Mind or Matter

In my classes recently we've spoken about the view of reality often referred to as Idealism. Idealists hold that what really exists is not objective material stuff but rather ideas in minds. The notion is intriguing, largely because it's so counterintuitive and also because it seems that so many scientists and philosophers have come to the belief that some version of it is more plausible than the common sense view that the world is made of material substance.

In light of these class discussions I wanted to run this post that I originally put on VP a year ago:

One of the many fascinating questions being revived in today's philosophical debates is the question of the ultimate nature of reality. In other words, what is the world fundamentally made of? For the last two hundred years, and still today, the consensus answer among scientists and philosophers is that matter is the fundamental constituent of the world. Everything in the world, it's believed, can be reduced to matter or energy.

This view is called metaphysical materialism, but despite its status as the consensus view there have always been prominent thinkers who've insisted that materialism is quite wrong. There has long been a substantial minority of very brilliant men who believe that the material world is really an expression of mind and that mind is fundamental. This view is usually referred to as metaphysical idealism.

Here are a few examples of quotes from scientists and philosophers who embrace(d) one form or another of metaphysical idealism:

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter." Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, 1944

"Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." Erwin Schroedinger, quantum physicist

"It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality." Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner, 1961

"If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history." Thomas Nagel, author of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, 2012.

"What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving “entanglement” (the phenomenon Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices. To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time." Antoine Suarez, 2013

So what does it matter (no pun intended)? If mind is fundamental then it may follow, psychologically if not logically, that personality is as well, and pretty soon it seems plausible to think that the fundamental reality is in fact the Universal Mind of traditional theism.

This is an intolerable conclusion for metaphysical naturalists who thought they had laid such notions to rest in the 19th century. Now it appears that the matter is far from settled, and as we enter into the second decade of the twenty-first century there's an interesting philosophical donnybrook brewing over whether science and philosophy, so far from having proven there is no transcendent mind, no God, are actually, even if inadvertently, accumulating increasing evidence that there is.

How to Get Thugs Off the Streets

The story starts out almost like a joke: Four men walk into a bar .... except this story isn't funny. According to news reports, two of the four men stood by the door while the other two produced weapons and ordered everyone to lie down on the floor. It was early morning and the bar was closing so there weren't many patrons in the establishment. The four men thought it'd be an easy heist - clean out the cash register and do heaven only knows what to the barkeeper and waitress who were closing up.

What the four men didn't realize, however, was that one of the few remaining patrons sitting at the bar was carrying a weapon of his own. He drew it and began firing. The would-be thieves got off three shots. I don't know how many shots the patron fired, but when the smoke cleared two of the thieves were dead and the other two had skeedaddled. No one else was hurt.

I suppose there are some lessons in this incident and numerous incidents like it that occur all across the country.

1. It's a dangerous world out there with lots of bad people in it.
2. Bad guys have guns and are perfectly willing to use them for nefarious purposes.
3. Keeping guns out of the hands of good guys is a bad idea.
4. When citizens are armed it gets much more dangerous for the thugs, fewer of them are successful, and fewer of them, like the two mentioned above, will have the opportunity to repeat their crimes.

Some readers will object, though, that if guns proliferate more people, especially children, will be injured or killed in accidental shootings. That may be true, but it reflects a misplaced concern. Here's why: In their very popular book Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner point out that children under ten drown at a higher rate in backyard pools than are killed in accidental shootings. The rate is one child drowning for every 11,000 pools (about 550 children per year overall), and one child accidentally killed for every million guns (about 175 children in total per year). In other words, a child is far more likely to die in a swimming accident in a residential pool than as a result of an accidental discharge of a gun.

If gun ownership and right to carry laws should be restricted because of the chance of accidents then, to be consistent, we should also restrict who can have a pool in their backyard, but, though a child's death is tragic no matter how it occurs, no one is campaigning for the restriction of swimming pools.

Camille Paglia and Our Cultural Delusion

Camille Paglia is no conservative but neither has she any patience with the shibboleths of much of the left and their sundry delusions about sexuality and human nature. A recent article by Paglia in Time is worth reading in its entirety, but I've included the most pungent excerpts here. She's a voice worth heeding, at least on this topic.

The springboard for her critique of leftist delusions about human sexuality and male/female difference is the recent disappearance of a UVA sophomore named Hannah Graham and the arrest of a hulking 32 year-old who is also suspected in another such disappearance:

Too many young middle class women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil .... The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.

There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.

Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

It's hard to disagree with any of this. From female naivete about men to the feckless delusions among liberals that sexual assaults can be meliorated by speech codes and absurd protocols for male/female interactions, the left seems to think that we can immerse young males in a highly sexualized, even pornographic culture, but yet keep them from acting out their fantasies on relatively helpless and trusting young women by wearing ribbons and wagging our fingers in their faces when they cross some line of "inappropriate" conduct.

Where I do disagree with Paglia is in labeling men who commit such crimes as psychotic or aberrational. These men are not abnormal. They're not mentally deranged. They are the inevitable products of a pornographic culture which has embraced the notion that moral judgment is an anachronism. A society which can no longer teach its young men that sexual predation is evil, that it is a crime against God's law, is inevitably opening the door to a "might-makes-right" view of life which justifies any transgression as the prerogative of the strong over the weak in the Darwinian struggle.

Some men use women and then kill them. This is evil, but the modern world is averse to using that word because evil is a term laden with moral import. When society insisted on secularizing morality it forfeited the ability to use moral terms altogether. It abandoned the traditional categories by which rape and murder had formerly been judged. Add to this the insistence that man is just an animal and that there's nothing about him that's transcendent, that he's just a flesh and bone machine, and the only surprise in men acting consistently with the assumptions they've all their lives absorbed from the cultural voices with which they've been surrounded is that we are shocked and horrified by this completely predictable behavior.

This is pretty much the theme of my book In the Absence of God. I hope that if you haven't read it you will.

Bamboozling Us about Jobs

The Obama administration released a jobs report last week that touted the fact that 248,000 jobs had been created in the past month and that unemployment has dropped to 5.9%, its lowest level since 2008. This sounds good and has been been presented to the public that way, but for a different take on these numbers check out the analysis by Wayne Allyn Root who declares that the numbers are pure fantasy.

First, he points out, the reason unemployment dropped to 5.9% is that 315,000 more Americans dropped out of the Labor Force last month.

To understand why this is significant, suppose imagine a population in which there are 100 people with jobs or looking for jobs. Of those one hundred, 90 are working and 10 are unemployed but still seeking work. The unemployment rate would then be 10%. Now there are two ways to lower that rate. The desirable way is to increase the number of workers by having some of the unemployed find jobs. If, say, five out-of-work people obtain work the number of unemployed would be cut in half and now only five percent of the labor force is unemployed.

