Family and the Class Divide

One of the troubling sociological trends in our society has been the growing gap between the upper and lower classes, and an important fact researchers have discovered about this gap is the shift in attitudes among members of the lower socio-economic class toward marriage.

This is not a new topic here at Viewpoint but a recent piece by Glenn Stanton reminds us of the disturbing trend occurring among the low-income segment of our population, a trend that's found, by the way, among all racial groups. Here are some key excerpts:

Just 70 years ago, social mobility and protection from poverty were largely a factor of employment. Those who had full-time work of any kind were seldom poor. Fifty years ago, education marked the gulf separating the haves from the have-nots. For the last 20 years or more, though, marital status has increasingly become the central factor in whether our neighbors and their children rise above, remain, or descend into poverty. The research is astounding.

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute explains in his important book “Coming Apart: The State of White America” that in 1960, the poorly and moderately educated were only 10 percent less likely to be married than the college educated, with both numbers quite high: 84 and 94 respectively. That parity largely held until the late 1970s.

Today, these two groups are separated by a 35 percent margin and the gap continues to expand. All the movement is on one side. Marriage is sinking dramatically among lower- and middle-class Americans, down to a minority of 48 percent today. No indicators hint at any slowing. It’s remained generally constant among the well-to-do. This stark trend line led Murray to lament, “Marriage has become the fault line dividing America’s classes.”

Jonathan Rauch writing in the National Journal, certainly no conservative, notes that “marriage is displacing both income and race as the great class divide of the new century.” Isabel Sawhill, a senior scholar at the center-left Brookings Institute, boldly and correctly proclaimed some years ago that “the proliferation of single-parent households accounts for virtually all of the increase in child poverty since the early 1970s.” Virtually all of the increase!

We spend fortunes on various programs to rescue poor women and children who are drowning in the quicksands of impoverishment, but the remedy for poverty is almost incredibly simple and inexpensive:

Professor Bill Galston, President Clinton’s domestic policy advisor and now a senior fellow at Brookings, explained in the early 1990s that an American need only do three things to avoid living in poverty: graduate from high school, marry before having a child, and have that child after age twenty. Only 8 percent of people who do so, he reported, will be poor, while 79 percent who fail to do all three will.

These disturbing family-path trends are unfortunately true for millennials, as well.

One troubling aspect of this problem is that millennials are increasingly failing to follow Galston's prescription:

A recent report on this topic focusing on millennials reports that 97 percent of those who follow the success sequence—earn at least a high-school diploma, work, and marry before having children—will not be poor as they enter their 30s. This is largely true for ethnic minorities and those who grew up in poor families. But sadly, fewer millennials are keeping these things in order, compared to their Boomer and Xer forbearers.

It's astonishing, given the human predilection for personal well-being, and the enormous emphasis placed on well-being in our modern world, that so many people are spurning the most reliable means of achieving it:

A consistent and irrefutable mountain of research has shown, reaching back to the 1970s and beyond, that marriage strongly boosts every important measure of well-being for children, women, and men. Pick any measure you can imagine: overall physical and mental health, income, savings, employment, educational success, general life contentment and happiness, sexual satisfaction, even recovery from serious disease, healthy diet and exercise. Married people rate markedly and consistently better in each of these, and so many more, compared to their single, divorced, and cohabiting peers.

Thus, marriage is an essential active ingredient in improving one’s overall life prospects, regardless of class, race, or educational status.

Only 4 percent of homes with a married mother and father are on food stamps at any given time. But 21 percent of cohabiting and 28 percent of single-mother homes require such public assistance. Likewise, 78 percent of married people own their own home—a central goal in achieving the American Dream—while only 41 percent of cohabiting adults and 44 percent of singles do. Data indicates that marital status boosts home ownership more than home ownership increases marital opportunities.

Even women entering marriage between the conception and birth of their first child, regardless of class, education, and race, benefit from a greater standard of living by the following percentages.

• 65 percent over a single mother with no other live-in adult
• 50 percent over a single mother living with a non-romantic adult
• 20 percent over a single mother living with a man

The economic and other benefits to children of growing up in an intact family are profound, and when there are several generations of children raised in such families those benefits are compounded by having two sets of grandparents who have the financial wherewithal to provide assistance to their children and grandchildren with mortgages, cars, college tuition, as well as counselling and guidance through the vicissitudes of life.

The benefits of marriage also extend to men who become fathers:

The advantages of growing up in an intact family and being married extend across the population. They apply as much to blacks and Hispanics as they do to whites. For instance, black men enjoy a marriage premium of at least $12,500 in their individual income compared to their single peers. The advantages also apply, for the most part, to men and women who are less educated. For instance, men with a high-school degree or less enjoy a marriage premium of at least $17,000 compared to their single peers.

Marriage generates wealth largely because marriage molds men into producers, providers, and savers. Singleness and cohabiting don’t. Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof, in a prominent lecture more than a decade ago, explained the pro-social and market influence of marriage upon men and fathers: “Married men are more attached to the labor force, they have less substance abuse, they commit less crime, are less likely to become the victims of crime, have better health, and are less accident prone.”

Akerlof explains this is because “men settle down when they get married and if they fail to get married, they fail to settle down.” This is precisely why every insurance company offers lower premiums on health and auto insurance to married men. Settled-down men also work more, earn more, save more, and spend more money on their families than on themselves. They boost the well-being of women and children in every important way.

It's tragic that the belief that the traditional two-parent family is obsolete or unnecessary has gained currency today. From the fact that it's not perfect nor as prominent as it was fifty years ago, however, it doesn't follow that it's either unnecessary or obsolete. It still remains the best soil in which to grow flourishing men, women and children and a strong, prosperous society.

Craniopagus Twins

There's a fascinating account by David Klinghoffer at Evolution News of twin sisters who were born eleven years ago in Canada with conjoined skulls and brains.

According to a Canadian television documentary the girls' brains "make them unique in the world. Their brains are connected by a thalamic bridge, connecting the thalamus of one with that of the other. The thalamus acts like a switchboard relaying sensory and motor signals and regulating consciousness.

As Klinghoffer notes, though, the title of the documentary, Twin Life: Sharing Mind and Body, is misleading because although Tatiana and Krista Hogan of British Columbia share a range of senses and can move parts of each other’s bodies, their minds, their personalities, seem to be separate. Klinghoffer writes:

Neurological studies have stunned the doctors. Tatiana can see out of both of Krista’s eyes, while Krista can only see out of one of Tatiana’s. They also share the senses of touch and taste and the connection even extends to motor control. Tatiana controls 3 arms and a leg, while Krista controls 3 legs and an arm.

Amazingly, the girls say they also know one another’s thoughts without needing to speak. “We talk in our heads” is how they describe it.

But here’s the main point. Insofar as the mind subsumes the personality, these girls do not share a mind. Though together all the time, by physical necessity, their spirits are distinct, with “very different personalities.”

Despite their unique connection, the twins remain two distinct people. Tatiana is talkative, outgoing and high-strung, while Krista is quieter, more relaxed and loves to joke. But she has a temper and can be aggressive if she doesn’t get her way.

