Theistic Implications Don't Render a Paradigm Unscientific

Opponents of Intelligent Design (ID) often conflate ID with Creationism, perhaps because it confuses the public and enables ID's critics to make the claim that ID is a religious effort and not a scientific enterprise. The conflation is intellectually irresponsible because those who seek to identify ID with Creationism know, or should know, that they're not the same thing.

Creationists, particularly young earth creationists, use a literal reading of the first eleven chapters of the Bible as the interpretive grid which they impose upon the empirical evidence that scientists have uncovered.

ID proponents, on the other hand, base their arguments entirely upon science and philosophy and make no reference to the Bible or any religious text. They argue that the evidence scientists have discovered is best explained in terms of intelligent agency and very poorly explained in terms of purely natural processes and forces.

Whether ID is right or wrong is a question for scientists and philosophers to decide. It's not a religious or theological question.

Those who seek to obfuscate the difference between Creationism and ID either aren't being honest or haven't read any of the substantial corpus of work published by proponents of ID over the last three decades.

One of the most compelling ID proponents on the contemporary scene is philosopher of science Stephen Meyer whose books, Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis each make a case for the proposition that the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, and the infusion of new information necessary for the diversification of body plans during the Cambrian period, taken together make a powerful case for the conclusion that life and the universe were intentionally engineered by an intelligent mind.

Now it's certainly the case that ID has implications for one's metaphysical convictions, but that should hardly disqualify ID from competing in the scientific arena with naturalistic explanations, since naturalistic accounts also have their own metaphysical implications.

In the following seven minute video Meyer discusses the metaphysical implications he sees resulting from the superior explanatory power of ID. He summarizes the argument against naturalistic explanations for the origin of life, the origin of the cosmos and cosmic fine-tuning and concludes that the scientific evidence points to a transcendent intelligent creator. For a much fuller presentation of these arguments check out his book Return of the God Hypothesis, a book that I think would convince anyone whose mind was not already a priori opposed to Meyer's conclusion.

The Most Pressing Question

The last couple of posts have addressed themes touched upon by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. As we've noted in the previous posts, he talks in the book, inter alia, about our collective lostness - our contemporary forfeiture of objective truth, dignity, freedom, and morality as well as the loss of any ground for human rights.

There's one more thing he argues that we've lost in the modern age that I'd like to focus on today: Meaningfulness.

Sacks tells the sad story of author David Foster Wallace who took his own life at the age of 46 in September of 2008. Wallace once said that the emptiness of modern life manifests itself in a kind of lostness.

He noted that he and his friends were affluent, highly educated and successful in their chosen walks of life, but despite these advantages some of them were deeply into drugs, others were workaholics, others were going to singles bars every night.

They were, he said, "adrift."

He told a magazine in 1993 that "this is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values."

Reading his story reminded me of Ernst Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel The Sun Also Rises written in 1926 and F.Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby written the year before. They both describe a lost generation living lives of not-so-quiet desperation, lives spent in an alcoholic haze, enmeshed in petty squabbles and projects, trying to find something with which to satiate their hunger for meaning and purpose.

Albert Camus' novel The Stranger (1942) is a somewhat similar tale of the ultimate pointlessness of human existence.

The century since Hemingway and Fitzgerald has brought material blessing that those artists could never have imagined, but the emptiness of modern life, despite our comforts and technology, is as painful as ever.

A character in the movie Contact captures our existential anguish well when he says that, "In all of our searching the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other."

The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was perhaps ahead of his time when he asked, “What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?”

Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman insisted that, “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”

Why this awful nihilism that has descended upon Western societies like a suffocating smog over the last 100 years?

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre hints at an answer when he asserted that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal."

Writer Somerset Maugham puts it similarly when he wrote that, "If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.”

Death, these men tell us, is the big eraser. It wipes away anything that could possibly make life worth the suffering, the boredom, the terror that existence holds for so many. And as David Foster Wallace observed even those who live in relative comfort, maybe especially those, are not exempted from the ennui and the pain of existential emptiness.

Put differently, unless what we do matters forever, it doesn't matter at all. For this reason, to quote Evelyn Waugh, "Life is unintelligible and unendurable without God."

Sacks cites a New York Times article on the despair evinced by the soaring statistics of depression, suicide and self-harm, especially among the young. The article quotes one person who confessed that, "Drugs and alcohol are the only shining rays of light in my otherwise unbearable existence."

Another admitted that, "I no longer find much of anything meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying. Whatever used to keep me going has gone. I am currently struggling to find any motivation to keep going."

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw in the 19th century that the loss of God would eventually unmoor mankind and plunge him into a cold, empty void of meaninglessness and despondency. In The Gay Science (1882) he wrote:

"Whither is God?" he [Nietszche's Madman] cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?

Is not night continually closing in on us? .... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Modern man lives by the conceit that he can do away with God and the only consequence of his abandonment is that he's now free to sleep in on Sunday morning. This is very naive.

When we do away with God, as I've maintained over the last several posts, not only have we no longer anything upon which to base objective truth, mutual trust, human dignity, freedom of the will, objective morality, and human rights, but we also become untethered, lost in the cosmos, to borrow from the title of a Walker Percy novel.

We lose all hope of having any lasting meaning, purpose or significance. That's why the question of God is the most pressing question in all of life and why I return to it so often on Viewpoint.

Do Human Beings Have Dignity?

Article I of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 states that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."

Unfortunately, the worthies who composed this statement chose not to explore the deeper question of how being born a human being gives us either equality or dignity. Indeed, where does the idea of human dignity come from? And where do our rights come from?

Dignity (by "dignity" I mean worth, value or significance) derives from our ability to choose between right and wrong actions. Thus, dignity is related to morality. Immanuel Kant writes in his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals that, "Morality, and humanity in so far as it is capable of of morality, is that which alone has dignity."

But this is at odds with the prevailing worldview of our modern secular society. We may pay lip service to dignity, but in a secular world which no longer believes that God is relevant or even exists why should anyone think that anyone else possesses such a thing?

Psychologist B.F. Skinner titled his most famous book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) and urged us to get over thinking that we possess either free will or any other specialness that conferred dignity upon human beings.

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking claimed that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” If we're just scum from whence do we get the idea we have anything remotely resembling dignity?

The brilliant early twentieth century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that "When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Well, how much dignity do either a baboon or a grain of sand possess?

There's actually only one adequate source of human worth, but it's a source not open to naturalistic thinkers like Skinner, Hawking or Holmes. If it's true that we are in fact, as our Declaration of Independence states, all created equally and also true that we are created in God's image and prized by Him, then human beings do indeed have enormous value and significance.

If, however, there is no God, then it follows that what we call human dignity is a fiction we tell each other to make ourselves feel noble. And, if the notion of dignity is a fiction then so is the idea of human rights for there can be no rights if man has no special worth or significance.

If man has no special value then human rights are just arbitrary words hung on skyhooks; they're like paper money that has nothing of value backing it up.

Put differently, if there is no God, if all there is is the material universe, then Skinner is correct and human freedom is an illusion. We are all in the grip of the physical laws of nature and what we "choose" is what we've been determined by our environment or our genes to choose. And, if there is no freedom, if our choices are the inevitable products of factors beyond our control, then there can be no morality, since morality depends upon the freedom to choose, and if there's no morality there's no dignity, and if no dignity then no human rights.

