Justice and Critical Theory, Pt. I

What are we to understand by the term "social justice"? How can we seek to achieve it until we can define it, and whose definition of justice are we tacitly adopting when we talk about social justice?

Tim Keller has written an interesting essay on justice in which, leaning heavily on the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, he notes that there are at least four ways to look at the term. He illustrates them with this diagram:

Activists on the progressive left usually think of justice as defined by postmodern critical theory in which, following the thinking of Karl Marx, society subverts the power of dominant groups in favor of the oppressed. Keller writes that this view of justice has at least six main elements.

To understand why people today often talk past each other, if they talk to each other at all, it's helpful to understand that these six elements are widely accepted among people on the left and they determine how they see the world. Here's Keller's description:

First, the explanation of all unequal outcomes in wealth, well being, and power is never due to individual actions or to differences in cultures or to differences in human abilities, but only and strictly due to unjust social structures and systems. The only way to fix unequal outcomes for the downtrodden is through social policy, never by asking anyone to change their behavior or culture.

Second, all art, religion, philosophy, morality, law, media, politics, education and forms of the family are determined not by reason or truth but by social forces as well. Everything is determined by your class consciousness and social location. Religious doctrine, together with all politics and law are always, at bottom, a way for people to get or maintain social status, wealth, and therefore power over others.

Third, therefore, reality is at bottom nothing but power. And if that is the case, then to see reality, power must be mapped through the means of “intersectionality.” The intersectionality categories are race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity (and sometimes others). If you are white, male, straight, cisgender then you have the highest amount of power. If you are none of these at all, you are the most marginalized and oppressed–and there are numerous categories in the middle.

Most importantly, each category toward the powerless end of the spectrum has a greater moral authority and a greater ability to see the way truly things are. Only powerlessness and oppression brings moral high ground and true knowledge. Therefore those with more privilege must not enter into any debate—they have no right or ability to advise the oppressed, blinded as they are by their social location. They simply must give up their power.

Fourth, the main way power is exercised is through language—through “dominant discourses.” A dominant discourse is any truth-claim, whether grounded in supposed reason and science or in religion and morality. Language does not merely describe reality—it constructs or creates it. Power structures mask themselves behind the language of rationality and truth. So academia hides its unjust structures behind talk of “academic freedom,” and corporations behind talk of “free enterprise,” science behind talk of “empirical objectivity”, and religion behind talk of “divine truth.”

All of these seeming truth-claims are really just constructed narratives designed to dominate and, as such, they must be unmasked. Reasoned debate and “freedom of speech” therefore is out—it only gives unjust discourses airtime. The only way to reconstruct reality in a just way is to subvert dominant discourses—and this requires control of speech.

Fifth, cultures, like persons, can be mapped through intersectionality. In one sense no culture is better in any regard from any other culture. All cultures are equally valid. But people who see their cultures as better, and judge other cultures as inferior or even people who see their own culture as “normal” and judge other cultures as “exotic”, are members of an oppressive culture. And oppressive cultures are (though this word is not used) inferior—and to be despised.

Finally, neither individual rights nor individual identity are primary. Traditional liberal emphasis on individual human rights (private property, free speech) is an obstacle to the radical changes society will need to undergo in order to share wealth and power. And it is an illusion to think that, as an individual, you can carve out an identity in any way different or independent of others in your race, ethnicity, gender, and so on.

Group identity and rights are the only real ones. Guilt is not assigned on the basis of individual actions but on the basis of group membership and social/racial status.

According to critical theory, then, a just society is one in which these thought forms dominate the thinking of the masses and are reflected in the institutions of the culture.

If you're not accustomed to thinking along these channels then you're probably not very progressive, but it's good to understand how so many of the more vocal people in our society do think. These are, after all, certainly the thought forms of many of those who have taken to the streets of our cities to protest and/or riot in recent weeks.

Keller goes on to offer a seven point critique of critical theory. We'll discuss two of his criticisms in tomorrow's post.

What Gives Life Meaning?

A one minute excerpt from a discussion between Tucker Carlson and author Eric Metaxas dovetails so nicely with what my students and I will be talking about in class next week that I thought I'd share it.

The topic of their conversation was why Americans aren't having more children, and the whole six minute segment is worth watching, but at the 1:50 mark Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life [if people don't want to have children and families]? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?”

Metaxas' answer is, I think, exactly right:

Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it.

But what we do is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”

In other words, given the lurch toward metaphysical naturalism in the Western world, there's really no reason to think it's wrong to just live for oneself, to put one's own interests first, to seek to squeeze as much personal enjoyment out of this otherwise pointless existence as possible before we die.

Carlson responds to Metaxas' analysis with this,

But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it to Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.

True enough, but when they're alive and in the full bloom of life people often do think that the more things they can accumulate, the more sights they can see, the more pleasure they can experience the more meaningful their life will be. Carlson says that they're believing a lie.

Here's the video of the exchange:

Metaxas is, of course, not the first person to say what he says here. Philosophers have been making this same observation about the emptiness of modern life for decades. Two twentieth century French thinkers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, serve as examples.

Sartre wrote that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal," and Camus declared that, "...for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

If that's the way things are, multitudes of moderns have concluded, then why not just live for oneself and make the best of a bad situation. What sense does it make, they reason, to sacrifice the only life we have for other people, for kids and a family.

Their conviction is that matters is personal prosperity, power and pleasure and anything that interferes with the acquisition of those is best avoided.

