Why Would Anyone Oppose This?

What reasons does anyone have for opposing any of the following:

• deporting non-citizen supporters of terrorist organizations
• deporting non-citizen rapists, child molesters, and murderers
• exploiting natural gas and nuclear energy to meet our electrical needs
• eliminating waste and fraud in the government
• removing ineligible recipients from social security and medicare rolls
• tightening border security and vetting immigrants
• measures to insure that only citizens vote
• measures to enable minority kids to get out of failing inner city public schools
• protecting girls and women from men who delude themselves and others into thinking that they're really women and should be able to compete against girls in sports and who demand to dress in female locker rooms and be incarcerated in women's prisons.

If you have a friend or family member who thinks any of these should be opposed and who votes accordingly, you might ask them why.

Why Taiwan Matters

There's much in the news about a possible conflict between the U.S. and China over the island of Taiwan, and a lot of us might wonder why we should risk WWIII over an island thousands of miles away from us but only about 100 miles off the Chinese coast.

In his book Seven Things You Can't Say about China (see yestrday's post on VP), Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lays out the importance of Taiwan for our future well-being in a chapter titled China Could Win.

The Taiwanese people are mostly descendants of Chinese refugees fleeing from the mass murderer Mao Zedong in the wake of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. Under their leader Chiang Kai-shek these refugees formed their own government and declared themselves to be independent of China. We guaranteed their safety then and have guaranteed it ever since, despite the fact that China sees Taiwan as part of China and threatens to take it by force.

Cotton writes that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would precipitate a stock-market crash causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs. The severing of ties with China would result in depleted goods on store and pharmacy shelves, and soaring prices. All of this would lead to a worldwide "Great Depression."

Our automobile industry, along with all the supporting industries and businesses - steel, aluminum, dealerships, parts stores, etc. - would be devastated. As would everything, such as agriculture, that depends on transportation to get goods to market.

The tech industry and every industry that relies on electronics would also be ruined since Taiwan is the dominant producer of the world's most sophisticated computer chips. Anything that uses these chips, which is almost everything, would soon be unavailable.

If the U.S. failed to come to Taiwan's aid against China, or even if we did but failed to prevent the invasion, our alliances would weaken as other countries reassessed our willingness or ability to meet our commitments.

Controlling Taiwan would permit China to project power into the Pacific and cut off the sea lanes that run through the South China Sea, virtually isolating Japan and South Korea from their main suppliers of oil. The Philippines and Southeast Asia would be in even greater peril from Chinese military and economic domination.

Once America's military protection from China was no longer seen to be reliable, nations would feel the need to develop their own nuclear deterrent, and nuclear weapons would proliferate.

Totalitarians around the globe would be energized to increase the repression of their people and invade their neighbors knowing that the U.S. was no longer the economic and military threat to them that it once was.

China would be in a position to dictate economic terms to much of the world, including, perhaps, the U.S., and demand that other countries stop trading in dollars, which would wreak havoc upon Americans seeking loans to buy homes and whatever else was still available.

There are numerous other consequences of a Chinese assault on Taiwan that Cotton addresses in his book, but he closes the chapter with this:

China could defeat America in the global struggle for mastery; it all starts and really ends in Taiwan. No one can predict with certainty how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would end up, especially without knowing how the United States would respond. But however it turns out, it would set off a catastrophic chain of events. The only winning strategy to preserve American primacy is to deter Chinese aggression in the first place.

Much of the world is focused on Ukraine and the Middle East at the moment, but the bigger threat to world peace is China, and we need to understand why. Buying and reading Senator Cotton's book is a good way to help us do that.

Seven Things You Can't Say About China

Senator Tom Cotton (R. AR) has written an amazingly helpful book titled Seven Things You Can't Say About China. Cotton is an Iraq and Afghanistan combat vet who is currently serving in the Senate as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Regarding China he knows whereof he speaks.

Here are the seven things that many Americans feel they cannot say about China on pain of suffering economic or professional consequences:

1. China Is an Evil Empire: The cruelty of their persecution of Christians and other religions, as well as their own people, is horrifying.
2. China Is Preparing for War: The growth of their military, including their nuclear arsenal, is frightening.
3. China Is Waging Economic World War: They're using every means to make the world economically dependent upon them so they can control the decisions governments around the world make.
4. China Has Infiltrated Our Society: Americans in virtually every niche of our society, from Hollywood to professional sports, the news media, universities, and corporations, are too intimidated by China to do or say anything that displeases them.
5. China Has Infiltrated Our Government: By placing sympathizers in the government and military, their espionage efforts have greatly accelerated over the last decade, costing us billions in intellectual capital.
6. China Is coming for Our Kids: Through social media and other forms of influence, including drugs like fentanyl, China is increasing its grip on the minds of our young.
7. China Could Win

Communist China has gained enormous influence over what can be said about them in our society. Each page of Cotton's book is replete with examples of how attempts to tell the truth about the Chinese government have resulted in people losing their jobs, being canceled or otherwise intimidated into docility.