But evidently this isn't what's happening. What's happening is that every month more people drop out of the labor force. In other words, if the ten unemployed in our imaginary labor force all gave up looking for jobs and left the labor force, then unemployment would drop to zero since there'd now be ninety people left in the labor force and ninety people working. It's full employment but it's hardly a sign of a healthy economy.

Thus, the 5.9% unemployment figure from last month means nothing when so many people are dropping out of the labor force. It doesn't tell us anything about how many more people are working than were working a year ago. In fact, the Labor Force Participation Rate is lower now than it's been in 36 years. Ninety two million Americans of working age are not currently working. Where have these people gone?

Some have gone on disability, some have retired, some are on some form of welfare, but with fewer people working and more people living off what those who are working pay in taxes, we're finding ourselves in an unsustainable position.

But what about those 248,000 new employees the administration is so proud of? Again, the figure is deceptive. A full 230,000 of the new jobs went to those in the 55 to 69 year-old age group. In other words, most new jobs went to retirees who need to continue working at other jobs to pay their supplemental insurance premiums, to pay the taxes and mortgages on their homes, and to help support their kids and grandkids who can't find work and can't afford to live in the Obama economy.

In fact, in the prime working age group of 24 to 54 years old, 10,000 jobs were actually lost last month.

This brings Root to the worst part of all of this. Most of the 248,000 new jobs are either part-time or low wage. That's why older Americans are taking them. Eighty percent of new jobs were in what he calls the lowest quality categories.

No wonder so many people favor raising the minimum wage even though doing so would actually reduce overall incomes. Minimum wage jobs are all that are available to a lot of people today.

The next time you hear an administration spokesperson boast that unemployment is down, be very skeptical until you find out how many people have dropped out of the work force and what kind of jobs new hires are getting. The administration doesn't publicize those statistics, and the media mentions them only sotto voce, but without knowing those numbers the unemployment rate is meaningless.

Preaching and Practicing

During Israel's recent war with Hamas in Gaza our administration repeatedly expressed it's dismay and outrage at the inadvertent civilian casualties resulting from Israeli bombs. Now that American bombs are producing inadvertent civilian casualties as we try to "degrade" ISIS in Syria the White House seems to have misplaced its moral punctiliousness. In fact, President Obama has even relaxed the standards he had set for predator strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere in order to give our bombers more leeway to hit ISIS targets even if civilians may be "collateral damage." Israel's Bibi Netanyahu might be forgiven if he thinks Mr. Obama has been a bit hypocritical in this matter.

So, too, might George W. Bush be forgiven for thinking the same thing. As a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama ripped President Bush for what he perceived to be our national unpreparedness in dealing with a potential avian flu epidemic. Avian flu never reached our shores, but Ebola has. During the Obama presidency, Ebola has afflicted more Americans and people in America than did avian flu. We certainly seem to have been caught unprepared. There's precious little of the antidote that saved the lives last summer of two American missionaries, and we seem to have no policies in place to prevent people from immigrating here from infected regions. When is Mr. Obama going to issue an apology to former President Bush?

I don't blame Mr. Obama for relaxing the standards governing when we can drop bombs and when we must hold back. Nor do I fault him for the fact that Ebola has made its way to the U.S. I do fault him, however, for his very strong criticism of others who did, essentially, the same thing Mr. Obama is doing or failed to do the same thing Mr. Obama has failed even more to do. His criticisms of Israel and former President Bush turn out to be a dish of political opportunism, buttered with moral posturing, and seasoned with hubris - standard fare in this White House.

Two Cheers for Discrimination

Not too long ago President Obama assured us that it was unlikely someone with Ebola would make it to our shores, but not unlike other of his assurances what he gave us to believe would not happen has happened, and the fact that it has happened prods me to ask a couple of questions about immigration.

We've been told that it's selfish of us to close our borders, that we're a nation of immigrants and should welcome anyone into the country who can make it in. We're told that it's discriminatory to exclude people from the blessings the United States has to offer and that those of us who have enjoyed those blessings should be willing to share them with the poor of the world who have not.

In reply to these asseverations it's appropriate to raise two questions:

1. Do the people who make them lock their doors when they leave their homes and their cars? And,
2. What's wrong with discrimination?

If someone who locks their home or car tells us that we should admit anyone into our national home who wants to come in I think we're entitled to ask them why they lock their own homes? Why don't they welcome into their home anyone who can get there and make available to them whatever blessings they have in their refrigerators and wallets? The reason they don't, of course, is not because they're stingy or selfish, but because they wish whatever of their goods they share with others to be offered on their own terms. They don't want what they worked for and built to be subject to plunder by every passerby who decides to plop himself down in front of their tv and clean out their refrigerator. Precisely so, but then why is our national border any different than their front door? Why should we not lock our border and only let in those we can accommodate?

Indeed, why is there a fence around the White House and armed guards to prevent people from wandering in, at least theoretically? Why are we upset that someone breaches the White House door, but we're not supposed to be upset that tens of thousands are breaching our national door?

All of which leads to the second question. If someone locks the door to her home, she usually allows family and friends in when they call, but is nevertheless leery of strangers. Why? Because she discriminates. She discriminates against the stranger and in favor of her family members, and there's nothing at all wrong with that. Indeed, it's prudent. To accuse people of the sin of "discrimination" because they wish to close our national home until we've determined that applicants for admission will not be a threat to our safety or a drain on our resources is simply hypocrisy unless the persons making the charge do not themselves discriminate against strangers seeking admittance to their personal homes.

In our Politically Correct age when people are discouraged from actually thinking, and the mere recitation of a word is sufficient to put an end to a dialogue - like calling someone a racist puts an end to any discussion about race and confers the moral high ground on the person who makes the allegation - we're fearful of being thought discriminatory. But discrimination, like prejudice, is bad only in some contexts, and it's simplistic and simpleminded to think that one has delivered a telling moral judgment on another merely by accusing them of either.

The Talk

David Barash is an atheistic evolutionary biologist who has an essay in the New York Times Sunday Review in which he explains "The Talk" he has with his biology students every year. The Talk is his attempt to convince students that science and religious belief are incompatible and that science is fact-based whereas religion is values-based.

There's much in his article which merits criticism, but I want to focus on three claims with which Barash confronts his students, and which he apparently believes are devastating to his students' religious beliefs. Barash writes:

As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God.