A materialist who believes that immaterial minds don't exist might argue that the girls don't seem to share the same "mind" because they don't entirely share the same brain. If the two girls had only a single brain between them then, the materialist could argue, they would have the same personality, etc. Moreover, the fact that they can "read each other's mind," at least partially, suggests that their "minds" are not completely separate anyway.

On the other hand, a proponent of mind/brain dualism - the belief that we are comprised of both a material brain and an immaterial mind - might reason that the very different nature of the girls' personalities points to something else about them that's not established, or at least not completely established, by their brains. That they share much of their brain in common with each other but possess disparate personalities suggests that something other than the brain is responsible for their personalities.

Their case is certainly compatible with the dualist view, but doesn't seem to provide conclusive evidence for it. In any event, here's the documentary of the girls made several years ago. The girls and their family are very remarkable people:

Killing the Philosophical Spirit at UTSA

Alfred MacDonald, a grad student in the philosophy department at the University of Texas San Antonio, has provided us empirical evidence of where bisexuals stand in the favored hierarchy of groups in the postmodern progressive university.

According to an article in The Federalist, MacDonald has evidently learned the hard way that members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual group are strictly forbidden by the stringent rules governing political correctness to say anything even mildly critical of members of any group ranked higher than they in the PC pecking order.

After class one day, MacDonald got into a conversation with some other grad students in which the topic of Islam came up, and he expressed, as he later put it, that “I was bothered that I could be killed in ten Muslim countries.” MacDonald is bisexual, and there are in fact Muslim countries in which homosexuality is punishable by death.

MacDonald's infraction led to him being called on the carpet by the head of the philosophy department, a department which supposedly wears the mantle of free and open thinkers from Socrates to Voltaire.

When the chair, Eve Browning, refused to tell him by e-mail what the meeting was about he decided to record it. The transcript of their meeting reveals MacDonald to be a somewhat troubled and mediocre student, but what's fascinating about it is how Kafkaesque the exchange is between Browning and MacDonald, especially when they start discussing the Muslim fiance.

Bear in mind as you read it that the offended parties in this are all adults. They're professors and grad students, not elementary school children.

After some introductory remarks Browning gets to the point:

EVE BROWNING: Well, the reason why we’re meeting and why I asked to meet is that several faculty and several other graduate students have expressed concerns about things you’re doing in class and out of class, and the nature of the concerns ....There’s a concern about your having made some inappropriate comments to other graduate students…

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t talk to anybody and I haven’t in a long time.

EVE BROWNING: Sorry?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t talk to anybody. I don’t know what inappropriate comments I made.

EVE BROWNING: Well this was an episode in professor Chen’s class or afterwards …

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t have that class.

EVE BROWNING: What?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t have that class.

EVE BROWNING: Well… the complaint came from him about this partic-

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t even know who that is. Professor Chen? Like C-H-...

EVE BROWNING: Shunwu Chen?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t know who that is. I have no idea how I could’ve… I’m not even registered for his classes, you can check. I’m in two of Almeida’s classes, and Josh’s…

EVE BROWNING: … so it was a conversation you had with a couple of other students that you weren’t originally part of, and you joined it, and the topic of… the topic of one student being engaged to a Muslim came up, and it was alleged that you made offensive comments about Islam to that student -- and this is all, I represent this all as alleged because I wasn’t there....

ALFRED MACDONALD: ....I don’t even know. I’m totally mystified. I really don’t talk to people -- at this program -- much at all.

EVE BROWNING: You don’t recall the topic of a Muslim fiance ever coming up?

ALFRED MACDONALD: That yes,...I said that I was bothered that I could be killed in ten Muslim countries. I’m bisexual. So they’d definitely do that in the ten countries where I would be -- you know.

EVE BROWNING: Doesn’t that strike you as an inappropriate thing to say about someone’s fiance?

ALFRED MACDONALD: I wasn’t talking about the fiance. The fiance could have whatever interpretation of the religion that they want....it wasn’t about the fiance, it was about the religious practices in those countries.

EVE BROWNING: How is it appropriate to bring that up in connection with someone’s fiance?

ALFRED MACDONALD: They brought it up. The Islam part.

EVE BROWNING: And you brought up the threat to your life as posed by this fiance?

ALFRED MACDONALD: No. We got to the subject of Islam, not the fiance.

EVE BROWNING: Do you understand how someone would find that offensive?

ALFRED MACDONALD: How someone would FIND that offensive, yeah; how they could perceive it, yeah; yeah, I mean, if I…

EVE BROWNING: It’s a confusing comment to me because Muslims do not all live in countries in which bisexuals are executed. Muslims live in the United States--

ALFRED MACDONALD: Sure.

EVE BROWNING: --Muslims live in France, Muslims live in every country in the world -- it’s the fastest growing world religion.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Yeah, one of my good friends at the university is Muslim.

EVE BROWNING: And do you tell him that you object to his religion because there are places on earth where gay, lesbian and bisexual people are discriminated against, including your own country?

ALFRED MACDONALD: Well, “her.” And my verbiage was “killed” not “discriminated against.” I mean, Death penalty’s pretty severe.

EVE BROWNING: What does that have to do with her being engaged to a Muslim?

ALFRED MACDONALD: Nothing. I wasn’t talking about the engagement to the Muslim. I was talking about Islam in that particular moment.

EVE BROWNING: Well, let me just say that kind of thing is not going to be tolerated in our department. We’re not going to tolerate graduate students trying to make other graduate students feel terrible for our emotional attachments.

This is a ludicrous exchange and surprisingly full of non-sequiturs on the part of a chair of a philosophy department, but it gets worse. Her next tactic is to appeal to threats:

EVE BROWNING: And, if you don’t understand why that is, I can explain fully, or I can refer you to the Behavior Intervention Team on our campus which consists of a counselor, faculty member, and person from student affairs who are trained on talking to people about what’s appropriate or what isn’t.

ALFRED MACDONALD: I just won’t bring anything up about Islam again. That’s pretty simple. Although I’m not sure what you mean by.... what do you mean by “it won’t be tolerated?” Like I’ll be straight up prevented from registering? Or the team that you mention, the behavior intervention team, they’re going to do something or… what exactly is the penalty for breaking that, assuming that I’m in some other situation where I say something that someone else finds offensive and you...

EVE BROWNING: We’d put it either before the behavior intervention team or the student conduct board and ask them to make a recommendation.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Ask them to make a recommendation? What does that mean?

EVE BROWNING: Whether they would refer you for counseling; whether they would recommend that you be academically dismissed; they would assess the damage. They would probably try to speak to the students who are complaining and the faculty that are complaining and make a recommendation. In any case…

ALFRED MACDONALD: And this is over… I thought that UTSA was a public university with first amendment protections? So I could be dismissed for stuff like that? Just…

EVE BROWNING: Making derogatory comments? Yes.

The dialogue continues for some time in this vein, finally concluding with this exchange:

EVE BROWNING: Those are things that would get you fired if you were working in my office. The Islam comment would get you fired.

ALFRED MACDONALD: ...Would it really get me fired to say that I could be killed somewhere?