The book is not long, about 190 pages, but it's full of information of which every American needs to be aware, and I highly recommend it.

You can purchase the book on Amazon, of course, but I want to plug a small independent bookstore called Hearts and Minds that's run by friends of mine. Their order form is here.

A Philosopher Considers Cosmic Fine-Tuning

The physicist Bernard Carr once declared that "if you don't want God you better have a multiverse." What he meant is that the fine-tuning of the force strengths and constants that comprise the fabric of our universe have to be calibrated with an astonishing precision or else life could not exist.

That dozens of these values should be so exquisitely fine-tuned as to permit life is such an astronomically improbable state of affairs if our universe is the only one that exists that the only way to avoid the conclusion that it was intentionally designed to be this way is to accept the idea that there are an incomprehensibly vast number of other universes beyond our own that are all different.

If that's so, then the existence of one as fine-tuned for life as is ours becomes almost inevitable, just as the odds of getting a royal flush if one is dealt enough hands of cards becomes inevitable.

Yet the multiverse hypothesis seems to be foundering, and Phillip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University, explains why in a recent article at The Conversation. Goff writes:

One of the most startling scientific discoveries of recent decades is that physics appears to be fine-tuned for life. This means that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall within a certain, very narrow range.

One of the examples of fine-tuning which has most baffled physicists is the strength of dark energy, the force that powers the accelerating expansion of the universe. If that force had been just an infinitesimally amount stronger, matter couldn’t clump together. No two particles would have ever combined, meaning no stars, planets, or any kind of structural complexity, and therefore no life.

If that force had been an infinitesimally amount weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity. This means the universe would have collapsed back on itself within the first split-second – again meaning no stars or planets or life. To allow for the possibility of life, the strength of dark energy had to be, like Goldilocks’s porridge, “just right”.

This is just one example, and there are many others.

The strength of dark energy is said to be fine-tuned to within one part in 10^123. For a point of comparison there are "only" 10^80 atoms in the entire known universe. Goff continues:

The most popular explanation for the fine-tuning of physics is that we live in one universe among a multiverse. If enough people buy lottery tickets, it becomes probable that somebody is going to have the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with different numbers in their physics, it becomes likely that some universe is going to have the right numbers for life.

Goff, though formerly a believer in the multiverse, has been persuaded that the multiverse hypothesis is based on a fallacy. He illustrates the fallcy thus:

Suppose Betty is the only person playing in her local bingo hall one night, and in an incredible run of luck, all of her numbers come up in the first minute.

Betty thinks to herself: “Wow, there must be lots of people playing bingo in other bingo halls tonight!” Her reasoning is: if there are lots of people playing throughout the country, then it’s not so improbable that somebody would get all their numbers called out in the first minute.

But this is an instance of the inverse gambler’s fallacy. No matter how many people are or are not playing in other bingo halls throughout the land, probability theory says it is no more likely that Betty herself would have such a run of luck.

It’s like playing dice. If we get several sixes in a row, we wrongly assume that we are less likely to get sixes in the next few throws. And if we don’t get any sixes for a while, we wrongly assume that there must have been loads of sixes in the past.

But in reality, each throw has an exact and equal probability of one in six of getting a specific number.

Multiverse theorists commit the same fallacy. They think: “Wow, how improbable that our universe has the right numbers for life; there must be many other universes out there with the wrong numbers!” But this is just like Betty thinking she can explain her run of luck in terms of other people playing bingo.

When this particular universe was created, as in a die throw, it still had a specific, low chance of getting the right numbers.

Betty would be wrong to infer that many people are playing bingo. Likewise, multiverse theorists are wrong to infer from fine-tuning to many universes.

Goff then looks at the question whether there is scientific evidence for a multiverse and also examines a hypothesis called the "anthropic principle" which is another attempt to avoid the conclusion that fine-tuning points to an intelligent creator. You can read about that peculiar argument and also why there's only very tenuous scientific evidence for a multiverse at the link.