The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call the argument from complexity. This once seemed persuasive, best known from William Paley’s 19th-century claim that, just as the existence of a complex structure like a watch demands the existence of a watchmaker, the existence of complex organisms requires a supernatural creator.

Since Darwin, however, we have come to understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon.

Well, if this is all it takes to demolish his students' faith their faith probably wasn't very well-informed to start with. In the first place, Barash misunderstands the argument he thinks he has refuted. It's not an argument from complexity, it's an argument based on specified complexity, i.e. information. It is information which needs to be explained because the living world is full of it and it's no more a product of random processes such as operate in evolution than a library is a product of blindfolded monkeys hacking away at a computer.

Secondly, it's pretty much an open secret among biologists that the processes Barash cites, random variation and natural selection, cannot account for the introduction of new information into the genome. The most they can accomplish is a reshuffling of the information that currently exists. This allows for variation to arise, like various breeds of dogs from an ancestral prototype, but it doesn't explain how dogs could ever have arisen from a single-celled structure.

Thirdly, the Darwinian processes Barash cites cannot explain how that single-cell ever arose in the first place. There is no more frustrated group of biologists today than those who are seeking a plausible explanation for the origin of life. The reason for their frustration is simple. It's maddeningly difficult to come up with a mechanism which could have operated prior to the existence of living things which could have created the information contained in even the simplest cell, especially since, in our experience information is never produced by anything other than intelligent agency.

Barash goes on to boast that:

A few of my students shift uncomfortably in their seats. I go on. Next to go is the illusion of centrality. Before Darwin, one could believe that human beings were distinct from other life-forms, chips off the old divine block. No more. The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them — literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness. Moreover, no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure as well as physiological mechanism.

This is a peculiar argument: Barash is saying that because we are physiologically indistinguishable from other animals therefore there's nothing about us to suggest that we have not descended from other animals, but this is a straw man. No one has ever said that what makes us unique is our bodies. What makes us distinguishable from other animals are not physical traits but mental and/or spiritual traits such as reason, language, art, the capacity for wonder, compassion, morality, a sense of transcendence, a sense of truth, etc. No one knows how these things evolved or why. No one knows how the human mind with its ability to discern meaning, to do math, and to form abstract ideas could have evolved. For Barash to suggest to his students that we're just phylogenetic mammals and that's the end of the matter is to burden them with the misconception that the ontological gulf between humans and other creatures is narrower than it really is.

Barash continues his demolition work:

Adding to religion’s current intellectual instability is a third consequence of evolutionary insights: a powerful critique of theodicy, the scholarly effort to reconcile belief in an omnipresent, omni-benevolent God with the fact of unmerited suffering.

Theological answers range from claiming that suffering provides the option of free will to announcing (as in the Book of Job) that God is so great and we so insignificant that we have no right to ask. But just a smidgen of biological insight makes it clear that, although the natural world can be marvelous, it is also filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, fratricide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death — and that suffering (like joy) is built into the nature of things. The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.

This is not the place to discuss the problem of suffering which is indeed vexatious. Suffice it to say, though, that it's not at all clear how human suffering is logically incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful and good God, as Barash implies. The fact that it may be difficult to see why such a God would permit suffering hardly entails the conclusion that such a God doesn't exist.

The point, though, to which I wish to call attention is Barash's claim that we are "produced by a natural, totally amoral process." If this is so, then where does our moral sense come from? How does a totally amoral process produce the universal belief that some things are objectively wrong to do? And if a totally amoral process did give rise to such beliefs why do we feel compelled to obey them? How can blind, impersonal processes impose upon us a duty to behave in accord with them? It's like thinking that it's somehow wrong to go up in a hot air balloon because we'd be offending the law of gravity.

So here's the syllogism with which Barash's students should confront him: If man is the product of a totally amoral process then no objective moral duties exist. However, objective moral duties do exist (e.g. a duty not to abuse children, or to cheat the elderly out of their life savings). Therefore, we are not the product of a totally amoral process.

Now having a student raise that argument would certainly make Professor Barash's talk a lot more interesting.

The de Grasse Tyson Contretemps

A week or so ago I posted a piece on VP about Neil de Grasse Tyson's proclivity to stretch the truth past the snapping point. Tyson is the cosmologist, disciple of Carl Sagan, who hosted the recent remake of Sagan's Cosmos on PBS. The show was littered with misleading statements and outright errors about the history of the relationship between religion and science, and Tyson has come in for serious criticism for these and other whoppers he has been disseminating.

Much water has flowed over that dam since the original report of Tyson's tenuous commitment to the truth by Sean Davis at The Federalist.

Much has been revealed, too, about the intellectual dishonesty, not just of Tyson, but also his fans in the twitterverse and the disreputable tactics of Wikipedia which now wants to banish all mention of the controversy from its site in order to protect Tyson.

The consistently marvelous Mollie Hemmingway has a fine tongue-in-cheek summary of this bizarre episode here, and I recommend it to anyone who trusts scientists to be honest, objective, and non-political. If that describes you Hemmingway's column is sure to disillusion you.

The sordid account of Tyson's repeated disregard for objective facts tells us much about the view of truth in our post modern culture. What matters for many people is whether what is said reinforces or promotes the hearer's preferred narrative. If it does, then it's true - true for them - and that's the only truth that matters. What actually is the case is unimportant if it does no work in promoting an agenda or reinforcing a worldview that one just knows has to be correct, and can therefore be disregarded.

The ascension of secularism in the age of modernity eventually pulled out from under us any ground for believing that there is an objective moral right and wrong, and post moderns responded to this development by subjectivizing all values. Thus Tyson's mendacity is not wrong, in their eyes, and, if it's useful, if it works, the post modern will even say it's right.

This pragmatic view of truth - whatever works is right - is not only intellectually dishonest and lazy, it's dangerous. It reduces truth to a mere feeling and facilitates the reinforcement of our prejudices. It excuses our reluctance to hold our beliefs up to the light of objective facts to see if we really are right in what we believe. In this view, lying to people in the service of a larger truth - the truth of scientism, naturalism, or left-wing politics as in Tyson's case - is the morally proper thing to do.

Ideas have consequences and this inversion of common sense is one of the consequences of our embrace of the secular in the modern age.

The Problem with Naturalism

Richard Dawkins famously defined faith as "believing despite the lack of evidence," a crime against reason that he imputed to theists of all stripes. I submit that this is a better definition of "blind" faith and, ironically, it's as common, or moreso, among naturalists (i.e. atheists) as it is among theists.