We are, as Holmes suggested, simply a different species of baboon.

Freedom, morality, dignity and rights are all ontologically dependent upon there being a personal God. One can say, of course, that there is no God, but what he can't say, and be consistent, is that there is no God but that morality, human dignity and human rights all nevertheless still exist.

To say that is to talk nonsense.

The Decline of Civility

There's no doubt that civility in our public discourse has declined, that there's more hostility, more vituperation, greater polarization than at any time within living memory.

In his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that though there've been raw, rude and raucous periods in the past, especially during elections, in our own day,

... something new is happening: the sense that the other side is less than fully human, that its supporters are not part of the same moral community as us, that somehow their sensibilities are alien and threatening, as if they were not the opposition within the political arena, but the enemy, full stop.

What has brought this about? Sacks offers "four independent but mutually aggravating causes."

First, he avers, is "the deepening individualism of Western societies since the 1960s." When a country has been at relative peace for an extended period of time the sense of togetherness and unity tends to atrophy. Combine this diminishing sense of unity with an increasing sense of individual autonomy and people will often feel less need to be polite to each other.

Second, is "the phenomenon of the internet which has changed the nature of communication and the way we acquire our information about the world." Internet websites, coupled, I might add with cable television, have transformed broadcast news into a "narrowcasting" of news targeted at audiences with specific interests and political ideologies.

This encourages us to listen only to points of view that are compatible with our own and which reinforce our beliefs, and reinforcement tends to push us toward political and/or religious extremes.

Third, this new media has what has been called a disinhibiting effect. Just as motorists are often emboldened to be more rude and abusive when ensconced in the security of their vehicle, the new social media tends to bring out the worst in people who feel secure behind their screens.

This is the result, Sacks claims, of five features of social media:

• It's anonymous. No one has to give their true name or reveal their identity or address.
• It's invisible. No one sees the people they're insulting and they don't see you.
• The communication often isn't done in real time. There's a time gap between you typing out your message and the other party reading it.
• It's unregulated. There are few, if any, rules.
• Finally, it's not face to face. There's something about being face to face with someone that tends to mitigate rudeness and enhance courtesy.

Sacks writes at length about the fourth factor contributing to our contemporary incivility, but it can perhaps be summed up by saying that our modern mobility has weakened our sense of community. Many people who read this scarcely know the people who live more than two houses removed from theirs. Many people who read this have probably lived at multiple addresses since leaving high school or college and many of them no longer live in the community in which they grew up.

When we have no roots in a community, when we don't know the people with whom we interact, we find it easier to be discourteous to them. When we have a deep attachment to a community, on the other hand, we feel a bond, almost a kinship, with those with whom we share that community and its values.

And this leads back to what Sacks says in the first quote above. We've become so fragmented as a society that we frequently don't share the same values as others. We may speak the same language, but our worldviews are so divergent that we have trouble communicating. We are almost alien to each other.

The more different people are from each other the more difficult it is to feel a connection with them and the easier it is to feel, and express, animosity toward them when frictions arise.

In closing, I'd like to add two additional causes to the four to which Sacks attributes what we might call our current crisis of civility:

First, people often express opinions that they hold fervently but inchoately. That is, they may have strong opinions and voice them, but when challenged to defend them they find themselves at a loss. The inability to defend one's views when challenged is embarrassing and frustrating and it's easier to just smother one's critic in a fog of contumely, which is what a lot of people choose to do.

Second, and this perhaps lies at the root of most of what was said above, many people, having abandoned the Judeo-Christian worldview and its ethic of loving one's neighbor and living by the Golden Rule, often no longer feel they have a duty to treat others as persons loved by God and deserving of being treated with dignity.

Of course, people who claim to adhere to the Judeo-Christian worldview can be just as offensive as anyone else, but when they are they betray the commandment to love their neighbor. When a secular individual acts uncivilly he's betraying nothing. For the secular man there's no moral imperative to be civil, kind, tolerant or compassionate.

The secular man/woman is morally autonomous, and that's a problem for any society that wishes to maintain a modicum of decency.

Truth and Trust

In 2016, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in his final book before his death last November (Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times), the Oxford English Dictionary declared the term post-truth to be its "word of the year."

Oxford's dictionary defines post-truth as an adjective denoting the circumstance that objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Britain's Lord Hall, director-general of the BBC, warned that the world is facing "the biggest assault on truth since the 1930's." Sacks writes that according to a Pew Research Center report,

A majority of Americans now view fake news as a more serious problem than terrorism, illegal immigration, racism or sexism. Almost seven in ten say it undermines confidence in government. Fifty four percent say it damages people's confidence in one another.

In other words, a majority of Americans doesn't believe that their media is telling them the "real" truth about what they report, but where there's no confidence that what we hear is true there'll surely be no trust.

Our society, Sacks argues, has arrived at the point where our skepticism about the possibility of truth is corroding trust, not just in our media but in all our institutions as well as our interpersonal relationships. This is the legacy of our postmodern age.

When "truth" becomes whatever has appeal to the listener, whatever comports with his or her own beliefs, biases, and predilections, when you have your truth and I have mine, then what basis do we have for trusting each other?

How have we come to such a predicament? Entire books have been written on that question, but perhaps the short answer is, to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we have forgotten God.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) foresaw the consequences of man's abandonment of God in the second half of the 19th century. He realized, long before it dawned on many of his fellow atheists, that if God does not exist then there's no objective standard for truth nor for morality.

"There is no truth, " Nietzsche declared, "there are only interpretations."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Because there is no objective truth, there's no reason why anyone should aspire to be truthful, and if there's no God there's no objective moral obligation to be truthful anyway. The moral duty to be truthful is an anachronism, according to Nietzsche, a holdover from the Christian belief that God imposes the duty of truthfulness upon us: In The Gay Science he writes:

Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are not moral? .... we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.

Put differently, in Nietszche's day men had rejected God but they still tried to hold on to belief in truth, especially moral truth. Nietszche saw that you can't do it. You can't have one without the other.

If you want to make moral judgments and discern truth from falsehood then you have to undergird that with a theistic worldview. If you don't want theism, you have to be willing to foresake truth, morality and trust as well.

A world that no longer believes in God will soon enough stop believing in truth, including moral truth, and when truth no longer matters trust will soon die, and when that happens, Rabbi Sacks warns, society will be well on the road to complete disintegration.

Multiple Layers of Information

The theory of naturalistic evolution holds that unguided, unintelligent physical processes like genetic mutation and natural selection have blindly, over vast stretches of time, generated a huge increase in information. Evolution started with simple molecules and has produced the extravagant diversity of complex living things we see all around us, but this theory has a serious conflict with modern genetics.

Biochemist Michael Behe argues in his book Darwin Devolves that much of what is thought to be evolutionary progress is actually devolution from higher levels of information to lower levels. This comes about when genes are broken in one fashion or another, the loss of the broken gene allowing other genes to express themselves differently (See the video series Secrets of the Cell).

