Important Fusion Breakthrough

One of the goals of those researching cleaner energy is to produce heat the way the sun does it, through nuclear fusion. Unlike nuclear fission which produces a lot of radioactive waste products, fusion is clean. The waste product is helium.

It also uses hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium as fuel which can be readily obtained.

The nuclei of these isotopes are positively charged and thus repel each other, but on the sun they're forced together under incredible pressure and temperature to form helium. In this process, called fusion, an immense amount of energy is produced, enough to provide all the heat and light that have bathed our planet for its entire existence.

If this reaction could be harnessed on earth it would go a long way to solving our future energy problems. The difficulty has been generating the conditions necessary to force those nuclei together so that they fuse.

Now it seems that a major hurdle has been overcome by the Lawrence Livermore lab. Newsweek hasthe report:

A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has been confirmed a year after it was achieved at a laboratory in California.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers.

Once the hydrogen plasma "ignites", the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, with the fusions themselves producing enough power to maintain the temperature without external heating.

Ignition during a fusion reaction essentially means that the reaction itself produced enough energy to be self-sustaining, which would be necessary in the use of fusion to generate electricity.

If we could harness this reaction to generate electricity, it would be one of the most efficient and least polluting sources of energy possible.

No fossil fuels would be required as the only fuel would be hydrogen, and the only by-product would be helium, which we use in industry and are actually in short supply of.

The problem with fusion energy at the moment is that we do not have the technical capabilities to harness this power. Scientists from across the world are currently working to solve these issues.

Newsweek has more details of this encouraging development. Unfortunately, although ignition is a big step there are still many technological difficulties to be overcome and commercial fusion generation may still be decades away.

Even so, humanity is one step closer to realizing an energy boon.

The FBI Doesn't Deserve Our Respect

In the wake of an historically unprecedented raid on the home of a former president by agents of the FBI - a raid that Geraldo Rivera likens to a librarian sending a SWAT team to retrieve an overdue library book - both the DOJ and the FBI have come in for massive criticism from both conservatives and independents.

FBI Director Christopher Wray took umbrage at the criticism and delivered a disturbing statement defending the FBI on Thursday. In a piece for The Federalist Margot Cleveland launches a devastating critique of the Director and his statement.

Here's what he said:

Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others. Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans.

The second sentence is so obvious as to be banal, but the first sentence is actually alarming.

What Wray calls "attacks" are legitimate criticisms of the agency he heads. What erodes respect for the rule of law is not the criticism but the behavior that elicits that criticism.

Nor are these criticisms "violence" or unfounded as Wray claims.

In the past five years the FBI has been guilty of both seeking to undermine and depose a duly elected president through deception and dishonesty and has also been guilty of employing an unjust double standard in the manner in which it investigates political figures.

The facts are indisputable and Cleveland makes them clear:

There is nothing “unfounded” in the condemnation of the FBI for its handling of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and it is because of that widespread misconduct that Americans doubt the legitimacy of the FBI’s decision to search the former president's home.

Crossfire Hurricane revealed that agents at the highest levels in the bureau held an anti-Trump political bias. The inspector general’s report established that the FBI submitted four FISA applications replete with lies and material omissions, allowing agents to obtain a court order to surveil Carter Page in violation of Page’s constitutional rights.

The country also learned that the FBI used a backdoor conduit in Bruce Ohr to continue to accept “intel” from Christopher Steele after terminating him as a “confidential human source.”

The Mueller report revealed that for all the talk about investigating Russian interference in the election, the FBI ignored the obvious question of whether Steele had been fed Russian disinformation to meddle in our affairs.

And the trial of Michael Sussmann revealed how nonchalant the FBI was about being misled.

There is nothing “unfounded” about any of these criticisms, and it is precisely because of their legitimacy — and that they all flowed from a “get-Trump” mentality — that the country now condemns the FBI’s raid on Trump’s home.

These are all legitimate criticisms of the FBI's behavior. Does Wray think they constitute "violence?" If so, what conclusion should Americans draw?

Should we conclude that our freedom of speech does not include the freedom to criticize the FBI? Are we on the verge of becoming another version of the Soviet Union?

Cleveland continues to excoriate Wray's absurd statement by focusing on the FBI's double standard:

Further, even if this time the FBI (and its sources) didn’t lie and the court didn’t rubber stamp the search warrant, the raid still deserves condemnation because of the obvious double standard.

The FBI never raided Hillary Clinton’s home during the FBI’s investigation of the former secretary of state for mishandling classified documents.

Consequently, Clinton had time for her minions to wipe her homebrew server with BleachBit, making it impossible for the FBI to recover some emails.

The FBI also didn’t raid Clinton’s houses to search for the 13 mobile devices it believed she might have used to email her staff. The DOJ instead asked Clinton’s lawyers to provide the Blackberries and other devices to agents.

Clinton’s attorneys later told the FBI “they were unable to locate any of these devices.”

Not only was Ms. Clinton the beneficiary of the FBI's deference to Democrats so, too, is the Biden family:

The double standard appears also to apply to Hunter Biden, unless the FBI somehow succeeded in quietly searching his residences without anyone’s notice.

But even that would contrast with how agents treated Roger Stone, when the media amazingly knew to be handy during the pre-dawn raid and search of the Trump ally’s home. And these are but a few of the many examples of disparate treatment based on political affiliation.

Nor is criticism of the FBI’s broader handling of the Hunter Biden case “unfounded,” as multiple whistleblowers recently made clear when they told Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that FBI headquarters buried verified or verifiable evidence implicating the son of the now-president.

If Wray is upset about the public perception of the FBI as a tool of the Democrat party then maybe he should do a little head-knocking and house cleaning at the agency he runs and reestablish the kind of unbiased, non-partisan reputation they once enjoyed.

Wray wants his agency to be respected but respect has to be earned, and it's a lot easier to lose it than it is to gain it.

No New Ideas

In a piece written for his Dispatch column Jonah Goldberg maintains that there have only been two big, new ideas in the history of Western civilization.

The first idea is of particular interest and importance. It is that human beings have inherent dignity and worth:

Basically, there have only been two really new, really big, and really successful ideas in human, or at least Western, history. The first was born of Judaism and Christianity—the idea that the individual has innate moral value and dignity, regardless of class, caste, or tribe.

This idea was entailed by the Divine assertion in the very beginning of the Bible (Genesis 1:27) -"So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them."

If human beings, alone among all created beings, are created in God's image then they have especial worth and value, both corporately and individually.

Apart from this there's no reason whatsoever to assign any particular value to human beings. Every attempt to do so is completely arbitrary. Thus, the atheist and brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking could write 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.”

Numerous animal rights activists and others are arguing that human beings are not of any more worth than fish or trees. On atheism, of course, they are correct. Atheism (or naturalism) has no non-arbitrary way to ground human exceptionalism.

Moreover, there's nothing in naturalistic evolution that justifies considering human beings to be equal to each other in the rights they enjoy. Given atheistic evolution those who can impose their will on others are perfectly justified in doing so.

Why would it be wrong?

Nietzsche argued in just this way that morality was an invention of the weak to prevent the strong from doing just that. Morality, in other words, is just a subterfuge to protect the weak from the law of survival of the fittest.

The second idea, Goldberg claims, is based upon this Judeo-Christian notion that individuals have innate dignity and value:

The second, which stands atop the first, is liberal democratic capitalism. This idea subordinates the state by making it a piece of technology that serves the people chiefly by providing a legitimate way of making decisions in a free society.

Plenty of kings and czars cast themselves as servants of their subjects. But the key word there is subjects. Pretty much whenever the principle was tested, the people served the state, personified by a ruler, not the other way around.