Consider three beliefs naturalists hold for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence:

1. They believe that life somehow arose from non-living molecules (abiogenesis) purely by chance.
2. They believe that the universe spontaneously popped into existence ex nihilo and uncaused.
3. They believe that there's an infinite array of universes (the multiverse) in addition to our own.

There's scarcely a shred of evidence for any of these beliefs but naturalists are firmly committed to them because to yield on any of them is to open the door to a non-natural explanation which brings them perilously close to theism.

Perhaps the most ironic belief naturalists hold is their belief that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. I say this is ironic because naturalists also believe in the evolutionary story of the development of the human species.

A consistent naturalist believes that we are the product solely of evolutionary forces that have worked blindly and randomly over the eons fitting us for survival in the environment in which our ancestors found themselves.

This is a charming story but there's a serious flaw in it if one takes it too seriously. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued, one can believe in evolution or one can believe in naturalism, but it's irrational to believe in both. Why is that? Lots of people do, don't they?

The answer is simple. According to naturalism, everything evolves to increase the prospect of survival of one's kind, thus our reason has evolved as a tool to promote human survival. But if that's so, then the function of our reason is to promote survival, not necessarily to find or discern truth. Sometimes, knowing the truth may lead to survival, but sometimes falsehoods may promote survival.

Consider an ancient patriarch who carries a genetic mutation that generates a belief that the more children one has the greater will be one's prospects in the afterlife. Such a man is likely to have many children, most of whom will inherit the gene and who will in turn have many children of their own who will possess the gene. The belief has enormous survival value for the gene which triggers it and will spread through the genome even though the belief is completely false. In like manner, our brains and its functions have developed to optimize survival regardless of whether those functions lead us to truth or not.

Thus if one believes evolution is how we got here, he really has no grounds for believing that his reason is a trustworthy guide to truth, especially about metaphysical matters. It may lead us there sometimes and it may not at other times. Since naturalism is a metaphysical belief system, it follows that one who accepts evolution has thin grounds for believing naturalism to be true.

The only basis for confidence that our reason is trustworthy is if we believe that human reason is somehow instilled in us by a a transcendent, rational mind which superintended the process, evolutionary or otherwise, by which we came to be.

When a Darwinian atheist complains that theists are irrational he's essentially acknowledging that he doesn't understand the consequences of his own beliefs. The irony is that he trusts his reason purely as an act of blind faith. Indeed, the further irony is that theists, the very people he indicts for being irrational, are the only people who have solid grounds for believing that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth.

Another Myth Bites the Dust

Recently we ran a video which debunked the myth that we only use 10% of our brain's capacity. There's another myth circulating out there that has also been debunked for quite some time but which nevertheless persists as something of an urban legend. It's the notion that people can be meaningfully classified as either "right-brained" or "left-brained."

Here's a video featuring a rather frenetic speaker explaining that it just ain't so:

The speaker makes a good point that the terms "right" and "left-brained" do have rhetorical value as aptitude descriptors, as long as we don't take them literally.

The Holder Resignation

Eric Holder announced yesterday that he'll be stepping down from his post as America's chief law enforcement officer. I'm in no position to say where Mr. Holder ranks in the pantheon of American attorneys general, but I would be surprised were he not somewhere near the bottom.

A short list of his most egregious derelictions would include the following:

• He secured clemency (as Deputy AG under Clinton) for 16 FALN terrorists as well as a pardon for wealthy donor and convicted felon Marc Rich.
• He refused to prosecute New Black Panthers in Philadelphia who were intimidating white voters in the 2008 election. He said that they were "his people" and he wasn't interested in prosecuting them.
• He illegally facilitated the flow of guns to Mexican criminals (Operation Fast and Furious), some of which were used in numerous murders including that of an American border agent, Brian Terry. Holder misled congress on this operation, stonewalled their investigation of it, and was subsequently cited for contempt of congress, the first sitting attorney general in history to merit this disgrace.
• He refused to investigate the IRS which was illegally denying conservative groups tax-exempt status that was granted as a matter of course to similar liberal groups.
• He refused to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the administration's handling of the Benghazi incident.
• He dismissed his critics as racists and accused Americans of being "a nation of cowards" for not having a "conversation on race."
• His DOJ illegally seized the phone records of journalists and, like a scene right out of the movie The Lives of Others which depicted how the East German secret police spied on dissenters, Holder's Justice Department secretly monitored the phone calls and emails of correspondent James Rosen.
• He implemented Operation Choke Point which pressures banks not to grant loans or credit to legal gun shops which makes it very hard for these small businesses to stay open.
• He blatantly refused to enforce laws against gay marriage and illegal immigration and has sued to overturn laws which would require voters to show that they're legal residents of the state they're voting in.

He has been, in short, a political hack in a position of great power, power that he has abused in order to protect the Obama administration and promote its agenda.

He won't be missed by anyone who values the rule of law and its unbiased enforcement on behalf of all Americans, black and white, liberal and conservative. National Review sums up his resignation this way:

Eric Holder’s legal mercies have typically been reserved for Clinton donors and unrepentant terrorists, but his decision yesterday to step down as attorney general of the United States after nearly six years is an act of mercy toward the American public.

In an administration characterized by outsized misadventures — from the use of the nation’s tax bureau to suppress political opponents to the use of secret waiting lists at government hospitals that killed American servicemen — Eric Holder managed to make his Justice Department a source of special, nay, historic attention: In June 2012, Holder became the first U.S. attorney general to be held in contempt by the House of Representatives. He earned every vote.

Achieving “justice” via the Justice Department may be an intrinsically unlikely prospect, but none of Holder’s recent predecessors — Janet Reno, John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, even the much-maligned Alberto Gonzales — exhibited his sheer contempt for the rule of law. Much to his preference was employing the law for political purposes; or, when necessary, dispensing with the law completely.

President Obama praised Mr. Holder on the occasion of his announcement of his resignation, and well he might since Eric Holder was Mr. Obama's "heat shield" and he performed that task assiduously. Having a friend as Attorney General certainly makes it easier for a president to exceed his constitutional authority himself and Mr. Obama has taken adroit advantage of Mr. Holder's complaisance.

It'll be interesting to see who the President nominates to succeed Mr. Holder and what drama those nomination hearings will produce.

Time to Die

Ezekiel Emanuel is so adamant that he doesn't want to live past the age of 75 that he's written a fairly lengthy article in The Atlantic explaining why. There's lots to say about this piece, and I recommend a column at The Federalist for an amusing critique.