This, however, means that for change to have occurred there must have been a greater amount of genetic information at the start than at the culmination which is exactly opposite of what the standard evolutionary model states. Why is it so hard for evolution to proceed in the way normally supposed by the standard theory and which most high school students are taught? Geneticist John Sanford explains:

Most DNA sequences are poly-functional and therefore must also be poly-constrained. This means that DNA sequences have meaning on several different levels (poly-functional) and each level of meaning limits possible future change (poly-constrained).

For example, imagine a sentence that has a very specific message in its normal form but with an equally coherent message when read backwards.

Now let's suppose it also has a third message when reading every other letter and a fourth message when a simple encryption program is used to translate it. Such a message would be poly-functional and poly-constrained.

We know that misspellings in a normal sentence will not normally improve the message, but at least this would be possible.

However, a poly-constrained message is fascinating, in that it cannot be improved. It can only degenerate. Any misspellings which might possibly improve the normal sentence will be disruptive to the other levels of information.

Any change at all will diminish information with absolute certainty....Changing anything seems to potentially change everything!

Thus, almost any change in an organisms DNA would be catastrophic for the organism, but if this is so how did complex organisms with high levels of information encoded in their DNA evolve from simpler organisms with lower levels of information?

The answer we often hear from our Neo-Darwinian friends goes something like this: "It must've happened somehow because we know evolution is true, and we know its true because here we are!"

Well, yes, we might reply, but couldn't there be some other explanation for how we got here? To that query our friends often give an answer something like, "The only other live explanation is that we were created by a supernatural Being, but we know that's false because we know there's no such Creator."

And how do we know there's no such Creator? we might ask. "Because," we're assured, "Darwinian evolution has made such a being unnecessary and irrelevant."

Hmmm. Somewhere in that chain of "reasoning" a circular argument or two seems to be lurking.

Why the Cubans, Mr. President?

I have from time to time made the tongue-in-cheek observation that if the migrants pressing on our southern border could be expected to vote Republican the Democrats would be themselves down there with sleeves rolled up building a barrier to rival the Great Wall of China to keep them out.

Of course, that was just a surmise for which I had no real evidence. Until now. Hot Air's Allahpundit notes that the Biden administration has recently declared that any refugees seeking to enter the United States without proper authorization will be turned away and sent to wait in another country.

He wonders why that policy applies to people arriving by sea but not by land. Why is the Biden administration adopting for Cubans what was essentially Trump's Remain in Mexico policy for migrants seeking to enter the U.S. through the southern border, but not applying it to those migrants arriving through Mexico?

And as others have noted, it's odd (not really) that there's no outrage among Democrats or their media mouthpieces over the "cruelty" of closing our borders to people fleeing the oppression of a communist dictatorship. Yet we were constantly told that Trump's policy of not letting in migrants from across the Rio Grande was "inhumane" and "not our values."

Moreover, isn't it true that many of these potential Cuban refugees would be people of color? Why aren't there protests over the blatant racism of the Biden policy of slamming the door shut so that people of color can't get in? Trump was certainly harangued by cries of racism because he was building a wall that would keep dark-skinned Hispanics out.

So, where is the outrage from Democrats and the majority of the mainstream media? Why are these “cruel” policies toward potential dark-skinned migrants fleeing economic hardship and brutal oppression at the hands of a tyrannical government not being denounced as cruel racism? The silence, Harsanyi says, is almost deafening.

Well, perhaps we need not look too deeply into these questions to find plausible answers. Jazz Shaw, also at Hot Air, notes:

Compared to other Hispanic minority groups, Cubans tend to be more conservative in their politics and are more likely to register as Republicans. Trump overperformed with Cuban-Americans in 2020, a fact that very likely put him over the top in carrying Florida.

So with the Democrats in charge, it seems that the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and the wretched refuse of your teeming shore doesn’t include the Cubans.

Nor anyone else likely to vote Republican, but if this is the reason for pulling up the drawbridge so Cubans can't get in, it's a shameful disgrace. Yet what other reason could there be?

Some have suggested that Mr. Biden doesn't want thousands of people risking the treacherous 90 mile trip across the Caribbean, but the thousand mile trek across Mexico with heat, cartel coyotes and sundry other thugs is scarcely safer.

Others may be closer to the mark when they point out that Democrats don't want an influx of refugees coming from Cuba because it makes that socialist paradise look bad, and so it does and so it should, but if that's the reason for the difference in policies it's just as ignoble as keeping them out for fear that the Cubans will bolster the GOP in Florida.

Perhaps Mr. Biden will favor us with an explanation, but perhaps not. Perhaps even he realizes that nothing he can say would make what should be a humanitarian decision sound like anything other than a cold, heartless political calculation.

Darwin's Racism and Sexism

I mentioned a few days ago that Allison Hopper's essay in Scientific American was so absurd as to be embarrassing to both her and the journal which published it (See Hopper's Whoppers).

Her thesis was, essentially, that it's somehow racist of Darwin skeptics to reject the evolutionary paradigm. She writes, for instance, that she wants to “unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.”

Yet it was the 19th century Darwinians who provided the very scientific justification seized upon by the racists who came along at the end of that century and the first fifty years or so of the 20th century.

In an article at Evolution News Michael Flannery states that,

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s indefatigable “Bulldog,” wrote a shameful essay on May 20, 1865, shortly after the conclusion of the American Civil War. He suggested that the South should be relieved given that it was no longer responsible for the care and “protection” of the now-former slaves.

He declared that no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.” A reform-minded American Darwinist, Charles Loring Brace, concurred.

Richard Weikart, author of the book From Darwin to Hitler, writes that, contrary to Ms Hopper's allegations,

...the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy.

In a 2017 article in his Radix journal, Richard Spencer, a leading figure on the white supremacist Alt-Right argued that “Group differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection” and “racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution.”

This is a commonplace view among white supremacists, as you can easily discover by looking at white supremacist websites and print publications.

...most people today who reject evolution, which includes many people of color, are not racists. On the other hand, most of the leading white supremacists today embrace evolutionary theory with alacrity.

In a piece at Science Princeton anthropologist Augustin Fuentes, who is sympathetic to Darwin, nevertheless points out the harmful opinions he expresses in his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Fuentes writes:

...some of Darwin's other assertions were dismally, and dangerously, wrong. “Descent” is a text from which to learn, but not to venerate....“Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin's day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity.

Darwin portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less than Europeans in capacity and behavior. Peoples of the African continent were consistently referred to as cognitively depauperate, less capable, and of a lower rank than other races.

....yet he still, baselessly, asserted evolutionary differences between races. He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.”

This too is confounding given Darwin's robust stance against slavery.

Well, if I may be permitted a quibble, Fuentes seems to be mistakenly assuming that opposition to slavery necessarily entails that one regards the enslaved as in all respects equal to the rest of humanity, but that's clearly not so.

A number of abolitionists who opposed slavery nevertheless thought that blacks were inferior to whites.

One need not think the "races" are in every sense equal to see that chattel slavery is a moral evil. Nor must one think that everyone is in every sense equal to everyone else in order to believe that everyone should be treated equally under the law.

But that aside, Darwin's chauvinism didn't end at race. It extended also to sex. Fuentes notes that:

In “Descent,” Darwin identified women as less capable than (White) men, often akin to the “lower races.” He described man as more courageous, energetic, inventive, and intelligent, invoking natural and sexual selection as justification...