The ruler’s interests might get gussied up with all sorts of theological or paternalistic junk, but what won out were the interests of the ruler and the ruling class.

Liberal democratic capitalism, the rule of law, and the sovereignty of individual rights overturned all that. Perhaps not always in practice, but conceptually it was a truly new idea, the only truly new idea in the history of political ideas.

It took over fifteen centuries for these ideas to percolate throughout the various cultures of the West, but once they did they revolutionized how people looked at everything from economics to law to each other.

Tragically, both of these ideas are in danger of falling into desuetude today in a culture that holds their foundation - Judeo-Christian religion - in contempt. To the extent that that foundation is dismantled we will find ourselves living in a culture similar to that of ancient Rome with all its brutality, treachery, inequality and horrors.

Why Our Universe Cannot be Infinitely Old

One thorny problem for any naturalist metaphysics is that the consensus among scientists is that the universe came into being at some point in the past.

If that's true then, for reasons discussed in a recent post, it's strong evidence for the existence of a creative, intelligent, transcendent, eternal, and personal first cause, i.e. either God or something very much like God.

If such a cause exists, of course, then naturalism is false, so naturalists, understandably chary about accepting the conclusion that their metaphysics is false, sometimes take refuge in the argument that the universe is infinitely old, past eternal, or beginning-less.

The post linked to above offered scientific reasons for rejecting this argument, but there are philosophical reasons as well. One of these is that an actually infinite set of any physical entities, whether they be moments, or atoms, or whatever, is probably impossible.

Philosopher William Lane Craig explains in the following short video some of the paradoxes that arise in an infinite series of entities and why such a series is highly implausible:

Moreover, even if the universe were in fact infinitely old it still could never have arrived at the present moment.

Kirk Durston in an article at Evolution News and Views explains why:

The evidence from science points to a beginning for the universe. Some atheists, understanding the possible theological implications of a beginning, prefer to set aside science and assert that the past is infinite either in terms of the number of years this universe has existed, or in terms of a fantasized infinite series of universes in a multiverse....

In the real world, an infinite past means that if you were to set the current year as t = 0 and count back into the past, there would never be an end to your counting, for there is no year in the past that was the "beginning."

No matter how long you counted, you would still have an infinite number of years ahead of you to count and, if you were to look back at the set of years you have already counted, it would always be finite.

In other words, if the universe is infinitely old then, if you began counting back from the present moment, you could never count back to a starting point. No matter if you counted forever you would never reach a first moment of the universe.

It follows, then, that neither could you count forward from infinity past to the present moment. If the universe extends infinitely into the past and contains an infinity of past moments then no matter how many of those moments tick by the present moment would never arrive.

Put differently, in order for a series of moments to arrive at the present there has to be a starting point, but if the past is eternal then the necessary starting point keeps receding further and further into the past and in fact does not exist at all.

If there's no initial moment then there's no second moment, and if no second then no third, and so on, and if all this is so, then there'd be no present moment either. But obviously there is a present moment, so it would seem that the assumption of a past eternal universe is false.

Durston goes into more detail than this, but the implication is clear. If the universe is not past eternal then it had a beginning. And if it had a beginning it had a cause.

And any cause of the universe must have the properties listed above, all of which is to say that a finite universe is strong evidence that theism is true.

The Coming War with China

Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, authors of the forthcoming book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, have written a very informative piece (free access, I think) on that topic for the Wall Street Journal.

Anyone interested in potential war with China over Taiwan should read it.

The authors open with this:

The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific. While the world has been focused on Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan.

Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity.

This peaking-power syndrome—the tendency for rising states to become more aggressive as they become more fearful of impending decline—has caused some of the bloodiest wars in history. Unless the U.S. and its allies act quickly, it could trigger a conflict that would make the war in Ukraine look minor by comparison.

China has been preparing for this war for a long time:

For the past decade, China’s factories have churned out ammunition and put warships to sea faster than any country since World War II.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) regularly practices missile strikes on mock-ups of Taiwanese ports and U.S. aircraft carriers, and PLA vessels and aircraft menace Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace several times a week.

There is a crucial consideration that makes war likely sometime in the next few years:

Senior U.S. officials warn that China might attack Taiwan in the next half-decade, possibly even in the next 18 months.

Beijing’s belligerence might look like the mark of an ascendant superpower. But the reality is more complex. China isn’t so much a rising state as a peaking power, one that has acquired fearsome coercive capabilities—and soaring power ambitions—but now faces worsening challenges at home and abroad.

...China’s future doesn’t seem so bright. Once-torrid growth had already slowed dramatically before Covid-19 compelled the government to lock down major cities indefinitely.

Water, farmland and energy resources are becoming scarce. Thanks to the legacy of its one-child policy, China is approaching demographic catastrophe: It will lose 70 million working-age individuals over the next decade while gaining 120 million senior citizens.

And whereas the outside world once aided China’s rise, now advanced democracies are kicking Chinese firms out of their financial markets, strangling China’s tech giant Huawei, boosting military spending and creating multilateral coalitions to check Beijing’s expansion.

Mr. Xi may tout the rise of the East and the decline of the West, but behind the scenes, Chinese government reports paint pessimistic pictures of slowing growth at home and surging anti-Chinese sentiment abroad.

In the long term, China’s woes will make it less competitive. It probably can’t outpace America in a superpower marathon, let alone America plus its allies. But in the near-term, we should expect a more dangerous China—one that gambles big to reshape the balance of power before its window closes.

Thus, the longer China waits the less likely their chances of being able to mount a successful war that won't push their own economy past the breaking point.

There are additional considerations, moreover, that make war likely within the next few years:

Mr. Xi’s reforms of the PLA—meant, among other things, to make it capable of taking Taiwan—are nearly complete.

China is rapidly deploying missiles, aircraft, warships and rocket launchers that can pummel Taiwan; it is assiduously rehearsing large-scale amphibious assaults.

Meanwhile, U.S. military power is about to dip. The mid-2020s will witness the mass retirement of aging U.S. cruisers, guided-missile submarines and long-range bombers, leaving the U.S. military with hundreds fewer missile launchers—the key metric of modern naval firepower—floating and flying around East Asia.

While Washington, Tokyo and Taipei are all undertaking much-needed defense programs focused on denying Chinese hegemony in Asia, those efforts won’t bear fruit until the early 2030s.

Mr. Xi has repeatedly said that the task of “liberating” Taiwan cannot be passed down from generation to generation. In the mid- and late 2020s, he’ll have his best chance to accomplish that mission.

Might Beijing try to woo Taiwan back into the fold by intimidation and seduction? Probably not, say Brands and Beckley:

If war comes, it is likely to feature the massive application of force.

Beijing could theoretically try to coerce Taiwan into unification with a more limited operation, such as an air-sea blockade or the seizure of Taiwan’s small offshore islands.

Yet none of these options can guarantee Taiwanese capitulation, and all of them would give Taipei, Washington and other democracies time to mount a punishing response.

To achieve its goals, China has to go big and brutal from the start.

The authors go on to describe what going "big and brutal" would entail and what the U.S. and Taiwan should be doing now to prevent it. And, if they can't prevent it, how they should respond to it.

Like I said above it's a very informative article, and I highly recommend it to anyone concerned about what's in store for all of us over the next couple of years.

A Secular Case for Life?

At The Dispatch David French responds to the argument made by many Pro-Choicers that those opposed to abortion are invariably animated by religious motives.

