Hero or Sinner?

Radio host Dennis Prager once told a story of a woman in Nazi-occupied Poland that raised some interesting moral questions. The story was made into a Broadway play entitled Irene's Vow.

Prager said this about the play:

Playwright Dan Gordon and director Michael Parva have made goodness riveting in the new Broadway play, "Irene's Vow." The Irene of the title is Irene Gut Opdyke, who, at the time of the play's World War II's setting, was a pretty 19-year-old blond Polish Roman Catholic to whom fate (she would say God) gave the opportunity to save 12 Jews in, of all places, the home of the highest-ranking German officer in a Polish city.

Ultimately discovered by the Nazi officer, she was offered the choice of becoming the elderly Nazi's mistress or the Jews all being sent to death camps.

As it happens, I interviewed Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago and again 12 years later, and she revealed to me how conflicted she was about what she consented to do not only because she became what fellow Poles derided as a "Nazi whore" but because as a deeply religious Catholic she was sure she was committing a grave sin by regularly sleeping with a man to whom she was not married and worse, indeed a married man, which likely rendered her sin of adultery a mortal sin.

What she did therefore, was not only heroic because she had to overcome daily fear of being caught and put to death, but because she also had to overcome a daily fear of committing a mortal sin before God.

During the German occupation, Irene Gut was hired by Wehrmacht Major Eduard Rügemer to work in a kitchen of a hotel that frequently served Nazi officials. Inspired by her Christian faith, she secretly took food from the hotel and delivered it to people in the Jewish ghetto.

She also smuggled Jews out of the ghetto into the surrounding forest and delivered food to them there. This, at a time when Poles were being shot just for giving bread to Jews.

Meanwhile, Rügemer asked her to work as a housekeeper in his requisitioned villa.

Once she had become the officer's housekeeper she had, unbeknownst to him, hidden a dozen Jews in his basement. During the day while he was away from the house tending to his duties, she would go out to find food and medicine for the Jews, and they would do the cleaning and other tasks that Irena was supposed to do.

Before the Major returned in the evening they would return to the basement. This went on for some time until one day Rügemer came home early and discovered what was happening. He was about to report the Jews to the SS but Irene pleaded with him not to. He then confronted her with the terrible choice mentioned above. You can read more about Irene here.

Here are a couple of questions this story compels us to ponder: Is what Irene did in agreeing to be the Major's mistress wrong or right? Do you, like Prager, see her adultery as heroic and deeply good or do you see it as wrong and sinful? Or neither? Is your answer one you could explain to someone else or is it an intuition that you have?

St. Patrick's Legacy

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day even if because of Covid everything is closed and there are no parades.

Language Is Hard to Explain

Geneticist Michael Denton's most recent book, somewhat awkwardly titled Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, is a remarkable piece of philosophy of biology. In the book Denton critiques the classical Darwinian view that biological structures develop in organisms gradually over long periods of time because they serve an adaptive function.

This view is called functionalism and Denton argues persuasively that functionalist explanations are simply inadequate to explain a host of structures like the mammalian forelimb, the shapes of leaves, the structure of flowers, and many others.

One other example of phenomena that functionalist explanations cannot explain, Denton argues, is the emergence in human beings of language. He recently wrote a synopsis of his argument for Evolution News of which the following is a part:

In the early 1960s, in one of the landmark advances in 20th-century science, Noam Chomsky showed that all human languages share a deep invariant structure. Despite their very different "surface" grammars, they all share a deep set of syntactic rules and organizing principles. All have rules limiting sentence length and structure and all exhibit the phenomenon of recursion -- the embedding of one sentence in another.

Chomsky has postulated that this deep "universal grammar" is innate and is embedded somewhere in the neuronal circuitry of the human brain in a language organ.

Children learn [human] languages so easily, despite a "poverty of stimulus," because they possess innate knowledge of the deep rules and principles of human language and can select, from all the sentences that come to their minds, only those that conform to a "deep structure" encoded in the brain's circuits.

The challenge this poses to Darwinian evolution is apparent. Take the above-mentioned characteristic that all human languages exhibit: recursion. In the sentence, "The man who was wearing a blue hat which he bought from the girl who sat on the wall was six feet tall," the italicized words are embedded sentences. Special rules allow human speakers to handle and understand such sentences. And these rules, which govern the nature of recursion, are specific and complex.

So how did the computational machinery to handle it evolve? David Premack is skeptical:

I challenge the reader to reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness.

Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or proto-humans were hunting mastodons... Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers to be able to remark, "Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack"?

Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules, of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like.

For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

There is considerable controversy over what structures in the brain restrict all human languages to the same deep structure....

Yet, however it is derived during development, there is no doubt that a unique deep structure underlies the languages of all members of our species. It is because of the same underlying deep structure that we can speak the language of the San Bushman or an Australian aborigine, and they in turn can speak English.

The fact that all modern humans, despite their long "evolutionary separation" -- some modern races such as the San of the Kalahari and the Australian aborigines have been separated by perhaps 400,000 years of independent evolution -- can learn each other's languages implies that this deep grammar must have remained unchanged since all modern humans (African and non-African) diverged from their last common African ancestor, at least 200,000 years ago.

As Chomsky puts it:

What we call "primitive people"... to all intents and purposes are identical to us. There's no cognitively significant genetic difference anyone can tell. If they happened to be here, they would be one of us, and they would speak English... If we were there, we would speak their languages.