Fuentes acknowledges and laments the influence Darwin has had ever since on public attitudes about race and gender:

Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements “validated” by their presence in “Descent” as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.

So, should Darwin's statues be taken down?

No, but I don't know how activist wokesters can demand that statues of southern slave owners and Confederate generals be toppled while Darwin, whose views actually provided much of the intellectual rationale for 19th and 20th century racism, remains placidly ensconced in Shrewsbury and at the London Museum of Natural History.

Darwin Statue in Shrewsbury, England

Darwin Statue at London Museum of Natural History

William Galston on CRT

Former Clinton administration official and current Wall Street Journal contributor William Galston has a piece in Wednesday's Journal (subscription required) that highlights a few of the most troubling aspects of Critical Race Theory.

Here are some excerpts from his column. The quotes are from two of the seminal CRT thinkers Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado and their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:

He [Delgado] writes that critical race theory “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

This would seem to mean that CRT opposes the idea that all persons should be treated equally under the law and that the law should not aspire to be neutral in regard to the race of those who come under its purview. By questioning the validity of Enlightenment Rationalism it also apparently questions, or more accurately, rejects, the idea that reason and logic should be employed to settle disagreements and to establish policy.

It builds on critical legal studies and radical feminism, the work of European theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the American radical tradition, including the Black Power and Chicano movements of the 1960s and early ’70s.

Gramsci, of course, was a communist and the Black Power movement was separationist. CRT substitutes race for class in Marxist theory and rejects the ideal of racial integration. Just as Gramsci's Marxism promoted the revolution of the oppressed classes, so, too, does CRT theory require a revolution that would completely overturn the social order. It would essentially seek to make whites the oppressed class.

Citing Delgado and Stefancic Galston proceeds to describe some of the key tenets of critical race theory:

These propositions include the belief that racism is ordinary, “the usual way that society does business,” not aberrational; and that “triumphalist history”—the confidence that the legislation and court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s set the U.S. on the course of irresistible racial progress—neglects social backlash and legal retreat.

Liberal approaches to racism, such as colorblindness and neutral principles of law, can fix only the worst abuses. But if racism is deeply embedded in thought processes and social structures, they say, then only “aggressive, color-conscious efforts” to change the status quo can make a difference.

Or, to quote another theorist Ibram X. Kendi in his book How to Be an Antiracist, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

Presumably, what Kendi means is that the laws must be tilted to advantage blacks even if this disadvantages whites and Asians, and if blacks are being discriminated against today, whites and Asians must be discriminated against tomorrow.

It's not a prescription likely to engender racial harmony.

Here's Galston,

“White privilege”—the unspoken, unseen advantages that whites enjoy—is a key aspect of these social structures. Changing laws without undoing the “racial subordination” inherent in white privilege will not get us very far.

Incrementalism is a bankrupt strategy; “everything must change at once.” The logical conclusion is that to overcome racism, we need a cultural revolution.

The case against affirmative action, we are told, rests on “an implicit assumption of innocence on the part of the white person” this policy displaces. The guilty parties are the beneficiaries of affirmative action who take what does not rightfully belong to them.

But if racism is “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained,” as critical race theorists insist, then “no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” Because all whites benefit from a system of unearned advantage, race-conscious remedies simply rectify that injustice.

This “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained” racism is, however, notoriously difficult to pinpoint. The burden of proof that it exists despite being invisible rests on the person making the claim, and mere racial disparities are not even compelling evidence, let alone proof of systemic racism.

Galston concludes with this:

I have barely scratched the surface of this complex movement in these paragraphs. But one thing is clear: Because the Declaration of Independence — the founding document of the American liberal order — is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation.

Yes, and those who advocate teaching this to our children are advocating teaching our children to despise both their nation and its history, their own "whiteness," and ultimately their own selves.

Little wonder that parents all across the nation are outraged that both the NEA and the AFT have endorsed teaching CRT (see the link) and thousands of teachers have pledged to teach it in defiance of state laws which prohibit it.

The Culture War Is a Long War

Tanner Greer has written a very interesting essay at a site called Scholar's Stage titled Culture Wars Are Long Wars.

Although he doesn't mention philosopher Thomas Kuhn and his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his essay could be seen as an application of Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts in science to the sphere of culture and politics.

Greer begins with this lede:

We are told that conservatives “lost the culture war.” I dissent from this view: American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that.

They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture.

Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation.

No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

Greer believes that politics is downstream from culture, to use the late Andrew Breitbart's phrase, and as such the political fight that Republicans have waged is really the wrong fight. Unless the culture is changed political remediation will only be effective around the margins.

I have to register a minor disagreement at this point. It seems to me that what's needed in the present day is actually a two-pronged attempt to change both the culture and the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics because culture and politics are both influenced and changed by the other.

The law is a teacher, and when laws are changed the people are instructed and the culture is changed. The Civil Rights acts of the fifties and sixties were imposed on a majority population that was largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the plight of black people in America, but the law roused the majority from their slumbers.

Aristotle lends his considerable authority to this view when he writes that,

The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions....Lawgivers make the citizens good by inculcating (good) habits in them...if he does not succeed in doing that his legislation is a failure.

Anyway, Greer continues:

Cultures can be changed; movements can be built. But as these examples all suggest, this is not a quick task. Culture wars are long wars. Instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time—usually two to three generations of time. It is a 35-50 year process....

This is all true although I wish Greer would've explained how a culture - and politics - can be changed apart from a religious awakening.

With regard to religion he offers this insight which is also on the mark:

America’s future is godless not because the God-fearing were convinced of the errors of their faith, but because their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren never adopted their faith to start out with.

Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.

This is Kuhn's paradigm shift. Kuhn writes that scientific theories are rarely overthrown by the generations which initially championed them. What happens instead is that too many discoveries accumulate that the theory can't explain. The younger generation of scientists that doesn't have the professional and emotional investment in the theory that their elders have, become skeptical.

As the older generation retires and dies away their younger successors are freed up to promote a new theoretical paradigm which accounts for most of the anomalies and which ultimately supplants the old theory.

I think this is happening today with intelligent design which will, I think, eventually supplant a clunky, arthritic Neo-Darwinism as the old line Neo-Darwinists shuffle off the stage.

Greer elaborates on the cultural paradigm shift in the following:

....almost all “social” or “value laden” attitudes are established early in life and are then maintained throughout it. The “formative events” of one’s youth truly are formative.

The ideas, attitudes, and social pressures of one’s youth have a similar impact on one’s worldview, even after the conditions that created these pressures have long disappeared.

Cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort. They can, however, build up a system of ideas and institutions which will preserve and refine the ideals they hope their community will adopt in the future.

The real target of these ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren. Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn.

Future generations will be open to values, religious, political and cultural, that the current generation rejects outright.

This will not be apparent at first. Beneath the official comings and goings of the cohorts above, a new consensus forms in the cohorts below. Ideas will fester among the young, but their impact will be hidden by the inability and inexperience of youth.

But the youth do not stay young. Eventually a transition point arrives.