So, does Goff accept Bernard Carr's other option, that the universe we live in was created by God. Well, no. Instead he embraces the pantheistic idea that the cosmos is itself the intelligent, purposeful agent of its own creation:

[We] face a choice. Either it’s an incredible fluke that our universe happened to have the right numbers. Or the numbers are as they are because nature is somehow driven or directed to develop complexity and life by some invisible, inbuilt principle.

In my opinion, the first option is too improbable to take seriously. My book presents a theory of the second option – cosmic purpose – and discusses its implications for human meaning and purpose.

Evidently, any theory, no matter how bizarre or lacking in evidential support, is preferable to having to accept that the universe is the creation of an intelligent, personal and transcendent God. Why?

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

In her magisterial 1951 work titled The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian tyrannies grow out of the fragments of a highly atomized society comprised of lonely, alienated, and isolated individuals who have lost faith in the institutions of their culture and who lack both a knowledge of, and appreciation for, their history.

Rod Dreher picks up on this theme in his book Live Not by Lies. He writes that our contemporary young, despite the superficial connectedness they may feel as avid consumers of social media, are largely unhappy and isolated to a historically unprecedented degree.

Their loneliness and ennui manifest themselves in epidemic rates of teenage depression and suicide which psychologist Jean Twenge says have placed us "on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades." Much of the deterioration in the mental well-being of those born since 2000, she claims, "can be traced to their phones."

Walk into a restaurant or any gathering place where you might find groups of young (and maybe not-so-young) people sitting together and it's not unusual to see each of them alone in their own world, staring at their phones, or wearing ear buds or head sets that exclude any meaningful interaction with others.

I've visited people in their homes who keep the television on so loud that conversation is all but impossible, and, of course, lonely people congregate in night clubs where the music creates a din over which it's impossible to talk. Even in a crowd we're often functionally alone.

Dreher says that modern technology and social media are just two of the forces creating the conditions for what he calls a decadent, pre-totalitarian culture. Not only social atomization and widespread loneliness, but also the embrace of radical ideologies, the erosion of religious belief, and the loss of faith in our institutions leave society "vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation."

Totalitarian tyrants will do all they can to destroy a sense of community in the people they oppress because community is a support system that encourages resistance. It's much easier to control people when they lack the sense of identity that comes from belonging to something bigger than themselves.

Where in our modern society do we still find community? The family is disintegrating, churches are empty, neighborhoods are populated by people who frequently move on after a few years, and there are so many entertainment options that one feels it almost unusual to find someone who watches the same tv shows or the same podcasts.

Arendt asserts that when people lack community - a sense of belonging - they'll crave the fellowship and identity that an ideological commitment provides. They'll sign on to any movement that gives them a sense of importance and fills their otherwise empty lives with meaning, even if that meaning is at bottom an illusion.

It is precisely this promise of a meaningful life that propelled the Bolshevik communists to power in an effete Russia after 1917 and enabled the rise of Hitler in a worn out Germany in the 1930s.

Could we, too, be slouching toward totalitarianism?

During the covid pandemic our government imposed draconian restrictions on society that almost totally isolated people from each other. They closed schools, limited athletic events, and restricted the size of gatherings to a relatively few people who were required to hide their faces behind masks and maintain "social distance." If and when another deadly virus should strike would those in our government who harbor totalitarian inclinations be even more repressive?

What happened during the pandemic should give us pause. If we think tyranny couldn't happen here then perhaps we understand neither history nor human nature nor the fragile state of our contemporary culture.

Fledging Their Young

From time to time I've posted on birds that I've been fortunate to see in my little corner of the world. One bird that makes it into eastern Pennsylvania once or twice each winter is a resident of Greenland but which occasionally wanders south in the winter into the Middle Atlantic states.

The bird is called the Barnacle goose and it's perhaps the most handsome of all the geese seen in the United States. A couple of years ago, one of these birds turned up in a park about an hour and a half from my home, so, since I had never seen one before, I took a drive to see this one.

One thing that makes Barnacle geese especially interesting is the manner in which their young are fledged, which is spectacular. The young are hatched on ledges high up on cliff faces, but their natural milieu lies in the water hundreds of feet below. Watch this video to see the remarkable manner by which they get from the ledge to the water:

That any of them survive is surely one of the wonders of the animal kingdom.