Kamala Harris, Sarah Palin and Progressive Hypocrisy

Women's groups are preparing to counter what they think will be the inevitable sexist slurs and racial epithets that'll be directed at Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's choice to be his running mate. I wonder how many genuine slurs and epithets Harris will actually have to endure. Compared to, say, what Sarah Palin experienced I suspect Harris won't have much to bear on the matter of insults.

I wonder where these women's groups were when Palin was selected by John McCain as his running mate against Barack Obama in 2008 and was subjected by the progressive left to the most vile and vicious assault ever bestowed on a woman in politics.

Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson recounts the history of Sarah Palin's ordeal, and it's worth reading for anyone concerned that Kamala Harris might be called a naughty name by some internet troll.

What ensued after Palin's selection, Davidson writes,

was the greatest persecution of an American political figure in modern times. Palin, a mother of five who had recently given birth to a baby boy prenatally diagnosed with Down's Syndrome, became an object of hate for the media. Nothing has come close in its ugliness, its mendacity, its complete lack of restraint and, given Palin’s status as the second woman ever to appear on a major-party presidential ticket, the abject hypocrisy of a media establishment that purports to champion women’s rights and equality.

Here's a partial list of the insults that were directed at Palin:

She has been called a ‘freak show,’ a ‘joke,’ an ‘extreme liability,’ a ‘turncoat b*tch,’ an ‘insult,’ a ‘fire-breather,’ ‘xenophobic,’ a ‘sitcom of a vice-presidential choice,’ a ‘disaster movie,’ a ‘shallow’ person, ‘chirpy,’ a ‘provincial,’ a ‘disgrace to women’ who was ‘as fake as they come,’ a ‘nauseating,’ ‘cocky wacko,’ a ‘jack in the box,’ ‘Napoleon in bunny boots,’ ‘extreme,’ ‘radical,’ a ‘vessel,’ a ‘farce,’ ‘Bush in drag,’ ‘not very bright,’ ‘utterly unqualified,’ a ‘bimbo,’ ‘Danielle Quayle,’ the ‘new spokesperson for bellicosity and confrontation,’ a ‘fatal cancer,’ ‘like a really bad Disney movie,’ ‘laughable,’ an ‘odd combination of Chauncey Gardiner from Being There and Marge from Fargo,’ ‘dangerous,’ a ‘bully,’ the ‘biggest demagogue in America,’ the ‘Paleolithic Princess of Parsimonious Patriotism,’ the ‘anti-Wonder Woman,’ ‘judgmental’… ‘dictatorial’ with a ‘superior religious self-righteousness,’ a ‘racist’ who was ‘absurd,’ ‘scary,’ and a ‘token,’ a ‘bantamweight cheerleader,’ an ‘airhead,’ an ‘idiot,’ a ‘librarian in a porn film,’ a ‘Jesus freak,’ a ‘man with a vagina’… a ‘Drama Queen,’ a ‘Republican blow-up doll’ who ‘ideologically’ is ‘their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread,’ an ‘opportunistic anti-female,’ a ‘true Stepford candidate, a cyborg,’ a ‘quitter,’ and—this list is by no means exhaustive—a ‘bonbon.’

And these don't include the sundry obscene epithets to which she was subjected. Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic concocted a bizarre theory about Palin's Down syndrome child:

Sullivan, with the blessing of his editors at The Atlantic, descended to depths rarely seen in American political journalism: he helped hatch and then relentlessly pursued a sleazy conspiracy theory that Palin’s infant son with Down's Syndrome, Trig, was not her own, that he was really her teenage daughter’s, that the public presentation of Trig as Palin’s son was an elaborate political ruse, and that Sullivan could prove it by analyzing photos of a pregnant Palin and applying his apparently newfound expertise in obstetrics.

Sullivan "repeatedly demanded that Palin’s doctors release medical records proving she gave birth to her son, Trig." The same media that waxed apoplectic at the suggestion that Barack Obama may not have been born in America both approved of, and heartily participated in, the vile attempt to destroy Sarah Palin. One writer, Joe McGinnis, even went to Alaska and rented a house next door to Palin so he could spy on her for a book he was writing to try to ruin her politically and personally.

The progressive media, Davidson avers, has sown the wind and will reap the whirlwind. He concludes with this:

Now they come forward under the guise of calling out sexism in politics with a thinly-veiled attempt to preempt all legitimate criticism of Harris. It won’t work. Republicans and conservative media are not likely to treat Harris the way Palin was treated, but when Democrats and the media inevitably cry out that Trump is being sexist, that conservatives are being unfair, and that in retrospect they regret how they treated Palin, no one will be able to hear them above the whirlwind.

Davidson is correct. Everytime the media responds to some criticism of Harris with allegations of sexism or unfair treatment of a "woman of color" the response should be, "Do you remember Sarah Palin? Do you remember what you and your colleagues said and did to her?" Nothing that will be said about Harris will be anything near as revolting and as cruel as what was said about Sarah Palin and her family by progressive Democrats.

Davidson has more at the link, including mention of a classy congratulatory note to Harris Palin posted on Instagram. Indeed, Palin has more class than do many of her erstwhile critics.

How Modern Culture Dehumanizes Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As with sex, so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent. Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it. When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males along the bell curve undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling more men onto the other side of the line than would have been there otherwise.

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

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

Fire-Maker

It's easy to take things for granted as we go through our everyday lives, but when we stop and think about some of those things it can just take our breath away.

Consider, for example, fire. When we reflect upon all the things about earth that have to be just right for fire to exist and then think about all the physical characteristics of an animal that have to be just right for that animal to be able to use fire, and then contemplate 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 just leaves one shaking his head in amazement.