Thus, the argument goes, to oppose a law that guarantees a right to abortion would be a government imposition of religion:

Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, I’ve seen a number of people argue that Dobbs is essentially “theocratic,” that it’s the result of a Christian majority of judges imposing their religious beliefs on a religiously-diverse country.

To these critics, arguments against abortion are inherently and inescapably religious—which makes laws curtailing abortion a form of state establishment of religion that violates the religious liberty of dissenting Americans.

An example of this point of view is presented by Matthew Yglesias in a tweet last week in which he wrote:

Abortion policy is the most fun issue to debate on Twitter because one side is motivated by religious considerations and yet the people who hold that view have all been trained to deny that’s the case as if at any minute they might be pressed into arguing a Supreme Court case.

Yglesias believes there are no compelling secular reasons for opposing a right to abortion. French disagrees. He argues that there's a secular case to be made for being pro-life.

I, however, happen to agree with Yglesias on this one, but before I explain why let me summarize French's argument. He writes:

An unborn child has its own separate DNA. It isn’t a tumor or other form of growth that is an extension of the mother. It’s utterly dependent on its mom to live, no question, but it is a separate human life.

Moreover, it is not an inherently religious decision to grant worth to that life—any more than it’s inherently religious to grant worth to any life.

...A friend once explained it to me in these memorable terms. It was because he believed that life was the secular version of a miracle, he said, "The idea that evolutionary processes could lead to the creation of a person who could think, feel, and love was one of the most remarkably improbable things that he could imagine. The natural world was a wonder for him, and the natural world included you and me."

French quotes a left-wing thinker named Mary Meehan:

It is out of character for the left to neglect the weak and helpless. The traditional mark of the left has been its protection of the underdog, the weak and the poor.

The unborn child is the most helpless form of humanity, even more in need of protection than the poor tenant farmer or the mental patient. The basic instinct of the left is to aid those who cannot aid themselves. And that instinct is absolutely sound.

It's what keeps the human proposition going.

This is not an inherently religious argument...It is a moral argument, and moral arguments are not the exclusive prerogative of people of faith.

All that French says here is true, but it misses the point.

It's a biological fact that an individual human life begins at conception, but we can't derive a moral principle from a biological fact.

We cannot base the answer to the question why it's wrong to destroy that life on the biological fact that it's a human being. There must be a higher principle that tells us that human life is sacred, but for an atheist what could that higher principle be?

Don't misunderstand. An atheist may accept that human life is sacred and believe that it's wrong to kill a fetus, but the decision to accept that principle is arbitrary. There's nothing in her atheism that requires that one accept it.

The arbitrariness of this decision is evident in a quote French gives us from a former colleague at National Review who is both an atheist and pro-life:

Over the years, I have had all manner of intricate explanations thrown in my face as to why I, a nonbeliever, might be so invested in saving the lives of human beings who, if left to their own devices, will get to experience all the beauty, heartbreak, and mystery of life.

But, all told, the answer is simple: I am one.

An atheist might ask Cooke why being human means that it would be morally wrong to take the life of another human? What's the higher principle that forbids the taking of human life and where does that principle come from?

Here's my point: I am pro-life because biology tells me that a human life commences at conception (If you doubt this ask yourself this question: When did you come into being?), but I believe it is wrong to take that life, in lieu of very compelling reasons, because I believe that God forbids the gratuitous taking of innocent life.

If I were an atheist I'd have no reason to think that the gratuitous taking of innocent life is morally wrong, or that anything is morally wrong, or right. Indeed, were I an atheist I'd have a very difficult time explaining what is even meant by the term "morally wrong."

So, atheists can and do oppose abortion, a fact for which we can be grateful, but their decision to do so, just like the decision of an atheist to be pro-choice, is purely subjective. It's based on nothing more than their feelings.

The arguments against abortion, like any moral arguments, are at bottom religious because the principles involved - primarily the sacredness of innocent life - are grounded in Divine sanction. They cannot be founded on anything else. No moral claim can be.

Read the rest of French's essay. Even though I think he misses the mark with his main point, his overall column, like most of his work, is interesting.

Mr. Biden's Economy

The Biden administration is trying hard to convince us that we're not in a recession because we're at very low unemployment rates. Things aren't so bad, they tell us, and they're getting better and better due to President Biden's masterful navigation of the economic ship of state.

Well, maybe, but Carrie Sheffield at the Daily Caller has a different take.

She encourages us to consider the whole picture and notes that even though the number of U.S. jobs jumped 528,000 last month, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.5% from 3.6%, matching a five-decade low, that doesn't tell the whole story.

She writes that these figures mask the drop in July of the labor force participation rate to 62.1% in July from 62.2% in June, but this is still far below the 63.4% labor force participation in February 2020.

This translates, she notes, to millions fewer people who would otherwise be working today compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic.

She also notes that jobless claims rose to 260,000 for the week of July 30, almost 6,000 more than the 254,000 recorded the week prior, according to the Labor Department.

Moreover,

Consumer sentiment is at record lows as credit card debt is skyrocketing at a rate not seen in 20 years as people go into the red to pay for inflation.

Credit card balances grew by $46 billion in the second quarter of 2022, the New York Federal Reserve reported, a 5.5% spike from the first quarter.

There was also a 13.1% spike in new credit card accounts. “Americans are borrowing more, but a big part of the increased borrowing is attributable to higher prices,” the New York Fed said in a news release.

Meanwhile, gas prices have dropped some, though they’re still painfully high compared to when Biden took office.

Inflation is at 9.1%, higher than it's been since 1981, and no agency that has studied the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act believes it will actually reduce inflation and most think it will increase it.

In the end, the people who suffer the most from inflation are the poor and the 67% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

It's a tragically ironic state of affairs foisted on the poor by the party that has historically claimed to be their champion.

The Revolution in Philosophy

For some years now there has been a quiet revolution occurring in university philosophy departments throughout the West. Whereas for the better part of the 20th century to be a university philosophy professor was to perforce be a philosophical materialist or naturalist, today a significant minority of philosophers are Christians and the number is growing.

Philosopher William Lane Craig discusses this phenomenon in an article posted on his website. He writes:

“The contemporary Western intellectual world,” declares the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga, “is a battleground or arena in which rages a battle for men’s souls.” Three schools of thought struggle against each other in the competition to win the minds of thinking men and women: Enlightenment naturalism, post-modern anti-realism, and theism, typically Christian theism.

It is in the field of philosophy that the decisive battles are taking place, and the outcome of these contests will reverberate throughout the university and ultimately Western culture.

Craig then presents a summary of twentieth century philosophy with its heavy emphasis on the positivism of the early century which gave rise to the Verificationism of A. J. Ayer.

In order to understand where we are today, we need first of all to understand something of where we’ve been. In a recent retrospective, the eminent Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf describes what it was like in philosophy at Princeton during the 1950s and ‘60s. The overwhelmingly dominant mode of thinking was scientific naturalism.

Physical science was taken to be the final, and really only, arbiter of truth. Metaphysics—that traditional branch of philosophy which deals with questions about reality which are beyond science—metaphysics had been vanquished, expelled from philosophy like an unclean leper. “The philosophy of science,” says Benacerraf, “was the queen of all the branches” of philosophy, since “it had the tools. . . to address all the problems.”

Any problem that could not be addressed by science was simply dismissed as a pseudo-problem. If a question didn’t have a scientific answer, then it wasn’t a real question—just a pseudo-question masquerading as a real question. Indeed, part of the task of philosophy was to clean up the discipline from the mess that earlier generations had made of it by endlessly struggling with such pseudo-questions.