So far as anyone knows, there is virtually no detectable genetic difference across the species that is language-related.

[I]t is not only the deep structure of language that has remained invariant across all human races. All races share in equal measure all the other higher intellectual abilities: musical, artistic, and mathematical ability, and capacity for abstract thought. These also, therefore, must have been present in our African common ancestors more than 200,000 or more years ago, and must have remained unchanged, and for some reason latent since our common divergence.

To suggest that language and our higher mental faculties evolved in parallel to reach these same remarkable ends independently in all the diverse lineages of modern humans over 200,000 years ago or more, would be to propose the most striking instance of parallel evolution in the entire history of life and be inexplicable in Darwinian terms.

If I understand Denton aright, these capacities, which all humans share, have been present from the origin of the species, but no alleged non-human evolutionary precursor has them. Thus, these capacities, as remarkable as they are, must have evolved with extraordinary rapidity, appearing full-blown in the earliest human beings.

That's very hard to explain in terms of traditional Darwinian gradualism and functionalism.

It seems the more we learn the more implausible classical naturalistic Darwinism appears to be.

The Best Prepared Candidate?

In the following video segment Britain's Sky News reporter Rita Panahi raises questions about Joe Biden's fitness for the presidency, specifically with regard to his mental acuity.

It's deeply ironic that the Democrats who have for three years been questioning Donald Trump's mental health seem to have few qualms about Mr. Biden's apparent liabilities.

The last couple of minutes of this almost seven minute video are very sad to watch, and I certainly don't want readers to think that it's intended to make fun of Mr. Biden's difficulties, but this is the man that most Democrats would have voters believe is best prepared to lead America for the next four years. We need to ask whether that's really true.

How is it that a party which is obsessed with diversity and which so often pats itself on the back for being more "inclusive" than its Republican opposites, as well as for it's greater appeal to the young, nevertheless is offering up to the electorate two rich white men in their late 70s?

One of these men is a wealthy socialist, of all things, who recently suffered a heart attack, never has had a real job outside of politics and has never achieved anything of note within the political sphere beyond getting himself elected.

The other candidate is also a life-long politician who verbally abuses voters, has a reputation for pawing women and young girls, has allegedly embarrassed female secret service agents by skinny-dipping in their presence and who is now apparently suffering frequent bouts of cognitive confusion.

The Democrats have indulged their contempt for Donald Trump for almost four years, but what are they offering American voters as an alternative?

Secrets of the Cell (Pt. V)

Here's the fifth and final installment in the series of videos titled Secrets of the Cell featuring Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe. In this final episode, Behe argues that the design in nature points powerfully to a designer, an intelligent agent who had purposes in mind in engineering the cell.

The purposeful arrangement of parts is evidence, convincing evidence, that something is designed. We may not know who the designer was, when the designer worked or how the designer built what we see, but the fact that its parts are exceedingly complex and purposeful is an extremely reliable indicator of intentional design:

Together, these five short videos give a very succinct and clear exposition of what's known as Intelligent Design (ID), the argument that there are very compelling reasons to think that life on earth is the product of an incomprehensibly intelligent mind. To see episodes one through four scroll down or click on these links: Episode I; Episode II; Episode III; Episode IV.

On the Nature of the Soul

Usually when people talk about the soul and life beyond the death of the physical body they draw looks of incredulity and even scorn from fashionably skeptical materialists, but when a scientist as prominent as physicist Roger Penrose talks about it, well, then the skeptics should at least listen.

Penrose's theory is that the soul consists of information stored at the sub-atomic level in microtubules in the body's cells. At death this information somehow escapes the confines of the microtubules and drifts off into the universe. He claims to have evidence to support this hypothesis, and perhaps he does.

I haven't seen the evidence, but I'd like to know how the information "knows" that the body has died and what mechanism controls it. I'd also like to know what the information is about, how it functions without a physical body, and what disembodied information leaking out into the universe "looks" like.

Anyway, I'm not altogether skeptical of Penrose's theory. I've long advocated the view that, if we do have a soul (as a substance that's neither physical nor mental - neither body nor mind), that it consists of information. In this I'm in agreement with Penrose.

Where I differ from him is that in my view the soul is the totality of true propositions about a person - an exhaustive description of the person at every moment of his or her existence. It's the essence of the person. But whereas Penrose locates the information in cellular microtubules I would place it in the mind of God. In the unimaginably vast database of God's mind there is, so to speak, a "file" containing a complete description of every person who has ever lived, perhaps every thing that has ever existed.

Since the information is located in the mind of God it's indestructible - immortal - unless God chooses to destroy it. Each human being is therefore potentially eternal.

To take this line of thinking one more step, perhaps when our physical bodies die our "file" is "downloaded," in whole or in part, into another body situated in a different world, or at least in a different set of dimensions than what we experience in this world. It would be a different kind of body, perhaps, but a body all the same.

On this view, the soul is not something wraith-like that's contained in us, but rather it's "in" God. As with a computer file, he could choose to delete it altogether or to express it, in whole or in part, in any corporeal "format" he sees fit.

In any case, if this hypothesis is at all close to describing the way things are, the death of our bodies is not the death of us, and, if physical death is not the end of our existence, we're each confronted with some pretty serious implications.