EVE BROWNING: In that situation as you’ve described it, absolutely yes.

ALFRED MACDONALD: How?

EVE BROWNING: Don’t even ask. It’s clear you’re not taking my word for it. I don’t care to convince you. If I can’t persuade you that it’s in your interest to behave in ways that other people don’t find offensive and objectionable, then at least I’ve done my job.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Well I know that it’s in my interest. I’m just trying to understand the reasoning.

EVE BROWNING: You don’t have to.

ALFRED MACDONALD: Well, this is a truth-seeking discipline!

Well, Mr. MacDonald is a bit naive about that last point. Philosophy is obviously not a truth-seeking discipline at UTSA. Truth, at least the notion of objective truth, is an outmoded concept in some precincts in the contemporary academy. Nowadays, at places like the University of Texas, apparently, a bisexual student can get drummed out of the philosophy department simply for observing that bisexuals are executed in many Muslim countries which is, of course, manifestly true, but in a post-fact world there are some things one is simply forbidden to criticize and one of those sacrosanct topics is Islam, whether what one says about it is objectively true or not.

I wonder what Dr. Browning would have said had Mr. MacDonald asked her to explain to him what he said that was false, and if nothing was false, why, in a philosophy graduate program, true propositions are verboten.

I also marvel at how fragile these UT students and professors must be that they need to be insulated from any speech that might hurt their feelings. These are adults, after all, but they must possess the delicate psyches of children if Mr. MacDonald's assessment of the Islamic world caused them so much pain and grief.

Can Science Survive Postmodernism?

This is the question Denyse O'Leary addresses in a column at Evolution News. Here are a few excerpts from her answer:

The intellectual costs of metaphysical naturalism are rising rapidly.

Traditional “modern science” naturalists viewed supernaturalism as the chief danger to science. To permanently exclude the supernatural, post-modern naturalists have gone well beyond their forebears. They have thrown away reason, which is problematic because reason points to a truth outside nature. They have reinvented reason as an evolved illusion rather than a guide to truth. And, in a cruel but inevitable irony, they liberated superstition from modern science’s jail.

For those who believe in it, reason has always provided a check on superstition. But post-modernists, who dismiss reason as a form of oppression and evidence as unnecessary to high science, cannot simply dismiss such fields as astrology and witchcraft. If everyone’s truth is as true as everyone else’s truth, scientists must lobby for their truths as an interest group in a frenzied market.

The populations most affected by post-modernism tend to be more superstitious than those that resist post-modernism. They are also much more likely to dismiss academic freedom. Contemporary science conflicts are beginning to reflect these shifts....

We hear that objectivity is “cultural discrimination” (or sexist), Newtonian physics is exploitative, mathematics is a “dehumanizing tool” (if not white privilege), and algebra creates hurdles for disadvantaged groups. And mavericks in science are a problem because they tend to be wealthy, white, and male....

We might have guessed blindly that post-modernism (anything goes!) would lead to more academic freedom. So why is it not working out that way? The problem is that post-modernism is not about freedom as such. It is the assertion that there is no truth to be sought, no facts to be found, that are true for everyone. Everyone is entitled to feel as they wish.

There's more at the link, but here's her point: If there's no truth to be found through a reasoned exchange of ideas, if indeed the very idea of objective truth is an anachronism, if one's truth is merely what one feels strongly, if truth is defined as whatever works to help one group achieve its goals and purposes, then rational debate is just a waste of time.

So is any recourse to objective evidence and facts to support one's claims. One side must simply impose its ideas on all others by dint of intimidation and the exercise of raw political power. Might makes right.

In the late Medieval period whoever ruled the land determined the religion his subjects would follow. That principle, stated in Latin as cuius regio, eius religio (Whose region, his religion) in the post-modern era could be stated as cuius regio, eius scientia.

In such an intellectual climate science is no longer about discovering truth about the world, rather it's little more than a species of ideological politics.

In an environment hostile to open-minded inquiry, an environment deeply contrary to that which nurtured science from the 17th century through most of the 20th, science cannot thrive. And if science withers so, too, will technological advance.

Unless we get over our post-modern aversion to objective truth we may well find that we're living during the high water mark of scientific discovery and progress, and the marvelous tide that has made our lives so much healthier and more comfortable than those lived by our ancestors may soon begin to drain away.

Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach described the ebb of religious faith, but what he says about religion in the modern age may be just as apt for "The sea of science" in the post-modern era:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Be Careful What You Wish for, Millennials

An annual report from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation used YouGov polling data to assess American attitudes toward socialism and communism. What they found is that more millennials in the United States said they would rather live in a socialist society than said they preferred capitalism.

Among millennials, 42 percent would prefer to live in a capitalist society, while 44 percent said they would rather live in a socialist society. Seven percent opted for communism and the same percentage said they preferred fascism. In other words, 58 percent of millennials want to be less free, and 14 percent of those wish to live under a totalitarian tyranny.

The only comfort, if one can call it that, in this survey is that it also showed that most people truly don't know the difference between capitalism, communism, fascism and socialism.

There's a well-known story, probably apocryphal, about a college prof whose students yearned to see socialism established here in the U.S. The prof agreed and suggested they start by implementing it in their class.

The students weren't sure what he meant so he explained: On previous tests there had been a lot of grade inequality since some students had A's and B's and some had D's and F's. The students with high grades, the prof declared, should feel guilty since they're privileged by being smarter and having better study habits than the low achievers who can't help that they're not as smart and were raised in an environment that failed to inculcate good study habits and a desire for academic success.

So, the prof informed his students, on the next test anyone who has a B or higher will have points subtracted from his or her score and given to those who had failed. That way everyone would have a C. Everyone would be equal and happy in the new socialist-run classroom.

Actually, the high-achievers didn't think they'd be happy at all because the new system sounded grossly unfair, but they kept quiet at first because they didn't want their classmates to think they were selfish and uncompassionate toward the less fortunate.

On the other hand, this idea sounded great to the low-achievers, but the high achievers, being smarter than their classmates, quickly realized there'd be no point in studying for the tests since everyone would get a C whether they studied or not. Then they thought a little further and realized that since no one would study there'd be no A's and B's at all. In fact, it was quite possible that no one would even pass the exam. Everyone might fail. They'd all be academic equals, but they'd all be equal failures.

When they mentioned this to the prof he nodded and replied, "But that's how socialism works."

Not only is socialism unfair, not only does it not work (especially in a nation with a substantial underclass), but it also breeds selfish, ungrateful citizens. Here's a video that explains why:

Maybe the reason so many millennials say they like socialism is not because they understand what it does to an economy and to the character of the people who live in the system, but because they liked Bernie Sanders, and he was a socialist. He was promising free tuition, free healthcare, free everything. How he'd deliver on those promises they might not have understood, exactly, but when you're feeling the Bern maybe you don't much care.

Why Mind Matters

Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel argued that there is something it is like to be a bat whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a stone. Bats, and people, have conscious experience that purely material objects do not have, and it is this conscious experience that is the defining feature of minds.

This experience, Tallis observes, is not a fact about the physical realm:

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system.