There was thus a certain self-conscious, crusading zeal with which philosophers carried out their task. The reformers, says, Benacerraf, “trumpeted the militant affirmation of the new faith. . . , in which the fumbling confusions of our forerunners were to be replaced by the emerging science of philosophy.

This new enlightenment would put the old metaphysical views and attitudes to rest and replace them with the new mode of doing philosophy.”

The book Language, Truth, and Logic by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer served as a sort of manifesto for this movement. As Benacerraf puts it, it was “not a great book,” but it was “a wonderful exponent of the spirit of the time.”

The principal weapon employed by Ayer in his campaign against metaphysics was the vaunted Verification Principle of Meaning. According to that Principle, which went through a number of revisions, a sentence in order to be meaningful must be capable in principle of being empirically verified.

Since metaphysical statements were beyond the reach of empirical science, they could not be verified and were therefore dismissed as meaningless combinations of words.

Ayer was very explicit about the theological implications of this Verificationism. Since God is a metaphysical object, Ayer says, the possibility of religious knowledge is “ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics.” Thus, there can be no knowledge of God.

This was the ruling philosophical paradigm in many universities throughout much of the latter part of the 20th century. Consequently, most philosophers dismissed any metaphysical claims, including the claims of Christianity, as meaningless.

I hope you grasp the significance of this view. On this perspective statements about God do not even have the dignity of being false. They’re just meaningless words or sounds uttered in the air.

If you say to someone, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” you’ve said nothing more meaningful than if you had proclaimed, “T’was brillig; and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”

Today that movement has all but disappeared. What happened? Well, what happened is a remarkable story.

It is indeed and you can read about how it all changed at the link. Suffice to say that Christian philosophers, though still a minority, are having a profound impact in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, ethics and epistemology. They're also influencing the field of philosophy of mind.

In any case, the landscape of academic philosophy looks much different than it did just fifty years ago, so much so that atheistic philosophers are taking notice.

An example of this notice is a piece that atheist philosopher Quentin Smith wrote some twenty years ago which Craig quotes in his article.

Give it a read.

For the Record

In his most recent column at The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Jason Riley notes the "complicated relationship" the Democrats and, I might add, Republican "Never Trumpers" have with the former president.

They want us to remember, Riley says, the nonstop chaos of his administration, his Twitter rants, how he debased the presidency on Jan. 6 and won’t stop lying about the 2020 election results.

But, Riley adds, the Democrats and their Trump hating fellow travelers want us to forget Mr. Trump's successes:

The reality is that when Mr. Trump wasn’t embarrassing himself, he was advancing a more or less traditional Republican agenda of lower taxes and lighter regulations. The upshot was an acceleration in economic activity, higher labor-force participation rates and narrowing racial inequality.

Here are some of the facts Riley cites:

“During Trump’s first three years in office, median household incomes grew, inequality diminished, and the poverty rate among Black people fell below 20% for the first time in post-World War II records,” the Journal reported in October 2020. “The unemployment rate among Black people went under 6% for the first time in records going back to 1972.”

Minorities weren’t the only beneficiaries of this boomlet.

Between 2017 and 2019, wages for the bottom 10% of earners grew at more than double the rate they did during President Obama’s second term.

This record is all the more impressive because it defied expectations. The growth of gross domestic product during Mr. Obama’s final year in office was only about half of what it had been a year earlier, which prompted no shortage of doom-and-gloom economic forecasts for the Trump presidency.

Nevertheless, in 2017, 2018 and 2019, the unemployment rate came in below what the Federal Reserve had predicted, while GDP was higher than anticipated.

Democrats are loath to give Mr. Trump’s tax and regulatory agenda any credit for these outcomes, but the economy performed in the main just as administration officials and supply-side economic modeling predicted.

Lower corporate tax rates were intended to reverse the downward trend in business investment, and following their implementation major companies announced wage hikes, bonuses and 401(k) match increases.

In the two-year period after the 2017 tax reform passed, household incomes rose by more than they had in the previous eight years combined.

Much of the media is obsessed with January 6th, but rarely is the history Riley recounts mentioned. They also seem to think that that the "Inflation Reduction" act that the Democrats are poised to pass is some sort of great success story for the Biden administration, but Riley has a different view:

Democrats, via the Inflation Reduction Act unveiled last week, want to raise the taxes that Mr. Trump cut. No matter what it’s called, the legislation is another tax and spending bonanza that will do little if anything to reduce inflation. But passage could discourage the kind of business investment we saw before Covid.

And because corporate levies are borne mainly by employees, higher taxes on businesses can also lead to lower wages and less hiring.

Why are the Biden people so single-mindedly determined to undo everything Donald Trump did? Do they think that because Trump is "evil" everything he did must also be evil and must therefore be undone, no matter how beneficial it was for the country?

The White House seems to be under the impression that Mr. Trump got the boot in 2020 because of his stewardship of the economy and that voters want his economic policies reversed. But the economy is one area where Mr. Trump consistently polled strongest, and he was elected in 2016 in large part because of the sluggish growth under Mr. Obama.

As Mr. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden rode shotgun through the slowest economic recovery since World War II—a recovery that finally kicked into gear after tax reforms opposed by most Democrats in Congress took effect.

This "reasoning" has, however, put the Democrats in a perilous position for this November:

Democrats are in a bind. With inflation at a 40-year high, violent crime rates spiraling upward, and a border situation that even has Democratic mayors of sanctuary cities complaining about too many illegal immigrants, the midterm elections could be significantly worse than they typically are for the party that controls the White House.

Riley concludes with this:

Whether the issue is crime, immigration or the economy, Democrats are putting progressivism ahead of pragmatism and believe that the defeat of Mr. Trump in 2020 gives them license to do so. But Mr. Trump lost his bid for a second term because the country grew tired of his behavior, which shouldn’t be confused with his economic and political agenda.

It might take a midterm shellacking for the left to finally figure out why Joe Biden was elected.

It might be mentioned in closing that one of the reasons for the chaos in the Trump administration mentioned at the outset of this post is that he was constantly subjected to congressional harassment for alleged crimes that he never committed. The Democrats fomented chaos and then criticized the White House for the chaos.

In any case, the country would be in much better shape today if Mr. Biden had continued the bulk of Trump's policies even as Trump himself no longer resides in the White House.

What's a Conservative to Do?

One of the difficulties confronting conservative voters in recent and upcoming elections is that given a choice between a man whose personal character is deeply flawed but whose policies are better for the country and the world than those of his opponent and an opposing candidate whose personal character is perhaps better but whose policies are deplorable, who do you vote for?

If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024 and any of the potential Democrat candidates being talked about today win the Democrat Party's nomination, we'll be confronted with just such a choice.

There are those on the right, people I admire and whose opinion I respect, who argue that Donald Trump should not get a conservative's vote no matter who he's running against, but their arguments simply fail to convince me.

Take Russell Moore for example. Moore is Public Theologian at Christianity Today magazine and Director of Christianity Today’s Public Theology Project. In talking about how Trump voters would defend their support for a man of such profound moral defects he stated:

The argument that they [Trump supporters] would use is that there had to be a disruptive figure who would be willing to do whatever it took to appoint the sorts of people who would hand down the Dobbs case. I don’t buy that argument for a number of reasons. And one of them, the author of the Dobbs case is a George W. Bush appointee.

I don’t think that you would have had largely any different decision from a Jeb Bush court or Marco Rubio court, a Ted Cruz court, than you would have with a Donald Trump court, especially given the way that attention is so carefully paid now on both the right and the left to court appointments.

So I don’t think that Donald Trump uniquely was going to make judicial appointments that someone else wouldn’t have made.

I also think that one has to look not only at the final result in this case but what is the cost of hitching the pro-life movement to a figure such as this.