I'd like to focus here on a few specific paragraphs in which he describes precisely what he will do when he turns 75. Emanuel writes:

At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless. And that good reason is not “It will prolong your life.” I will stop getting any regular preventive tests, screenings, or interventions. I will accept only palliative—not curative—treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability. Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either.

This means colonoscopies and other cancer-screening tests are out—and before 75. If I were diagnosed with cancer now, at 57, I would probably be treated, unless the prognosis was very poor. But 65 will be my last colonoscopy. No screening for prostate cancer at any age. (When a urologist gave me a PSA test even after I said I wasn’t interested and called me with the results, I hung up before he could tell me. He ordered the test for himself, I told him, not for me.)

After 75, if I develop cancer, I will refuse treatment. Similarly, no cardiac stress test. No pacemaker and certainly no implantable defibrillator. No heart-valve replacement or bypass surgery. If I develop emphysema or some similar disease that involves frequent exacerbations that would, normally, land me in the hospital, I will accept treatment to ameliorate the discomfort caused by the feeling of suffocation, but will refuse to be hauled off.

What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs. A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no.

Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.

Obviously, a do-not-resuscitate order and a complete advance directive indicating no ventilators, dialysis, surgery, antibiotics, or any other medication—nothing except palliative care even if I am conscious but not mentally competent—have been written and recorded. In short, no life-sustaining interventions. I will die when whatever comes first takes me.

Here's what disturbs me about this. Emanuel is a doctor, one of the chief architects of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and a close advisor to President Obama (his brother, Rahm, was Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff during his first term). If he were simply making a personal decision about his own future health care that would be unremarkable, but why publish a personal decision in a national magazine unless there was a more far-reaching agenda?

Given Emanuel's status and history there's reason to worry that this is more than just one man's opinion. It sounds ominously like a prelude to something much more sinister. Maybe I'm wrong, but the subtext of Dr. Emanuel's essay seems to be that not only is this what he's decided to do for himself, but it's what you should decide for yourself as well. It's better for you, better for your family, and better for the country if we don't have to spend billions of dollars on keeping you alive once you're no longer productive.

From there it's not much of a leap to imagine that the policy he's advocating for himself will be advocated as national policy for everyone. The government, which, if the left has its way, will eventually become the single payer of health care costs, will simply decide not to cover the expenses associated with the procedures Emanuel lists above.

At that point Sarah Palin and others who predicted that Obamacare will lead to government bureaucrats - she called them "death panels" - deciding what procedures and tests will be covered and what won't be, essentially consigning those over 75 to the trash bin, will become a reality.

If you don't have time to read the original piece in The Atlantic read the shorter critique in The Federalist. It's quite good.

Know Your Enemy

I support the President's use of force against ISIS in Iraq (I have reservations, however, about what we're doing in Syria, although I certainly hope it works out well), but I think it was foolish of him to commit himself to not using American ground troops. That, like so many other promises Mr. Obama has made, may find itself being cast to the winds if it becomes clear that air strikes can't get the job done.

I also think it's both sad and funny that Mr. Obama is now doing pretty much what Mitt Romney was pilloried for predicting in 2006 that Mr. Obama would have to do if he pulled our troops out of Iraq, and it's also richly ironic that Mr. Obama, in launching a preemptive war in Iraq and Syria is really doing what he condemned Bush and Cheney for doing in the early years of the last decade.

The ironies mount when we recall that President Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is launching a war that will almost certainly result in civilian casualties, perhaps more casualties than Israel inflicted on the Palestinians in their recent engagement which outraged so many on the left (where is the anti-war left on this, anyway), but none of that is what I wanted to talk about in this post.

I wanted to comment that it'd be a lot easier to have confidence in our Commander-in-Chief's judgment in prosecuting this new war if we didn't have reason to believe that he doesn't really understand the nature of the foe. When he announced the other day that no religion condones the kinds of murders that ISIS and other Islamic radicals have perpetrated he showed that, despite his Muslim background in Indonesia, he doesn't really understand Islam.

I don't claim to either, but someone who does is the man in this video. He was raised a Muslim in Morocco and has studied the religion all his life, even though he left it some years ago. In this eight minute video he explains why Mr. Obama's understanding of Islam is at best incomplete:

If Brother Rachid appears nervous during his presentation, he has good reason to be. Apostates from Islam automatically incur a death sentence, and it's incumbent upon Muslims everywhere to kill him if they can.

One of the first principles of war-fighting, I'm told, is to understand your enemy. Until Mr. Obama recognizes that Muslims are taught to harbor an implacable hatred for their enemies, i.e. all non-Muslims, and that killing infidels - you, me and our children - is a notion woven into the warp and woof of Islam, taught in Muslim madrassas all around the world, including the U.S., and rarely renounced by practicing Muslims anywhere, we will always be at a disadvantage in whatever dealings we have with them.

This is not to say that any and all Muslims are our enemy. They certainly are not, and we should strive to treat them with dignity, respect and kindness, to the extent we are able. But ISIS has declared itself to be our enemy, and we need to realize that what they're doing to people everywhere they go - the beheadings, the crucifixions, the live burials - so far from being a violation of the Koran, is enjoined by it, as Brother Rachid points out.

Miscellaneous Oddities

Random thoughts on various matters:

Isn't it odd that....

• ...when one of the most critical problems we face as a society is that too few fathers seem to care to even live in the same house as their children, much less discipline them, our media ignores that problem while seeking to destroy a man, Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, for disciplining too much? Why not just require him to take some parenting classes and let it go?
• ...our media has developed an insatiable appetite for cases of spouse abuse in the NFL, an industry in which the incidence of spouse abuse is actually below the national average, but not among police officers, a profession in which spouse abuse is two to four times higher than in the NFL? Spouse abuse, it should be noted, is also pretty high in the media.
• ...when conservatives declare that employers should not be compelled to buy birth control for female employees our political leaders sniff that Republicans are waging an unconscionable "war on women," but when we bomb the bejabbers out of ISIS in Iraq and Syria using all manner of explosive ordnance to blow the terrorists to smithereens, the administration refuses to call it a "war"?
• ...the president and his administration claim ISIS poses a risk to our national security but if the air strikes don't stop them and if other Arab nations don't fight them we won't send ground troops in to do the job? How much of a threat to our security can Mr. Obama think ISIS is if he's not committed to doing whatever's necessary to stop and destroy them?
• ...Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the ongoing IRS scandal has had a hard time of it since news broke that that IRS was illegally using its power to hamper the activities of groups which opposed the Obama administration, but when given the chance to explain her role in this scandal Ms Lerner invoked her fifth amendment right not to incriminate herself? Very well, but in a recent Politico story she's reported to have said that she tunes out the news reports centered on her because “I probably would have lost my mind if I had read it all, because your reaction when this happens is, ‘Wait a minute, let me explain to you what happened.’”
  Well, wait a minute, didn't she have the chance to explain to us what happened and chose not to do so thereby preventing the American people from seeing whether its government is abusing its power or not?
• ...despite all of the forecasts of precipitous global warming, polar ice cap melting, and unprecedented storms and meteorological chaos the global temperature has stayed roughly constant for the last twenty years, polar ice is actually thicker and more extensive than it's been in several years, and our weather has actually been fairly mild in terms of hurricanes and other storms. A story in today's LA Times also dampens concerns that higher summertime temperatures in the American Northwest are due to anything other than a shift in Pacific Ocean winds.
  Maybe conditions will still change all of a sudden, but science is based on empirical evidence, and there's precious little evidence from the last two decades to warrant the conclusion that catastrophic climate change is imminent.