Six Perplexing Problems in the Philosophy of Science

Mathematician Granville Sewell has a piece at Evolution News in which he lists six evidences of purposeful agency in the structure of the universe and the emergence of life. Not only are these strong evidences for what philosophers call intelligent design, but they also constitute six very difficult problems in the philosophy of science.

Sewell introduces his six with this:

The ACLU speaks for much of the media and of academia when it says the theory of intelligent design “simply says that some things that seem very complex could not have happened based on natural causes. So where it sees complexity, it declares that it must have been created by a supernatural entity. This is not science.”

Oh really? Is that all there is to it? Not exactly. Below is a modest attempt to provide a summary of the main scientific evidences for design in our world, for those who have been told that such evidence does not exist.

The six lines of evidence he lists and discusses are these:

1. The Fine-Tuning of Conditions on Earth
2. The Fine-Tuning of the Physical Laws of the Universe
3. The Origin of Life
4. The Evolution of Humans
5. The Origin of Human Consciousness
6. The Beginning of Time

He gives an explanation of each of these at the link, which the reader is encouraged to check out. Each of them is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic understanding of reality.

Some other examples he could have mentioned are insect metamorphosis, sexual reproduction, and the extraordinary fitness for life of many of the atoms on the periodic table (although perhaps he'd subsume this last example under #1 and #2).

In his recent book The Miracle of the Cell geneticist Michael Denton explains how the chemistry of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous, as well as several heavier elements, is precisely what it must be in order for there to be living things of even minimal complexity. This chemistry, Denton avers, must've been baked into the universe at the very outset of its existence, long before any life appeared.

It is, Denton says, a "primal blueprint" for life.

As in the other books in the series of which it is a part (Firemaker, Wonder of Water, and Children of Light) Denton takes us in The Miracle of the Cell on an excursus into the cell to show us that had not these elements had precisely the properties they do, living cells would be quite impossible.

He concludes this fascinating book (fascinating, but perhaps not for readers with scant background in chemistry or biology) with these words,

I believe that when the path [from chemistry to life] is finally elucidated, it will turn out to be extraordinary, one of the greatest scientific wonders, revealing a far deeper teleology [purpose] in nature than all the elements of natural fitness for the cell and for life documented so far.

Even more, I believe that the elucidation of that fateful route [to living cells] will be of far greater intellectual consequence than any other discovery in science since the birth of science in the sixteenth century. Indeed, I believe that the path, when discovered, will prove to be so obviously indicative of a profound teleology in the very ground of being that it will prove a watershed in the history of thought.

Conversely, if instead it is eventually established that there is no purely natural path across the great gulf from non-life to life, and that only the additional exertion of an intelligent agent could have assembled the first cell on Earth, that will be equally a watershed in human thought.

For readers with the equivalent of a high school education in chemistry or an undergraduate level education in biology almost every page of Denton's book contains captivating descriptions of the exquisite fine-tuning of the atoms and molecules necessary for the construction of a functioning biological cell.

I highly recommend it to readers with the appropriate background.

The Binding Problem

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

Philosophers refer to this as the "binding problem." How does the brain coordinate diverse sensory information (like color, shape, and location) into a unified perceptual experience, despite these features being processed in separate brain regions? It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

Materialism and Intentionality

Many people believe that human beings are a composite of both mental and material substance. This view is called substance dualism and among philosophers it seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. Still, the currently dominant view among philosophers remains, at least for the time being, materialism.

Materialism is the view that everything, including us, is reducible to matter and the atoms that make matter up. Materialists deny that there's anything about us that's immaterial. They deny that we possess an immaterial mind or soul, and they insist that electrochemical processes in the brain can account for all of our mental activity.

Philosopher Ed Feser argues that this view is simply false and he adduces something called intentionality as just one of several phenomena that cannot be explained as solely a function of matter or neurological processes:

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself.

Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general.

Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc.

In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

The debate has fascinating implications. If there's more to us than just the chemicals that make us up, if there's something immaterial that's an essential element of our being, then is that immaterial mind (or soul) something that's not subject to death as physical matter is? Might there be something about us that continues to exist even after the body dies?

Materialists scoff at the idea, but materialism no longer commands the allegiance of philosophers like it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's too much it can't explain and intentionality is just one example.

Terrorism and the Left

Karol Markowicz at the New York Post notes that there's very little mention of the domestic terrorism being waged against Tesla, Tesla dealerships, and Tesla owners by Democrats and their leftist allies in the media.