Joe the Science Denier

When I was an undergrad majoring in biology I worked for a couple of summers doing research with my faculty advisor which afforded us the opportunity to have many conversations on all sorts of topics. One thing he stressed in those conversations was the need for any aspirant to the intellectual life to develop a healthy skepticism - the scientific attitude required a skepticism about received opinion and authority in all areas of life - politics, religion, and even science.

My advisor insisted that to doubt and question what we were told by those in authority was the path to truth and independent thinking. This was back in the late sixties and early seventies and my advisor was himself an atheist and a political radical in much the same mold as Bernie Sanders.

I think I absorbed those informal lessons pretty thoroughly, but I came eventually to think his own skepticism ironic since as skeptical as he professed to be, he seemed dogmatically certain that his political views were truth itself, that there was no god of the sort that Christians believed in, and that Charles Darwin was as correct as any scientist ever was about what we might today call Molecules to Man evolution.

I was reminded of my advisor, for whom I had a deep respect, and our many conversations as I read a column on skepticism by neuroscientist Michael Egnor.

Egnor begins by noting that our social betters often consider those of us who have doubts about anthropogenic climate change, or Darwinian explanations of life, or the ability of metaphysical naturalism to offer a satisfactory account of morality, free will, human consciousness, etc. "anti-intellectual science deniers."

He then describes for us a typical example of the species, a guy named Joe:

Joe has no scientific education. He’s a truck driver. He works a couple of jobs to support his family, he pays his taxes, coaches his son’s little league team, and goes to church on Sundays. He is anything but a scientific expert, but he does know a few things.

Joe has been told since the 1980s that the world is going to end due to global warming. It sounds like those crazy guys with the placards who say the world is gonna end tomorrow. The earth’s sell-by-date keeps getting pushed forward — polar ice caps were supposed to melt, but didn’t, polar bears were supposed to go extinct, but didn’t, sea levels were supposed to inundate coastal cities, but didn’t, and tens of millions of climate refugees were supposed to perish fleeing the catastrophic heat. Joe’s still waiting.

He is also still waiting for the apocalyptic global cooling he was told about in the 1970s (Joe ain’t no scientist, but he has a good memory). He remembers watching Paul Ehrlich on TV in the late 1960s warning that overpopulation was going to cause billions of people to die of starvation and cause nations to disintegrate over the next couple of decades.

Joe wonders how a scientist could be so wrong and still keep his job and even get elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Joe knows that if he screwed up his own job like that, he’d be fired before the day was out. But those rules don’t apply to scientists. Joe remembers hearing that DDT and other pesticides was going to kill all birds and give us all cancer. DDT was banned, and lots of people started (again) dying of malaria, and scientists were pretty proud of themselves for getting DDT banned and told people who didn’t want to get malaria to sleep with nets.

Joe remembers being told by scientists in the 1990s that AIDS was going to spread to the heterosexual community and kill millions of Americans. He remembers the panic over Y2K, when nothing happened except that some scientists got big grants to study it.

Joe has heard a lot about the science replication crisis — he doesn’t fully understand it, but he knows that it means that a whole lot of science is basically made up.

Joe remembers his father talking about when the U.S. government sterilized tens of thousands of innocent people against their will because scientific experts insisted that humanity was degenerating due to poor breeding. Joe isn’t exactly sure what eugenics was, but he knows that nearly all scientific institutions embraced it for nearly a century, and Joe suspects that it was just a way to make sure there weren’t too many people like Joe.

Joe doesn’t know what to think about evolution. He believes in God, and knows that it’s obvious that a Higher Power made this beautiful and vastly complex world. He doesn’t have a problem with the claim that animals change over time, but he doesn’t think that scientists should drag his son’s teachers into federal court to force them to teach his boy that there’s no purpose in life.

He thinks we should be able to question science, especially in schools. And he wonders why Darwin’s theory is so certain, since it can’t even stand up to questions from schoolchildren.

Egnor has more to say about the reasons for Joe's doubts about what he hears from the scientific priesthood, but I think we all get the picture. Joe may not know much about how scientists over the course of his lifetime have arrived at their conclusions, but he does know that quite often those conclusions have been very wrong. Maybe a little less trust and a bit more skepticism would've been a good thing and would still be a good thing today.

P.S. For what it's worth, although I included Egnor's paragraph on DDT, I disagree with his apparent disapproval of the ban on this pesticide and am myself glad it's no longer poisoning our ecosystems.

A Case for Dualism

Philosophical materialists maintain that the brain is all that's involved in our cognitive experience and that there's no need to posit the existence of an immaterial mind or soul. Moreover, given that brain function is the product of the laws of physics and chemistry, materialists argue that there's no reason to believe that we have free will.

For materialists mind is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain, much like we use the word digestion to refer to the function of the stomach, but, they argue, just as digestion is an activity and not an organ or distinct entity in itself, likewise the mind is an activity of the brain and not a separate entity in itself.

As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses in this fifteen minute video, however, the materialist view is not shared by all neuroscientists and some of the foremost practitioners in the field have profound difficulties with it.

Egnor explains how the findings of three prominent twentieth century brain scientists point to the existence of something beyond the material brain that's involved in human thought and which also point to the reality of free will.