Sometimes, this transition will be marked by a great event the old orthodoxy cannot explain. At other times it is simply a matter of numbers. In either case, the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.

Greer cautions against hoping for a quick change. He's right to do so. Our present cultural circumstances did not develop overnight. They've been some sixty years or more in the making and have still not run their complete course.

Most of us, like the generation of ancient Israelites that fled Egypt, will not live to see the promised land:

.... as culture wars are long wars, there are no quick victories. If you reject the quickly crystalizing orthodoxy of America’s millennials, your short-term options are limited. The millennials are a lost generation; they will persist in their errors to the end of their days.

Theirs is a doomed cohort—and for most of the next two decades, this doomed cohort will be in charge.

But like all orthodoxies, theirs will eventually stumble. Today’s orthodoxy will meet events it cannot explain. Today’s hopes will be the source of tomorrow’s sorrows. When those sorrows arrive, a rising generation will be looking for alternatives.

The job of today’s insurgents is to build a coherent critique of this orthodoxy, a compelling vision of a better way, and a set of networks that can guard the flame until the arrival of that happy day.

This sounds very much like Rod Dreher's prescription in both The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies.

Greer is optimistic that the day will come when the current soft totalitarianism (Dreher's term) collapses. My concern, though, is that it'll only come if there's a revitalization of the Judeo-Christian faith that underpins the values to which he'd like to see us return.

Until we see signs of that revitalization I'm afraid the paradigm shift toward which Greer looks will be postponed indefinitely into the future. Anyway, read his essay. It's very good and there's much more to it than I can write about here.

Intellectual Virtues

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, Critical Race Theory, abortion, transgenderism, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that it's reasonable to hold?

Mill continues:

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred.

All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions.

It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among many of those participating in debates, especially online, on the issues of our day.

Closing the Door to the Divine Foot

One of the most fascinating fields of study in biology is the field of embryology - the study of how a zygote develops into an adult organism. For most animals our knowledge of their ontogenetic development is still incomplete, but a team of scientists has worked out the complete developmental history of a nematode called C. elegans and has won a Nobel Prize for their achievement.

The ontogeny (the development of an organism from fertilized egg to adult) of this tiny worm, so small that you need a microscope to see it, is programmed to follow a specific pathway, but several mysteries surround attempts to determine what it is that controls that ontogeny as well as attempts to elucidate how undirected processes could ever have produced such a control system in living things.

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson discusses some of the problems in this 10 minute video.

Perhaps there's a materialist explanation for embryological development such as we see in C. elegans and even more astonishingly in higher organisms, but if there is itmust be a closely guarded secret.

What we see in this presentation seems to point to a teleology that many scientists insist on ruling out a priori because teleology, the notion that there are ends or purposes in nature, doesn't fit into their naturalistic worldview. After all, if there's a goal or end toward which an embryo strives there must've been an intelligent agent which established it. Goals do not result from naturalistic processes.

Yet I wonder if these scientists aren't missing something by refusing to admit the possibility of teleological explanations into their scientific work.

I've quoted before in this context a passage from William James that I think is particularly apt. James wrote that, "Any rule of thought that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." If the purpose of science is to discover truth why rule out ahead of time certain kinds of explanations just because they're incompatible with a particular metaphysical commitment?

The refusal to permit the hypothesis that a mind may be somehow responsible for what we see in C. elegans reminds me of another quote, this one from the late geneticist Richard Lewontin who just passed away last week at the age of 92. Lewontin once wrote that,

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Scientists used to declare that they were committed to following the evidence wherever it leads, but now that there seems to be much evidence that leads away from naturalism and toward a creative mind as the fundamental explanation for nature and the cosmos, that declaration is apparently no longer operative.

Who's Responsible for the Culture War?

One of the aspects of our modern politics that's particularly galling is the brazen dishonesty of the political class. President Trump's tenuous connection to the truth was well-documented, but those on the left are equally as bad, if not worse.

For more than three years the progressives lied to us about the Russian collusion business. More recently, Democratic spokespersons have, with a straight face, told us that it's not Democrats who want to defund the police, it's Republicans. Truth is often MIA in the culture war.

Speaking of the culture war, another mendacity that the left often foists upon us is that conservatives are the aggressors in the contemporary culture war, and that it's the political right which is responsible for the polarization of our politics and culture. This is so obviously absurd that it'd be funny were it not so serious.

The fact is that the left has for almost a century been seeking to tear down virtually every institution and value that have traditionally glued our diverse society together. The left has relentlessly attacked the family, the church, law enforcement, the military, our educational system, our economic system, our history, our traditional understanding of sexuality - almost everything one can think of - while conservatives have been waging a defensive struggle, trying to preserve what's good against the leftist onslaught.

Nevertheless, as soon as conservatives resist the left's assaults on our institutions and moral values, their opponents accuse them of being the aggressors in the culture war. Conservatives find themselves in the position of a man being repeatedly slapped in the face who puts his hands up to fend off the blows and is thus accused of being provocative, hostile and aggressive.

A good example of this is the left's response to conservative parents who protest against their children's schools for teaching their students that they're racists and ladening them with guilt for being white. The left professes dismay that parents would resist teachers inculcating Critical Race Theory and its racist offshoots in their classrooms, and it's the parents who are called racists for opposing this supposedly "antiracist" indoctrination.

Kevin Drum, himself a progressive, has a helpful set of graphs at his website which show quite clearly that our contemporary polarization is a result, not of conservatives moving further to the right, but of Democrats moving further to the left.

Drum analyzes six issues that divide progressives and conservatives, five of which might be considered cultural and one economic, and finds that on each issue Democrats have moved leftward in far greater numbers than Republicans have moved toward the right. For example, on immigration he notes that:

The Republican view of immigrants has bounced up and down a bit and is now up by maybe five points or so since 2000. The Democratic view has gone up by 35 percentage points.

(Note that by "up" I mean that the percentage share of partisans who hold the conventional partisan opinion has gone up. For Republicans, it means the share of Republicans who endorse the right-wing position has gone up. For Democrats it means the share of Democrats who endorse the left-wing position has gone up.)

In other words, Republicans (which should not be confused with conservatives, but which may serve as a stand-in for the purposes of this illustration) have become slightly more opposed to immigration over the last two decades than they were in 2000 whereas Democrats (liberals and progressives) have become more amenable to immigration by 35 percentage points.

On abortion the numbers are similar:

Among Republicans, the most extreme view on abortion (always illegal) has gone up by about two points since 2000. Among Democrats, the most extreme view (always legal) has gone up by 20 points.

On same sex marriage:

Democratic support for same sex marriage is up 50 points. Republican support is down 39 points (that is, they've moved 39 points away from the conservative position).

Republicans have become much more "liberal" on this issue but nearly as liberal as Democrats have.

On guns:

Among Republicans, the conservative point of view has gone up about 10 points. Among Democrats, the liberal point of view has increased by about 20 points.

On taxes:

The Republican view of taxes has gone down about ten points (probably due to the Bush tax cuts). The Democratic view of taxes has gone up by about 20 points.

Again, Republicans have moved somewhat toward the liberal position on taxes (high tax rates), but Democrats have moved in even greater numbers toward that position.

On religion:

Among Republicans, religiosity hasn't changed at all. Among Democrats, it's gone down by nearly 15 points.