When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Nagel goes on to make the claim, a claim that has put him in the bad graces of his fellow naturalists, that naturalism simply lacks the resources to account for conscious experience. Tallis writes:

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and [moral] value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s [naturalism's] identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, nor by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

One might wonder why naturalistic materialists are so reluctant to acknowledge that there's more to us than just physical matter. What difference does it make if an essential aspect of our being is mental? What does it matter if we're not just matter but also a mind? Indeed, what does it matter if we are fundamentally mind?

Perhaps the answer is that given by philosopher J.P.Moreland. Moreland makes an argument in his book Consciousness and the Existence of God that naturalism entails the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy, that is, there are no immaterial substances. Thus, the existence of human consciousness must be explicable in terms of material substance or naturalism is likely to be false. Moreland also argues that there is no good naturalistic explanation for consciousness and that, indeed, the existence of consciousness is strong evidence for the existence of God.

Nagel, an atheist, doesn't go as far as Moreland in believing that the phenomena of conscious experience point to the existence of God, but he comes close, arguing that there must be some mental, telic principle in the universe that somehow imbues the world with consciousness. There is nothing about matter, even the matter which constitutes the brain, that can account for conscious experiences like the sensations of color or a toothache. There's nothing about a chemical reaction or the firing of nerve fibers that can conceivably account for what we experience when we see red, hear middle C, taste sweetness, or feel pain. Nor is there anything about matter that can account for the existence of moral value.

If it turns out that naturalism remains unable to rise to the challenge presented by consciousness then naturalism, and materialism, will forfeit their hegemony among philosophers, a hegemony that has already been seriously eroded.

Read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.

Unexamined Assumption

Reading about the recent terror attack in New York City and how the man who committed this horrendous atrocity was able to come to this country through a program designed to increase our ethnic, religious and cultural diversity, brought to mind a question I've pondered for some time.

That question is, why do we assume that diversity is, on balance, a public good? Indeed, our elites have elevated diversity and multiculturalism to the status of an idol, but how thoroughly has this apotheosis ever been debated?

No doubt diversity adds spice to our cultural life, but I take a contrarian view on whether diversity is an unalloyed good for our polity. I don't see any reason to think it is and several reasons to think it isn't.

A society is strong to the extent that the people who comprise it share values, language, customs and religion in common. These commonalities have been the glue that has held us together for three centuries. As people immigrated into the U.S. they've either largely shared these same features or desired to adopt them and assimilate into our culture, but for the last several decades voices on the left have been telling us that assimilation is somehow a betrayal of the immigrant's home culture, that so far from expecting people to assimilate we should go to whatever lengths are necessary to accommodate the immigrant's desire to keep his or her old ways.

It's no wonder that some who come here want no part of assimilation. They want the benefits of living in a Western country while rejecting pretty much everything that enables the country and its people to provide them those benefits in the first place. Karissa's portrayal of her parents described in this post are illustrative.

The more diverse we are, the more different we are, the less we will share in common and the more divided we will inevitably become. Diversity breeds division, not solidarity. It tends to fragment a society, not unify it.

Because we have traditionally shared what may loosely be called a common culture we've managed for the most part to maintain something approximating national unity, but this has been despite our diversity not because of it. As the cultural gaps between people widen into chasms the bonds that hold us together fray like strands of a rope until eventually we become an unstable congeries of balkanized cultures, sharing little in common, resentful and suspicious of each other.

Those who promote unlimited immigration either don't believe this actually happens, or they don't care if it happens, or they in fact want it to happen. In the first case they're naive, in the second they're foolish, and in the third they're simply malevolent.

Perhaps I'm missing something. If so, I invite readers to help me see what it is about diversity that makes it such a desideratum among our cultural elites.

Quantum Weirdness

Why do some physicists think that the material universe is dependent upon mind? Why do they think that an observation somehow creates a reality which didn't exist prior to the observation?

The following video illustrates a classic experiment that some say proves that materialism, the belief that matter is the fundamental reality, is false. The experiment is compatible with the view that mind is the most fundamental substance and that matter is a product of an observing mind.

One commenter at the Youtube site for this video asserts that all the theories seeking to explain the existence of the universe distill to three possibilities:

1. Either the universe(s) has always existed in one form or another and thus never needed creating because it always existed.

2. Or the universe(s) created itself from nothing where nothing previously existed.

3. Or that a divine entity has always existed and created it through an act of will.

He goes on to say that:

Each of these alternatives is equally outrageous and impossible to believe but one MUST be true. I like to think the first one is true.

I don't think I agree that these are all equally hard to believe. I think the second is much harder to believe than the other two. Be that as it may, the commenter favors the first as a matter of metaphysical preference which is another way of saying that he doesn't really want a divine creator to exist.

Why he's averse to that alternative, he doesn't say, but I think a lot of people, whether theists or naturalists, share his basic outlook. What they believe about the universe, their fundamental worldview, is not a matter of logic or compelling reasons.

It's more a matter of taste, or subjective preference, or aesthetics, and it's very difficult, especially in this pragmatic, postmodern age, to persuade someone whose belief is based on a matter of personal preference to abandon it for the alternative.

Why the West is Worth Defending

It's been my experience that many young people assume the multicultural stance that all cultures are equally valid and that no one in one culture should pass judgment on the practices of other cultures. I think that it's proper to adopt this stance a priori, that is until one has had a chance to examine the practices of other cultures, just as we should not pass judgment on individuals until we have had some experience with the person.

But to hold to the belief that we should never pass judgment either on individuals or cultural practices, even after we have had such experience, is to adopt a kind of moral paralysis.

An example of a practice widespread among Muslim communities, a practice most people would find horrific, is honor killing.

A recent article by a Turkish journalist and political analyst named Uzay Bulut at The Daily Caller presses home the point that this is not just a problem in Muslim countries but a problem in Muslim communities in the West as well.

Ms. Bulut writes about a Facebook post from a Kurdish woman named Karissa who was born and raised in Finland and who tells a very sad story:

I am a 23-year-old Kurdish girl born and raised in Finland. My parents are conservative Kurds from Bashur [Iraqi Kurdistan]. My mother’s from Hewler [Arbil] and my father’s from Kirkuk.

About 4 years ago I decided I couldn’t stand my parents anymore. My parents are Muslim conservatives and they have a tribal mind. I finished high school and after that they wanted to marry me off. I refused a few times until they got violent, so I decided to flee home. I have not had any contacts with my parents for the last 4 years. My entire family threatens me with death messages and if they see me, they will surely kill me or get violent.

“Today I am 23. I finished my dream university and have a great job and I live alone. My parents can contact me when they feel I am more important than their cultural tribal values and religion.

Bulut writes that she was deeply moved by the woman's testimony and decided to learn more about her. She discovered that her family’s physical and psychological abuse against her was so intense and unbearable that she had to leave home. The reason for their pressure was that they feared her “integration into Finnish society.”

Karissa goes on to say that,

Both my parents are very religious Muslims. They were afraid that after I completed high school, I would move out and live a free life like a Finnish woman. They were afraid that I would fall in love with some Finnish guy and be with him. So they got violent. But I never thought about these things. I was thinking about how to get a good education and find a good job.