His lecture is an excellent summary of the case for philosophical dualism and is well worth the fifteen minutes it takes to watch it:

Katie's Soul

My classes have begun discussing what philosophers call the mind/body problem, that is, the question whether the brain alone can provide an adequate explanation for our cognitive experience or whether there's justification for believing that something else, an immaterial mind or soul, is also involved.

I did a post some time ago on an article that sheds some very interesting light on this question, and I thought it might be worthwhile to post it again since it ties in with our class discussion. Here it is:

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has a fine piece at Plough.com in which he argues against the materialist view that we are simply material beings with no spiritual or mental remainder.

The materialist holds that everything about us that might be attributed to qualities like soul or mind are ultimately reducible to the physical structure of the material brain. Matter and the laws of physics can in principle explain everything.

The opening paragraphs of Egnor's essay call this view into serious question. He writes:

I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain – a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water.

Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little chance at a normal life.

She had a fraternal-twin sister in the incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had. I explained all of this to her family, trying to keep alive a flicker of hope for their daughter.

I cared for Katie as she grew up. At every stage of Katie’s life so far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister. She’s made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school.

I’ve had other patients whose brains fell far short of their minds. Maria had only two-thirds of a brain. She needed a couple of operations to drain fluid, but she thrives. She just finished her master’s degree in English literature, and is a published musician.

Jesse was born with a head shaped like a football and half-full of water – doctors told his mother to let him die at birth. She disobeyed. He is a normal happy middle-schooler, loves sports, and wears his hair long.

Some people with deficient brains are profoundly handicapped. But not all are. I’ve treated and cared for scores of kids who grow up with brains that are deficient but minds that thrive. How is this possible?

Well, if materialism is true it's hard to see how it could be possible, but if materialism is false then there might be an explanation that includes a soul or mind that's somehow integrated with the brain but which is nevertheless not ultimately explicable in terms of the material stuff that makes us up.

Egnor goes on in his essay to show that mental processes like thoughts and sensations cannot be reduced to physical structures and also to explain why the materialist denial of human free will is almost certainly wrong.

He offers the sorts of arguments that are making it very difficult nowadays to be a consistent materialist. Indeed, some materialists are finding it so difficult to explain phenomena like human consciousness solely in terms of the material brain that they've even taken to denying that consciousness exists, but this seems like madness. After all, doesn't one have to be conscious in order to think about whether consciousness exists?

Evidently, some philosophers will go to any lengths, no matter how bizarre, to avoid having to accept any idea that may lead to the existence of anything that's consistent with a theistic worldview.

Egnor concludes his column with this:

There is a part of Katie’s mind that is not her brain. She is more than that. She can reason and she can choose. There is a part of her that is immaterial.... There is a part of Katie that didn’t show up on those CAT scans when she was born.

Katie, like you and me, has a soul.

Secrets of the Cell (Pt. IV)

We've been posting the videos in the series titled Secrets of the Cell featuring biochemist Michael Behe. In this the fourth installment Behe argues that most evolution is not really progressive at all but actually regressive.

What often happens to produce change in an organism is that pre-existing genes are broken or blunted so that their function is lost. Despite this impairment, however, a survival advantage of some sort is still conferred on the organism.

This is exactly the opposite, though, of what occurs in the Darwinian model.

According to the regnant evolutionary theory, mutations in an organism's DNA actually produce new genes which in turn eventually produce new traits in the species. Starting with primitive molecules, accumulated mutations acted upon by natural selection have, over billions of years, produced every type of living thing we see on earth, including humans. Or so the theory goes.

The difference between the two views is quite significant. If most evolution is really devolution then the question arises as to the origin of the pre-existing genetic material. Where did it come from? Behe will tackle that question in future episodes, but for now this six minute video gives the viewer a good explanation of the process by which most genetic change actually occurs in a species.

To view previous episodes go here for part I, here for part II and here for part III.

Denying That We're Conscious

Philosopher Galen Strawson asks what the silliest claim ever made might be and concludes that the answer has to be the claim made by some philosophers that conscious experience is merely an illusion and doesn't "really" exist. In an interesting, albeit rather lengthy, piece at The New York Review of Books he calls this claim "The Denial."

A summary of the argument the contemporary Deniers make against conscious experience looks something like this:

1. Naturalism entails materialism which entails that all reality is reducible to matter.
2. Conscious experience cannot be reduced to matter.
3. Therefore, conscious experience isn't real.

Strawson is himself a naturalist and a materialist so he agrees with the first premise, but he insists that the second premise is just wrong. We know far too little about the brain, he argues, to assert that conscious experience can't be reduced to brain matter. His own argument, then, looks like this:

1. Naturalism is true and it entails that all reality is reducible to matter.
2. Conscious experience is real.
3. Therefore, conscious experience can be reduced to matter.

I completely agree with the second premise of this argument. Pace the Deniers, the premise can only be denied on pain of incoherence. I agree with Strawson that it seems folly to deny it. If it's an illusion that I'm in pain, for instance, then I'm still experiencing the sensation of pain via the illusion. Thus, even if I'm under the spell of an illusion I'm still having a conscious experience.

Nevertheless, the conclusion of this syllogism only follows if we know that the first premise is true. Strawson seems to beg the question by assuming it is, but that's just a metaphysical preference, a presupposition, an act of faith on his part. It could just as easily be false for all we know since he offers no argument for it.