In this 21 minute video Australian geneticist Michael Denton walks us through the astonishing series of properties and characteristics of the earth, fire, and mankind that have to be precisely calibrated in order for humans to have developed the culture that we have today. Had any of those properties been other than what they are humans might never have survived at all, much less developed an advanced culture.

Someone hearing all this for the first time might well be astounded by the fortuity of it all.

The book on which the video is based is available here.

The Miracle of Metamorphosis

One of the most breath-taking feats of nature, a feat that occurs everyday in flower gardens in almost every neighborhood, is the metamorphosis of an egg to a caterpillar to a butterfly. It's an astonishing transformation, and it's remarkable that some people can go through their entire lives without giving it a second thought.

As you watch the beautifully filmed eleven minute video below, ask yourself how this process could have ever developed through undirected mechanisms like blind chance and fortuitous mutations. You might ask, too, why such a process would have ever occurred. After all, it certainly wasn't necessary for the caterpillar's survival, and, indeed, any chance development of any of the events that occur in metamorphosis would've been fatal to the insect unless the whole process was already in place.

And one more point to ponder: Why and how did the exquisitely beautiful patterns of butterfly wings evolve from a mindless series of random events?

It takes an extraordinarily tenacious commitment to a naturalistic worldview and an abundant supply of blind faith in the power of random chance to produce the astonishing organization of parts and the choreography of steps that occur in the transition from caterpillar to butterfly to insist that, however this all arose, intelligent agency played no role in the process.

Some Scientists Are Beginning to Sound a Lot Like Creationists

An article by Michael Marshall at New Scientist discusses theories about how the first life originated (abiogenesis). His article is behind a paywall, but his lede sounds very much like what creationists have been telling us now for decades, although I'm sure both he and the scientists he mentions would be aghast at that suggestion.

Here's his opening:

When Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile ball of rock, slammed by meteorites and carpeted with erupting volcanoes. Within a billion years, it had become inhabited by microorganisms. Today, life covers every centimetre of the planet, from the highest mountains to the deepest sea. Yet, every other planet in the solar system seems lifeless. What happened on our young planet? How did its barren rocks, sands and chemicals give rise to life?

Many ideas have been proposed to explain how it began. Most are based on the assumption that cells are too complex to have formed all at once, so life must have started with just one component that survived and somehow created the others around it. When put into practice in the lab, however, these ideas don’t produce anything particularly lifelike. It is, some researchers are starting to realise, like trying to build a car by making a chassis and hoping wheels and an engine will spontaneously appear.

The alternative – that life emerged fully formed – seems even more unlikely. Yet perhaps astoundingly, two lines of evidence are converging to suggest that this is exactly what happened. It turns out that all the key molecules of life can form from the same simple carbon-based chemistry. What’s more, they easily combine to make startlingly lifelike “protocells”. As well as explaining how life began, this “everything-first” idea of life’s origins also has implications for where it got started – and the most likely locations for extraterrestrial life, too.

With due respect to these researchers, the probabilities of life arising solely by chance either gradually or especially spontaneously are so daunting, so miraculous, that it requires an enormous exertion of blind faith to believe that it happened. To have a "living" cell there must not only be a container for the cellular organelles, there must be a functioning metabolism, and most difficult of all a functioning genetic system that is able to create proteins as well as replicate itself and the cell.

It is astronomically improbable that each of these formed themselves by chance independently and spontaneously, much less that they all formed themselves simultaneously and at the same location (see the eleven minute video below).

Yet if one is a naturalist there's apparently no limit to the amount of credulity one is able to muster to maintain belief in undirected nature's ability to perform such miracles.

On the other hand, intelligent agents perform complex feats of creation every day, feats that chance would find impossible to achieve in trillions of years. Unfortunately, there's no room in a naturalist ontology for an intelligent agent to have been active in the creation of life, so, it's amusing that some origin or life researchers are coming around to the view that life was indeed created in a burst, just like creationists have always said, but that no Creator was involved.

The idea of a spontaneous origin of life calls to mind the much-quoted conclusion of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow, an agnostic astronomer, famously wrote:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Bet You Didn't Know This

It's almost certain you didn't know this if you get your news from CNN, MSNBC, or the New York Times.

Charles Fain Lehman at The Washington Free Beacon reports that Gallup polls show that over 80% of black Americans want the police to spend as much or more time in their neighborhoods as they currently do.

Asked if they would prefer police spend more, less, or the same amount of time in their neighborhoods, 61 percent of black respondents told Gallup the same, while a further 20 percent said more. Just 19 percent said less. Black respondents were more likely to want more police presence than white, Asian, and all adults overall.

The overwhelming support for current levels of policing even holds among black respondents who say they see the police often or very often. Two in three of those say they would like to see the police the same amount or more; 84 percent of black respondents who see the police "sometimes" responded that way, along with 92 percent of those who see the police rarely or never.

This is not at all consonant with what we've been hearing on progressive media outlets where the movement to defund or abolish the police has been getting a lot of airtime. Lehman reports that large majorities of Americans report trusting their local police departments and even in Minneapolis they oppose efforts to defund their police despite the views expressed by the majority white city council.

This is perhaps why Democrats, including Joe Biden, have muted their calls for defunding the police in recent days. They suddenly realized, it seems, that they were mistaken to think that parroting the demands of Black Lives Matter would ingratiate them with the black community.

There appears to be among blacks, just as among whites, a silent majority, and the silent majority of blacks is apparently wiser than the Democrats have given them credit for being.

Precedent for Filling a SCOTUS Vacancy

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 87 and suffering from a series of maladies, most recently a recurrence of cancer. There's talk that she may have to retire although she herself vows to soldier on. Nevertheless, should she be unable to perform her duties and decide to retire before the November election the Republican leadership in the White House and Senate has promised to fill her seat expeditiously.

