The Resurrection "Plot"

One of the explanations promoted over the years by skeptics to explain how Jesus' tomb came to be empty after His crucifixion and burial was that the disciples managed somehow to steal His body. In his book The DaVinci Code, author Dan Brown seems to support this theory, and many others have advocated it as well.

Given all of what history records about these events the idea seems implausible at the very best. For example, the "stolen body" theory doesn't explain how the disciples overcame their fear, formulated a plot to steal the body, managed to overwhelm an armed guard, and why they were never arrested for their crime.

Nor does it explain why they really believed Jesus had risen from the dead and were prepared to suffer and even die for that belief. It also fails to explain how such a plot could've been kept secret among so many conspirators.

The theory that Jesus' corpse was hidden somewhere by the thieves also fails to explain why so many people, in diverse circumstances, believed that they had seen Jesus alive after His death. For example, the fact that Paul, who was an enthusiastic persecutor of Jesus' followers, and James, the brother of Jesus, who was skeptical of his brother's sanity, both became committed followers of "The Way." The New Testament states that it was an appearance by Jesus that convinced them that He really had come back from the dead.

Anyway, the Babylon Bee has a little fun mocking the "stolen body" theory in the video below, and I wish all our readers a wonderful Resurrection Day tomorrow. Enjoy the video:

John Updike on the Resurrection of Jesus

As Christians around the world prepare for Easter this coming Sunday I'm reminded of the American novelist John Updike (1932-2009). Updike was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but despite his flaws he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively, literally, physically, and historically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. The miracle of the Resurrection is the guarantee that the Christian's faith in Christ is not misplaced. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Most-The Bridge

Tomorrow Christians observe the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday. Given the importance of the day for Christians it might be helpful to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film titled Most-The Bridge.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on the first "Good Friday."

It might be well today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son, and who those passengers on the train were - and are.

Thoughts on Miracles and Easter

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable.

It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from a circularity. He seems to base the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident.

They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that it's possible that there are an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist.

The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it's not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well?

If there are a near-infinite array of universes, a multiverse, as has been seized upon as a means of avoiding the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead.

After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

The New Yorker's Misguided Attempt to Ruin Easter

As we approach Easter and the celebration of the greatest event in human history, the resurrection from death of the Son of God, the secular media is once again doing what they can to discredit either that particular event, miracles in general, or Christian belief in toto.

An example is a recent article in The New Yorker which has triggered a fine response from the Catholic bishop Robert Barron. You can watch Barron's remarks about the New Yorker piece below.

Sophisticated folks at venues like the New Yorker aren't content with reducing the Resurrection of Jesus, the most significant event to have ever occurred, into a celebration of the Easter bunny. They want to empty the day of any and all transcendent meaning.

The apostle Paul says of such people that "professing themselves wise they make themselves fools." Bishop Barron's brief remarks illustrate why:

Friends, the mainstream media typically uses Easter as a time to “debunk” Christianity with old, tired arguments. After reading a rather annoying article in The @NewYorker, I’d like to share my thoughts with you. pic.twitter.com/EVZKKZaDcY

— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) April 1, 2025

Five Major Political Outlooks among Protestants

For those readers who are Protestant Christians Mark Tooley has written an interesting piece at Juicy Ecumenism in which he offers a taxonomy of American protestantism. As I read it I was curious to see where I fit in. Maybe you will be, too.

He begins by noting that there are currently five major streams of Protestant political outlook and activism. Here are the five with a brief excerpt from Tooley's description of each each:

The old Religious Left which is comprised chiefly of clergy from what’s left of Mainline Protestantism. It has little political influence but sometimes gets attention because it can stage rallies with berobed clergy in clerical collars....It rejects or minimizes historical Christian ethical teachings about human sexuality and the human body and endorses identity politics. It largely equates God’s Kingdom with an ever-expanding federal entitlement and welfare state.

The old Religious Right which was founded in the 1970s and 1980s by parachurch groups like the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. It advocated moral renewal through political action to defend “traditional values.” It is pro-life, pro-traditional family and pro religious expression in public life. It has been mostly Reaganite, backing tax cuts, limited government, a strong U.S. national security posture, and free market economics.

The neo-Anabaptist left resembles the old Religious Left but is more adamant about pacifism, peacemaking and rejecting American “empire.” It has professed to be more theologically orthodox. And it was originally pro-life and affirmed traditional Christian sexual teaching but later mostly liberalized on these issues.

MAGA Christianity crystalized around the rise of Donald Trump over the last decade. Unlike the old Religious Right, it does not necessarily favor limited government but exalts in increased executive power vested in a strong man who can fight The Left. It is nostalgic for America’s past but not necessarily for America’s founding constitutional principles, which can impair its ambitions. It mostly hat tips to traditional Christian views about abortion and marriage but is willing to subordinate those stances to wider political ambitions.

The TheoBro right which wants a Christian confessional state that legally privileges Christianity as the only remedy for defeating the Left. Some of its leaders openly denounce voting rights for women as a liberal, modern corruption that undermines the family. Its denizens are not very numerous but have a high profile through social media. And its influence exceeds its numbers because it is aligned with much of MAGA Christianity.

A friend told me that didn't recognize himself in any of these and suggested that Tooley should've included a sixth stream characterized by the ministries of Tim Keller, Al Mohler, and some PCA churches.

In any case, Tooley has more on each of these groups in his article. If you read it you may ask yourself, if you are a Protestant, where, if anywhere, you would fit most comfortably.

What's Wrong with CRT

The following was been posted a few years ago, but because the topic has been so contentious for so long, I thought it might be helpful to repost it:

News reports from around the country have revealed a great deal of discontent among parents with their local school board members who've introduced Critical Race Theory (CRT) into their children's curricula. A number of its defenders of CRT, like the erstwhile talk host at MSNBC, Joy Reid, have insisted that the objectors who criticize its implementation in schools and businesses don't really know what it is.

She and others of her progressive ideological leanings would have us believe that CRT is just a benign attempt to educate students about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. It is that, of course, but it's much more than that.