Here's his own summary of his argument:

Naturalism states that everything that concretely exists is entirely natural; nothing supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. Given that we know that conscious experience exists, we must as naturalists suppose that it’s wholly natural. And given that we’re specifically materialist or physicalist naturalists (as almost all naturalists are), we must take it that conscious experience is wholly material or physical.

And so we should, because it’s beyond reasonable doubt that [our mental] experience...is wholly a matter of neural goings-on: wholly natural and wholly physical.

Strawson goes on to describe how other naturalist philosophers have come to deny the reality of conscious experience:

But then—in the middle of the twentieth century—something extraordinary happens. Members of a small but influential group of analytic philosophers come to think that true naturalistic materialism rules out realism about consciousness. They duly conclude that consciousness doesn’t exist.

They reach this conclusion in spite of the fact that conscious experience is a wholly natural phenomenon, whose existence is more certain than any other natural phenomenon, and with which we’re directly acquainted, at least in certain fundamental respects.

These philosophers thus endorse the Denial.

The problem is not that they take naturalism to entail materialism—they’re right to do so. The problem is that they endorse the claim that conscious experience can’t possibly be wholly physical. They think they know this, although genuine naturalism doesn’t warrant it in any way.

So they...claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, although many of them conceal this by using the word “consciousness” in a way that omits the central feature of consciousness—the qualia [i.e. our sensations of color, taste, fragrance, sound, pain, etc.]

Strawson and I agree, then, that qualia, and thus conscious experience, are real, but we disagree over his rejection of the claim that conscious experience cannot be completely reduced to material stuff. It seems to me that qualia are fundamentally different from matter, and it's exceptionally difficult to see how the experience of red, for instance, can be reduced to electrochemical phenomena in the brain.

As the late philosopher Jerry Fodor once said:

Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.

When we experience the sensation of color, or sweetness, or pain the immediate cause of that sensation is physical or material, but the sensation itself is not. A miniature scientist walking around inside someone's brain while the host is tasting sugar will only observe electrochemical reactions occuring in the neurons and synapses.

She'd see electrons whizzing about, chemicals interacting, and nerve fibers lighting up, perhaps, but however deeply she probed into the host's brain she wouldn't observe "sweetness" anywhere. Likewise, mutatis mutandis, with every other sensation her host might be experiencing.

So, I'd suggest a reformulation of the first syllogism:

1. Naturalism entails materialism which entails that all reality is reducible to matter.
2. Conscious experience probably cannot be reduced to matter.
3. Therefore, Naturalism is probably false.

This argument rests on the truth of the second premise, of course, a premise which Strawson denies. But he can't, or at least doesn't in his essay, give any reason for his denial of the premise other than his a priori conviction that Naturalism is true.

If, though, it's reasonable to think that the second premise is true, and a lot of philosophers, many metaphysical Naturalists among them, are convinced it is, then it's reasonable to believe the conclusion that Naturalism is probably false is true as well.

Secrets of the Cell (Pt. III)

Here's the third in biochemist Michael Behe's series of five minute videos titled Secrets of the Cell. In this episode Behe mentions how many of the structures found in living organisms are being studied for possible applications in our own technology.

Along the way he discusses a fascinating aspect of leafhopper anatomy. Leafhoppers are insects which possess the ability to jump enormous distances relative to their body size. This ability is facilitated by actual gears at the base of their jumping legs.

So how did these organisms develop these amazing machines? Was it purely by means of random genetic mutations and natural selection? Behe is apparently going to tackle those questions in the videos still to come, but for now this video serves as beautifully filmed prelude:

How to Prepare for the Worst-Case Scenario

If you're concerned about how to prepare in case the coronavirus turns out to warrant a national or regional lockdown, here are some measures recommended by an infectious disease epidemiologist named Katy Talento at The Federalist.

She opens her column with a discussion of some of what the Trump administration has already done, noting that political correctness is a poor weapon in the fight against spread of a pathogen.

She then cautions us that a "lockdown" is a possibility:

If this virus starts spreading unabated the way it is in other countries right now, one of the likely interventions that civil authorities would consider is a regional or even national lockdown. In this scenario, citizens would be “invited” to stay at home long enough to wait out a few incubation periods of the disease—probably between two to six weeks.

Governments would likely use curfews and transportation restrictions to starve the virus of new hosts through isolating people in smaller groups, with little contact between the groups.

What does this mean for you? It means that you should prepare to be at home for at least a few weeks. Unlike in most natural disasters, we can expect to have power and water, but non-essential activities and other gathering places will be shut down, including schools, coffee shops, non-emergency health-care facilities, churches, and gyms.

So how should we prepare to be confined to our homes for several weeks?

Obviously, it’s good to have a solid month’s food supply. That should include a number of electrolyte-balancing drinks, canned or frozen fruit and vegetables, and other healthy food mixed in with the Cheetos, in order to maintain strong immune function.

Stock up on pet food, cat litter, and for apartment-dwellers, pet soilage pads. Having enough heavy-duty trash bags will be as essential as a plan for how and where you will store trash securely without having to leave your home.

First aid and medical supplies will be important, as health-care facilities could very well be the most dangerous place for the uninfected, not to mention the aggravation and delay you’ll face of needing to explain to law enforcement why you’re on the streets. Best to handle as much medical mayhem as you can on your own.