Democrats have complained that this would be hypocritical since when Antonin Scalia died before the 2016 election and Barack Obama sought to appoint Merrick Garland, the Republican Senate refused to move on his nomination, effectively killing it. Even a few Republicans think it would be wrong to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court this close to an election.

Dan Mclaughlin at National Review vigorously disagrees. He opens his piece with these words:

Given the vital importance of the Court to rank-and-file Republican voters and grassroots activists, particularly in the five-decade-long quest to overturn Roe v. Wade, it would be political suicide for Republicans to refrain from filling a vacancy unless some law or important traditional norm was against them. There is no such law and no such norm; those are all on their side.

Choosing not to fill a vacancy would be a historically unprecedented act of unilateral disarmament. It has never happened once in all of American history. There is no chance that the Democrats, in the same position, would ever reciprocate, as their own history illustrates.

...throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lame-duck session after the election, even after defeat.

Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic. Republicans should not create a brand-new precedent to deviate from them.

President Trump is not only on solid legal ground, but also has precedent on his side in sending up a nominee as long as he's in office, even if he's a lame-duck after November:

Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it.

Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate.

So, today, Donald Trump has the raw power to make a Supreme Court nomination all the way to the end of his term. Senate Republicans have the raw power to confirm one at least until a new Senate is seated on January 3, and — so long as there are at least fifty Republican Senators on that date — until Trump leaves office.

But should the Republican Senate use their legal power to seat a nominee the president sends them at this stage of Trump's presidency? Democrats argue that the Republican Senate refused to seat Merrick Garland before the 2016 election, and that it would be hypocritical of them to now seat a Trump nominee, but McLaughlan points out that the two situations are very different. In the case of Garland the presidency and the Senate were split with the former belonging to the Democrats and the latter to the Republicans. At present both belong to the Republicans.

Nineteen times between 1796 and 1968, presidents have sought to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year while their party controlled the Senate. Ten of those nominations came before the election; nine of the ten were successful, the only failure being the bipartisan filibuster of the ethically challenged Abe Fortas as Chief Justice in 1968.

So, if a vacancy should occur, the Republicans have the right, both legally and in terms of precedent, to confirm Mr. Trump's nomination. Indeed, were the roles reversed the Democrats would certainly confirm a nominee sent them by a president of their own party regardless of when the vacancy occurred. For the Republicans to decline to do likewise would be a case of gross political malpractice that would alienate their voters for a generation.

McLaughlin has much more detail in his article, and interested readers are urged to check it out.

Millions Owe Their Existence to the Atomic Bomb

As I write this (August 6th) it is the 75th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, Japan with an atomic (or fission) bomb. John C. Hopkins has a very interesting and informative column on the bombing at the Wall Street Journal, but unfortunately it's behind a paywall. Nevertheless, I'd like to share some of what Mr. Hopkins, a nuclear physicist, writes.

He notes that the death toll of the two attacks (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in August of 1945, was horrific - somewhere between 129,000 and 226,000 men, women and children, but that, even so, it actually saved millions of lives.

The reason is that had the Japanese not been forced to surrender an invasion would eventually have been undertaken which, it was estimated, would cost the lives of 400,000 to 800,000 Allied troops and between five to ten million Japanese. The Japanese authorities had mobilized almost their entire society to fight to the death, and would have lost millions in the ensuing resistance to the invasion.

Had the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not induced the Japanese leadership to surrender, the war would've dragged on for at least another year and a half, which would've allowed time for the Soviet Union to invade the northern part of the country. A Soviet invasion would most likely have led to a partitioned Japan with a communist North and a free South. Vast numbers of Japanese would've found themselves living under a communist tyranny much as did the citizens of Eastern Europe.

Moreover, Japan faced a major famine shortly after the war that was partly mitigated by humanitarian shipments of more than 800,000 tons of food provided by the U.S. Had the bomb not been used the Allied invasion, the famine and the seizure of much of the country by the U.S.S.R. would've all occurred about the same time. The misery imposed on the Japanese people would've been catastrophic, far more catastrophic, even, than the devastation wrought by the bomb.

Although Hopkins doesn't mention it in his article, there's another incidental point that might be made about all this. Had the war continued into 1947 few military personnel would've been discharged before it was over. This means that almost none of those contemporary Americans who had a father, grandfather or great grandfather in the service during WWII would have been conceived. There are millions of Americans alive today who never would've been born had their ancestor not been discharged from the service when they were, setting them free to marry and start a family.

In other words, whether you think dropping the nuclear bomb was right or wrong, millions of Americans are alive today because President Harry Truman made the decision to drop the bomb on Japan in August 1945. If you're one of these individuals you might say that you owe your existence to the atomic bomb.

The Atheist's Conundrum

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent poses an interesting set of questions via an imaginary dialogue between a theist and an evolutionary materialist (atheist):

Theist: You say there is no God.
EM: Yes.
Theist: Yet belief in God among many (if not most) humans persists.
EM: I cannot deny that.
Theist: How do you explain that?
EM: Religious belief is an evolutionary adaption.
Theist: But you say religious belief is false.
EM: That’s correct.
Theist: Let me get this straight. According to you, religious belief has at least two characteristics: (1) it is false; and (2) evolution selected for it.
EM[looking a little pale now, because he’s just figured out where this is going]: Correct.
Theist: You believe the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis [NDS] is true.
EM: Of course.
Theist: How do you know your belief in NDS is not another false belief that evolution has selected for?
EM: ___________________
Our materialist friends are invited to fill in the blank.