CRT, its own advocates have written, seeks to radically revolutionize America in the name of ending "oppression." It rejects the values of the earlier Civil Rights movement such as the belief that people can, or should, strive to be "color-blind." Race is paramount. To not consider race in any interaction is an instance of "white supremacy."

CRT also repudiates racial integration because, proponents argue, it leads to "cultural genocide" as the minority group is inevitably absorbed into, and assimilated by, the dominant (white) group.

It rejects classical liberalism and the notion of human equality, substituting instead an emphasis on "equity," i.e. the idea that if there are disparities between races in any metric such as mortality rates, life expectancies, incarceration rates, disciplinary actions in schools, etc. they are necessarily the consequence of racism. No other explanation is allowed.

CRT rejects logical reasoning, objectivity, standpoint neutrality, and fairness in discussions about race as "white values," and the attempt to adopt these values by People of Color (POC) is to adopt "whiteness" and to betray one's own race by tacitly affirming the superiority of white values to the values of the oppressed class.

It furthermore dismisses the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the principle of blind justice. These ideals, too, are "white."

Its emphasis is on the subjective "lived experience" of POC. Their stories are self-validating. To question them is to engage in an act of white supremacy or racism. The idea that truth is objective is rejected. Knowledge is experiential and feelings are self-validating.

Science and reason are tainted by "whiteness." Statistics are meaningless if they conflict with what a member of the "oppressed class" feels deep in her soul to be true.

It also teaches that whites, and only whites, are inherently racist, and no matter how hard they may try, they're helpless to expunge the stain. All they can do is submit to the moral superiority of the oppressed, do some kind of penance, and plead for forgiveness, which, if it is granted at all, is only tentative.

Moreover, according to CRT the structures of our society are irremediably saturated with racism and must be torn down. What will replace them, they don't know or say, but, like the Jacobins in 1789 and the Bolsheviks in 1917, it's enough at this point to destroy the old order. The new non-racist order will somehow arise of itself.

Further, anyone who benefits from this "structural racism" is ipso facto a racist and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist.

"Whiteness" refers to anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society regardless of the beneficiary's skin tone. If you're black, but you integrate into the white status quo then you're "white" regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

But don't take my word for any of this. Instead, watch this video produced by a very bright young man who did his homework and dug into the original sources. His name is Ryan Chapman, and he presents the main points of CRT in a dispassionate, objective fashion that CRT proponents would doubtless dismiss because, after all, Chapman is a white person seeking to be objective, neutral, and fair.

Even so, the video is quite good and is a very helpful explication of what the major figures in CRT are themselves saying about it. Joy Reid should watch it:

How Modern Culture Dehumanizes Women

Scanning the news we're often confronted with stories of mistreatment of women in our culture. Stories about campus rape culture, sexually hostile workplaces, spousal abuse, and other examples of violence and degrading behavior perpetrated against women seem to abound, and the question this all raises is "why?" Why does it seem that more men today, more than in previous generations, hold women in such low esteem? Why are women so much more likely to be objectified and treated with disrespect today than a few generations ago?

I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the problem is a result of the moral revolution that took place in the 1960s and 70s concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.

During those decades pornography was mainstreamed, and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Three generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images. This has likely had several undesirable effects.

First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's much more to be seen anywhere one looks than merely a shapely ankle.

Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who's not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images. Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be like the women they encounter in movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women.

A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role, and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships. The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened and trouble results.

At the same time that pornography exploded, sex was disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding of them any kind of permanent commitment. This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was no sense in "buying a cow as long as the milk was free."

People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they're often not respected. Respect may be feigned, of course, as long as the benefit is imminent but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting a diminution of respect often follows and results in the woman being treated accordingly.

Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to subordinate their natural impulses and to value instead hearth and family, but our entire culture has conspired in the last forty years to minimize and deride that lesson. So, when many a modern man, unfettered by any profound commitment to a particular woman and children, grows accustomed to the woman he's with she'll eventually begin to bore him, and it won't be long before his eye is cast elsewhere in search of another potential source of sexual excitement.

Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality in the 60s and 70s was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint, even insulting, for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her. Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and nurture them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

The more vocal feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus, our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible. This, too, dehumanized women by eroding the esteem in which their gender had formerly been held among men.

As with sex, so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent.

Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it. When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males along the bell curve undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling more men onto the other side of it than would have been there otherwise.

This affects women as much as men, if not more so, because women are often the victims of male violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger, and aggression.

It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him if she does.

Is it Possible to Know That God Does Not Exist? (Part II)

I ended yesterday's post on Gary Gutting's interview with UMass philosopher Louise Antony with the claim that there are dozens of good reasons for believing that God exists. One such reason is the modern argument from design, but Professor Antony tries to anticipate that argument in the interview:

Many theists think they’re home free with something like the argument from design: that there is empirical evidence of a purposeful design in nature. But it’s one thing to argue that the universe must be the product of some kind of intelligent agent; it’s quite something else to argue that this designer was all-knowing and omnipotent.

Why is that a better hypothesis than that the designer was pretty smart but made a few mistakes? Maybe (I’m just cribbing from Hume here) there was a committee of intelligent creators, who didn’t quite agree on everything. Maybe the creator was a student god, and only got a B- on this project.

The problem with this objection is that the concession that the designer exists but is a bit incompetent is that it concedes too much. Once we grant the existence of a designer (or a committee of designers), even if the designer(s) seems to be unable to create a perfect world, then the atheist has essentially lost the argument. She's conceding that something beyond this universe exists which is powerful enough and intelligent enough to create this universe, even though the creation is imperfect.

That's a concession that an atheist cannot afford to make. It puts her on a very slippery slope to theism since it'd be plausible to believe that any designer of the universe would have to have the minimal qualities of transcending space, time and matter, be unimaginably powerful and unimaginably intelligent. It might also be plausible to assume that this creator is personal, since it would've created personality embodied in beings like you and I. If so, we're getting pretty close to the God of traditional theism.

Too, close, certainly, for the comfort of most atheists.

Even a less than perfect designer is still a designer that transcends this universe and possesses the traits listed above. Even a team of designers is still comprised of designers which possess those traits.