Now again, I think people can make arguments in various ways, but that is deeply concerning to me. I don’t think you can have, long term, a pro-life ethic without a concern for vulnerability, a concern for women, character. I mean, I think all of those things matter.

There are at least three things wrong with this: First, the author of the Dobbs opinion is just one Justice among nine. There's a majority of Justices on the Court who support the Dobbs decision precisely because Donald Trump appointed three conservatives.

Second, it's not at all clear that Jeb Bush, et al. would've appointed Justices similar in philosophy to those who decided Dobbs. There's every reason to think they would've appointed Justices similar to Chief Justice John Roberts who actually dissented from the majority in Dobbs, and who was also appointed by George Bush.

Third, even if those Republicans Moore mentions would've selected Constitutionally-minded jurists to serve on the Court, it's surely doubtful that had any of the other Republican candidates won the nomination in 2016 that they would've defeated Hillary Clinton in the general election.

Finally, Moore's last paragraph is just incomprehensible. A "long-term pro-life ethic" does indeed require people of character, but neither Hillary Clinton nor Joe Biden are known for their moral rectitude and neither of them would do anything to protect the unborn, so I can't figure out what Moore's talking about in that sentence.

Is he saying that pro-lifers shouldn't want Roe overturned until it can be done by Justices appointed by a morally upright president and that if it's overturned by Justices appointed by a moral reprobate that there can't be a viable long-trerm pro-life ethic?

David French who writes for The Dispatch holds sentiments similar to those of Moore. He doesn't think much of the argument that one must vote for the "lesser of two evils." He writes:

But here’s an argument that was morally serious, especially in both general elections — if one candidate is going to win, shouldn’t you vote for the one you believe in good faith will do the least harm to the nation, even if that person has profound flaws?

This was the “lesser evil” or “hold your nose and vote” position. There are people I respect who made this choice both times, and they did so without once rationalizing Donald Trump’s lies or minimizing his sins.

French's response to this argument is that voting for the lesser of two evils eventually corrupts you. You ultimately turn the lesser evil into no evil at all.

So, what should we do? Vote for the greater evil? That seems absurd. Should we not vote at all? That may well amount to the same as voting for the greater evil. French doesn't really help us with this problem. He simply insists that to vote for Trump, even if he's the lesser evil, will corrupt us all.

This completely ignores the corruption of our culture that's occurring under Biden and which is only slowed by a Supreme Court that was picked by Trump.

French is dismayed by Trump's lies, but are they any worse than Biden's whose record for mendacity is extraordinary. He's also dismayed by Trump's sexual reputation, but Biden was credibly accused of sexual assault by his staffer Tara Reade when he was a senator and also accused by his wife Jill's first husband of having an affair with Jill while they were both still married to their first spouses.

Both accusations came to nothing because Joe and Jill denied it and a complaisant media hushed it up.

French is concerned about Trump's corrupting influence, but he says nothing about the corruption of the Bidens, the influence peddling and the nefarious doings of Hunter from which the father has profited.

Personally, I agree that we need good men in government, but if the choice is between two less than good men we must perforce hold our noses and vote for the "lesser evil." In fact, isn't that what many Biden voters thought they were doing?

I hope Trump doesn't run in 2024, and if he does I won't vote for him in the primary, but if, notwithstanding, he gets the nomination and is running against someone like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg I will certainly vote for him in November.

Does the President Care?

The Biden administration has shown either shocking incompetence during it's nineteen months in office or a sheer will to purposely transform this country into something approximating a third world nation - abandoning Afghanistan in chaotic fashion, promoting inflation, presiding over supply chain inadequacies, creating a de facto open border with Mexico, restricting our energy supply - these are just a few examples, but perhaps the most insidious instance is a declaration last June that requires schools and other entities to allow anatomical males into the private spaces of females:

The Biden administration announced in June it would interpret Title IX, a federal law banning sexual discrimination against women, as though lawmakers intended “to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Biden officials said schools must let transgender individuals use the intimate facilities of the opposite sex, and participate in sports based on their gender identity, or Biden would withhold federal funding for their school lunch plan, which feeds low-income children.

This policy declaration displays either an incomprehensible stupidity or a deep malevolence, or both, on the part of Biden administration officials, and Florida, for one, will have none of it:

Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. noted in a memo to all public, private, and charter schools in the state that, since the document is a “sub-regulatory” guidance, it merely states the federal government’s understanding of law. Since the federal government admits guidances do not — and cannot — carry legal weight, the latest transgender document “should not be treated as governing law.”

Florida state law prohibits the Biden administration’s agenda. “To the extent that you do any of these things, you jeopardize the safety and wellbeing of Florida students and risk violating Florida law,” Diaz wrote. Last June, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act requiring students to compete against members of their own sex.

His stance is shared by governors across the nation, 15 of whom protested Biden’s transgender policies in a letter sent to the president on Wednesday. “By expanding Title IX to include gender identity and sexual orientation, your [a]dministration puts girls and women of all ages at risk,” wrote the governors, all Republicans. “The rule ensures that a far-left ideology on gender will be taught in schools nationwide.”

....Biden’s policies constitute nothing more than “a continuation of what we saw occur during the Obama administration,” which issued a May 2016 federal guidance requiring schools to let men use the restrooms, lockers, showers — and live in the college dorm rooms — of the opposite sex.

It has been the goal of the left, going back to the 19th century communists, to destroy the nuclear family, and one way to achieve this is to tear down all distinctions between men and women, creating a society with no sexual taboos or restraints, and making sexual congress as free and easy as casual conversation.

Demanding that biological men be permitted to mingle with women in environments such as showers and locker rooms is a ploy by a morally bankrupt administration to further this agenda.

Moreover, the Biden administration's insistence on allowing physical males to compete athletically against females is manifestly unfair to women and almost certain to destroy women's sports.

Evidently, Mr. Biden is either oblivious to what his underlings are wreaking or he just doesn't care.

Is Religion Dying?

Lots of stories have been written in recent years about the rise of the "Nones," by which is understood those who have no religious affiliation and consider themselves agnostics or atheists. The articles conclude that since the number of people who hold to some religious belief is diminishing, therefore religious belief is in decline in America.

In an article appearing in last Friday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required), however, a couple of scholars from Baylor University, Byron Johnson and Jeff Levin, argue that this conclusion is not warranted by the evidence.

The column opens with this:

Reports of religion’s decline in America have been exaggerated. You’ve heard the story: Churchgoers are dwindling in number while “Nones” — those who tell pollsters they have no religious affiliation—are multiplying as people abandon their faith and join the ranks of atheists and agnostics.

Headlines declare that the U.S. is secularizing along the lines of Europe. From Britain’s Daily Mail in 2013: “Religion could disappear by 2041 because people will have replaced God with possessions, claims leading psychologist.”

These conclusions are based on analyses that are so flawed as to be close to worthless. In a new study with our colleagues Matt Bradshaw and Rodney Stark, we seek to set the record straight.

Johnson and Levin argue that,

Data from five recent U.S. population surveys point to the vibrancy, ubiquity and growth of religion in the U.S. Americans are becoming more religious, and religious institutions are thriving.

Consistent with some previous studies but contrary to widely held assumptions, many people who report no religious affiliation — and even many self-identified atheists and agnostics — exhibit substantial levels of religious practice and belief.

They cite a number of studies from which they've culled their data and continue,

The religious landscape in the U.S. is changing but not in the ways that draw headlines. Hundreds of new denominations have quietly appeared, as have thousands of church plants (new congregations) and numerous non-Christian religious imports.