The Perils of Whistleblowing

When Republicans were in the White House anyone who "blew the whistle" on government shenanigans was treated like a national hero by the media, but now that the Democrats are in control whistleblowers are sometimes treated more like terrorists.

Hot Air has the story of a man named Michael Lutz who exposed sleazy political chicanery by Wisconsin District Attorney John Chisolm who has been abusing his legal authority in order to harass Republican Governor Scott Walker.

About Chisolm the Hot Air piece says:

His efforts to tear down Walker are quickly becoming the stuff of legend. A longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told [the source] and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis high school, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office.

Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”

Lutz subsequently told several media outlets that Chisolm's criminal prosecution of Walker was purely political/personal and had no legal merit at all. After the news got out that a whistleblower in Chisolm's office had spilled the beans, Chisholm launched a massive hunt to find out who in the circle of those in the know was the source of the leaks.

After missing a scoop on Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm’s long-running investigation into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers, along with the district attorney’s staff, hunted down the key source who had asked for anonymity, fearing retaliation…

The source turned out to be Lutz, a former prosecutor in Chisholm’s office who feared his reputation and his law practice would suffer if he were unmasked.

The district attorney’s staff launched a Nixon-style “mole hunt” to find the anonymous source, a Journal Sentinel columnist said, and was annoyed that the description of the confidential source wasn’t precise enough to identify him. The staff developed a list of roughly a dozen suspects, the columnist said. The Journal Sentinel never reported this secret search.

They found their guy, in the person of Michael Lutz, a decorated and disabled-in-the-line-of-duty police officer who worked with John Chisholm, first as a police officer and later in the district attorney’s office. One “journalist” at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got rather personal in rooting out the source.

The feared retaliation was not long in coming. The Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice, whose “political watchdog” column is titled “No Quarter,” appeared after dark at [Lutz's] home on Sept. 11. Bice’s persistent door-bell ringing and heavy knocks awakened and frightened the [Lutz’s] sleeping 12-year-old daughter, he said. The noise was so loud that a neighbor came out to investigate the din.

When [Lutz], a decorated and disabled-in-the-line-of-duty police officer, came to the door, he opened it a crack to hear Bice demand to know if he was the person quoted in the story. He did not deny it.

So Lutz reveals the truth about the DA's attempts to get Walker indicted and removed from office on fabricated charges and the Journal-Sentinel retaliates not against Chisolm but against Lutz. Lutz's career is now in jeopardy:

The retaliation he feared was that the influence of Chisholm and his allies could affect his new career. He was right.

“I have relocated my kids to prevent them from being brought to tears by any more J-S reporters and to protect them from the onslaught that has already begun. All for telling the truth.”

The consequences for telling that truth are already being felt, Lutz writes. “My law practice .... is over in MKE [Milwaukee]. There is no doubt, as one person has put it, that I am already blacklisted. . . . . Supporting the family will be difficult. Of course, it has been a huge undertaking to go through 4 surgeries, take care of 2 children, drive back and forth to Madison daily in order to get my law license ... only to be persecuted for simply telling the truth.”

It's tragic, but sadly it's what often happens when powerful, corrupt people are revealed to be malfeasant. It'd just be nice if the left were as solicitous about protecting those who inform on liberal officials from retaliation as they are about those who inform on conservative administrations. It'd also be nice if the liberal media weren't complicit in the attempt to destroy the livelihood of men who do the right thing.

Killer Chimps

It's agreed by all scientific researchers that chimpanzees murder members of their own species. What's in dispute about this behavior, according to a recent New York Times story, is why they do so. Some who study these animals think they're under stress from humans and that this stress somehow pushes them to violence.

A new study, however, has concluded that chimp murders are a part of their natural evolutionary development. Here's the relevant excerpt from the NYT:

The study’s authors argue that a review of all known cases of when chimpanzees or bonobos in Africa killed members of their own species shows that violence is a natural part of chimpanzee behavior and not a result of actions by humans that push chimpanzee aggression to lethal attacks. The researchers say their analysis supports the idea that warlike violence in chimpanzees is a natural behavior that evolved because it could provide more resources or territory to the killers, at little risk.

If it's true that killing is a natural behavior for chimps, and if it's true, as Darwinian evolutionists assure us, that human beings are simply hairless chimps with a bit more brainpower, then is not murder natural for humans also? And if natural then not really in any sense a violation of how we should behave?

We balk at that conclusion, of course, but if we're naturalists (i.e.atheists) and if we embrace the Darwinian view of humanity, what do we think makes humans different such that murder should have a moral dimension for us that it doesn't have for those animals most closely related to us? Researchers in the field may be repulsed by chimp violence and saddened by the deaths, but do they believe that murderous chimps have transgressed some objective moral law? If not, why are human murderers thought to transgress such a law? If there is no such law for chimps and other animals why do we think there is such a law for humans?

It seems to me that the naturalist has no good answer to this. If we're just animals then there is no objective moral law. If, however, one insists on believing that there is an objective moral law, a genuine right and wrong, then that person must also accept the idea that there must be a lawgiver, a personal transcendent moral authority (PTMA), who promulgates the moral law and holds us accountable to it. Apart from this belief in what amounts to a God our conviction that it's wrong to murder, to be cruel, to torture, to abuse children, is completely without objective foundation. When we voice that conviction we're simply doing no more than stating our personal predilections, and our personal, subjective tastes can hardly be the standard for morality.

Once again, it seems to me, the naturalist is between a rock and a hard place, metaphysically speaking. Either he can give up his belief that there is an objective moral duty not to murder and embrace a nihilistic view of morality, or he can give up his naturalism and embrace the idea that there must be a PTMA.