This is the point that philosopher Alvin Plantinga has been making for the last twenty years or so. If the cognitive faculties we currently possess have evolved so as to make human beings better suited for survival back in the stone age what grounds do we have for thinking that those faculties reliably lead to truth, especially truth about metaphysical beliefs like a belief in naturalism?

Consider an example: Suppose in some prehistoric society a belief arises that the more children one has the more richly they'll be rewarded in the afterlife. Suppose, too, that our doxastic inclinations are produced by our genes which are themselves the result of natural selection. If so, people who possess the genes for this belief are likely to have many more children, on average, than those who don't have those genes, and the genes that dispose toward the belief will spread rapidly through the population even though the belief is false.

In other words, evolution favors beliefs which have survival value, not necessarily truth value. If we believe ourselves to be solely the products of a natural process like evolution the most we can say about our beliefs about things like atheism and theism is that they must have survival value or they wouldn't have persisted.

A purposeless process like evolution which is geared to promoting survival is indifferent to the actual truth of beliefs. It's only attuned to their utility.

That being so, why should an atheist have any confidence that his reason is a reliable guide to truth? Indeed, the paradox for the atheist is that if atheism is true he can have no confidence that it is. His belief that it's true is the product of cognitive faculties shaped for survival, not for truth.

It's only the theist who believes that God designed humankind's cognitive faculties to lead to truth who can have any confidence that those faculties are in fact reliable.

Why Is the Universe So Mathematical?

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. It would indeed be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathphobic students may wince at a statement like this, but it gets worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises. In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

Has it Ever Worked Anywhere?

Polls show younger voters to be sympathetic to what is often called "Democratic Socialism" which is why socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are popular among the young. 

Conservatives tirelessly point out, though, that socialism has never worked well anywhere and usually makes the middle class poor and the poorer classes even poorer. In fact, socialism is often a disaster as we've seen in countries like Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba. 

Progressives often counter this argument by declaring that those countries have misapplied socialist principles, and direct our attention instead to Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark as examples of  socialist success stories. 

A short piece in a Heritage Foundation pamphlet, however, explains why these counterexamples don't work:

First, these countries are not technically socialist....socialism entails a centrally planned economy with nationalized means of production. Although these countries have high income taxes and provide generous social programs, they remain prosperous because of their free-market economies. 

Denmark ranks as the 8th most economically free country in The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which cites free-market policies and regulatory efficiency as reasons for the high standard of living. Sweden is ranked 22nd and Norway 28th, both with similar descriptions of thriving private sectors and open markets. 

These three countries are clearly not operating under centrally planned economies, or their economic freedom scores would be significantly lower.

Second, the success of these countries is clearly based on a capitalist foundation, and it predates the expansion of social programs. Sweden, for example, became a wealthy country in the mid-20th century under a capitalist system with low tax rates. 

Social programs and high tax rates were not implemented until the 1970s, which caused the economy to significantly underperform and unemployment to rise. In recent years, Sweden has been privatizing socialized sectors, such as education and health care, cutting tax rates, and making welfare less generous. 

Even though tax rates and government spending remains comparatively high, open-market policies generate the revenue to support the spending.

Finally, these countries are largely homogeneous and have a culture that is conducive to a large welfare state. Scandinavians are described as hardworking citizens with extremely high levels of social trust and cohesion. 

By contrast, America is a much larger country with lower levels of social trust, and therefore, a comparison is difficult to assess. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are not democratic socialist countries that the U.S. can be accurately compared with, and could be better described as “compassionate capitalists.” 

As such, the “democratic socialists”... are left with no successful examples of their vision, only disastrous ones.

The allure of socialism is hard to understand given the fact that 1) it has had such a calamitous effect on the economies of so many countries that have tried it, and 2) that countries in which it has been an unambiguous success have proven to be as elusive as the fountain of youth.

Voter's Guide for 2020

It's an unfortunate fact about our socio-political life that many people who vote don't really vote for the person who best represents their beliefs. Rather they vote on the basis of the candidate's looks, personality or simply because the candidate for whom they vote, whatever he or she stands for, isn't the other guy.

Whether we think a candidate is personable, or eloquent or virtuous the most important thing about him or her, aside from their integrity, are the policies they would implement. We should be primarily concerned not with their looks but with the direction they would take the country.

The choice in the next election is between candidates of one party which supports each of the following or makes each of the following more likely, and candidates of a party which opposes each of these. If you favor a majority of these measures then you should vote for Democratic candidates, if you oppose most of them you should not vote Democratic regardless of how attractive or otherwise appealing (or repugnant) a candidate is:

1. Lowering the voting age to 16.
2. Opposition to measures like voter ID and extending the voter franchise to non-citizens.
3. Adding additional Justices to the Supreme Court to ensure that SCOTUS decisions go the way the left wants them to go.
4. Appointment of judges and Supreme Court Justices who believe their role is to make law rather than objectively interpret the law and/or the Constitution.
5. Abolition of the electoral college.
6. Allowing felons to vote.
7. Granting statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico thus effectively giving Democrats four more senators.
8. Allowing biological men to use girls' restrooms and locker rooms and compete against girls in scholastic athletics.
9. Making it a hate crime to speak out against the LGBTQ agenda, even from the pulpit.
10. Effective repeal of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
11. Effective repeal of the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms.
12. Protecting and promoting abortion on demand and infanticide.
13. Higher taxes and more government regulations on business and industry, stifling job growth and increasing unemployment among the poor.
14. Making fossil fuel industries like coal, oil and fracking economically unsustainable.
15. Abolition or deep curtailment of air and car travel.
16. Exorbitant social spending and a shift away from a capitalist to a socialist economy.
17. Providing subsidies for those who choose not to work.
18. Open borders.
19. Sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants.
20. Free health care and welfare for illegal aliens.
21. Racial preferences and "reparations."
22. A return to forced busing.
23. Weakening the military.
24. Abolition or weakening of police forces.
25. Effectively permitting rioters to burn businesses, churches and public buildings and threaten citizens with physical harm.
26. Obliteration of our historical heritage.
27. Keeping schools and businesses closed until there's a vaccine for Covid-19.
28. Making it more difficult for private schools to operate and for poor people to send their children to the schools of their choice.
29. Hostility, or at least antipathy, toward Jews and Christians.
30. Destroying the reputation and/or livelihood of anyone merely accused of sexual impropriety (except Joe Biden).
31. Destroying the reputation and/or livelihood of anyone who holds views on race relations and/or sexuality at variance with those on the left.