These more than make up for losses from mainline Protestant denominations, which are indeed in free fall and have been for decades. But the decline of established institutions is easier to track than the formation and growth of new ones.

Adherents of these new denominations and congregations might be classified as “Others,” .... But large databases on American religion often lump Others in with the Nones. Respondents who don’t see their faith or denomination listed check off the only remaining option, “none of the above.”

The error extends to the counting of religious institutions. The U.S. Religious Census, organized by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, tracks the number of congregations and congregants at the county level. But recent research in three U.S. counties confirms that it has missed between 26% and 40% of their congregations.

Many are evangelical and Pentecostal churches, especially Latino and African-American congregations, as well as nondenominational churches and megachurches, many with multiple campuses. This means that instead of 344,894 congregations (based on the most recent U.S. Religious Census data), there may be as many as 500,000 houses of worship in the U.S.

Omitted are not only thousands of small congregations but huge ones such as Lakewood Church in Houston (with weekly attendance of 45,000), Gateway Church in the Dallas area (100,000), North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga. (40,000), Life Church in Edmund, Okla. (30,000), and Christ’s Church of the Valley in Phoenix (32,000).

All of this helps explain why the proportion of Nones has increased sharply—from 15% in 2007 to 30% in 2021—even though the proportion of atheists in the U.S. has held steady at 3% to 4% for more than 80 years.

Oddly enough, even many of those who self-describe themselves as atheists or agnostics behave as if they were believers:

According to the 2018 General Social Survey, 6.4% of self-described atheists and 27.2% of agnostics attended religious services monthly or more; 12.8% and 58.1%, respectively, prayed at least weekly; 19.2% and 75% believed in life after death; and 7.3% and 23.3% reported having had a religious experience.

In other words, religion in America may be far healthier than articles in the popular media would suggest.

War News

From the start of the war the news out of Ukraine was, for the Russians, rarely good, and last week was no exception.

The first piece of bad news was that the Ukrainians used their new HIMARS missile systems,* donated by the U.S., to punch holes in a crucial bridge over the Dnipro river, thus making it much more difficult for the Russian troops occupying the major city of Kherson to be resupplied:

Ukrainian forces using U.S.-supplied precision artillery severely damaged a bridge vital to the Russian military's supply lines in occupied Kherson, Ukraine authorities said Wednesday.

"Successful missile strikes on bridges over the Dnipro River by #UAarmy create an impossible dilemma for russian occupiers in #Kherson," the Ukrainian Defense Ministry tweeted. "Retreat or be annihilated by #UAarmy. The choice is theirs."

The bridge is one of two crossings over the river that Russia uses to transport personnel and equipment to territories it occupies. The strike didn't aim to destroy the bridge but to make it impossible for the Russian military to use, Ukraine's Operational Command South spokeswoman Nataliya Gumenyuk said.

The second piece of bad news was that the Ukrainians announced that total Russian combat losses included more than 40,000 troops killed or wounded along with the destruction of 1,738 tanks and 3,971 armored vehicles.

Then the BBC reported on a speech by British MI6 chief Richard Moore who, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, opined that recent Russian gains were "tiny" and that Russia was "about to run out of steam":

Our assessment is that the Russians will increasingly find it difficult to find manpower and materiel over the next few weeks. They will have to pause in some way and that will give the Ukrainians the opportunity to strike back.

On top of this are repeated reports of poor Russian morale and very costly Russian incompetence in the field. In one recent instance three Russian helicopters opened fire on their own troops on the ground. The troops fired back and downed one of the helicopters.

This episode came a week after Russian troops in Luhansk, trying to target a Ukrainian missile battery, accidentally shot down one of their own Su-34M fighter jets instead.

Whatever the final outcome of this barbaric war of aggression on the part of the Russians turns out to be, it has been an extraordinarily costly undertaking in terms of men, material and the Russians' reputation around the world.

If they do eventually prevail it'll be a perfect illustration of what's meant by a Pyrrhic victory, one from which it may take them decades to recover. *HIMARS is a mobile missile system that uses GPS to ensure very accurate strikes at up to 50 miles away. These missiles have allowed Ukraine to hit ammunition dumps behind Russian lines and to target command centers. This not only erodes Russian morale, it has also forced them to pull their ammunition back which lengthens supply lines and slows their ability to keep their own artillery and troops supplied.

Our Breathtaking World

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop. Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-blowing.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically:

An Atheist's Dilemma

Alfredo Metere is a senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In an article at Cosmos he argues that the laws of physics leave no room for free will, that the universe is a deterministic system, and that all human choices were made inevitable by the initial conditions which prevailed at the Big Bang.

Here are some key excerpts from his argument:

One of the major fundamental questions in physics concerns the presence or absence of free will in the universe, or in any physical system, or subset, within it.

Physics is based on the idea that nature is mechanistic, which means that it works like a machine. A machine is just a system, and therefore, by definition, it is a collection of elements, each of them with a specific, possibly different function, all working together to achieve a specific purpose, general to the whole machine.

If we believe in the Big Bang Theory – and the universe’s continuous expansion is a strong indication that such theory must be correct – the initial state of the universe was a single point (known as a singularity) that then expanded to the cosmos we know and perceive today, which, of course, includes us.

If so, there is a causal relationship between the Big Bang and us. In other words, free will is not allowed, and all of our actions are just a mere consequence of that first event. Such a view is known as “determinism”, or “super-determinism” (if one finds it productive to reinvent the wheel).

Set aside the objection to Metere that according to quantum physics the universe is fundamentally indeterminate (See the argument developed at Evolution News by Michael Egnor), and bear in mind that most metaphysical naturalists are inclined to agree with Metere's analysis. Naturalism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a materialist view of reality, and materialism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a determinist view of human volition.

Atheism, materialism and determinism all cluster together so that those who hold one view, generally hold the other two as well. If they don't, they have to somehow reconcile what appears prima facie to be an inconsistency.

Now consider the awkward dilemma this places an atheist (metaphysical naturalist) in.

If atheism is true then materialism follows. Everything is ultimately reducible to, and explicable in terms of, material particles and the forces between them. And if materialism is true then determinism is true. There's no locus for free will in a purely material substrate like the brain.

Our choices are chemical reactions in our brain, and those reactions are caused by other chemical reactions, and so on back to the Big Bang.

All of those reactions are determined, so as Metere says, there's a causal relation between us and the Big Bang, and there's no room for any "choice" occurring outside that causal chain. But, if determinism is true then our beliefs are the product of non-rational chemical reactions, a coupling and decoupling of particles.

If that's so, then the belief that atheism is true is alo non-rational, so why should anyone believe it? Some people have the appropriate chemical reactions that lead to atheistic belief and others don't, but in neither case does the objective truth of things factor into the picture.

It might be objected that our beliefs are formed by reasons which stimulate the appropriate chemical reactions, but this is also problematic.

Our reasons are themselves ultimately determined by chemical reactions, so if our reasons are determined then we don't necessarily hold them because of their truth value, but because of a host of other causes, most of which are unknown and unknowable, and perhaps all of which are non-rational.

Moreover, reasons are ideas, and ideas are immaterial. How does a materialist account for the efficacy of immaterial ideas acting on material atoms and molecules to produce an immaterial belief?

Metere closes with this:

[O]ne can be tempted to interject that if free will does not exist, why do we punish criminals? It is not their fault, after all. A counter-argument to that is that punishment is the natural response to crime, such that global equilibrium can be sustained, and therefore punishment is just as unavoidable as the commission of wrongdoing.