Such a designer is not the God of theism, to be sure, but the existence of a transcendent designer(s) of any sort is certainly much more compatible with theism than it is with the naturalists' claim that the universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. Moreover, if there's a plausible answer to the problem of an imperfect creation or the problem of suffering, theism becomes even more likely.

For examples of some plausible responses to the problem of suffering watch the following five minute video:

Gutting's interview continues:

G.G.: Would you say, then, that believers who think they have good reasons for theism are deceiving themselves, that they are actually moved by, say, hopes and fears — emotions — rather than reasons?

L.A.: I realize that some atheists do say things like “theists are just engaged in wishful thinking — they can’t accept that death is the end.” Theists are insulted by such conjectures (which is all they are) and I don’t blame them. It’s presumptuous to tell someone else why she believes what she believes — if you want to know, start by asking her.

When atheists allege that theism is an expression of wishful thinking it should be noted that if so - and I have little doubt that that's at least part of why many theists hold to their convictions - it must also be the case that atheism is also an expression of wishful thinking. If wishful thinking lies behind the faith of some believers then it also lies behind the lack of faith manifest in many unbelievers. In other words, many atheists disbelieve because they simply don't want there to be a God.

You can read a couple of very bright atheists admitting this themselves here.

The claim that theism is just wishful thinking is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways. As such it reminds me a little of mathematician John Lennox's retort to atheist biologist Richard Dawkins in a debate between the two. Dawkins averred that theists believe in God because they're afraid of the dark. Lennox responded by saying that atheists disbelieve in God because they're afraid of the light.

Is it Possible to Know That God Does Not Exist? (Part I)

At the Opinionator philosopher Gary Gutting of Notre Dame interviews atheist philosopher Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The interview is interesting for a number of things Ms Antony asserts, including her claim that she knows there is no God:

Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God. But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic?

Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.” I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean.

G.G.: That is what I mean.

L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.

With due respect to Ms Antony, I simply don't see how anyone can know such a thing. It's a bit like saying that one knows there are no living beings elsewhere in the universe. One can believe this, one can be skeptical or doubtful that there are any such beings, but how one can know that a transcendent mind does not exist is not at all clear, at least not to me.

Nevertheless, she doubles down on her claim a bit further on in the interview:

G.G.: O.K., .... But the question still remains, why are you so certain that God doesn’t exist?

L.A.: Knowledge in the real world does not entail either certainty or infallibility. When I claim to know that there is no God, I mean that the question is settled to my satisfaction. I don’t have any doubts. I don’t say that I’m agnostic, because I disagree with those who say it’s not possible to know whether or not God exists. I think it’s possible to know. And I think the balance of evidence and argument has a definite tilt.

But a "definite tilt" to the evidence, even if such a tilt existed, hardly warrants a claim to knowledge. Gutting goes on to ask her what sort of evidence she has in mind:

L.A.: I find the “argument from evil” overwhelming — that is, I think the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being is a zillion times lower than that it is the product of mindless natural laws acting on mindless matter.

Prof. Antony is surely speaking here of a psychological probability rather than a statistical probability since the latter is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, it's true that evil and suffering often make it difficult to believe that God exists, and if that were the only evidence we had then the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent deity would seem unlikely.

But the evil in the world is not the only evidence we have. It's only one element in what philosophers call our evidential set.

Imagine, for example, that every Chinese man you met on a trip to China was under six feet tall. If that experience was the only relevant evidence you had you might be justified in doubting that there are seven footers in China. But suppose you subsequently acquired several other bits of evidence. You learn, for example, that some Chinese play basketball, that some have even played in the NBA, and that some have even played center in the NBA. Perhaps you also read about a man named Yao Ming who was 7'6" and played for the Houston Rockets until 2011. As your evidential set expands, the force of the original piece of evidence begins to diminish.

Likewise with the argument from evil. Evil is only one element in our evidential set. There are dozens of good reasons for thinking that a God exists, and there are also ways of answering the argument from evil which greatly lessen its force. When considered as just one part of the entire body of evidence the existence of evil is not nearly as dispositive as Ms. Antony suggests.

We'll talk more about Gutting's interview with Professor Antony on tomorrow's Viewpoint.

Blinders

I'm sure we all have mental blinders that keep us from seeing what we don't want to see, especially on matters of religion and politics. I'm sure I do, and it'd be good for all of us to be made aware of what we're not seeing.

Since those best positioned to make us aware of what we're overlooking are those who stand on the other side of the political divide and can see our blind spots more clearly, I offer the following to my friends on the left:

Friends and family have asked how anyone could vote for a liar like Donald Trump. This would be a fair question were it not for the fact that these friends and family would have people vote for the same administration who for the last five years lied to us about Joe Biden's mental acuity.

Donald Trump has an uneasy relationship with the truth, to be sure, but at least there's no doubt that he's the president. Who has actually been the de facto president for the last two and a half years of the Biden administration? Ron Klain? Jeff Zients? Jill Biden? Hunter Biden?

Why did the Biden people lie about the president's debility so adamantly and for so long?

Speaking of lies and Hunter Biden how many times did Joe Biden tell us he had no conversations with Hunter about his business dealings? How many times were we lied to about Hunter's sleazy laptop being Russian disinformation so that it wouldn't diminish Joe's chances in the 2024 election?

How many times has Biden lied about the circumstances of his son Beau's death? How many times has he just made up stories about his life? How many times did he or his administration tell us the border was under control and to the extent that it wasn't there was little he could do about it?

One of his most egregious lies was telling the American people that no American servicemen and women had been killed abroad during his presidency. This despite the loss of thirteen Americans in the Abbey Gate debacle in Afghanistan and three more to a missile attack in Jordan. Is it only Trump's lies that matter to people? Is a lie worse if it comes from Trump and less bad if it came from Biden?

I have a couple of friends who claim to be strongly pro-life. Yet they can't understand why anyone would vote for a man as flawed as Donald Trump who, despite those flaws, is perhaps the most pro-life president in our history, rather than voting for Kamala Harris who supports removing almost all restrictions on a woman's right to kill her unborn child.