It may seem that some of these are unfair misrepresentations or exaggerations, but every one of them has been promoted, encouraged, tolerated or implemented by leaders in the Democratic party - presidential candidates, governors, senators, congresspersons, and/or influential members of the media.

Keep the list and see how many of them come to pass over the next four years if the Democrats win the White House and the Senate in November.

The Incredible Ant

Tropical army ants display an incredible behavior. As a column of ants marches through the rainforest they encounter small ditches or other barriers across which they form a bridge with their bodies so that other ants can cross over:

                

This is amazing. How do insects know to do this? The behavior is obviously inherited but how is it passed on? Genes code for proteins and proteins build structure. What is it that codes for behavior? If it's proteins then how do protein molecules in the teensy brain of an ant translate into behavior? 

And how does instinctive behavior evolve in the first place? According to the standard darwinian story, natural selection works on mutated genes to create novel structures, but if behavior isn't a function of an organism's genome how does it ever arise?

I wish that those who are so certain that all explanations are naturalistic, materialistic explanations would offer a plausible answer to these questions because they comprise what I think is one of the greatest mysteries about living things - the origin and transmission of instinctive behavior.

Math Is Hard

An article by Nancy Pearcey at the American Thinker illuminates how the corrosive acid of wokeness eats through everything and finds racism everywhere, even in something as unpolitical, universal, unbiased and successful as mathematics.

Pearcey begins her column with some mind-boggling illustrations:

A young woman describing herself as a teacher, Ph.D. student, and "social justice change agent," recently gained notoriety for tweeting, "The idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural," a product of "western imperialism/colonialism."

Yes, even mathematics, held up as the most objective and neutral of disciplines, is being reshaped by critical theory, which claims that all ideas are social constructions by groups using their power to advance their own interests.

This is not just the inflammatory language of young social justice warriors. Alan Bishop, who teaches at Cambridge University, wrote an article titled "Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism," in which he deplores "the process of cultural invasion in colonised countries by western mathematics."

In Educational Studies in Mathematics, two math educators at Georgia State University write, "Dominant mathematics is a system established as right and True by the White men who have historically controlled and constructed the game." The authors call for "critical mathematics" to expose "the power dynamic between the oppressor — White, male mathematicians — and the oppressed — the marginalized Other."

Gutiérrez charges that algebra and geometry perpetuate white privilege because the textbook version of math history is Eurocentric: "[c]urricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans."

I'm not sure which history textbooks she's talking about. We all use Arabic numerals, and in my college math class, we learned that the concept of zero as a place holder came from India; that the Babylonians gave us the 360-degree circle and the 60-minute hour; that the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Chinese all had a rough idea of the value of pi.

A website for teachers, "K–12 Academics," calls for the development of "anti-racist" mathematics: 

I have no idea what an "anti-racist" mathematics would look like. Would we have to pretend that Europeans had no role in the development of mathematics? Would we have to conjure imaginary discoveries of mathematical principles by races and tribes in a kind of historical affirmative action?

As Pearcey notes, mathematics was developed by scholars all across the ancient world, not just Europe. Geometry, in particular, was a product of scholars throughout the Middle East and Egypt as well as Greece. It was pursued and advanced in the West because it was enormously successful in explaining how the universe works and because it allowed for giant strides in technology.

Pearcey argues that the above examples are the bizarre offshoots of what academics refer to as Critical Theory which maintains that all human activity can be explained in terms of power plays to advance the interests of oneself or one's group:

Critical theorists argue that mathematics is just another arbitrary human creation that has been used to privilege certain groups while excluding others. Since all worldviews are regarded as equally valid, the selection of any one worldview to teach in the classroom can only be a matter of privileging the interests of one social group over others.

I wonder how many folks who believe that math is arbitrary would board an airplane developed by aeronautical engineers who believed that any equations used in designing the plane were just as valid as any other.

Pearcy adds:

But critical theory contains a fatal self-contradiction. While proponents of the theory treat everyone else's beliefs as relative to social conditions, they treat their own beliefs as objective and universally true. And they are just as exclusive as anyone else in insisting that their view captures the way things really are. 

Critical theory is also inherently coercive, which makes it dangerous. Because it reduces truth claims to power plays, it has no problem with using power to advance its own views. Gutiérrez warns, "Any resistance to the sociopolitical turn is a form of hegemony." In other words, no resistance, no disagreement allowed.

Many educators are buying into critical theory because it promises them a more culturally sensitive approach for helping non-white students become more confident in their mathematical abilities — certainly a worthy goal. But ultimately, critical theory will harm more than help. Because it denies the very possibility of knowledge, ironically, it undercuts the deepest motivation for education: the unrelenting search for truth.

