprehensible. If what the Gospel writers tell us is true then the child who was born in a stable that day was not just a special baby, it was the incarnation, the incorporation, of the very creator of the universe!

This is such a breathtaking thought that it's humanly impossible to get one's mind around it. The God who created us and all the galaxies in the cosmos deigned to make Himself like one of us in order to share in the pains and sorrows of being human, being willing ultimately to suffer an excruciating death, all so that our death need not be the end of our existence.

This is what the Gospel narratives insist actually, literally happened, and if they're correct, if they're only approximately true, they surely recount the greatest, most astonishing, story ever told.

This three minute video beautifully illustrates the point:

As we go about making our Christmas preparations this year, it'd be good to keep in our minds the literal wonder of what it is we're preparing to celebrate.

Three Christmas Symbols

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. The X is actually a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X (Chi) to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin it has signified the opposite of an attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word really is.

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A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree to represent the stars on the night Jesus was born. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

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No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held to be important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney) thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (The name "Santa Claus" is from the Dutch for Saint Nicholas) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

The Christmas Guest

To help put you in the proper frame of mind for Christmas here's a lovely poem by Helen Steiner Rice (1900-1981) titled "The Christmas Guest," recited by the late, great Johnny Cash (1932-2003):

What Are the Odds?

What are the odds that all the parts that comprise an automobile could be manufactured out of their raw materials and assembled to form a fully functional automobile solely by exposing the parts to the forces of nature like sun, wind, lightning, etc.? You might expect that it would never happen but according to scientists working in what's called Origin of Life research something like that must've happened to form the first living thing.

This life form was a cell with a cell membrane and which could metabolize and replicate itself. This cell would've been at least as complex as a 1940s automobile, so what are the odds that something like that cell could've formed by pure chance and the laws of chemistry and physics?

An article by Otangelo Grasso at Evolution News explores the probabilities. I'll skip the math, but you can check it out at the link. Grasso's calculations show that the odds of a cell containing just 438 proteins, which is probably the minimum for a functioning cell, are the equivalent of winning the Powerball Jackpot 12,996 times in a row.

And that's just the probability of coming up with the proteins that make up the cell. There's much, much more to a viable cell than just the proteins.

Grasso goes on to remark that,

This estimate does not include the fact that multiple copies of proteins would likely be required. It also leaves out the DNA required to manage the production and maintenance of proteins, and the need to interconnect proteins properly.

This astronomically large number illustrates the extreme improbability of such a complex system arising by chance alone. It highlights the challenges in explaining the origin of life through purely random processes.

We can express the argument this way: A minimal functional cell requires a specific set of integrated proteins. The probability of this specific set of proteins forming spontaneously is astronomically low (equivalent to winning the Powerball lottery 12,996 times in a row). Therefore, the spontaneous formation of a minimal functional cell through random processes is virtually impossible.

The astronomical improbability of the spontaneous formation of even a minimal set of functional proteins necessary for life presents a significant problem for purely naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. We can see, then, why researchers in the field are, as Rice University chemist James Tour has put it, “clueless” about how life’s origin came about.

When we are faced with such daunting improbability, it is reasonable to consider alternative explanations. Most scientists seeking a resolution of the puzzle don’t want to go there, whether for reasons of philosophical outlook, peer pressure, or personal preference. However, when examining highly specified and complex systems that appear to be fine-tuned for function, especially when the probability of their chance occurrence is vanishingly small, the inference to design becomes a logical possibility, at the very least.

The argument for design is strengthened by the observation that living systems exhibit characteristics often associated with designed objects — such as information content, goal-directed processes, and interdependent parts functioning as a whole. The minimal cell, with its precisely coordinated set of proteins and genetic instructions, bears hallmarks of purposeful arrangement rather than random assembly.

And, of course, purposeful arrangement requires an intelligent arranger. So, at the beginning of life there was a mind designing it for a purpose. Some seek to answer the question as to who or what such a designer would be by suggesting that life was engineered by some denizen of another world and was somehow seeded on earth, but that just puts the question back a step. How did life in this other world begin?

Since the universe had a beginning the regression of designers can't go on forever, it has to stop at some point with a mind that did not emerge as the creation of any other being, a mind not contingent upon any other mind, a mind very much like what people think of as God.

C.S. Lewis On the Three Versions of Christmas

C.S. Lewis once wrote an amusing piece on the three types of Christmas. For your enjoyment I've posted it here:

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn’t go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality.

If it were my business to have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs.

But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone’s business. I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers.

Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out — physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them.

They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself — gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things.

I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

How Many Galaxies Are There?

Our sun and the planets it holds in thrall, including our earth, reside in a small corner of a vast galaxy called the Milky Way, a swirling mass of dust, gas and billions of stars. The Milky Way is so huge that it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, 100,000 years to get from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Yet, as huge as it is, our galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies strewn across an incomprehensibly big universe. This short video explains how we know this:

Relative to all this our planet is an infinitesimally tiny speck and the inhabitants of our planet - us - are even tinier. It's no wonder that some philosophers have concluded that human beings and the quotidian pursuits in which we engage have no more significance than motes of dust bouncing around in a shaft of light.

Those philosophers are right - unless the universe was intentionally created and we were purposefully put here for a reason.

Intolerant Tolerance

There's lots of talk nowadays about "tolerance," although the conversation has morphed quite a bit from what it was just a couple of years ago. It used to be that we were enjoined by progressives to be tolerant of those who disagreed with us, who held political or religious opinions at variance with our own or who adopted a lifestyle that others may have thought immoral.

Now the talk in progressive circles is all about what Herbert Marcuse back in the 60s was promoting as "repressive tolerance." Marcuse argued that tolerance and freedom of speech should not extend to those who hold retrograde political views, views that other groups find offensive or harmful. He insisted that freedom of speech was a subterfuge that elites employed to enable them to maintain power and as such should not be accorded the cherished status that has traditionally been conferred upon it.

In the educational sphere, in particular, Marcuse wrote that measures of repressive tolerance,

...would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, if you believe in maintaining a strong military defense, if you believe that America is the greatest country ever to grace the planet, or if you disagree that social security should be increased or perpetuated, you should be denied the ability to voice your views.

This, in good Orwellian fashion, Marcuse labels genuine freedom of thought. He goes on to write that,

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual...the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin...with stopping the words and images which feed his consciousness.

To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

So, if tolerance means that people should be allowed to argue against what Marcuse thought to be a better form of life, in his case Marxism coupled with sexual freedom, then those arguments should be repressed. People must not be exposed to well-reasoned arguments if those arguments may be so cogent as to persuade the hearer to reject the ideology of the left.

Marcuse made this case in 1965 in an essay titled Repressive Tolerance, but it's bearing fruit today in social media, the academy, and news organizations like the New York Times where any opinion that wanders beyond the bounds of acceptable progressive orthodoxy is quashed.

One of the arguments that the progressive left makes in support of "repressive tolerance" - which is, ironically, a fascist notion - is based on a misuse of a footnote in philosopher Karl Popper's famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. John Sexton at HotAir.com explains that the footnote, which some leftists have seized upon to promote repression of deviant ideas and street violence, is being abused:

[Popper's] idea was pretty simple: If society is completely tolerant, then the intolerant will rule society because there will be no one willing to stand up to their intolerance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a tolerant society to be intolerant toward those who are themselves intolerant.... You can probably see how this plays into certain Antifa arguments about “punching Nazis” and using street violence against the intolerant.

Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Popper added, however, that,

In this formulation, I do not imply...that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

In other words, as long as people are willing to debate and discuss and have conversations about their disagreements, as long as they don't seek to impose their views by violent means, we must insist on tolerance and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. It's only when people opt for violent coercion that tolerance comes to an end.

Here's Popper:

But we should claim the right to suppress them [those who eschew dialogue and resort instead to force] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

The fascist left, including Antifa, seizes on this as a justification not only for suppressing contrary ideas but also for violence, yet it's pretty clear that Popper was claiming that resort to violence is justified only when the other side refuses to engage in fair debate and chooses instead to substitute "fists and pistols" for reason and logic. It's also pretty clear that it's the extremists on both left and right in our current social landscape who fit the profile of those of whom Popper was speaking.

The extremist rejects argument because at some level he knows that neither facts nor reason are on his side. He senses the rational inadequacy of his position so he rejects reason and rationality rather than give up his position or subject it to rational scrutiny.

The only truth he recognizes is whatever he feels most strongly to be true, and since his feelings are self-authenticating and self-validating there's no point in debating them. He needs only to force you to accept his "truth," and if you refuse then you must be compelled, with violence, if necessary, to submit.

After all, if you disagree with the progressive left then you must be a racist bigot, and you should be silenced or have your face smashed. If you disagree with the extremist right then you must be part of the conspiracy to undermine America and you deserve to get stomped on.

That's unfortunately where we are today in America.