A lot of folks are sure that Donald Trump is a fascist, and perhaps he does list toward authoritarianism, but I've heard very little from those who condemn his and his supporters' alleged penchant for fascism about contemporary political violence perpetrated by the left. Why are so many liberals so silent about the BLM riots, the Antifa violence, the assassination attempts, the Tesla bombers, and so on?

Political violence is the trademark of fascism and is at least as common on the left as it is on the right. Indeed, in our current political moment it seems to be much more a feature of the left.

What would those who are willing to spend years in jail for vandalizing Teslas and assaulting Tesla owners say if asked why they harbor such a deep hatred for Elon Musk? What exactly has Musk done that makes him the object of so much loathing? That he has trimmed the bureaucracy? That he has saved taxpayers billions of dollars by finding and eliminating waste and fraud? What?

Speaking of taxes, why is it that people who think we should all pay more in taxes often take all the deductions to which they're legally entitled? If they think we should all pay more, why don't they?

Why is it that those who demand that we throw open the doors of our country to whomever wishes to come in nevertheless lock the doors of their homes and cars when they leave them? Why open the doors to the country to those in need but close the doors to our homes to those in need?

It's ironic that those who are most vocal in their desire for peace are often the most vocal in their disdain for the one president who has probably done more to bring peace to the world than any of his predecessors. If Trump fails to get a ceasefire in Ukraine and a satisfactory conclusion to Hamas' war against Israel it won't be for lack of trying. Would peace be any more likely were Kamala Harris our Commander in Chief?

I asked a relative once why she so despises Trump. Her answer was that E. Jean Carroll accused him of having assaulted and raped her (he was found not guilty of rape) some years ago and that he was in general an odious human being. Perhaps so, but had Biden stayed in the race she would've voted for him despite his perverse weirdness around women and children and despite the fact that he was credibly accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, and despite the fact that he was accused by Jill's first husband, Bill Stevenson, of having had an affair with her while she was still married to Stevenson.

My relative did vote for Kamala Harris whose husband once publicly slapped a woman so hard it almost knocked her down and who hired a secretary solely because of her looks and "friendliness." Is there a significant difference between these cases on the "odious" scale?

As I said above, I'm sure we all have political blinders that keep us from seeing what we don't want to see. It'd be good for all of us, including those hostile to Trump and Musk, to recognize ours.

Free Will Skepticism (Pt. II)

I posted Part I of this topic on Saturday (see the post below this one). I concluded that entry by noting that the consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion. The Guardian's Oliver Burkeman offers Saul Smilansky as an example:

Saul Smilansky, [is] a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, [but that] although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise ....“On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on...it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said.

“For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”

Smilansky is right about the consequences of a deterministic view of human choice. Not only would it do away with the idea that humans deserve reward and punishment, it would also do away with the idea of moral guilt. It would also strip our species of any notion of human dignity, equality, or rights.

Here's Burkeman:

By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces. “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts,...“it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”

Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.

For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified....Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.”

The preceding paragraph illustrates why so few philosophers believe we can live consistently as determinists. Caruso uses words like "unjustified" and "capricious," but if determinism is true there are no acts which are justified or unjustified, and there certainly is no caprice.

Everything happens as the inevitable consequence of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. To complain that an act is unjustified is meaningless and to allege that an act is capricious is to imply that it could have been otherwise than it was, which is nonsense if determinism is true.

Caruso commits the same inconsistency in the next section. Burkeman writes:

Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.

You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat.

But how, assuming the truth of determinism, can we speak of a "right" to do something and an "obligation" to do something else? These words are meaningless if there are no genuine choices. If at every given moment there's only one possible future how can people have a right or an obligation to do other than what they've been determined to do?

Like so many philosophical questions, the question of free will really comes down to the question of God. If one doesn't believe in God then it's indeed difficult to see how we could have free will even though we'd find it impossible to live consistently as a determinist.

But if God does exist then it's possible that He has endowed us with an immaterial self (mind or soul) not subject to physical law and out of which not only conscious experience but also genuinely free choices arise.

Put differently, if you believe that there are at least some moments in your life when you're genuinely free to choose between two alternatives, then to be consistent you should be a theist. If you are a naturalistic materialist then free will certainly would seem inexplicable, but if determinism is true why are the implications so disturbing and why can't we live consistently as determinists?

As Burkeman admits, he has to live as though determinism is false:

I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option.

In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.

Burkeman has much more to say about "Free will Skepticism" at the link. The article's a bit long, but worth reading in that it does a good job of presenting the determinist challenge to those who believe in libertarian free will.

Free Will Skepticism (Pt.I)

There's an interesting article at The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman a couple of years back on the topic of free will.

Although Burkeman writes the article in such a way as to suggest that he himself is a determinist, or what he calls a "free will skeptic," he admits at the end of the piece that he "personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life."

Nevertheless, almost all of the people he cites in the article are determinists with the opinions of some compatibilists* mixed in, but he doesn't mention any arguments from those philosophers who believe we have libertarian free will*.

I've pulled a few passages from Burkeman's article that help to give a sense of it. Let's start with this one:

Nothing could be more self-evident [than that we make free choices]. And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

It's important to note that each of these thinkers is a naturalistic materialist. Their determinism is a derivative of their prior belief that all that exists are matter and the physical laws which govern it. Being committed to that ontology it's not surprising that they would be free will skeptics, since materialism allows no room for any deviation from physical law. As Burkeman says at one point, "Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock?"

If, however, naturalistic materialism is false, if there's more to us than just our material bodies and brains, if we also possess an immaterial mind or soul, then the strength of the argument for determinism is substantially diminished.

Burkeman explains why the free will question is crucially important:

...the stakes could hardly be higher. Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.

Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness.

And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

The consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion. I'll talk about that when I post Part II on this topic on Monday.

*Compatibilism is the notion that even though our choices may be determined, it makes sense to say we’re free to choose as long as our choices are caused by internal causes like reasons, rather than external constraints. Compatibilists think determinism and free will are both true. Libertarian free will is the view that there are some moments in which one can genuinely choose between two or more possible futures.