Or maybe they're buying into critical theory because math is hard, both to teach and to learn, so their solution is to simply do away with math. Next they'll be saying the same thing about reading and writing. 

What a great way to insure that inequalities between socio-economic strata grow even wider and that the more disadvantaged are plunged back to a state of primitive barbarism. No hate-filled Klansman could've devised a more insidious plot to oppress blacks than promoting the idea that they alone, among all the nation's minorities, can't learn the white man's math and shouldn't be expected to.

Why Think People Are Equal?

Yuval Harari is the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and a secular materialist who nevertheless recognizes the distressing shortcomings of his materialism. In Sapiens he notes that, 

[T]he American Founding Fathers . . . imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of [human beings], and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.

In other words, when a secular modern speaks of ideals like justice and human rights, he or she is simply reciting contemporary fairy-tales. The ideals of which these folks speak are socially fabricated illusions employed to oil the gears of society to make it function better. 

Indeed, the claim to be "fighting against injustice" is a foolish absurdity unless one is operating out of a Christian (or theistic) worldview. Every time our secular social justice warriors speak of "justice" and "equality" they're actually parasitizing the Christianity many of them reject.

Harari continues,

It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal?

. . . According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal.’ The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God.   

Apart from Christianity there's no foundation for the principle of human equality and therefore no foundation for the idea of justice. Those who march down our cities' streets shouting "No Justice, No Peace" are yelling an empty, meaningless slogan, unless they're standing in a Christian worldview.

Those who complain of the injustice of income inequality, discrimination and racism are doing nothing more than emoting. They're expressing their displeasure with things as they are, but there's no more heft to their complaint than if they simply said "Ugh! I really don't like that."

The question they should be asked is why are these things wrong? Why are they "unjust," and why is injustice wrong? Unless they stand on a Christian understanding of the world, or at least a theistic understanding, they can have no coherent answer. One can be a secularist or atheist or one can believe that injustice and inequality are objectively wrong, but one can't do both.

Harari clearly recognizes the problem for secularists such as himself:

However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.

Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently.’

Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.

It's intriguing that people can accept all that and still think it's somehow more sophisticated, virtuous or rational to live their actual lives as though it's all false. When a secular (or atheistic) materialist's life day after day repudiates the secular materialism he claims to believe, the one thing he can't claim is that his secular materialism makes sense.

Comparing Stories

A worldview is a set of assumptions we hold that act as a lens through which we look at life and the world. Our worldview is our story, our way of thinking about life. 

There are basically two stories that are competing today for our hearts and minds. There are, of course, many other options but for most of us in the Western world they distill to two: Naturalism and theism.

Naturalism is the belief that nature is all there is. There are no non-natural or immaterial entities like souls, minds or God. There are no miracles. Everything is the inevitable consequence of the laws of physics. 

Theism, on the other hand, is the belief that there is a personal supernatural Being who created the world and is, to some extent, involved in it. This Being - God - is the source of meaning, morality, beauty, love and human dignity and much else.

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live consistently within its parameters. On this test naturalism falls short since many, if not most, naturalists find that they have to give up some beliefs and assumptions that are very difficult, or even impossible, for them to let go. 

Among the things for which there is no room in a naturalist ontology (set of things which exist) are the following: 

1. ultimate meaning in life 

2. free will 

3. objective moral right or wrong/justice 

4. intrinsic value of human beings/human rights and dignity 

5. mind/consciousness 

6. an adequate ground for beauty, love and objective truth 

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in the classical Christian theistic story, it could be argued that at least some of them (1,3,4,6) are actually entailed by that story. 

The logic of naturalism, however, compels one to regard them all as illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that. They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives do have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if they do have free will. 

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but in the way they live their everyday lives they affirm their reality over and over again. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage, because their own worldview simply cannot provide them. 

But when one has to poach from competing stories in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to holding a rational, coherent worldview. 

To be consistent a naturalist should be a nihilist and accept the emptiness and despair entailed by nihilism, yet even though some naturalists see that, few can bring themselves to accept it. For those who do, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that naturalism requires. 

For many others, though, who long for that same liberation, the nihilistic consequences either don't occur to them, or if they do, they're often simply ignored as though they don't matter. 

Naturalists are free to embrace this schizoid view of life, of course, but they're not free to live as if they can hold onto those existential needs while denying the only adequate ground for them and at the same time declare their worldview to be more rational than the Christian alternative.

It's not.

The Warfare Myth

Ever since the 19th century there's been a myth circulating that there's an inherent conflict between science and religion, specifically Christianity. The belief, often held by contemporary atheists but rejected by virtually every historian of science, is that there's a logical incompatibility between the two spheres that has led to intellectual warfare between them. 

According to this myth, to be either a person of science or a religious person is to automatically exclude being the other.

In his book The War That Never Was philosopher of science Kenneth Kemp explains why the Warfare Myth is false and why there's in fact no incompatibility between science and the Christian belief that God both created the world and has acted in it.

He gives four possible views of the relationship between nature and non-nature (or the supernatural). In the list below V stands for "View." Kemp uses a slightly different notation that would require a bit of explanation so I've taken the liberty of using a simpler notation:

V1- Only natural beings exist.
V2- Non-natural beings (if they exist at all) have no causal influence on the natural world.
V3- Non-natural beings exist, but they only occasionally act as direct causes of events in the natural world.
V4- Non-natural beings exist and frequently act as direct causes of what happens in the natural world.

V1 is incompatible with Christianity but is not at all necessary for the conduct of science. Indeed 50 of the 52 greatest progenitors of the scientific revolution were theists who rejected V1.