People are being doxxed and swatted, their cars are being vandalized and their lives and livelihoods threatened by left-wing thugs who, like all ideological extremists, have taken to violence against those with whom they disagree.

Here's Markowicz:

Another Donald Trump presidential term, another spate of violence going largely ignored — or even smirked at — by Democrats and their media friends.

Tesla dealerships are being firebombed and shot at, while Tesla vehicles are vandalized and their owners assaulted.

Trump-supporting influencers are getting “swatted,” set up for dangerous police encounters by opponents who phone in hoax distress calls.

Relatives of Trump-aligned public figures — including the sister of US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Elon Musk’s brother — are receiving bomb threats.

This cannot go on.

She adds that,

The multiple attacks on Teslas aren’t mere vandalism. This is terrorism exactly as the dictionary describes it: “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”

These “vandals” are terrorizing Tesla the company, as well as Tesla owners — going so far as to dox them with an online map — all because they don’t like the opinions of its CEO.

It’s calculated to scare, to terrorize, people away from driving Teslas in order to apply political pressure on Musk.

It’s “nothing short of domestic terrorism,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday.

Fortunately, a number of these vandals have been arrested and hopefully they'll be fully prosecuted. If justice is served they'll be facing five-year mandatory minimum sentences and could receive up to twenty years to contemplate their stupidity.

Markowicz has more details and links in her NY Post column. This apparent indifference among progressives to terroristic assaults on the property and people who drive Teslas is seemingly of a piece with the left's resistance to Trump's attempt to remove felons who are here illegally. Every attempt to expel violent criminals and terrorist sympathizers is met with court challenges intended to delay, obstruct, and prevent the removal of these threats to our families and well-being, which raises a question:

Why would anyone want these people to remain in the U.S.?

There was no indication from the left that they objected to the massive influx of unvetted migrants when the Biden administration opened our borders to let in millions of aliens, including tens of thousands of convicted criminals, but now that the Trump administration is doing all it can to repatriate them the left is demanding that they be vetted and throwing up every obstacle to prevent their deportation.

Why?

One might be forgiven for thinking that the so-what attitude toward domestic terrorism and the strenuous efforts to keep foreign murderers, rapists, and extortionists in our neighborhoods suggests that leftists are deliberately doing whatever they can to degrade and undermine our society.

Of course, to suggest such a thing is to invite accusations of paranoia, but then anyone who has read any political history could tell us that violence, terror, and social destabilization have been the modus operandi of the left going back to at least the French Revolution of 1789.

Evidently, it still is today.

Materialism's Consciousness Problem

I mentioned yesterday that I'm currently reading John Lennox's book on AI titled 2084 and the AI Revolution. In Chapter 11 Lennox mentions the belief among some materialists that the brain is a computer made of meat and that computers will someday be able to do all the things human beings are able to do and do them better.

Of course there are some things that computers can do better than humans can do them right now, but there's a long list of capacities and abilities that humans have that computers don't have and, what's more, it's hard to imagine how they ever could have them. Here's a partial list:

• Human beings have beliefs, doubts, hopes, regrets, resentments, frustrations, worries, intentions, desires, values, a sense of being a self, and a sense of past, present, and future.
• Human beings experience awareness, understanding, grief, curiosity, boredom, interest, pride, color, warmth, embarrassment, expectation, trust, gratitude, pain, pleasure, guilt, and affection.
• Human beings appreciate beauty and humor, can apprehend abstract concepts, and are creative.
• Human beings can know and can feel.

Machines can do none of this and, indeed, it's hard to grasp how any material object, no matter how complex, could have any of the capabilities that we associate with human consciousness. That's one reason why many philosophers are of the opinion that our material bodies and brains are not all there is to us.

It's why many believe that we're also comprised of an immaterial mind or soul. In fact, some philosophers would say that we are souls and that we have bodies.

If that's true then, contrary to what materialists believe, physical death might not mark the end of our existence. The death of the body might be like the birth of a child, a transition to a brand new existence.

Longtermism

I'm currently reading John Lennox's updated book on artificial intelligence titled 2084 and the AI Revolution. In one of the chapters he discusses "longtermism," a rather ungainly word that stands for the view among some secular AI proponents that we have a profound responsibility to future generations, both biological and simulated humans. Lennox writes,

The basic idea, still based on the assumption that all lives are equally valuable, is that it is better to save trillions of potential lives in the (far distant) future than billions of lives today. Current thinking about longtermism is set out in the book What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill of the Future of Humanity Institute.