Politics In Church

Ryan Burge is a sociologist who specializes in religious matters. He recently put together some data on how eager preachers are to deliver political sermons and how eager Christians are to hear such messages in Church. The short answer to both is "not very much."

Here are a couple of charts he put together based on his data:

Burge writes:

I get the very clear sense from this data that any pastor who chooses to speak up about political division in the United States is going to anger a whole lot of their flock. In most churches, 40-50% of people think that their clergy should avoid discussions of political division completely.

Then, another 30-40% mostly think that this is a bad idea. You just don’t see a lot of church-going folks who are keen on their pastor talking about what is going on in the world of politics, just the opposite.

This is interesting because the perception among a lot of secular folk is that churches are hotbeds of political indoctrination. Burge mentions this:

Doing a lot of public facing work on religion has taught me that a significant number of people who aren’t religious or don’t attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning.

The vast majority of pastors aren’t talking about politics on a regular basis and when they touch on anything that may be in the political realm it’s about topics like racism and income inequality. Both can be discussed in fairly apolitical ways.

I wonder if this is true of African American churches. Many people have the impression that they're more political than churches that are mostly white, but if Burge has any data on this he didn't present it in his article.

He closes with this:

The other side of this is that huge majorities of congregations just want to avoid politics entirely from the pulpit. They don’t want their pastor or priest to try and discuss the political divides that we are facing. Being around church people my entire life, that’s the clear impression I’ve always gotten.

They see Sunday worship as a respite from all the Culture Wars and the talking heads and the political battles that seem to consume our every waking moment.

Yes, there are pastors who are expressly political. You often see them on social media - but this data makes the point clear: these religious leaders are outliers. They must be understood in that context.

Burge has more on this topic at the link.

A Biologist Confronts Wokeness

Outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he states his reasons (and those of fellow atheistic scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker) for resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).

Coyne explains that the organization has abandoned science by capitulating to those who insist that a woman is "whoever she says she is." Coyne wrote a letter rebutting transgender ideology, which the Foundation published but then removed from their website because, they declared, its publication was "an error of judgment," “does not reflect our values or principles,” and had caused “distress.” The FFRF, they insisted, stands “firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community.”

Coyne sees this as misguided and the Foundation's censorship as a betrayal of science.

There's an irony in Coyne's complaint, however. As David Klinghoffer relates at Evolution News, Coyne has omitted two relevant points from his WSJ article. Here's Klinghoffer:

First, he has himself been an enthusiastic censor, seeking, if I may borrow his own words, to “silence critics who raise valid counter arguments.” In fact, he won the Censor of the Year Award from the Center for Science in Culture back in 2014 for his efforts to silence a Ball State University astrophysicist, Eric Hedin, for teaching a course on “The Boundaries of Science.” The course pointed students to, among other things, some literature on intelligent design.

In his war on Dr. Hedin — a younger, less powerful, and untenured scientist — Dr. Coyne joined forces with none other than his good buddies at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRP). They went over Hedin’s head and succeeded in getting the course canceled. Hedin tells the story in his book Canceled Science.

Has Coyne come to regret any of this, now that he’s winning plaudits as a defender of free speech? As recently as 2022, nine years after the fact, he was still mocking Hedin at Coyne’s blog, "Why Evolution Is True" (“Eric Hedin beefs about being ‘canceled’ at Ball State by the FFRF and me”).

Using his power and the prestige brand of his university to bully someone like Hedin was nothing less than loathsome. Coyne was a pioneer of “cancel culture” well before the term came into vogue.

Indeed, Darwinians, so far from being champions of free speech, have been among the most censorious people in our culture, demanding that all university instructors toe the Darwinian line or suffer unhappy professional consequences.

Klinghoffer continues:

And second, what about the gender binary position that Coyne also champions? If it’s mistaken to believe a man can become a woman, fairly competing against women in women’s sports, using women’s locker rooms and restrooms, demanding to be housed in women’s prisons, and all the rest, how did this mistaken way of thinking arise? What forces in the culture help us understand where it came from?

In his op-ed, Coyne blames existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. He complains that “some forms of feminism” hold that “sex is a social construct.” Coyne harrumphs, “This is a denial of evolution.”

Klinghoffer wants to argue that transgender ideology is not at all a denial of evolution but rather is perfectly compatible with it which is true, but I'd go one step further. I'd agree with Coyne that transgenderism is a product of existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory, but these are all, in many respects, outgrowths of the atheism Coyne himself embraces.

Atheism leads to skepticism about the possibility of absolute truth, and that epistemic skepticism manifested itself in the 20th century in existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. If Coyne believes that transgender ideology is a betrayal of science, perhaps he should examine how and why the atheism on which he stands has resulted in the ideas that have produced it.

You can read the rest of Klinghoffer's piece at the link.

Why Would Anyone Oppose This?

What reasons does anyone have for opposing any of the following:

• deporting non-citizen supporters of terrorist organizations
• deporting non-citizen rapists, child molesters, and murderers
• exploiting natural gas and nuclear energy to meet our electrical needs
• eliminating waste and fraud in the government
• removing ineligible recipients from social security and medicare rolls
• tightening border security and vetting immigrants
• measures to insure that only citizens vote
• measures to enable minority kids to get out of failing inner city public schools
• protecting girls and women from men who delude themselves and others into thinking that they're really women and should be able to compete against girls in sports and who demand to dress in female locker rooms and be incarcerated in women's prisons.

If you have a friend or family member who thinks any of these should be opposed and who votes accordingly, you might ask them why.

Why Taiwan Matters

There's much in the news about a possible conflict between the U.S. and China over the island of Taiwan, and a lot of us might wonder why we should risk WWIII over an island thousands of miles away from us but only about 100 miles off the Chinese coast.

In his book Seven Things You Can't Say about China (see yestrday's post on VP), Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lays out the importance of Taiwan for our future well-being in a chapter titled China Could Win.