If he does neither, if he clings to his naturalism while at the same time clinging to his conviction that murder is objectively wrong, then he's behaving irrationally. He may hold on to his atheism, but he can't claim that it's the reasonable position, and he certainly can't claim that either the nihilist or the theist are behaving less rationally than he is.

Silence of the Media Lambs

Readers who've been following matters for a couple of years will remember how the media sought to portray the tea party as a bunch of violent extremist kooks. Try as they might, however, every attempt to pin some act of violence on them fell flat because the violence was all in the fevered imaginations of the lefty press and their political allies.

I was reminded of this when I came across a report of an attempt recently to firebomb the office of a black congressman from Missouri named Emanuel Cleaver. The Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window of his office but failed to ignite and damage was minimal. News reports of this attack were even more minimal.

Why? I wondered. The perpetrator had been apprehended, and I knew, as everyone does, that had the guy been a tea party conservative, or any kind of conservative, or even a quasi-conservative Republican the episode would have displaced even Roger Goodell's handling of spouse abuse in the NFL on the news. It would've been "all hands on deck" for the media as they wrung every drop of anti-conservative propaganda out of their reporting on the attack. Allegations of violent racism on the right would've filled the airwaves.

But there was almost nothing. The episode flew like a stealth bomber right under the radar. No one said much of anything about it. So, again, why? Even Cleaver's office downplayed the incident and said it was no big deal, but surely, if the alleged spitting incident in which Cleaver claimed in 2010 that a tea party protestor spit on him was a big deal, and it was huge even though it never happened, then surely an attempted firebombing in which he or his staff could've been killed was a big deal, so why wasn't it?

Well, it turns out that the perp is a 28 year-old sympathizer of an organization called the "KC Fight Back Insurrectionist Collective," and a letter found in his belongings states in part that "The Missouri congress has been a willing partner in the US governments capitalist war hungry agenda." In other words, the reason not much was made of the bombing was that it was carried out, as so much political violence is, by a leftist, and leftist violence, though common, just doesn't advance the media myth that conservatives are the real villains in this country.

I don't know what punishment will be meted out to Mr. King, if any. After all, he's doubtless deranged, but maybe what courts sympathetic to the left will do is gently instruct him that Democratic congressmen are really his friends and nudge him instead in the direction of the offices of John Boehner as the proper target of his inept and futile lunacies.

Favorite Heretics

Richard Mouw, in a piece at First Things, writes about philosophical claims which, though false, are nevertheless illuminating. in the course of his post he also explains why Nietzsche and Sartre are his "favorite heretics." Here's part of what he says:

I tell my students that it is a good thing to have a couple of favorite heretics. Some false perspectives are illuminating, and it can be healthy for [people] who love ideas to be challenged regularly by perspectives that we can disagree with in productive ways.

For a while, especially when I was first learning the ropes in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell was one of my special favorite heretics. In his technical philosophical work in epistemology and logic, he changed his mind a lot, and showed no embarrassment about doing so. I admired that in him. But what I enjoyed even more were his popular writings, especially about religious matters.

Russell was boldly anti-religious. He saw no room for any substantive religious ideas in formulating an ethical perspective, or in investing oneself in social-political causes. But there were moments in his writings when he expressed a sense that to abandon religion is to lose something important—even if he was not clear exactly about what the loss amounted to.

One of my favorite Russell passages in this regard occurs in the context of some autobiographical reflections. As a gift for him on his twelfth birthday, he recounted, his grandmother gave him a Bible, which he still possessed. In the flyleaf she had written a couple of her favorite biblical texts: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil,” and “Be strong, and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be Thou dismayed. For the Lord Thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” Then Russell makes this remarkable confession: “These texts have profoundly influenced my life, and still seemed to retain some meaning after I had ceased to believe in God.”

I find something admirable in that confession. It expresses a sense of loss, along with a corresponding sense of moral loneliness. Being one’s own autonomous moral legislator can be a lonely experience.

I'm reminded in reading this of Julian Barnes' opening sentence in Nothing to Be Frightened of, his book on death and dying. Barnes says, "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." I think it's true that our modern age has been eager to dispense with God, but having done so it realizes, if only vaguely, that it has lost far more than it thought it was giving up. Modernity, it seems, is like a rebellious child who runs away from home only to get lost in a spooky forest where all sorts of scary apparitions beset her and cause her to yearn for the home she left but feels she cannot return to.

Mouw goes on:

It is for similar reasons that I have come to count as my truly favorite heretics the existentialist thinkers, especially Nietzsche and Sartre. Nietzsche, for example, expressed that sense of moral solitude with a deeper sense of loss than we see in Russell. In The Will to Power he laments that to be a person of “destiny” is to join “a whole species of heroic bearers of burdens.” It is to join a company of “men of incomprehensible loneliness.”

Part of my fondness for Nietzsche and Sartre is that together we share some common philosophical dislikes, such as the Richard Dawkins kind of “happy atheism.” My favorite existentialist heretics get directly to the heart of the matter in their depictions of the human condition. The non-existence of God, they say, means that there is no sovereign divine Will that called the universe into being.

And since an objectively ordered reality—a cosmos—would require a divine “let there be” to create and sustain it, reality is, properly understood, a chaos. With no supreme Creator available, it is up to us to make the best of it as finite creators of our worlds of meaning.

Nietzsche was an atheist but unlike many among the contemporary sort of unbelievers, he was deeply troubled by the implications of the "death of God." It was in his mind at once both liberating and catastrophic. Sartre held similar opinions. He felt the death of God, which he embraced, drained life of meaning and made it all a Sisyphean exercise in absurdity.

In any case, Mouw makes an important point, I think, when he says it's good to have a couple of favorite heretics. He's right in saying that it's good to interact with ideas that run contrary to one's own beliefs. For some reason people on both sides of the divides that characterize our public discourse - Christianity/atheism, conservative/liberal, pro-life/pro-choice, etc. - seem afraid to expose themselves to ideas presented by the other side. It's as if we fear that if we read their books and listen to their arguments we'll be seduced by them.

This is an empty fear, however. If what people who hold opinions at odds with our own say is true then by listening to them we benefit from the exposure to the truth, even if it makes us uncomfortable, and if what they say is false, then we are confirmed in the truth of our own opinion by pointing out their errors to ourselves and others. Both of these outcomes are good. The only bad outcome would be if what our antagonists say is false, but we are nevertheless seduced into accepting it.

The remedy for this, though, is not to avoid contact with those ideas, but rather to make sure that we know as much as we can about the things we believe so that we're better able to discern the difference between good and bad arguments, true and false claims. That, in fact, is one thing we should get from a college education.