Speaking of mayhem, businesses and homeowners should double-check their security systems and stock up on their self-defense instruments of choice, including ammo and firearm maintenance supplies. Don’t forget to get some practice time in at the range before a quarantine is enacted, if it’s been a while. There will always be those who try to take advantage of the situation to commit crimes.

People dependent on prescription drugs or other medical supplies, such as diabetes test strips or oxygen tanks, should talk to their physicians about getting extra refills prescribed. Physician offices may be on answering service-only status during a quarantine. Go through the hassle now rather than later with insurers and pharmacies to get those refills in hand, even though such stockpiling may not normally be covered.

If you can afford to do so, don’t hesitate to pay out of pocket to get an extra couple months’ supply.

Families should think through who will take care of Aunt Susie’s dog if Aunt Susie is sick, who will cook for Grandpa if Grandma falls ill, or how childcare will be handled if parents are sick or have to live at their essential job for a month. Families with loved ones in hospice care or nursing homes should talk to those care providers now about whether their plans are adequate. Don’t be afraid to pester if you’re not reassured by what you hear at first.

Apartment dwellers might wonder how they can avoid transmission of a respiratory disease when they share a communal ventilation system. For those in temperate climates, close your vents, and seal them off with duct tape and plastic wrap (or trash bags). Open your windows for fresh air instead.

Those who need their HVAC systems, try to seal off as many vents as you can, if you can sacrifice the use of some rooms. You might also consider duct-taping filmy or lightweight fabric over the vent so air can get through but droplets that might be carrying the virus have a greater chance of being captured on the fabric.

These are all excellent suggestions, but Talento has more:

Parents, don’t forget to stock up on indoor-activity supplies like coloring books, audiobooks, videos, academic, and recreational games. Check out these ideas at your taxpayer-funded public broadcasting site. And get some toys for Fido, too—pent-up canine energy is its own form of natural disaster for your shoes or furniture!

Essential personnel such as certain government officials, health-care workers, first responders, and utility workers won’t be able to stay home. Start talking now to your employers about how a month’s worth of staff might be housed on-site at these workplaces during a quarantine.

This will minimize the chaos of all these folks commuting each day, requiring a massive permitting operation to allow them on the road, and risking many more contacts among them than would otherwise occur if they slept where they worked.

She has a bit more to say about the administration's handling of this so far - she's very supportive - and then she concludes with this:

In the meantime, as the saying goes, we should pray like it all depends on God and prepare like it all depends on us.

This all assumes, of course, that this virus turns out to be extremely deadly, but indications so far seem to indicate that it's a serious threat only to those with compromised immune systems - the elderly, diabetics, heavy smokers, etc. There are many people, apparently, who have the virus but experience only mild symptoms and do not show up on the CDC data sheets.

If that's true then the fatality rate for this disease is lower than has been projected, but as Talento suggests, it's wise to prepare now rather than wait until we discover that the virus is more virulent than we had thought.

Totalitarian Democracy

In a speech last Wednesday (2/26/20) at the convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, Attorney General William Barr offered an insightful analysis of our current ideological divisions.

He said much that's worth contemplating, but one passage was particularly well-crafted. In it Mr. Barr critiques our slide toward statism, or what he calls totalitarian democracy.

Here's the passage:

Under our system of liberal democracy, the role of government is not to forcibly remake man and society. The government has the far more modest purpose of preserving the proper balance of personal freedom and order necessary for a healthy civil society to develop and individual humans to flourish.

But just as our robust vision of liberal democracy came to fruition in 1789, another conflicting vision was taking shape. This has been referred to as “totalitarian democracy.” Its prophet was Rousseau, and its first fruit was the French Revolution. In the two centuries since, totalitarian democratic movements of both the right and the left have appeared.

Totalitarian democracy is based on the idea that man is naturally good, but has been corrupted by existing societal customs, conventions, and institutions. The path to perfection is to tear down these artifices and restore human society to its natural condition.

This form of democracy is messianic in that it postulates a preordained, perfect scheme of things to which men will be inexorably led. Its goals are earthly and they are urgent. Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals.

Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection. The virtue of any individual is defined by whether they are aligned with the program. Whatever means used are justified because, by definition, they will quicken the pace of mankind’s progress toward perfection.

As one political scientist has noted, while liberal democracy conceives of people relating on many different planes of existence, “totalitarian democracy recognizes only one plane of existence, the political.” All is subsumed within a single project to use the power of the state to perfect mankind rather than limit the state to protecting our freedom to find our own ends. It is increasingly, as Mussolini memorably said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

While many factors have contributed to the polarized politics of today, I think one significant reason our politics has become so intense and so ill-tempered is that some in the so-called “progressive” movement have broken away from the fold of liberal democracy to pursue a society more in line with the thinking of Rousseau than that of our nation’s Founders. That has played a major role in our politics becoming less like a disagreement within a family, and more like a blood feud between two different clans.

Over the past few decades, those further to the left have increasingly identified themselves as “progressives” rather than “liberals.” And some of these self-proclaimed “progressives” have become increasingly militant and totalitarian in their style. While they seek power through the democratic process, their policy agenda has become more aggressively collectivist, socialist, and explicitly revolutionary.