The Taiwanese people are mostly descendants of Chinese refugees fleeing from the mass murderer Mao Zedong in the wake of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. Under their leader Chiang Kai-shek these refugees formed their own government and declared themselves to be independent of China. We guaranteed their safety then and have guaranteed it ever since, despite the fact that China sees Taiwan as part of China and threatens to take it by force.

Cotton writes that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would precipitate a stock-market crash causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs. The severing of ties with China would result in depleted goods on store and pharmacy shelves, and soaring prices. All of this would lead to a worldwide "Great Depression."

Our automobile industry, along with all the supporting industries and businesses - steel, aluminum, dealerships, parts stores, etc. - would be devastated. As would everything, such as agriculture, that depends on transportation to get goods to market.

The tech industry and every industry that relies on electronics would also be ruined since Taiwan is the dominant producer of the world's most sophisticated computer chips. Anything that uses these chips, which is almost everything, would soon be unavailable.

If the U.S. failed to come to Taiwan's aid against China, or even if we did but failed to prevent the invasion, our alliances would weaken as other countries reassessed our willingness or ability to meet our commitments.

Controlling Taiwan would permit China to project power into the Pacific and cut off the sea lanes that run through the South China Sea, virtually isolating Japan and South Korea from their main suppliers of oil. The Philippines and Southeast Asia would be in even greater peril from Chinese military and economic domination.

Once America's military protection from China was no longer seen to be reliable, nations would feel the need to develop their own nuclear deterrent, and nuclear weapons would proliferate.

Totalitarians around the globe would be energized to increase the repression of their people and invade their neighbors knowing that the U.S. was no longer the economic and military threat to them that it once was.

China would be in a position to dictate economic terms to much of the world, including, perhaps, the U.S., and demand that other countries stop trading in dollars, which would wreak havoc upon Americans seeking loans to buy homes and whatever else was still available.

There are numerous other consequences of a Chinese assault on Taiwan that Cotton addresses in his book, but he closes the chapter with this:

China could defeat America in the global struggle for mastery; it all starts and really ends in Taiwan. No one can predict with certainty how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would end up, especially without knowing how the United States would respond. But however it turns out, it would set off a catastrophic chain of events. The only winning strategy to preserve American primacy is to deter Chinese aggression in the first place.

Much of the world is focused on Ukraine and the Middle East at the moment, but the bigger threat to world peace is China, and we need to understand why. Buying and reading Senator Cotton's book is a good way to help us do that.

Seven Things You Can't Say About China

Senator Tom Cotton (R. AR) has written an amazingly helpful book titled Seven Things You Can't Say About China. Cotton is an Iraq and Afghanistan combat vet who is currently serving in the Senate as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Regarding China he knows whereof he speaks.

Here are the seven things that many Americans feel they cannot say about China on pain of suffering economic or professional consequences:

1. China Is an Evil Empire: The cruelty of their persecution of Christians and other religions, as well as their own people, is horrifying.
2. China Is Preparing for War: The growth of their military, including their nuclear arsenal, is frightening.
3. China Is Waging Economic World War: They're using every means to make the world economically dependent upon them so they can control the decisions governments around the world make.
4. China Has Infiltrated Our Society: Americans in virtually every niche of our society, from Hollywood to professional sports, the news media, universities, and corporations, are too intimidated by China to do or say anything that displeases them.
5. China Has Infiltrated Our Government: By placing sympathizers in the government and military, their espionage efforts have greatly accelerated over the last decade, costing us billions in intellectual capital.
6. China Is coming for Our Kids: Through social media and other forms of influence, including drugs like fentanyl, China is increasing its grip on the minds of our young.
7. China Could Win

Communist China has gained enormous influence over what can be said about them in our society. Each page of Cotton's book is replete with examples of how attempts to tell the truth about the Chinese government have resulted in people losing their jobs, being canceled or otherwise intimidated into docility.

The book is not long, about 190 pages, but it's full of information of which every American needs to be aware, and I highly recommend it.

You can purchase the book on Amazon, of course, but I want to plug a small independent bookstore called Hearts and Minds that's run by friends of mine. Their order form is here.

A Philosopher Considers Cosmic Fine-Tuning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goff, though formerly a believer in the multiverse, has been persuaded that the multiverse hypothesis is based on a fallacy. He illustrates the fallcy thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

In her magisterial 1951 work titled The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian tyrannies grow out of the fragments of a highly atomized society comprised of lonely, alienated, and isolated individuals who have lost faith in the institutions of their culture and who lack both a knowledge of, and appreciation for, their history.

Rod Dreher picks up on this theme in his book Live Not by Lies. He writes that our contemporary young, despite the superficial connectedness they may feel as avid consumers of social media, are largely unhappy and isolated to a historically unprecedented degree.

Their loneliness and ennui manifest themselves in epidemic rates of teenage depression and suicide which psychologist Jean Twenge says have placed us "on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades." Much of the deterioration in the mental well-being of those born since 2000, she claims, "can be traced to their phones."

Walk into a restaurant or any gathering place where you might find groups of young (and maybe not-so-young) people sitting together and it's not unusual to see each of them alone in their own world, staring at their phones, or wearing ear buds or head sets that exclude any meaningful interaction with others.

I've visited people in their homes who keep the television on so loud that conversation is all but impossible, and, of course, lonely people congregate in night clubs where the music creates a din over which it's impossible to talk. Even in a crowd we're often functionally alone.

Dreher says that modern technology and social media are just two of the forces creating the conditions for what he calls a decadent, pre-totalitarian culture. Not only social atomization and widespread loneliness, but also the embrace of radical ideologies, the erosion of religious belief, and the loss of faith in our institutions leave society "vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation."

Totalitarian tyrants will do all they can to destroy a sense of community in the people they oppress because community is a support system that encourages resistance. It's much easier to control people when they lack the sense of identity that comes from belonging to something bigger than themselves.

Where in our modern society do we still find community? The family is disintegrating, churches are empty, neighborhoods are populated by people who frequently move on after a few years, and there are so many entertainment options that one feels it almost unusual to find someone who watches the same tv shows or the same podcasts.