Check out Drum's website to see his actual graphs.

The point that Drum is making is that the polarization we see in our politics and the aggressiveness we see in our cultural conflicts in general is largely a result of more Democrats moving further to the left while conservatives (Republicans) remain for the most part where they've always been. Although in some cases Republicans have moved a bit leftward, there's no case in which Democrats have move toward the right.

White Privilege

According to the taxonomy of racism represented by the pyramid featured in a couple of previous posts, white privilege is a form of "covert racism," but why is that so?

Even if we assume it to be true that whites enjoy a privilege in this country that other races don't, an assumption with which I have problems, why is it racist to be born with a particular kind of privilege?

Many people are born with all sorts of characteristics that privilege them in our society - wealth, intelligence, good looks, physical assets, good parents, etc. so why is being born white singled out as particularly egregious to the point where some whites are claiming on social media that they're ashamed of being white?

Moreover, when one is asked to denote the privileges that accrue to whites by virtue of their whiteness the advantages they list are often trivial - not being followed in a store, not having people cross the street when they see you approaching, not being stopped by police for walking in a neighborhood not one's own, etc.

Parenthetically, I've been stopped by police at least twice and had residents drive by slowly when walking both in my own neighborhood and a neighborhood not my own. And I'm white. On each occasion I simply explained that I was walking for exercise, we had a friendly chat, and that was that.

Almost all of the more serious privileges - like not being denied a loan or an apartment simply on the basis of race, etc. - have been illegal in this country for decades, and it's hard to see how something that's illegal can be a privilege.

The idea that white privilege, if it exists, is a form of racism is hard to understand. Racism is an evil, but it's not evil to be born with privilege. Whether you are black or white, if you are born into an intact family with a father and mother who love you and love each other, you are privileged and will benefit for a lifetime in ways that others will not, but that's not evil.

Whether you are black or white, if you are born into the middle class you will have benefits for the rest of your life that those born into the lower classes do not have, but there's no moral fault in being born into that class.

Whether you are black or white, if you are born into a (relatively) free country like America you are privileged and will benefit for a lifetime in ways that others will not, but you certainly shouldn't feel guilty about it.

But, it will be objected, the particular privilege that's called "white privilege" evolved to the detriment of others and as long as you enjoy the benefits of that oppression, even if the oppression is historical and not current, you share in the guilt.

This objection is hard to credit. It's probably the case that everyone living in almost every country of the world is living in a country that was established through the conquest of other peoples and perpetuated by various other forms of injustice and oppression. There are probably few, if any, countries or peoples of which that is not the case.

So, should every person in the world today feel guilty for enjoying the benefits of what was done by others long before they were born? Should blacks feel guilty for enjoying the benefits of living in a country which severely mistreated Native Americans?

In his book I'm Not a Racist, But ... philosopher Lawrence Blum says that white privilege is not racism, but it's nevertheless a "racial ill."

I disagree. It's only a racial ill if those who enjoy the privilege are insensitive toward those who do not and/or actively seek to exclude those who do not from enjoying the same benefits.

But unlike intellectual and physical gifts, whatever serious privileges whites are alleged to enjoy are not, or should not be, exclusionary. Anyone can aspire to them. That's why millions of immigrants have risked their lives and the lives of their children to come here.

The biggest problem with the notion of white privilege, though, is that it implies that people are to be regarded according to the group to which they belong rather than as individuals. You, yourself, may not be an oppressor, the argument goes, but other members of your race were, and are, therefore you're implicated in their guilt.

But why should you be held responsible for what others who happened to have the same skin color have done? If you're a white Jew are you nevertheless responsible for the Nazis' crimes? If you're a black male are you therefore responsible for the disproportionate number of assaults by blacks on whites?

The attempt to impute guilt to an entire group is a derivative of the Marxism that has influenced so much of contemporary racial thinking. For Marx and his ideological descendants everyone is guilty or innocent based on their socio-economic class.

For our contemporary race theorists, race is simply substituted for class.

But it's just silly to claim that if persons are white they are ipso facto privileged and if persons are black they're not. Surely, Barack Obama, Denzel Washington or Oprah Winfrey are far more privileged in our society in most ways that most people think really matter than are 99% of the whites living in America.

In fact, it doubtless strikes a white single mother struggling to feed three children while keeping her creditors at bay as laughable to be told that she's a racist because she has "white privilege."

It would be a good thing if we retired the idea of "White Privilege" altogether. All it does is breed resentment and division. What we should focus on instead is what makes us the same and not what makes us different.

Hopper's Whoppers

An article by Allison Hopper at Scientific American is, or should be, embarrassing to both the author and her editor. Ms. Hopper's thesis is that what's called Creationism, a view based upon a literal interpretation of the Bible's Genesis account, actually promotes white supremacy.

How does she arrive at such a peculiar conclusion? She complains firstly, that children's books don't show "black-skinned early people who launched human civilization."

This is the first puzzler in her essay, but not the last. Almost every depiction of early hominids I've ever seen shows them to be either exceedingly swarthy or so hirsute as to be racially indecipherable.

She then adds that, "The global scientific community overwhelmingly accepts that all living humans are of African descent....We are all descended genetically, and also culturally, from dark-skinned ancestors."

Even if "the global scientific community" is correct that all humans descended from African ancestors, how does it follow that they were therefore dark-skinned? The fact that Africans throughout recorded history, as far as we know, have had dark skin certainly doesn't necessitate the conclusion that those who inhabited the African savannah in prehistoric times were dark-skinned.

But set that aside. Hopper hasn't yet gotten to the core of her complaint. What she wants to do is, "unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies."

So if you're skeptical of the "just so" stories of modern evolutionists it's because you're a white supremacist wishing to "perpetuate segregation and violence against Black bodies." Does she adduce any evidence for this claim? Yes, she does:

[T]he first wave of legal fights against evolution was supported by the Klan in the 1920s. Ever since then, entrenched racism and the ban on teaching evolution in the schools have gone hand in hand.

This is odd logic: The Klan opposed teaching evolution and the Klan is racist, so opposition to teaching evolution is racist.

It's an interesting instance of guilt by association, I suppose, but very poor reasoning. It's somewhat like arguing that the Pope is opposed to abortion and the Pope is Catholic, so those who oppose abortion are Catholic.

In any case, having warmed up with this pseudo-argument Ms. Hopper then delivers herself of some extraordinary theological exegesis:

At the heart of white evangelical creationism is the mythology of an unbroken white lineage that stretches back to a light-skinned Adam and Eve. In literal interpretations of the Christian Bible, white skin was created in God's image.

This is a head scratcher. I challenge Ms. Hopper or anyone else to show where in the Bible it says anything about the color of Adam and Eve's skin, or God's, for that matter. But Hopper's biggest whopper is this:

Dark skin has a different, more problematic origin. As the biblical story goes, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants' skin. Historically, many congregations in the U.S. pointed to this story of Cain as evidence that Black skin was created as a punishment.

Hopper manages to reinforce in this short passage the already strong suspicion that she never took the trouble to read the relevant passage. The Genesis account is completely silent about the nature of the mark, nor is the mark a punishment. Here's what the Bible says (Genesis 4:13-15, NIV):

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.