I was exposed to a lot of violence and ugly epithets. They said they would kill me because I didn’t want to marry. It was so hard for me to go through all of that, but I didn’t know what to do. I was so depressed and felt worthless. Many times, I thought of suicide.

The continuing threats from her family have forced her into hiding:

My family does not know where I live now. If they did, they could send my cousins to kill me or my father himself could kill me. Even the thought that they want to kill me makes me so sad and cry. My workplace is very near to my house, so I do not have to travel a lot.

Karissa's story is not uncommon. In fact she wrote this because she wanted to give hope to the many women around the world who languish in the same situation:

I know many women from the Middle East feel the same way and have the same fate as me. But many don’t have the courage to speak out. I had two female relatives who got shot in Kurdistan because their family members thought their daughters ‘tainted their families’ honor.’ I would want girls who are afraid of fleeing their homes to take the risk and flee.

But they are so afraid of their parents and what their relatives would think of or do to them. And if you are a woman, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to flee your home and survive in any majority-Muslim country.

Bulut is indignant that Western feminists seem indifferent to the plight of women in the Muslim world:

All of these horrific abuses against girls and women are taking place in Muslim communities while many self-described feminist activists in the West are busy discussing whether or not women should shave their legs or dye their arm pit hair, or what they should do in the face of “slut-shaming,” or why they should stop using “guys” to address “mix-gender groups” or what “non-binary pronouns” should be used for those who identify as neither gender, or both.

In the meanwhile, Muslim or ex-Muslim women across the world are violated or murdered by beatings, beheading, burning, shooting, and torture for daring to make their own decisions about their own lives, such as filing for divorce or rejecting their husband’s offers of reconciliation. In many cases, the perpetrators are released and not punished.

Violence against women is a serious problem in many parts of the world. But in majority-Muslim countries, it is systematic and broadly tolerated. Oppression of women is allowed or even encouraged in Islamic scriptures – the Koran and at the hadith sunnah literature. (For those who are interested, all of these scriptures are easily found on the internet.) And it is no secret that Muslim-majority countries are the worst violators of gender equality.

There's more from Bulut at the link and I encourage you to read the essay. She closes with a powerful indictment of some Western feminists:

For example, a women’s rights activist organization in Turkey called We Will Stop Femicides Platform, issues monthly reports about the girls and women who are murdered or abused, mostly by those closest to them, such as husbands, fathers, brothers, boyfriends, sons, or grandsons. It is mind-boggling that their efforts are largely ignored by feminist academics and activists in the West.

Karissa’s life story is also the reason why − despite all of its flaws − Western civilization is worth defending and fighting for. On the one side, Karissa’s own parents who threaten her with death for wanting to make her own choices. On the other side, there’s Finland, a free and civilized country that provides Karissa with human rights and freedoms, helping her preserve her dignity, regardless of her ethnic origin or religion.

Europe is far from perfect, but it’s still much more culturally, morally and intellectually superior to the Islamic world. And this is what so many Westerners seem to fail to grasp.

Furthermore, the move by some Western feminists to paint Islam as a pioneering force in women’s rights is actually enabling the repression and murder of more Muslim women.

Western feminists have a choice: They can either side with Islamists who oppress and even murder women, or they can honestly recognize the religious motivations behind those crimes and show solidarity with women violated by Muslim men. Sadly, many so-called activists seem to have chosen the former, showing how misguided they are in their thinking. Despite all of their claims, they have chosen to be ultimately uncaring and insensitive regarding women’s rights in order to protect a primitive religion.

If you'd like an example of the people she's talking about you can read about one of them here.

A Strange Place

The universe is a very strange place, stranger than we can imagine. One of the strangest things about it is something Albert Einstein once referred to as "spooky action at a distance." In quantum mechanics there's a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. No one knows how it works, no one really understands it, but every time it's been tested it's been shown to exist, and it's absolutely bizarre.

Here's the nutshell version: Two subatomic particles, e.g. electrons, can be produced from the disintegration of another particle. These daughter particles then travel at enormous velocities away from each other, but they somehow remain connected such that if a property of one of them is changed the same property in the other one changes simultaneously even though any signal sent from one to the other would have to travel at infinite speed to affect the other. This, though, is impossible, so how does the second electron know what's happened to the first? No one knows the answer to this, which is why Einstein, who could never accept the idea of entanglement, called the phenomenon "spooky."

An excellent 15 minute video featuring physicist Brian Greene explains this quantum weirdness:

An article at Nature discusses a recent test that pretty much clinches the theory that somehow particles that are widely separated from each other, even at opposite ends of the universe, are still in some mysterious way connected so that they can communicate instantaneously with each other:

It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world.

The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, could be the final nail in the coffin for models of the atomic world that are more intuitive than standard quantum mechanics, say some physicists. It could also enable quantum engineers to develop a new suite of ultrasecure cryptographic devices.

“From a fundamental point of view, this is truly history-making,” says Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In quantum mechanics, objects can be in multiple states simultaneously: for example, an atom can be in two places, or spin in opposite directions, at once. Measuring an object forces it to snap into a well-defined state. Furthermore, the properties of different objects can become ‘entangled’, meaning that their states are linked: when a property of one such object is measured, the properties of all its entangled twins become set, too.

This idea galled Einstein because it seemed that this ghostly influence would be transmitted instantaneously between even vastly separated but entangled particles — implying that it could contravene the universal rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. He proposed that quantum particles do have set properties before they are measured, called hidden variables. And even though those variables cannot be accessed, he suggested that they pre-program entangled particles to behave in correlated ways.

The recent experiments cited in the Nature article are said to show that Einstein was wrong and that entanglement exists. The universe is indeed a very strange place.

One possible explanation for the instantaneous "communication" between particles light years apart could be provided by the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley believed that the ultimate reality was not matter but mind. If he was right, and if the universe is as he and others have suggested, a kind of idea in the mind of God, then a change in one particle could be instantly perceived and transmitted to the second particle. In other words, the laws of physical nature are not the ultimate laws but are based on higher laws that derive from a non-physical mind.

This may sound very bizarre to many, but it's no more bizarre than the quantum phenomena themselves, and those seem undeniable.

A Maximally Great Being

I visited a website recently on which there was some discussion of the multiverse. One of the claims made was that if the multiverse is real then everything that can happen, i.e. everything that's logically possible, will happen somewhere among the near-infinite worlds that populate the multiverse.

I replied to that claim with the observation that one consequence of this is that if there is in fact a near-infinite number of different universes in which all logical possibilities are somewhere actualized then it follows that there must be a God.

The justification for this claim is that if in the multiverse all possible states of affairs are realized then there must be a world somewhere in the multiverse in which it’s true to say that a maximally great being (MGB) exists.

But if it's true that there is an MGB in one world it follows that this being must exist in every world (otherwise it wouldn't be maximally great), including our own. Since a "maximally great being" is what we mean by "God," it follows that if there's a multiverse then God must exist in our world.