Arendt asserts that when people lack community - a sense of belonging - they'll crave the fellowship and identity that an ideological commitment provides. They'll sign on to any movement that gives them a sense of importance and fills their otherwise empty lives with meaning, even if that meaning is at bottom an illusion.

It is precisely this promise of a meaningful life that propelled the Bolshevik communists to power in an effete Russia after 1917 and enabled the rise of Hitler in a worn out Germany in the 1930s.

Could we, too, be slouching toward totalitarianism?

During the covid pandemic our government imposed draconian restrictions on society that almost totally isolated people from each other. They closed schools, limited athletic events, and restricted the size of gatherings to a relatively few people who were required to hide their faces behind masks and maintain "social distance." If and when another deadly virus should strike would those in our government who harbor totalitarian inclinations be even more repressive?

What happened during the pandemic should give us pause. If we think tyranny couldn't happen here then perhaps we understand neither history nor human nature nor the fragile state of our contemporary culture.

Fledging Their Young

From time to time I've posted on birds that I've been fortunate to see in my little corner of the world. One bird that makes it into eastern Pennsylvania once or twice each winter is a resident of Greenland but which occasionally wanders south in the winter into the Middle Atlantic states.

The bird is called the Barnacle goose and it's perhaps the most handsome of all the geese seen in the United States. A couple of years ago, one of these birds turned up in a park about an hour and a half from my home, so, since I had never seen one before, I took a drive to see this one.

One thing that makes Barnacle geese especially interesting is the manner in which their young are fledged, which is spectacular. The young are hatched on ledges high up on cliff faces, but their natural milieu lies in the water hundreds of feet below. Watch this video to see the remarkable manner by which they get from the ledge to the water:

That any of them survive is surely one of the wonders of the animal kingdom.

Six Perplexing Problems in the Philosophy of Science

Mathematician Granville Sewell has a piece at Evolution News in which he lists six evidences of purposeful agency in the structure of the universe and the emergence of life. Not only are these strong evidences for what philosophers call intelligent design, but they also constitute six very difficult problems in the philosophy of science.

Sewell introduces his six with this:

The ACLU speaks for much of the media and of academia when it says the theory of intelligent design “simply says that some things that seem very complex could not have happened based on natural causes. So where it sees complexity, it declares that it must have been created by a supernatural entity. This is not science.”

Oh really? Is that all there is to it? Not exactly. Below is a modest attempt to provide a summary of the main scientific evidences for design in our world, for those who have been told that such evidence does not exist.

The six lines of evidence he lists and discusses are these:

1. The Fine-Tuning of Conditions on Earth
2. The Fine-Tuning of the Physical Laws of the Universe
3. The Origin of Life
4. The Evolution of Humans
5. The Origin of Human Consciousness
6. The Beginning of Time

He gives an explanation of each of these at the link, which the reader is encouraged to check out. Each of them is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic understanding of reality.

Some other examples he could have mentioned are insect metamorphosis, sexual reproduction, and the extraordinary fitness for life of many of the atoms on the periodic table (although perhaps he'd subsume this last example under #1 and #2).

In his recent book The Miracle of the Cell geneticist Michael Denton explains how the chemistry of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous, as well as several heavier elements, is precisely what it must be in order for there to be living things of even minimal complexity. This chemistry, Denton avers, must've been baked into the universe at the very outset of its existence, long before any life appeared.

It is, Denton says, a "primal blueprint" for life.

As in the other books in the series of which it is a part (Firemaker, Wonder of Water, and Children of Light) Denton takes us in The Miracle of the Cell on an excursus into the cell to show us that had not these elements had precisely the properties they do, living cells would be quite impossible.

He concludes this fascinating book (fascinating, but perhaps not for readers with scant background in chemistry or biology) with these words,

I believe that when the path [from chemistry to life] is finally elucidated, it will turn out to be extraordinary, one of the greatest scientific wonders, revealing a far deeper teleology [purpose] in nature than all the elements of natural fitness for the cell and for life documented so far.

Even more, I believe that the elucidation of that fateful route [to living cells] will be of far greater intellectual consequence than any other discovery in science since the birth of science in the sixteenth century. Indeed, I believe that the path, when discovered, will prove to be so obviously indicative of a profound teleology in the very ground of being that it will prove a watershed in the history of thought.

Conversely, if instead it is eventually established that there is no purely natural path across the great gulf from non-life to life, and that only the additional exertion of an intelligent agent could have assembled the first cell on Earth, that will be equally a watershed in human thought.

For readers with the equivalent of a high school education in chemistry or an undergraduate level education in biology almost every page of Denton's book contains captivating descriptions of the exquisite fine-tuning of the atoms and molecules necessary for the construction of a functioning biological cell.

I highly recommend it to readers with the appropriate background.

The Binding Problem

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

Philosophers refer to this as the "binding problem." How does the brain coordinate diverse sensory information (like color, shape, and location) into a unified perceptual experience, despite these features being processed in separate brain regions? It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

Materialism and Intentionality

Many people believe that human beings are a composite of both mental and material substance. This view is called substance dualism and among philosophers it seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. Still, the currently dominant view among philosophers remains, at least for the time being, materialism.

Materialism is the view that everything, including us, is reducible to matter and the atoms that make matter up. Materialists deny that there's anything about us that's immaterial. They deny that we possess an immaterial mind or soul, and they insist that electrochemical processes in the brain can account for all of our mental activity.

Philosopher Ed Feser argues that this view is simply false and he adduces something called intentionality as just one of several phenomena that cannot be explained as solely a function of matter or neurological processes:

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself.

Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general.

Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc.

In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

The debate has fascinating implications. If there's more to us than just the chemicals that make us up, if there's something immaterial that's an essential element of our being, then is that immaterial mind (or soul) something that's not subject to death as physical matter is? Might there be something about us that continues to exist even after the body dies?

Materialists scoff at the idea, but materialism no longer commands the allegiance of philosophers like it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's too much it can't explain and intentionality is just one example.

Terrorism and the Left

Karol Markowicz at the New York Post notes that there's very little mention of the domestic terrorism being waged against Tesla, Tesla dealerships, and Tesla owners by Democrats and their leftist allies in the media.