V2 is sometimes said to be necessary for science because if a non-natural being (God) exerted causal influence on the world then it would be impossible to formulate laws of nature since there'd be no regularities to provide the basis for such laws. This, however, is not true. A law of nature is simply a description of the way nature operates as long as there's no outside interference.

If an outside force interferes with a falling object by catching it that doesn't violate the law of gravitational attraction nor does it render the law invalid. As Kemp says, "Science does not presuppose, entail, or have any other logical connection to V2."

V4 would indeed make science difficult, but the belief that non-natural interventions are frequent is not essential to Christianity. That leaves V3 which is the position, probably, of most philosophically informed Christians.

Some naturalists have argued against V3, however. Biologist Richard Lewontin, for example, famously wrote that,

Either the world of phenomena is a consequence of the regular operation of repeatable causes and their repeatable effects... or else at every instant all physical regularities may be ruptured and a totally unforeseeable set of events may occur. One must take sides on the issue of whether the sun is sure to rise tomorrow. We cannot live simultaneously in a world of natural causation and of miracles, for if one miracle can occur, then there is no limit.

At first reading this sounds like a compelling refutation of V3, but Kemp offers a trenchant criticism of it. He begins with this sentence:

Science no more requires that all of what we observe be caused by natural interaction than it requires perfect observation on the part of scientists or the absolute impossibility of scientific fraud.

He then asks us to imagine Lewontin's quote modified by replacing parts of it with the words underlined as follows:

Either the world of phenomena is exactly as it is reported in laboratory notebooks ... or else all the data in all our laboratory notebooks could be completely wrong...We cannot simultaneously rely on science and admit that scientists can make mistakes, for if one mistake can occur, then there is no limit.

Kemp observes that phenomena are not exactly as reported in lab notebooks, scientists sometimes make imperfect measurements, sometimes they cheat, but these things are not common and despite them science is a very reliable guide to the way the world usually works. 

Just as science is fruitful despite these irregularities, it would still be reliable and fruitful, he argues, if there are occasional instances of supernatural intervention.

There's much more to Kemp's argument, but the point here is that there's no necessary or inevitable conflict, then, between the practice of science and the beliefs articulated in the Christian creeds. The claim that there is may perhaps be an expression of wish fulfillment on the part of naturalists who are a priori hostile to those creeds.

The Sudden Death of Freedom of Speech

Graham Piro at The Washington Free Beacon cites a new survey from the Cato Institute which found that a majority of Americans say they are worried about facing social or professional consequences for their political views. The details are not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to our culture's drift toward totalitarian group think, but they are certainly dismaying.

Here's Piro:

The survey, conducted by Cato in collaboration with YouGov, found 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression out of fear of offending others. Majorities across the political spectrum said they are worried about sharing their political opinions, including 52 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 77 percent of Republicans.

Thirty-one percent of liberals, 30 percent of moderates, and 34 percent of conservatives said they are specifically worried about professional retribution for political speech. The only respondent group with a majority confident in sharing political opinions was the "strong liberal" group, 58 percent of whom said they were confident. 

Fifty-two percent of respondents who identified as "liberal" said the political climate prevents them from sharing some of their beliefs, while 64 percent of "moderate" respondents and 77 percent of "conservative" and "strongly conservative" respondents said the same.

Respondents with stronger ideological leanings expressed support for punishing business executives who engage in political speech, although the sentiment was higher for strong liberals than strong conservatives. Half of "strong liberals" and 36 percent of "strong conservatives" said they support punishing business executives who donate to the opposing party's presidential candidate.

A Politico survey found that more Americans are becoming aware of so-called cancel culture, a social trend in which views are regulated through public shaming and self-censorship. Almost half of respondents told the outlet cancel culture had "gone too far," and only a quarter of respondents said they were not familiar with or had no opinion on the matter.

Cancel culture has gained prominence as more private citizens have faced real-world consequences for controversies that grew online. Recent examples include a high school teacher and coach who said he was fired for writing that "Trump is our president" on social media, a power company worker falsely accused of flashing a "white-power" sign, and an immigrant owner of a catering company whose daughter had written offensive social media posts as a teenager.

New York Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned from the paper after the opinion section ran an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that a group of staffers claimed put black Times employees "in danger." Opinion editor Bari Weiss also resigned from the paper, citing harassment she experienced from her colleagues, and Andrew Sullivan said he left New York magazine because he has "no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated" in the future.

At the beginning of the month, an open letter in Harper's Magazine defending the free exchange of ideas roiled progressives online and caused three of the letter's signers to withdraw their signatures. A response letter argued that the Harper's letter was a "caustic reaction to a diversifying industry" and accused free speech advocates of using "nebulous concepts and coded language" to uphold institutional norms that protect bigotry.

Anecdotally, I personally have heard people say that they support Trump but would never put a bumper sticker on their car, a Trump sign in their yard or wear a MAGA hat for fear that their property would be damaged or that they themselves would be physically assaulted.

Why have people, predominately people on the left, abandoned the Enlightenment principle of free speech and dialogue in favor of an oppressive power play that destroys careers and property and stokes resentments? Perhaps one reason is that these folks are at some level aware that their ideas are not only wildly unpopular when properly vetted, but they're also intellectually untenable. 

They sense that if their ideas were subjected to free and open discussion they wouldn't survive scrutiny and they themselves would look foolish. All that's left to those who wish to see those ideas implemented is to monopolize discussion by shouting, by sloganeering and by shutting up the opposition by whatever means necessary.

It's childish and barbarous, but that's where our society suddenly seems to find itself.