In other words, the criminal commits a crime because he was determined to do so by the initial conditions of the Big Bang, and society's authorities punish him because they were determined to do so also by the initial conditions of the Big Bang.

If this is true then there's no real culpability, no moral responsibility, no right or wrong, and, if there is no God, no ultimate accountability. On this view, whatever is, is right, or at least not really wrong. In fact, on this view right and wrong simply mean what people with power like and what people with power don't like. That road leads to slavery and Auschwitz.

I wonder, if someone were to rape his daughter or torture his son to death, if Metere would think that it wasn't really objectively wrong. Perhaps he would, I don't know.

Metere is a very bright guy, so I'm sure he has answers to these questions. I just wish he would have included them in his essay.

Joe Pangloss

The character named Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's novella Candide was the picture of optimism. No matter how bad circumstances around him were he was convinced that things were all okay.

President Biden is a Panglossian character. No matter how bad things are he's convinced, or at least let's on like he is, that everything is going to be just fine. As our economy plummets into a recession he denies that we're heading for recession. As inflation threatens the financial well-being of millions of Americans he insists that inflation is only temporary.

These aren't just isolated examples of Mr. Biden's sunny disposition. They seem rather to be symptoms of an inability to accept the calamitous consequences of his administration's actions.

Here, courtesy of Jim Geraghty at NRO, is a list of some of Mr. Biden's more egregious Panglossian moments:

• Early in his presidency, Biden insisted that that there was nothing significant about a sudden surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border in late winter: “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.” Under Biden, illegal border crossings and attempted crossings have reached their all-time highs, hitting new records, month after month.
• Biden’s public assessment of Afghanistan in July 2021 was infamously inaccurate: “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.” “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.”
• Back on July 19, 2021, Biden declared that: “Some folks have raised worries that this could be a sign of persistent inflation. But that’s not our view. Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary. . . . There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist. That’s totally different.”
• Then in December, Biden declared of inflation, “I think it’s the peak of the crisis. . . . Developments in the weeks after these data were collected last month show that price and cost increase are slowing. I expect more progress on that in the weeks ahead.” Inflation was 7 percent then, and it is 9.1 percent now.
• Also in December, Biden addressed the buildup of Russian forces on the border of Ukraine: “What I am doing is putting together what I believe will be the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr. Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he will do. That’s in play right now.” Apparently, those initiatives didn’t make an invasion difficult enough.
• Also in December, Biden insisted the supply-chain crisis that everyone warned about had never materialize: “The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur. Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered, shelves are not empty.” Yet the supply-chain problems continued into 2022.
• Also in December — this was a bad month! — Biden pledged that Americans would get 500 million free Covid-19 tests. Those tests didn’t start shipping until February, after the Omicron wave had surged through American households.
• In May, Biden said, “I think we’re going to be, in a matter of weeks or less, getting significantly more formula on shelves.” But since May, the formula shortage has actually gotten worse, not better.

It's hard to recall any historical figure who was so wrong so often about so much. President Biden is afflicted with chronic bad judgment and the nation which elected to the presidency a man who rose to prominence despite career-long mediocrity, is suffering for it.

Will AI Become Human?

Recently an engineer at Google made the startling claim that their computer, LaMDA, was actually sentient and self-aware. Here's some of the story:

A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made news by claiming that a chatbot he developed was sentient and spiritual, and that it should have all the rights people have. Lemoine claimed the chatbot (named LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) meditates, believes itself to have a soul, has emotions like fear, and enjoys reading.

According to Lemoine, Google should treat it as an employee rather than as property and should ask its consent before using it in future research.

This brought down a lot of criticism upon Google which subsequently relieved the engineer of his responsibilities for disseminating too much classified information:

Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.

Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA to be "wholly unfounded."

"It's regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information," a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.

Last year, Google said that LaMDA - Language Model for Dialogue Applications - was built on the company's research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.

Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine's views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

A lot of people do believe that computers will one day surpass human beings in terms of what they can do and will, in fact, be superhuman. Computer engineer Robert J. Marks explains why this concern is misguided in his very interesting book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will.

According to Marks computers will never be human no matter how impressive their abilities may be. No machine will ever be able to match what humans are capable of.

Computers can impressively manipulate facts. They have knowledge, but as Marks explains on page 16 there's a difference between knowledge and intelligence:

Knowledge is having access to facts. Intelligence is much more than that. Intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding: the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning and the ability to untangle ambiguities.

He writes:

Artificial Intelligence has done many remarkable things....But will AI ever replace attorneys, physicians, military strategists, and design engineers, among others? The answer is no.

The rest of the book is an entertaining explanation of why the answer is no.

In short, computers can only do what they're programmed to do and programs consist of algorithms developed by human agents. No one, however, can write an algorithm for the host of qualities and capabilities that humans have. They're non-algorithmic and thus non-computable.

Consider this partial list of things that human beings do that no algorithm could capture:

Human beings are aware, they know, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, warmth, compassion, guilt, grief, disgust, pride, embarrassment.

In addition, humans appreciate beauty, humor, meaning and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math.

They’re creative. They have a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas.

Computers do none of this. There's a vast chasm separating matter and conscious human experience.

The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel. A robot can be programmed to tell you it loves you but it doesn’t feel love.

Human beings have minds which are immaterial and which can't be reduced to electrical signals along neural circuitry. Material machines will never have a mind.

On Following the Crowd

Kylee Griswold writing at The Federalist about the Respect for Marriage act which the Senate may be considering soon. The RFM act would codify same sex marriage, a measure deemed necessary by proponents lest the Supreme Court overturn its Obergefell decision of 2015 which discovered such a right in the Constitution.

Griswold argues that those who disapprove of SSM should not be cowed by the majority, whether numerical or just vocal, who call them bigots. Just because a plurality endorses an idea doesn't make that idea reasonable or right.

She says this:

It’s OK to oppose the majority on this one. And thus it’s OK to oppose this piece of marriage-centric legislation.

First, marriage matters. It matters to the government, with traditional marriage rightly having distinct legal protections as the only union that naturally produces children — for the sake of whom those marriages should remain intact.

The government has no interest in people’s sexual behaviors except if those behaviors produce children, who are vulnerable for some 20 years of their lives and therefore must be legally protected in ways adults don’t need to be.

The legal protection children require is marriage, and thus marriage is not a sanction of any form of adult sexuality or affection but about children. And since same-sex relationships by nature cannot produce children, they don’t need government involvement.

But marriage matters for so many other things too, not least of which are physical health and wellness, societal flourishing, home building, and financial planning. It also matters to the God who created it — so it matters not what most people think.

Jack Phillips didn’t care what the majority thought when he kindly served gay customers yet declined to celebrate a same-sex marriage by designing a wedding cake. Neither did Barronelle Stutzman, who made friends with a frequent gay customer but couldn’t in good conscience participate in his homosexual wedding even though it meant losing almost everything.

They know marriage matters, and in their courage and conviction, they refused to jump off the cliff. Cowardly lawmakers who would go along with the majority on the Respect for Marriage Act would take another hacksaw to the lives and business of these two and so many others like them, whose First Amendment rights would just be further eroded by contrived rights.

Second, it isn’t a slippery-slope fallacy to recognize the ways in which the goalposts have shifted since Obergefell. What was once “two consenting adults in the bedroom” has become in-your-face, LGBT-positive programming for schoolchildren.

The right to marry has become the right to adopt a child. And “accept us” has become “affirm us.”

So far, anywhere “sexual orientation” has come to be foisted on the public, “gender identity” is sure to follow, and there’s no reason to believe Congress codifying a federal “right” to marry won’t spawn a federal “right” to any sex-specific space you so choose or the castration of children, doctors’ consciences be damned.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates admonished his pupil Crito that following the majority is not prudent: "[The majority] cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly.”