It's clear that whatever the "mark of Cain" was it was designed to protect him from those who would kill him. The "mark" was not a curse; the curse was being driven from the presence of God.

If anyone interpreted this passage as being somehow a justification for racism they're only showing themselves to be just as ignorant of the Bible as Ms Hopper.

The irony of this article, though, is that if anything bears responsibility for modern racism it is evolutionary theory and the belief, promoted by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man as well Herbert Spencer, that some races are inferior to, and more primitive than, others.

Darwin believed that Africans were less evolutionarily advanced than white Europeans and that they were inevitably doomed to extinction in the struggle for survival. He wrote in The Descent of Man:

The Western nations of Europe...now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization. The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.

If Ms. Hopper wants to draw our attention to the wellsprings of white supremacy she'd do well to point us to her beloved theory of evolution and its author.

The idea of a struggle for survival in which the most fit would prevail together with the Darwinian notion that some races are inferior to others provided white southerners during the Jim Crow era with all the justification they needed for relegating blacks to second class status.

It has also supplied the Nazis and every racist, bigot and antisemite of the twentieth century with the intellectual ammunition to justify their belief in their own racial and ethnic superiority.

If Ms. Hopper had done just a modicum of research before sending her silly piece off to Scientific American she would've known this and saved herself, and them, no little professional embarrassment.

Are Minds a Different Substance from Brains?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor recently debated naturalistic philosopher David Papineau on the mind/body problem. Egnor, a Catholic theist, believes that the mind and the body (i.e. the brain) are two distinct substances and that mind cannot be reduced to material stuff like the brain or it's functions.

Papineau is an atheist who believes that mind and brain are essentially the same thing, that what we call mind can be explained in terms of physical laws and processes.

A summary of Round One of the debate in which Egnor goes first can be read at Mind Matters. Egnor begins by explaining how his work in neuroscience is what led him to abandon atheism and become a Catholic in his mid-forties.

He adds that, "I had felt through much of my career that physics, biochemistry, biology, and particularly neuroscience, just didn’t make a lot of sense in a materialist paradigm."

He notes that he,

kept seeing patients who had largely missing brains or had brains split in half (for medical reasons, to treat otherwise intractable epilepsy) who lived normal lives. Whatever the mind is, it did not appear to be wholly dependent on the brain. And I learned a fair amount of neuroscience, but I found that I seemed to know less and less about the mind the more neuroscience I learned.

I’ve been doing neurosurgery now for the better part of 40 years, I’ve done 7,000 brain operations, and I’ve become convinced that there’s much more to the mind than the brain alone explains.

He then gives three reasons why he rejects the idea that the mind cannot be explained just in terms of the brain:

The first is that human mental states are characterized, in many instances, by the capacity for reason, by the ability to make logical inferences, to make logical connections, and a difficulty that materialism faces is that, while all of our logical reasoning entails logical connections between ideas, there are no logical connections between brain states.

Brain states are connected by physical laws, not by laws of logic, and that at least the identity theory brand of materialism, I think fails in this regard, because that is something about the mind, that is the ability to make logical connections, that is not present in the brain. The brain has no logic. The brain just has physics.

In other words, the brain performs electrochemical reactions along neurons, but electrochemical reactions do not employ logic. The provenience of logic is inexplicable in terms of material substance and the laws of physics.

The second reason why I think we can’t explain the mind entirely on the basis of brain states is the existence of qualia, what David Chalmers says is the Hard Problem of consciousness. I can see no reason to infer that any brain state would create first-person experience.

Brain states are third-person ontologies, so I don’t think qualia can be explained in a materialist perspective.

To grasp more firmly what Egnor is getting at imagine that you look at grass and see the color green. Where and what is the sensation of green? It's not in the grass but in your brain, but there's a problem.

The sensation is the product of a chain of chemical reactions that begin in your retina and are converted to an electrical signal transmitted along the optic nerve to your brain, but neither the light from the grass nor the chemical reactions it produces in the retina nor the electrical impulse that goes to the brain are "green."

Nor does the color green appear anywhere in your brain when you see the grass. So where is the green? What are we sensing when we experience the sensation of green? It doesn't seem explicable just in terms of anything in the brain. The same is true for pain, pleasure and all the phenomena of our sense experience.

And the third reason why I don’t think mind states can be explained materialistically is the phenomenon of intentionality.... the hallmark of mental states is that they’re always about something. They’re always pointed at something. There’s a goal to them.

And physical things never have any intrinsic about-ness. They’re simply collections of matter. So the salient characteristic of a mental state is that it’s about something. It has meaning. And you might say the salient character of a physical thing is that it’s never about anything, never has any meaning.

In physical terms the words you're reading are just chemical dots on a screen. They have no meaning in themselves, but they gain meaning when someone sees them. If all that's involved in this are meaningless physical patterns being apprehended by a material nervous system that consists of electrochemical reactions, where does the meaning come from?

This really is a perplexing question. Unfortunately, Papineau's response is to simply assert that there's really no problem here and the subsequent debate gets bogged down, as these kinds of debates often do, on an ancillary question.

Even so, Egnor's opening statement presents a powerful challenge to materialist philosophies of mind. You can watch his entire opening statement as well as the rest of the debate here:

An Atheist's Moral Confusion

A few years back Buzzfeed ran an article recounting accusations of alleged sexual improprieties toward women by celebrity atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss has been active over the last dozen years or so promoting atheism in books and debates with theistic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. Whether Krauss is actually guilty of behaving boorishly or not I can't say, but I was interested in some of the readers' remarks in the article's combox, particularly one from an atheist named Jim MacIver who wrote this:

This [Krauss' alleged conduct] is disgusting. It is the sort of behavior I expect from god-worshippers but not Atheists. We are supposed to be the ones who lead for truth and justice, logic and reason. Harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do but especially if an Athieist [sic] does it.

The religioniists [sic] will use this against us. This hurts us as a movement. This will hurt all Atheists, everywhere. Even more important, it hurts women who are victimized by men they thought they could trust.

You may think that Mr. MacIver sounds a bit like a teenager here, but a link accompanying his comment takes you to his Facebook page, and it turns out that he really is an adult. Given what he has said above, another claim he makes on his page sounds weirdly paradoxical:

I have no morality myself. Morality is arbitrary rules made up by old men to control the sex lives of human beings, particularly women. I have ethics, which tells you whats [sic] right.

Set aside his inapt distinction between morality and ethics, and set aside, too, the fact that on atheism, truth, justice and reason are all highly problematic notions. What I wonder about is how a man who claims to have no morals can say that "harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do".

I also wonder why it's especially indecent if the behavior is perpetrated by someone (i.e. an atheist like Krauss) whose worldview offers no basis for objective moral, or ethical, values and no reason to think that there's any ultimate accountability for anything one does in life.

On atheism, as Mr. MacIver acknowledges, there's no morally right or wrong conduct. The only criterion for assessing whether one should do something that one desires to do, if one is an atheist, is whether one can get away with it.

If someone's behavior hurts or otherwise victimizes women, why, given atheism, should Mr. MacIver be upset about that? All he's doing is emoting, expressing his subjective dislike for behavior that he finds personally unpleasant, but Mr. MacIver's personal repugnance hardly makes it wrong for others to do.