The crux of the progressive program is to use the public purse to provide ever-increasing benefits to the public and to, thereby, build a permanent constituency of supporters who are also dependents. They want able-bodied citizens to become more dependent, subject to greater control, and increasingly supportive of dependency. The tacit goal of this project is to convert all of us into 25 year-olds living in the government’s basement, focusing our energies on obtaining a larger allowance rather than getting a job and moving out.

That last sentence is a classic.

Democrats' Dilemma

I remember sitting in a high school faculty lounge in the spring of 1990 with a half dozen colleagues, including a foreign exchange teacher from Europe who asked us if someone could explain to him how our primary system for choosing presidential nominees worked. Nobody could. It's such a confusing, labyrinthine procedure that it seems one needs to be a political scientist to understand it.

The Democrats have saddled their voters this year with an even more arcane and convoluted system than existed thirty years ago, a process that, one could plausibly argue, should all by itself disqualify them from running the country.

The Cliff Notes version of the process is this: A candidate needs to garner in the state primaries 51% of the total pledged delegates, some 3979 delegates, to win the nomination on the first ballot at the convention this summer. If no candidate has that number (1990 delegates) after the first round of balloting then there'll be a second ballot on which delegates are then freed to vote for whomever they wish. Plus, there are "superdelegates" (party officials, office-holders, donors, etc.) of whom there are 771, who can also vote on a second ballot.

The number of votes needed to win the nomination on the second ballot is 2376 out of 4750 (3979 + 771).

It's all much more complicated than that, but the byzantine rules aside, the Democrats may also find themselves facing an agonizing dilemma this summer and fall.

Many delegates who'll be pledged to Senator Sanders won't actually want Sanders to be the nominee, and neither will many of the superdelegates. He's far too radical, even for the Democrat party which, in its current instantiation, is the most radical major party in modern American history.

If Sanders goes to Milwaukee in July with the most delegates but doesn't have the requisite 1990, many of his pledged delegates may defect to other candidates on the second round, and it's almost certain that many of the superdelegates will also support other candidates.

Consequently, the self-acknowledged socialist could be denied the nomination.

Now, here's the dilemma: Either Sanders gets the nomination or he doesn't. If he does he'll have a very difficult time raising money, he'll also have a very difficult time, barring unforeseen developments, beating Donald Trump in November, and his presence at the top of the ticket in the Fall could cost Democrats lots of offices further down the ballot.

On the other hand, if he's denied the nomination even though he had more delegates than anyone else on the first ballot, either he or his followers, or both, will likely walk out of the convention and sit out the election, which would split the party and probably result in an electoral disaster.

The question that is plaguing the Democrat party leaders, then, is how do they keep Bernie from getting the nomination while at the same time persuading him not to bolt at the convention?

They're probably hoping that former Vice-President Joe Biden wins today's primary in South Carolina (54 pledged delegates) and has a great showing on Tuesday when 1357 of the 3979 pledged delegates and about 260 superdelegates are up for grabs. If Biden can legitimately amass the 1990 delegates needed to win on the first ballot at the convention, Bernie won't have much of a complaint, and the party will breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Of course, if Biden, prone as he is to mental lapses and seemingly lacking any real passion for campaigning, is the party's nominee, that'll cause party leaders a whole other set of headaches.

What Exactly Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain.

But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face."

But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face? Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us. Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of consciousness. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Some Thoughts on Our Current Politics

Here's a sampling of the thoughts that occurred to me as I read the news over the last couple of months:

• Democrats are loath to credit President Trump's policies for the historically good economy Americans are currently enjoying and are trying to make the argument that President Obama actually created the conditions for the current economic boom. Very well, but if the economy was recovering under Obama: 1) Specifically which of his policies was responsible for the recovery, and 2) Why, when Trump undid most of Obama's policies, didn't the economy tank? Why did it instead skyrocket?


• Democrats have for years complained about "big money" in politics and have been very critical of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, but now that plutocrats Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are spending fortunes to unseat Trump, the only Democrats complaining about big money are the candidates that are running against those billionaires in the primaries.


• Speaker Nancy Pelosi justified ripping up the president's State of the Union speech on national television by alleging that the speech was all "mistruths." What, precisely, were the inaccuracies in the speech that warranted her display of incivility and contempt for the president? I could certainly have missed it, but I've yet to hear what those alleged mistruths were.


• The New York Times printed a story that the Russians are trying to influence the 2020 election in favor of Trump, a story which, from the outset, defied common sense. Why would the Russians want a man re-elected who has imposed hurtful sanctions on them and stymied their ambitions in Ukraine and Syria rather than a man, Bernie Sanders, who is himself either a communist or the next thing to it, and who was so deeply fond of the old U.S.S.R. that he spent his honeymoon in Moscow?


• The media has made much of the fact that Hispanics in Nevada turned out big for Bernie in the primary last week, but it puzzles me as to why they would have. Many of those Hispanic voters are either immigrants themselves or children or grandchildren of immigrants. Where did they immigrate from? For the most part they fled countries which have adopted the same policies that Bernie is promising to impose on us. These people fled from failed socialist states riven by the sort of corruption and crime that typically plagues socialist countries. They fled here to escape it all, and then they vote for a guy who praises the leaders, and who passionately advocates the same economic ideology, of the states those immigrants found intolerable?
  