Socrates believed that the majority is often governed by their emotions rather than their reason. For him, wise persons are heroic figures, committed to doing what's reasonable, not what the masses tell them they should do, even if this means that they stand alone, even if it means that they suffer the obloquy of those who substitute insults and threats for reasons and argument.

Socrates was willing to die for what he believed, and did.

Unfortunately, few of our contemporary politicians and even fewer of our media personalities are similarly committed. Senator Joe Manchin (D. WV) is perhaps an exception. Most of his colleagues have their fingers perpetually to the wind or they do whatever their told to do by their leadership.

Anyway, I've written on some of the reasons for resisting same sex marriage here. In short, it's the another step, IMO, toward achieving a goal held by the left since at least the early 19th century - the abolition of marriage and the family.

American Exceptionalism

In a short work titled American Exceptionalism sociologist Charles Murray summarizes the characteristics which he thinks make, or made, America exceptional among nations.

He also gives a chapter to the criticisms that have been levelled at America, but here I'd like to focus on what he, as well as foreign observers like Alexis de Tocqueville, believes made this country special, and why millions of immigrants are confirming this judgment by their willingness to risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.

Murray lists four elements that he identifies as "The elements of an exceptional culture:" Industriousness, Egalitarianism, Religiosity, and Community Life. He identifies three characteristics of each of these and makes the case that regarding these traits America and Americans were unique among nations in the 18th century.

Here's a short summary of his theme:

Industriousness (Self-reliance, hard work, getting ahead): It (industriousness) signifies the bone deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work and thereby making a better life for oneself and one's children. The industriousness of Americans fascinated the rest of the world. No other American quality was so consistently seen as exceptional.

Egalitarianism (No aristocracy, identification with middle class, equality of human dignity): America was by no means a classless society, but Americans retained a strong sense that whatever class you were in was a matter of what you made of yourself, not who your family was, and an equally strong sense that richer does not mean more virtuous or of greater human worth.

Religiosity (Source of social activism, source of utopian aspirations, source of inner self-government): America was and still is the most religious country in the Western world and its religiosity has profoundly shaped it.

To quote John Adams, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Community Life (Civic engagement, neighborliness, social trust): Murray uses the phrase "Community Life" to, in his words, "capture the odd combination of volunteerism, widespread charitable giving, and engagement in the community that was at the heart of American exceptionalism in the nineteenth century."

There may be other traits that characterized America and set the fledgling nation apart from most of the rest of the world in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but these four, Murray believes, are certainly among the most prominent.

Sadly, to the extent that any of them have eroded so has our uniqueness.

What Would Aliens Look like?

At Big Think Dirk Schulze-Makuch has a couple of short essays in which he speculates on what intelligent alien life forms would like if such there be. He writes:

What do aliens look like? Inundated as we are with science fiction movies, where aliens come in all different shapes and sizes, one wonders what form a real extraterrestrial would take. You need only look at the diversity of life on our own planet, from bacteria to humans to oak trees, to get a glimpse of what might be possible.

The variety is amazing, even though all known life forms have pretty much the same biochemistry and all are based on DNA. Sci-fi directors might look further for inspiration, to extinct species like trilobites or the giant shark Megalodon. But the real pool of possibilities is surely many times greater.

When I was asked in a recent documentary on German TV how I would envision an intelligent alien, I suggested that they might look like a crow with little hands on the edges of their wings, maybe a bit more sophisticated than the claws that bats have on the end of their wings. In theory, that would allow the creatures to build things and become technologically advanced.

He goes on in another essay to speculate that,

Either way, we expect the extraterrestrials to be very different from us. It is implicit in the word we use to describe them: aliens.

If we venture into an inhabited universe, we are likely to run into beings that evolved under entirely different physical circumstances. Will we meet them as curious, friendly, fellow explorers? Predators and prey? Will we be delighted or disgusted by their strangeness?

We might be so confused by their otherness that we don’t even recognize them as living beings.

The view outlined by Schulze-Makuch in these essays is a common one - intelligent, technologically advanced beings from some other solar system or some other galaxy would have had a different evolutionary history and would thus obviously not look like us.

It's the popular view, but in his book The Miracle of Man geneticist Michael Denton argues very cogently that it's wrong. If there are intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe the creatures who populate it would have to look pretty much like human beings.

Why?

Any life form in our universe must be subject to the constraints imposed by the chemistry and physics that governs this universe, and those constraints make it virtually necessary that intelligent, technologically advanced creatures have an ensemble of characteristics that in the end would make them look pretty much like we do.

They'd have to come from a planet similar to ours with copious amounts of water, an atmosphere with roughly the same percentages of oxygen and nitrogen, a temperature range suitable for life, etc. These factors would also constrain the anatomy and physiology of any creatures on the planet.

As Denton explains, for creatures to develop intelligence they have to be carbon-based - no other element including silicon, can substitute - and if they're carbon-based their biology will be similar to that of creatures on earth. To develop technology they'd have to be terrestrial creatures and oxygen breathers.

They'd likely have a brain similar to ours since ours has been found to be optimal for achieving the limits of biological intelligence, and unlike terrestrial apes, intelligent aliens would, like us, need to have a fully opposable thumb.

The creatures would also have to be able to use fire without which they never would've developed metallurgy and thus technology, but this means that they'd have to be able to secure and use fuel such as wood or coal. This would be very difficult if not impossible for any beings that lacked eyes, arms and hands. So, too, would tool use be difficult.

Bipedalism is also a necessity for any creature which uses tools, since it frees up the upper limbs, and achieving technology without using tools is incomprehensible.

Since the planet would have to be about our size its gravity would have to be about what ours is. This means that any creatures on it would have to be within a certain size range. They couldn't be too much smaller than are we because, inter alia, they would lack sufficient strength to hew lumber or mine ore.

Nor could they be much bigger since mass increases with the cube of one's height, but bone and muscle strength increase only with the square of the height. Thus, a much larger race of aliens would be less adroit and more fragile. Tripping and falling would be catastrophic (compare the fall of a toddler with the fall of an adult).

Denton explains much more and goes into much more detail in his book, but toward the end he says this:

Nature is uniquely fit not just for our biological being, for our aerobic terrestrial existence, and for our size and body plan, but also for our unique capacity for fire-making and for following the singular path through metallurgy to an advanced technology and a profound understanding of nature.

That claim can only be challenged by showing that, given the laws of nature and the structure of the cosmos, there is the possibility of fundamentally different types of biological life than ones based on carbon and water, the possibility of fundamentally different types of intelligent beings capable of making and controlling fire, and fundamentally different routes to an advanced technology and deep knowledge of the world, routes that do not pass through fire-making and metallurgy.

However, no credible alternatives of this sort have ever been proposed.

No single book or paper exists which provides a well-worked-out blueprint for a cell radically different from the canonical carbon-based cell, the basic building block of all life on Earth. No single paper or book exists which describes within the domain of carbon-based life an alternative biological design for an advanced organism comparable to modern humans possessed of a high metabolic rate and high intelligence.

Nor has an alternative design ever been proposed in any detail for an advanced intelligent aerobic organism capable of making and controlling fire. Nor is there a single paper which describes a substantially different route to an advanced technology and ultimately scientific knowledge.

One can imagine variations on the humanoid theme, of course, some more realistic than others. But to the degree that they are credible, they will be variations very close to the human form.

You can read a shorter summary of Denton's fascinating book here. Maybe somebody should send a copy to Mr. Schulze-Makuch.