A reader responded with two questions:

1. Since a maximally great individual would have to be the greatest in all possible fields, wouldn’t maximal “greatness” include maximal evil? Are we suggesting that Satan was the Creator?

2. The other problem is that if ... it’s not possible to get – or create – something from nothing then, since there is something, that something must always have existed. And if something has always existed, it was never created, so there is no need for a Creator. Is there?

These are interesting questions. One possible answer to the first is this:

An MGB is a being which possesses all compossible great-making properties (Compossible properties are properties it's possible to possess at the same time without contradiction.). Maximal evil and maximal goodness are not compossible properties. Thus the MGB would be either maximally good or maximally evil, but not both, and there are a number of reasons for thinking that the MGB is not maximally evil. Here's one:

If the MGB were maximally evil it's hard to account for why there would be so much good in the world. If maximal evil created the world it would seem that this world would be an unmitigated hell, and it's clearly not.

A reply to this might be that if the MGB is maximally good then we should expect this world to be heaven, but it's clearly not.

This is so, but the reason there is suffering and evil in the world is largely because of human free will which is bestowed on us because it's an eminently good property to have. A maximally evil being would have no reason to bestow upon us anything that was good. Thus, unlike the evil in this world which is at least partly explicable in terms of free will, goodness in a world created by a maximally evil being would be inexplicable.

We might also note that the problem posed by the first question still leaves the argument for an MGB intact. Even if an MGB could be maximally evil it's still the case that a multiverse entails the existence of a maximally great being, one which is the ultimate cause of all that is.

As for the second question there are also several possible answers. Here are a few: First, cosmologists have shown that the mathematics of eternity require a beginning to the universe. If this is so, then the universe hasn't always existed.

Second, it's true that something (i.e. material substance) doesn't pop into being out of nothing (i.e. the complete absence of anything), but by "nothing" is not meant the complete absence of anything but rather the absence of any pre-existing material substance. An MGB is not material substance but neither is it the complete absence of anything. Rather, it is pure being itself.

Moreover, even if matter were eternal or infinitely old that would not remove the need for a cause of its existence. Since it's possible for matter, as well as the universe that's made up of matter, to not exist, the universe is a contingent entity. However, contingent entities require a non-contingent (i.e. necessary) entity as their ultimate sustaining cause.

The ultimate sustaining cause of the universe must not only be a necessary being (i.e. it doesn't depend on anything else for it's existence), it must also be very powerful (since it has created a universe), very intelligent (since it has designed a universe), non-spatial (since it's outside the spatial universe), and non-temporal (since it's outside the temporal universe).

In other words, it has many of the same properties we attribute to a Maximally Great Being.

The Sizes of Things

I've told my students that the world appears to us as it does because we happen to be the size we are. I've suggested that were we considerably smaller, say, the size of an atom, the world would look much different. What appears solid, for example, would not seem solid at all to an atomic-sized creature (if such a thing were physically possible).

As something of a follow-up to that discussion I thought I'd repost this link to a fun interactive site that you'll find difficult to stop playing with once you start. By moving the scroll bar you can zoom in or out to see how big the universe is compared to our planet and how big we are compared to the smallest parts of an atom.

As you scroll toward the very small notice that it seems as if what we call matter simply ceases to exist. All there seems to be at the most fundamental level are hypothetical entities called strings - incredibly tiny filaments or wisps of energy. But if there's no material substance at the heart of reality is matter just an illusion?

Give the interactive site a try and spend a little time just being amazed. It may take a few seconds to load so be patient.

Libet on Free Will

This post is from the archive but is relevant to a topic we're discussing, or soon will be discussing, in class:

Students of psychology, philosophy and other disciplines which touch upon the operations of the mind and the question of free will may have heard mention of the experiments of Benjamin Libet, a University of California at San Francisco neurobiologist who conducted some remarkable research into the brain and human consciousness in the last decades of the 20th century.

One of Libet's most famous discoveries was that the brain "decides" on a particular choice milliseconds before we ourselves are conscious of deciding. The brain creates an electrochemical "Readiness Potential" (RP) that precedes by milliseconds the conscious decision to do something.

This has been seized upon by materialists who use it as proof that our decisions are not really chosen by us but are rather the unconscious product of our brain's neurochemistry. The decision is made before we're even aware of what's going on, they claim, and this fact undermines the notion that we have free will as this video explains:

Michael Egnor, at ENV, points out, however, that so far from supporting determinism, Libet himself believed in free will, his research supported that belief, and, what's more, his research also reinforced, in Libet's own words, classical religious views of sin.

Libet discovered that the decision to do X is indeed pre-conscious, but he also found that the decision to do X can be consciously vetoed by us and that no RP precedes that veto. In other words, the decision of the brain to act in a particular way is determined by unconscious factors, but we retain the ability to consciously (freely) choose not to follow through with that decision. Our freedom lies in our ability to refuse any or all of the choices our brain presents to us. Or, we might say, free will is really "free won't."

Egnor's article is a fascinating piece if you're interested in the question of free will and Libet's contribution to our understanding of it.

The End of Naturalism

Denyse O'Leary writes about the end of naturalism or, perhaps more precisely, the end of naturalistic materialism in an essay at Evolution News.

O'Leary points out that in order to maintain faith in naturalism, i.e. the belief that nature is all there is, one has to believe several claims for which there's no empirical evidence whatsoever and which are, at least prima facie, absurd. The claims are these:

• There is a multiverse, that is, an infinite number of universes beyond our own which are undetectable by us.
• Human reason is at best unreliable and at worst an illusion.
• Our sense of being a self is an illusion.
• Our sense that we have consciousness is an illusion.

Here's a quote from O'Leary's article about this last claim:

Michael Graziano tells us ... “Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct.”

Follow the link to see why she says what she does about each of the above assertions.

She might have added to her list of claims the fact that a naturalist must believe that the enormous amount of specific information required to construct the organelles of even the simplest cell somehow arose by chance. It's the equivalent of believing that the information required to construct and run a jet aircraft somehow gathered itself together without any intelligent input from human engineers.

Naturalism is forcing its votaries to jettison the principles of science as it has traditionally been practiced, compelling them to forfeit adherence to scientific objectivity and the demand for evidence. The naturalist believes, for instance, that there is an infinity of universes beyond our own, that life arose against astronomical odds purely by coincidence and through purely mechanical processes. He believes that consciousness, whatever it is, has a physical basis, and he believes all of this without a shred of evidence for any of it. He believes it only because his metaphysical commitments require it. In other words, his belief is an act of blind faith in naturalism.

Naturalism would be laughed off the stage of modern intellectual life were it not for the fact that it's the only alternative to belief in the existence of a transcendent intellect. If one is desperate to avoid the conclusion that such an agent is responsible for the world and for life she will believe whatever is necessary, no matter how contrary to her own experience, in order escape it.

For example, in addition to embracing the extraordinary implausibility of the efficacy of chance to bring about life, in addition to rejecting the aforementioned beliefs in the trustworthiness of reason, the self, and consciousness, a naturalist, to be consistent, should also reject the belief that there's any ultimate meaning or purpose to life, that objective moral values exist, that good and evil are real, that she has free will, and that she has a mind in addition to her brain.