To make a moral judgment of another person's conduct the atheist must piggy-back on a theistic worldview and hope that no one notices that he's deriving his moral sustenance from a source that he in fact believes has no actual validity.

Whenever an atheist makes the sort of judgments Mr. MacIver does he's engaging in a kind of moral parasitism, drawing nourishment from the host of theism because his own metaphysical assumptions lack the resources to support those judgments.

This is dreadfully inconsistent, although it occurs with surprising frequency among atheists despite it's obvious irrationality.

If Mr. MacIver truly believes that sexual misconduct toward women is objectively wrong, and if he truly prizes reason and logic he might want to reassess his atheism. He might also reflect on these words from a fellow atheist, a philosopher named Joel Marks, whose understanding of the implications of his atheism manifests a bit more clarity than does Mr. MacIver's:

This philosopher (Joel Marks) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t...

The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality...

I experienced my shocking epiphany that [Christian theists] are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God...

nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no morality. (Excerpted from Marks' An Amoral Manifesto).

If Marks is correct, and it's hard to argue against his conclusion given his premise that God doesn't exist, then it's very difficult to see how anyone could say that Lawrence Krauss, if he really did that of which he's accused, was acting in any way inconsistently with his atheism.

Nor can one say, Mr. MacIver's moral hand-wringing notwithstanding, how what he is accused of doing is in any way objectively "wrong."

China's Barbarism

Last Friday I posted a piece on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the CCP in which I mentioned the brutal history of the party.

What I mentioned in that post was really just the tip of the communist iceberg. A pair of articles at The Epoch Times gives us more of the grisly details of the communists' barbarism.

The first article highlights the CCP's long hostility toward religious belief.

During the decade long Cultural Revolution, for instance,

Priests and nuns were forced to kneel down in front of a large bonfire, watching helplessly as the flames devoured their sacred instruments and burned their skin.

In another Chinese city, students wearing red armbands hit Catholics with sharp wooden sticks, throwing one priest into a fire pit after he collapsed in pain. They beat one nun to death after she refused to stomp on a statue of the Virgin Mary.

One Catholic priest was buried alive in Beijing after declining to give up his faith.

Since then successive Party leaders have launched campaign after campaign to crush and control people of faith in China, be they Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs, or the Falun Gong meditation discipline:

One year after the CCP took power in 1949, Chinese troops marched into Tibet and forced upon the Tibetans a 17-point agreement to legitimize the CCP’s rule. Yet despite rosy promises of Tibetan autonomy on paper, Beijing turned the region into a surveillance state and installed labor camps.

The Dalai Lama, the region’s spiritual leader, went into exile in India in 1959 after the regime brutally crushed an uprising, killing tens of thousands of Tibetans. In the 20 years following, about 1.2 million Tibetans have died under the regime’s repressive policies.... More than 150 have resorted to setting themselves on fire in a desperate act of defiance.

A recent example is that of a Tibetan herder named Lhamo, a 36-year-old mother of three, who was detained in June 2020 for sending money to her family in India. The family members who saw her two months later found her “badly bruised and unable to speak,” according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

She died days later at a local hospital and was immediately cremated.

Of course it's not only Tibetan Buddhists who suffer under the boot of Communist oppression:

The CCP’s suppression of Catholic and Protestant churches has also intensified under current leader Xi Jinping’s watch.

Chinese authorities have removed thousands of crosses from churches, arrested pastors, ordered the removal of Christian images, and aggressively pursued a “sinicization” policy by establishing “patriotic churches,” in which pictures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are replaced with portraits of Xi or Mao.

The Chinese regime is also reinterpreting and retranslating the Bible to promote “Chinese-style Christianity,” with one Chinese ethics textbook twisting a story from the Bible to have Jesus stone a woman to death while claiming himself a sinner.

In 2017, at least four cities and one province restricted Christmas celebrations, banning displays of Christmas decorations, themed performances, and promotional activities. Communist officials in one university banned activities related to Western religious holidays in the name of helping the younger generation “build cultural confidence.”

One Christian this January received a hefty fine of 160,000 yuan ($24,733) for celebrating the holiday.

Underground churches have proliferated as a result of the regime’s oppression. In response, Chinese officials have detained church members and handed lengthy prison sentences to pastors.

Wang Yi, a pastor in central China’s Chengdu who founded one of the country’s largest unregistered Christian churches, was sentenced to nine years in prison in December 2019 for “illegal business operations” and “inciting to subvert state power,” a charge the regime frequently uses to silence dissidents.

In April, Radio Free Asia reported that Beijing was running secret brainwashing facilities, which usually involve torture, in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province to force Christians to give up their faith.

Last Friday's post mentioned the genocide of the Uyghurs in western China where they face forced labor, torture, sexual abuse, political indoctrination, forced abortion, and forced sterilization, but perhaps equally as bad is what the Chinese are doing to the Falun Gong.

Millions of Falun Gong adherents have been held in prisons, labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, and other detention facilities in China. Hundreds of thousands have been tortured in those venues in a bid to force practitioners to give up their belief.

An untold number have died under China’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, with their organs cut out to be sold on the transplant market.

An eye witness the Times calls "Bob" describes how the organ transplant operation works in the second of The Epoch Times articles:

Over the first five months of 2021, 599 Falun Gong practitioners are documented to have been sentenced for their faith; one of them, 81 years old, received nine years, according to data from Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that monitors the persecution of the faith group.

More than 15,000 were documented to have experienced harassment or arrests last year.

The prisoners determined to be suitable to have their organs extracted...would get injected with a drug said to relieve their pain. Its actual goal, though, was to prevent blood to coagulate after brain death and damage the organs, Bob said.

Those slated for organ harvesting were typically young, healthy men, usually in their 20s and 30s without a history of major illness, according to Bob.

At the execution site, prisoners were arranged in a line to be shot in the back of the head.

Many of the victims were Falun Gong. The article then describes how the bodies were removed to a van and cut open to harvest the organs for transplantation into the bodies of foreigners who paid well for the procedure:

George Zheng, a former Chinese medical intern, recalled assisting in an organ removal operation in the 1990s alongside two nurses and three military doctors, in a mountainous area near an army prison close to Dalian, a city in northeastern China.

The patient, a young man, was unresponsive but his body was still warm. The doctors had removed two kidneys from the man and then instructed Zheng to extract his eyes.

“At that moment, his eyelids moved and he looked at me,” he told The Epoch Times in 2015. “There was sheer terror in his eyes … My mind went blank and my whole body began to shake.”

The memories of those two eyes haunted Zheng for years.

The Chinese claim that they no longer harvest organs, but there's apparently a lot of evidence they still do. In any case, they also claimed they weren't responsible for the Wuhan virus which has killed millions of people worldwide, so their denials aren't worth much.

But even if it's true that they're no longer killing people in order to harvest their organs they're still a tyrannical and brutal regime.

To quote the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once again, "If God is dead then everything is permitted," and Vladimir Lenin said that, "Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order..."

The communists, whether under Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao or whomever, insist that God is dead and that therefore there are no moral constraints on what they do.

Everything is permitted. It's all moral.