  This may make sense to somebody, but I confess I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

Emergentism

One attempt to explain how an immaterial substance like mind could be produced by the purely physical substances that comprise the brain is called emergentism. On this view, when matter of the appropriate types is present in the appropriate complexity and order mind appears much in the same way that "wetness" appears when hydrogen and oxygen molecules combine in the appropriate ratios.

There's nothing inherent in either hydrogen or oxygen that exhibits the property of "wetness," but "wetness" nevertheless emerges from the combination of these two elements, thus wetness is ultimately reducible to material substance. Likewise, materialists argue, mind is not a separate and distinct substance from matter but emerges from it and is ultimately reducible to it.

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor has argued vigorously against this reductionist, materialist view of mind and shares some thoughts on emergentism in this short extract from an interview with Robert Marks at Mind Matters:

Robert Marks: Wouldn’t a materialist ideology require that the mind be an emergent property of the brain?

Michael Egnor: Well, it might even limit us with respect to the idea of emergence. That is, materialism would only be completely consistent with an emergent perspective if the emergent thing was material. That is, if some kind of immaterial soul emerged from brain activity, then that wouldn’t even be a materialist view.

In other words, emergentism is problematic for the materialist because it still allows for the existence of an immaterial soul or mind, however it is produced, which fits very awkwardly in a materialist ontology.

This is a serious problem with emergentism. The H2O molecule is material and wetness is a material property, but this is not analogous to brain and mind. Brains are material but minds are not:

Michael Egnor: [Emergentism] basically doesn’t do any lifting. It’s essentially the invocation of magic. And there are two very serious problems with the concept of emergence in philosophy of mind.

There are emergent properties that are accepted. A classic example is the wetness of water. It’s emergent in the sense that if one studies water rigorously from the standpoint of physics, there’s nothing about it that is particularly wet.

You can study the quantum mechanical attributes of oxygen and hydrogen and all the chemistry and physics of water and not come out of that with anything that suggests that it’s wet. But when you put real water in front of you and dip your finger in it, it’s kind of wet. So people say that wetness is an emergent property of water.

The thing is, with the philosophy of mind, if the mind is an emergent property of the brain, it is ontologically completely different. That is, there are no properties of the mind that have any overlap with the properties of brain. Thought and matter are not similar in any way. Matter has extension in space and mass; thoughts have no extension in space and no mass. Thoughts have emotional states; matter doesn’t have emotional states, just matter.

So it’s not clear that you can get an emergent property when there is no connection whatsoever between that property and the thing it supposedly emerges from.

Egnor adds a second difficulty, which, unfortunately, is less clear:

The other problem with emergence is even more fundamental: When you think about the wetness of water as an emergent property of water, you are really talking about a psychological state. That is, you are saying, psychologically you didn’t expect water to feel wet but by golly, it does. So that’s emergent. But you can’t explain the psychological state [of perceiving wetness] itself as emergent.

He seems to be making the point here that wetness is really the way our senses interpret our experience of water, but the ability to produce the sensation, as well as the sensation itself (like the sensations of color, sound, fragrance, etc.) is not a phenomenon of which matter is capable.

How, after all, do electrochemical processes in the material brain produce the sensation of blue? Where in the brain is the blue? If a microscopically tiny scientist were inserted into the brain and traveled around in it, would he see the brain light up blue, or feel wetness in the brain anywhere?

It's hard to see how matter, acting solely by itself, could create sensations, and it's hard to see how emergentism helps us understand it any better.

Secrets of the Cell (Pt. II)

In Part II of Michael Behe's series titled "Secrets of the Cell," the Lehigh University biochemist explains the concept of Irreducible Complexity, a phenomenon for which it's very difficult to give a plausible explanation in terms of blind, purposeless physical processes like genetic mutation, genetic drift and natural selection.

The video is five minutes long. Part I of the series can be found here.

If purely physical processes are inadequate to explain structures like the bacterial flagellum, then the worldview of naturalism, the chief supporting pillar of which is Darwinian evolution, is in very serious trouble.

If irreducible complexity cannot be plausibly explained as a result of natural processes and forces then the case for the existence and creative agency of a supernatural intelligence is made considerably stronger.

The Political Spectrum

The election season is once again heating up so to help readers understand some of the terminology that's being thrown around, I thought it might be helpful to rerun the following post. It's one that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and it explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we roll deeper into the campaign season readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform the beliefs one holds about social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed in the previous paragraph denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quarrel, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian writer, and Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson are popular libertarian commentators.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to be economic libertarians, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government in social affairs. Conservatives share with libertarians a strong emphasis on preserving the Constitution and upon devolving governmental authority from the central, federal government back to the states and localities.

They place more importance than do libertarians on preserving traditional values and are reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Like libertarians, conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. They also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is perhaps the most well-known contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley was a popular conservative thinker/writer, and Rush Limbaugh is a popular conservative commentator.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those constraints. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Bill Clinton was an example of a liberal politician as are current Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent, or even hostile, to traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives as are current candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the last presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are examples of contemporary socialists and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically, fascism is thought to be an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that although fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics. Paradoxically, Antifa, which purports to be an anti-fascist organization, employs fascist tactics in their activism.

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it doesn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today though throughout much of the twentieth century the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation. Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, communists.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading in the runup to the election this November.