It's all in all a pretty steep price to pay to enable one to avoid the theistic conclusion.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest

In my classes we recently discussed the question of what we mean when we say that something is real? One aspect of our experience we specifically addressed were sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, and sound.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and so on.

After we had moved on to other topics I came across an article that describes how music is transferred to a computer and then to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made in our brains. If there's no ear to hear it, no brain to interpret what the ear hears, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves were picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses were converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals were compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code was written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructed the bits in their proper sequence and transmitted them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relayed the file to a router, where the file was packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembled the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embedded the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, accessed by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converted the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy travelling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all. The music is created by our brain and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation that we experience and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

Just something to think about over the weekend.

Fire and Water

The second in a pair of excellent books by geneticist Michael Denton has just been released, and both are very much worth reading. The first was titled Fire-maker, and the second, just-released work, is titled The Wonder of Water. A non-scientist would have no trouble following and understanding either book.

Each of them provides the reader with fascinating information on almost every page as they examine two commonplace phenomena in our environment, fire and water, and explain that if those two phenomena didn't have precisely the properties they do, life would be either very much diminished, or even impossible.Certainly living things as complex as human beings would be impossible.

In Fire-maker, for example, Denton reflects upon all the properties of planet earth that have to be just right for the phenomenon of fire to exist and then recounts all the physical characteristics of an animal such as human beings that have to be just as they are for that animal to be able to use fire. He then examines what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed. It all just leaves one shaking one's head in amazement.

Here are a couple of related videos that'll give you an idea of what the books are about:

The more we learn about the world in which we live the harder it is to think that it's all just a marvelous coincidence that everything has just the properties it does.

For those who may have a stronger background in science and wish to probe more deeply into these matters, I recommend Denton's earlier book Nature's Destiny.

Origin

I recently finished the highly hyped novel Origin, Dan Brown's most recent effort to undermine theistic belief in general and Catholicism in particular. As in his previous works (The daVinci Code, Inferno, Angels and Demons) assaults on religious belief are embedded in a story, but unlike those earlier efforts, which were genuine page-turners that I found hard to put down, the story in Origin was pretty much a snoozer that I had to force myself to finish.

Despite the publicity given to the book, the best thing I can say about it is that it's possible that it's not the worst book I've ever read. Brown's attacks on theism were confused and sophomoric. It seemed as if he couldn't decide whether his target was belief in God or the expression of that belief in organized religion. He frequently conflates criticism of organized religion with atheism which is disconcerting and misleading since antagonism toward religion is not what makes one an atheist.

Throughout the book he advocates a naive 1960s Darwinism and demonstrates very little familiarity with the debate over biogenesis of the last two decades. He seems totally unaware of the developments in philosophy - particularly philosophy of religion, epistemology, the resurgence of Thomism, and the philosophy of science - which render most of his claims about the obsolescence and imminent demise of religious belief seem as if they were lifted from the mid-twentieth century.

For example, Brown has one of his main characters allege that faith, "by its very definition, requires placing your trust in something that is unseeable and indefinable, accepting as fact something for which there is no empirical evidence." This is, however, a tendentious definition of faith. Faith, as most people understand it, is not placing your trust in something for which there is no empirical evidence but rather placing one's trust in something despite the lack of empirical proof. There is in any case plenty of evidence for the existence of God even if proof that would command the assent of every rational person, including those who are averse to accepting that God exists, is hard to come by.

Brown also has his mouthpiece character predict that, "The age of religion is drawing to a close and the age of science is dawning." This assertion could only be made by someone with a very parochial view of the world. One only need look at what's happening around the globe - in the Islamic world, in Central and South America, in Africa - to see that though religion may be fading among the urban elites in Manhattan, it's doing just fine in much of the rest of the world.

One character in the book informs us that, "There are only two schools of thought on where we came from - the religious notion that God created humans fully formed and the Darwinian model in which we crawled out of the primordial ooze and eventually evolved into humans." This is not only simplistic, it's utterly false. Neither intelligent design advocates nor theistic evolutionists fall neatly into either of these two camps. The Darwinian view excludes any non-natural guidance or influence, but there are a lot of very thoughtful and intelligent people who believe that some kind of guided or intelligently influenced "evolutionary" process accounts for life on earth, even though Brown gives these folks little attention.

Add to these passages, and many others like them, a story line involving characters whose behavior seems totally implausible and an ending which is predictable from about a third of the way through the book, and the reader is left with a disappointing sequel to his earlier novels.

For a story in some respects similar to the one told in Origin and which preceded Origin by a year, The Soul of the Matter by Bruce Buff is, at least to my taste, a better reading choice.

Peas in a Pod

Harvey Weinstein's fall from power and prominence has been fascinating to behold. Once a highly feted movie producer and mega-donor to liberal political campaigns, Weinstein has suddenly become a social and political leper. The well-substantiated allegations of his brutish behavior that have finally managed to percolate to the surface of our national consciousness are truly loathsome. And they raise questions, among which are these:

How many of those in the media, those in Hollywood and those in academia who are now condemning Weinstein for his repeated harassment, and worse, of women who drifted into his orbit have known of his conduct for years and said nothing?

How many of those who knew and said nothing kept silent because Weinstein was on the "right side" of the issues and was a major contributor to Democrat campaigns?

How many of those who are now distancing themselves from Weinstein, who cannot think of adjectives strong enough with which to vilify him, nevertheless not only voted for Bill Clinton, even after his own sexual predations had become well-known, but actively supported and defended him?

I think it's a safe assumption that everyone on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and NBC and everyone at The New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times, and almost everyone in Hollywood who is currently voicing their disgust and censure of Weinstein nevertheless supported and even admired Mr. Clinton despite the fact that he was credibly accused by numerous women of acts no less despicable and not much different from those Weinstein has been accused of committing.

One thing these questions about this sordid episode illustrates, besides the moral decadence among our cultural elites, is that many of those who posture as advocates for women actually care more about achieving and holding political power than they do about women. They care more about their social standing than they do about their principles.

I don't know which is harder, to read descriptions of Weinstein's behavior or to listen to people who donated to Clinton and threw their considerable influence behind him expressing their repugnance and loathing of Weinstein's behavior. One wonders how they manage to keep a straight face. One also wonders why anyone bothers to listen to what they have to say.

Shoddy Journalism

A brief article at the Daily Mail on how President Trump is undoing what his predecessor tried to accomplish over his eight year tenure illustrates why one must approach what one reads in the media with a critical eye. The writer begins with this lede:

Brick by brick, the demolition job has begun: since taking office less than a year ago, Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the legacy of Barack Obama. Climate, free trade, health care, immigration, foreign policy -- the 45th US president has set about undoing just about everything done by the 44th.

All new presidents, of course, break with their predecessor once in the Oval Office, especially if they come from a rival political party. But what is striking is how systematic the hammer blows to Obama's legacy have been.

And rather than throw his weight behind new policies or projects, Trump has shown a willful desire to unpick, shred and erase everything his predecessor accomplished.