De Grasse Tyson, Serial Fabricator

There's an attitude among some of the left-leaning intelligentsia that they are just so smart that telling the truth is beneath them. Honesty is for the common people. For many post moderns, I suppose, there really is no objective truth, so whatever you say, as long as it coheres with your worldview, it's true "for you."

Physicist Neil de Grasse Tyson appears to be such a man. Ensconced on the Olympian heights of modern science, like a Nietzschean superman unconstrained by bourgeois moral values like truth-telling, he apparently feels free to just make stuff up whenever it'll make him look good to do so and make people he disdains look bad. Since his fabrications reinforce the prejudices of many in the media, and because he himself is a media darling, he's given a pass. Truth is not so big a deal for many journalists anyway, and besides, who are they to judge someone else, unless, of course, it's Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, or Ted Cruz?

Anyway, de Grasse Tyson's recent television series titled Cosmos was replete with historical errors, particularly on the topic of the relationship of the church and science, but that's not the only topic on which this prodigy of prevarication hones his yarn-spinning skills.

Sean Davis at The Federalist catalogues some of de Grasse Tyson's sundry dissimulations for us. He writes: Neil deGrasse Tyson may be a fabulous scientist, and a consummate showman, but he’s downright terrible at accurately quoting people. Or, if you’re a “glass half full” kind of person, you might say that Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty amazing at needlessly fabricating quotes and scenarios to showcase his own brilliance.

After citing several examples of de Grasse Tyson's allegedly creative manipulation of facts Davis closes with this:

At this point, I’m legitimately curious if any quotes or anecdotes peddled by Neil deGrasse Tyson are true....These are normally the types of errors that would be uncovered by peer review. Blatant data fabrication, after all, is the cardinal sin of scientific publishing. In journalism, this would get you fired. In Tyson’s world, it got him his own television show. Where are Tyson’s peers, and why is no one reviewing his assertions?

Somebody seriously needs to stage an intervention for Neil deGrasse Tyson. This type of behavior is not acceptable. It is indicative of sheer laziness, born of arrogance. Please, somebody, help him before he fabricates again.

And while we're at it, maybe someone should check out his Ph.D dissertation. Who knows how much of that is just made up.

In any event, this is yet another illustration of a recurring theme here on VP. Suppose it is indeed the case that de Grasse Tyson is deliberately fabricating quotes, stories, and historical "facts." Why shouldn't he do this if it will promote himself and his agenda, whatever it may be? Most of us would probably reply that it's morally wrong to lie to people and those who do it are despicable, but that response must confront a critical fact. If, as philosopher Michael Ruse claims, our moral values are simply "an illusion foisted on us by our genes," if there's no objective basis for those values as moderns like Ruse often claim, then the yarns of de Grasse Tyson, our politicians, and our friends, are not really "wrong" at all. They're just unfortunate behaviors that some people, maybe an increasing number of people, engage in that perhaps we wish they wouldn't. We don't like it when they lie, we find it irritating, just as we find the behavior of the guy in the next booth in a restaurant who insists on talking loudly into his cell phone irritating, but lies transgress no moral law. How can they if there is no moral law to be transgressed?

Modernity, by dispensing with God, has taken down all the speed limit signs, turned off the street lights, pulled the cops off the job, and left everyone on the road of life to fend for themselves. Little wonder it's so hard to find someone you can trust.

The NFL's Hypocrisy

Until the video was released showing Ray Rice landing a left hook to his girl friend's jaw in an elevator he was given a two game suspension. Everyone knew even before seeing the video what happened in the elevator but the NFL evidently thought a two game suspension was a just punishment for an offense that didn't go to court and which the couple apparently resolved between themselves since they subsequently married.

Okay, I guess, but as Charles Gasparino asks at NRO, where is the fairness in Rice's relatively mild punishment when Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Richie Incognito was effectively banished from the league for doing nothing more than talking mean to another teammate, who, like Incognito, is a 300 lb. lineman? Gasparino supplies some background:

Richie Incognito, an All-Pro offensive lineman, was branded a thug, faced countless hours of interrogation by league officials and their lawyers, and now can’t get a job in the NFL because he was found guilty of “bullying” a fellow lineman of equal size and strength.

Ray Rice, an All-Pro running back, was suspended for a mere two games, faced no similar league inquisition, and was heralded by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as a decent guy who made a simple “mistake” when he was caught on video dragging his unconscious fiancée out of the elevator after what appeared to be a physical altercation.

Welcome to political correctness, Goodell-style.

Incognito is banned from the league for saying mean things. Ray Rice was initially given the NFL equivalent of giving a child a timeout. Does the NFL really think that bullying and name calling are worse than assault and battery? Here's more from Gasparino:

Why did Goodell initially throw his support behind Rice after an obvious physical altercation with a woman but throw the book at Incognito for name-calling a 300-pound fellow lineman?

None of this is to excuse Richie Incognito’s conduct, which led to an unofficial banishment from football that continues to this day. But consider his actions and the response by the NFL. When e-mails and voicemails surfaced indicating that Incognito had, among other alleged improprieties, forced his Miami Dolphins teammate Jonathan Martin to attend team meetings at strip clubs, and used the n-word in one conversation with Martin (Incognito is white and Martin black), Goodell immediately launched a league investigation.

He even hired one of the country’s toughest attorneys, superlitigator Ted Wells, to conduct a probe into Incognito’s actions. The so-called Wells report called Incognito the ring leader of a gang of abusers who forced Jonathan Martin to flee the Dolphins mid-season last year through “a pattern of harassment.”

Incognito through a spokesman claimed that his actions and even the inexcusable racial language were more complicated than what the press had reported, saying he and Martin were friends. Martin through a spokeswoman said he played along with some of Incognito’s antics (including strip-club visits) to fit in with his teammates since Martin was a rookie and Incognito a seasoned veteran.

Goodell’s response: a massive report that made Incognito an untouchable in the NFL to this day for “bullying, taunting and constant insults.”

And his response to Ray Rice’s battery: Even after the second video has emerged, Goodell is leaving the door open for Rice’s eventual return to the league.

I'm just wondering here, but could the disparity between the treatment administered to Incognito, who must be something of a lout, and the treatment administered to Rice, who must be something worse, have anything to do with race? Is the NFL (i.e. Roger Goodell) so consumed by political correctness that he's eager to come down harder on a white player who bullies a black player than he is on a black player who bullies his wife? Maybe race has nothing to do with it, but the only other explanation, barring the existence of circumstances not made public about the two cases, is that Goodell is pretty much a capricious simpleton.