People are being doxxed and swatted, their cars are being vandalized and their lives and livelihoods threatened by left-wing thugs who, like all ideological extremists, have taken to violence against those with whom they disagree.

Here's Markowicz:

Another Donald Trump presidential term, another spate of violence going largely ignored — or even smirked at — by Democrats and their media friends.

Tesla dealerships are being firebombed and shot at, while Tesla vehicles are vandalized and their owners assaulted.

Trump-supporting influencers are getting “swatted,” set up for dangerous police encounters by opponents who phone in hoax distress calls.

Relatives of Trump-aligned public figures — including the sister of US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Elon Musk’s brother — are receiving bomb threats.

This cannot go on.

She adds that,

The multiple attacks on Teslas aren’t mere vandalism. This is terrorism exactly as the dictionary describes it: “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”

These “vandals” are terrorizing Tesla the company, as well as Tesla owners — going so far as to dox them with an online map — all because they don’t like the opinions of its CEO.

It’s calculated to scare, to terrorize, people away from driving Teslas in order to apply political pressure on Musk.

It’s “nothing short of domestic terrorism,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday.

Fortunately, a number of these vandals have been arrested and hopefully they'll be fully prosecuted. If justice is served they'll be facing five-year mandatory minimum sentences and could receive up to twenty years to contemplate their stupidity.

Markowicz has more details and links in her NY Post column. This apparent indifference among progressives to terroristic assaults on the property and people who drive Teslas is seemingly of a piece with the left's resistance to Trump's attempt to remove felons who are here illegally. Every attempt to expel violent criminals and terrorist sympathizers is met with court challenges intended to delay, obstruct, and prevent the removal of these threats to our families and well-being, which raises a question:

Why would anyone want these people to remain in the U.S.?

There was no indication from the left that they objected to the massive influx of unvetted migrants when the Biden administration opened our borders to let in millions of aliens, including tens of thousands of convicted criminals, but now that the Trump administration is doing all it can to repatriate them the left is demanding that they be vetted and throwing up every obstacle to prevent their deportation.

Why?

One might be forgiven for thinking that the so-what attitude toward domestic terrorism and the strenuous efforts to keep foreign murderers, rapists, and extortionists in our neighborhoods suggests that leftists are deliberately doing whatever they can to degrade and undermine our society.

Of course, to suggest such a thing is to invite accusations of paranoia, but then anyone who has read any political history could tell us that violence, terror, and social destabilization have been the modus operandi of the left going back to at least the French Revolution of 1789.

Evidently, it still is today.

Materialism's Consciousness Problem

I mentioned yesterday that I'm currently reading John Lennox's book on AI titled 2084 and the AI Revolution. In Chapter 11 Lennox mentions the belief among some materialists that the brain is a computer made of meat and that computers will someday be able to do all the things human beings are able to do and do them better.

Of course there are some things that computers can do better than humans can do them right now, but there's a long list of capacities and abilities that humans have that computers don't have and, what's more, it's hard to imagine how they ever could have them. Here's a partial list:

• Human beings have beliefs, doubts, hopes, regrets, resentments, frustrations, worries, intentions, desires, values, a sense of being a self, and a sense of past, present, and future.
• Human beings experience awareness, understanding, grief, curiosity, boredom, interest, pride, color, warmth, embarrassment, expectation, trust, gratitude, pain, pleasure, guilt, and affection.
• Human beings appreciate beauty and humor, can apprehend abstract concepts, and are creative.
• Human beings can know and can feel.

Machines can do none of this and, indeed, it's hard to grasp how any material object, no matter how complex, could have any of the capabilities that we associate with human consciousness. That's one reason why many philosophers are of the opinion that our material bodies and brains are not all there is to us.

It's why many believe that we're also comprised of an immaterial mind or soul. In fact, some philosophers would say that we are souls and that we have bodies.

If that's true then, contrary to what materialists believe, physical death might not mark the end of our existence. The death of the body might be like the birth of a child, a transition to a brand new existence.

Longtermism

I'm currently reading John Lennox's updated book on artificial intelligence titled 2084 and the AI Revolution. In one of the chapters he discusses "longtermism," a rather ungainly word that stands for the view among some secular AI proponents that we have a profound responsibility to future generations, both biological and simulated humans. Lennox writes,

The basic idea, still based on the assumption that all lives are equally valuable, is that it is better to save trillions of potential lives in the (far distant) future than billions of lives today. Current thinking about longtermism is set out in the book What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill of the Future of Humanity Institute.

There are several things amiss in this passage. First, where do secular tech types get the notion that all lives are equally valuable? Unless one is a Judeo-Christian theist who holds that we are all created in the image of God and loved by Him the idea that we're all equally valuable is nonsense. It certainly can find no support in a Darwinian framework which is the only live alternative to Divine creation available to a secular materialist.

Apparently the longtermists apparently just pull this assumption out of thin air, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Here's another problem with the quoted passage: Why think that we "owe the future anything"? Where does this idea come from? How did we incur the debt? How might a longtermist answer these critical questions?

Lennox goes on to quote a critic of longtermism who wrote that longtermism holds that "humanity has a 'potential' of its own, one that transcends the potential of each individual person, and failing to realize this potential would be ... a moral catastrophe of cosmic proportions."

But what makes it a "moral catastrophe"? Morality is about what's right and what's wrong to do, so why would it be wrong for humanity to fail to realize some vague potential in some far off future? Who would be guilty of this wrong? What does the concept of guilt even mean if, as most secular folks hold, no moral law exists, if there's no accountability for anyone, and if those upon whom this responsibility allegedly falls have been dead for centuries?

The only way any of these assumptions of longtermism could possibly make any sense is if there is a God who imposes upon us a duty to care about promoting the full potential of those not yet born and who holds us accountable for our failure to do so. Yet even those of us who are theists search in vain for any theological indication of who would be responsible and thus accountable for a failure to bring about this state of affairs.

In short, the moral assumptions of longtermism make no sense given a secular or naturalistic worldview, but even if a longtermist accepts the existence of God, those assumptions still don't make sense.