Well, why should President Trump be enacting new policies and projects when the old policies are stifling both our economic, political and religious freedom and diminishing the security of our nation? The assumption here seems to be that a president should allow whatever policies his predecessor enacted to remain in place, no matter how toxic those policies may be to the economic and social well-being of our people. Trump is wise to rid us of impediments to our national safety and flourishing imposed by the Obama administration before he moves on to advocate for other programs.

It's worth noting that each time he buries one of the reforms of the man who sat before him at the "Resolute desk," Trump sounds more like a candidate than a president.

"Reforms" is a word intended to persuade the reader that President Obama's executive orders were wise and needful and that President Trump's EOs are spiteful and reckless. In fact, a number of Mr. Obama's "reforms" were either unwise, illegal or usurpations by the executive branch of authority granted by the Constitution to the legislature. Undoing them simply returns us to the rule of law rather than the arbitrary rule of one man.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership? Within days of taking office, Trump signed an order pulling America out of the free trade accord, the fruit of eight years of negotiations between 12 Asia-Pacific countries, from Chile to Canada and Japan.

"We're going to stop the ridiculous trade deals that have taken everybody out of our country and taken companies out of our country, and it's going to be reversed," Trump said.

If Trump can rescind this deal it's only because it was never codified into law by Congress. The Obama administration signed off on it on its own, but the question that the article never raises is not whether Trump is undoing Obama's agreement but rather whether this agreement and others should be undone. If they should then what Trump is doing is good, if they shouldn't then what he's doing is unwise.

The Paris climate accord? Obama played a leading role in attaining that milestone in the effort to combat global warming.

Trump pulled out of the agreement signed by 195 countries, claiming that it "punishes the United States" and declaring: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."

Again, Trump could not pull us out of this agreement if Congress had approved it. Is it a good deal for the country or isn't it? Why didn't Congress get to act on it? Those are the questions to which the reader deserves an answer, but the article simply passes them by.

What about Obamacare, the signature legislative achievement of Obama's first term? After trying in vain to get Congress to repeal it, Trump is now working to bring about its collapse through the regulatory process.

What Trump has done here is rescind subsidies to big insurance companies that were not provided for in the Affordable Care Act, which Obama unilaterally granted and which a federal judge had declared to be illegal. You wouldn't know that, though, from reading this article.

And the Iranian nuclear accord? The bid to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon in return for a lifting of sanctions more than any other came to represent Obama's approach to world affairs.

"This deal will have my name on it," the Democratic president said shortly before it was concluded. "Nobody has a bigger personal stake in making sure that it delivers on its promise."

While Trump has stopped short of tearing up the Iran deal, as he threatened on the campaign trail, on Friday he warned he could do so "at any time," raising doubts about the fate of an accord born of years of painstaking diplomacy.

Even so, Iran has been cheating on the deal from the day they signed it, a deal that once again, Congress never explicitly approved. Iran is on the road to possessing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Having already threatened to use them once they have the power to do so, a deal that allows for their acquisition is exceedingly foolish, but there's no discussion in the article of the wisdom of the agreement, no explanation of why it should not be abrogated, just the assumption that if it's an agreement, and if it was arrived at painstakingly and signed onto with other countries, then it must be good.

Historian Jeffrey Engel ... sees no equivalent in recent decades to Trump's systematic application of the simple principle that "if the other guy liked it, it must be bad." To Engel, the explanation is that Trump's electoral base "never accepted fully Barack Obama as their president."

"There was a move among Obama's opponents to delegitimize him and to say that this man is not really president and consequently anything that he did, Trump's base is ready to get rid of," said Engel, who heads Southern Methodist University's center for presidential history in Dallas, Texas.

The possibility that President Obama's lurch toward the socialist left and that his embrace of policies which would diminish America's freedom, influence and power are sincerely rejected by a plurality of Americans as unwise is not even considered by either Professor Engel or the writer of the Daily Mail piece. The dismantling of Obama's executive orders is portrayed as mere spite and vengefulness, while the possibility that it is in fact an honest attempt to pull us out of a national "death spiral" after eight years of national vertigo is blithely ignored.

The Daily Mail has given us in this article a shoddy, careless piece of journalism.

Theories of Time

The class discussion recently turned to questions concerning the nature of time and a student dug out this post from 3/7/2014. Since it addresses some of what we talked about in class I thought it might be worthwhile to run it again:

Anthony Aguirre at Big Questions Online discusses the two theories of time. His discussion is difficult to follow unless one is familiar with quantum mechanics and relativity theory, but he does give a clear explanation of the two basic theories on offer. What he calls below the "Unitary Block" theory is sometimes referred to as the B-Theory of time. What he calls the "Experienced World" is the A-Theory.

When we step back, we thus seem to have two rather different and contrary views of time’s nature. In one, the ‘Unitary Block’, spacetime and quantum states are laid out ‘all at once’, specified once and for all by some set of boundary conditions. Everything at any time is uniquely determined by — and thus implicitly contained in — any other time, and the world exhibits no distinction between past and future.

At the same time, the ‘Experienced World’ we actually inhabit and observe has a very clear distinction between past, present, and future, produces entropy, and allows branching between a single present reality and several possible future realities.

Among knowledgeable and thoughtful people, there seem to be three basic views of this paradox:

1.The Unitary Block is the fundamental, and by implication more true description; things such as the arrow of time, definite experimental outcomes, etc., are emergent phenomena that, if we only could make precise enough computations, could be reduced to ‘nothing but’ the fundamental description.

2.The Unitary Block is wrong in some essential way. A more correct view would be much more like — and much more readily reconciled with — the Experienced World.

3.The Experienced World is more fundamental than the Unitary Block, which is just the correct description of regularities in the Experienced World in very particular regimes.

View 1 is by far the most common amongst my theoretical physicist colleagues, but I’ll make three arguments as to why we should think carefully before embracing it.

His arguments for considering the Experienced World (A-Theory) to be fundamental can be read at the link. One might wonder why scientists even think there is a Unitary Block. The answer has to do with Einstein's discoveries about relativity:

Right now, this second, an old man is exhaling his last breath. Elsewhere, two young lovers exchange their first kiss. Farther afield, two asteroids silently collide. Sunrise comes to a planet orbiting a neighboring star. This very second, a supernova detonates in a faraway galaxy.

And yet ‘this very second’ across the universe apparently does not really exist! Our best fundamental theory of space-time, Einstein’s Relativity, expressly precludes a single, objective definition of simultaneity. Events occurring ‘now’ by one observer’s estimation can — with equal validity — be said to occur at different times according to another observer who is far away and/or in motion relative to the first.

We don’t notice this issue much here on Earth, but it becomes very obvious for example in cosmology, where how one defines ‘now’ can determine whether the universe looks uniform or not, and even if it is finite or infinite!

It's all very fascinating stuff with fascinating implications. For example, if the Unitary Block theory is correct I'm not sure what sense it makes to talk about the age of the universe. Every moment of time would have come into being at the instant that the universe was created. If that's so, then what does it mean to say that the universe is 14 billion years old?