There are several things amiss in this passage. First, where do secular tech types get the notion that all lives are equally valuable? Unless one is a Judeo-Christian theist who holds that we are all created in the image of God and loved by Him the idea that we're all equally valuable is nonsense. It certainly can find no support in a Darwinian framework which is the only live alternative to Divine creation available to a secular materialist.

Apparently the longtermists apparently just pull this assumption out of thin air, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Here's another problem with the quoted passage: Why think that we "owe the future anything"? Where does this idea come from? How did we incur the debt? How might a longtermist answer these critical questions?

Lennox goes on to quote a critic of longtermism who wrote that longtermism holds that "humanity has a 'potential' of its own, one that transcends the potential of each individual person, and failing to realize this potential would be ... a moral catastrophe of cosmic proportions."

But what makes it a "moral catastrophe"? Morality is about what's right and what's wrong to do, so why would it be wrong for humanity to fail to realize some vague potential in some far off future? Who would be guilty of this wrong? What does the concept of guilt even mean if, as most secular folks hold, no moral law exists, if there's no accountability for anyone, and if those upon whom this responsibility allegedly falls have been dead for centuries?

The only way any of these assumptions of longtermism could possibly make any sense is if there is a God who imposes upon us a duty to care about promoting the full potential of those not yet born and who holds us accountable for our failure to do so. Yet even those of us who are theists search in vain for any theological indication of who would be responsible and thus accountable for a failure to bring about this state of affairs.

In short, the moral assumptions of longtermism make no sense given a secular or naturalistic worldview, but even if a longtermist accepts the existence of God, those assumptions still don't make sense.

Atheism and Objective Moral Duties

Lincoln Mullen wrote a review a decade ago of Peter Watson's The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.

In the course of his review, Mullen makes a point which I think needs to be clarified. He writes that:

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals.

He might be correct that this is a common charge, but even so, the problem that Christians (and theists in general) have with atheist morality is not that atheists don't have moral values but rather that they have no ground for making moral judgments beyond their own subjective preferences.

Take a concrete example: A tobacco company lies about the danger its product poses to the consumer. A theist would say that such deception is objectively wrong because it violates the will of the Creator who commands that people be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness - a command that imposes a clear moral duty not to harm people.

The atheist may also be outraged that the tobacco company has lied to people about the hazards of using its product, but the only reason they could have, if atheism is true, for condemning the company's behavior is that they simply don't like it. If an atheist were to respond to this by insisting that it's just wrong to hurt people, the question then needs to be asked, "Why is it wrong to hurt people?" History attests to the fact that multitudes of people have believed that there's nothing wrong with hurting others, so why were they incorrect?

If atheism is true then we are here as a result of a blind, impersonal, evolutionary process, and blind, impersonal processes cannot impose a moral duty on anyone to do anything. Nor can such processes prescribe or proscribe behavior, nor pronounce a behavior wrong in any meaningful moral sense.

Lots of thoughtful atheists have admitted this. Consider a few quotes from thinkers, all of whom are, or were, atheists:

• What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. ~ Richard Dawkins
• What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after. ~ Ernest Hemmingway
• This philosopher (Joel Marks is speaking of himself) 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 religious fundamentalists 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. ~ Joel Marks
• Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs....The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways. ~ Margaret Sanger
• For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel. ~ Richard Rorty.
• The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower. ~ Leo Tolstoy
• Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. ~ Karl Marx
• One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best. ~ Charles Darwin
• As evolutionists, we see that no justification (of morality) of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place. ~ E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... ~ Will Provine
• I would accept Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that if you do not believe in God, you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do. ~ Richard Rorty

So, the problem atheism has with morality, as the theist sees it, is not that atheists can't choose to adopt the sort of values of which society approves. Of course, they can. The problem is that they wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful moral sense had they chosen to adopt completely opposite values. Their choice is purely a matter of personal preference, like choosing to paint their house brown instead of green.

Thus, it's puzzling when atheists adopt the view that they hold to a superior morality than that of Christians as Mullen asserts in a later passage:

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

The most the atheist can claim, however, is that, on the Christian's own assumptions, the atheist's views on these issues might be closer to what God wills than are the Christian's views, but in order to make this claim the atheist has to piggyback on the theist's belief that both God and objective moral duties actually exist.

Moreover, the atheist cannot say that the theist is wrong in holding the views on these issues that perhaps he does. The most the atheist can say is that the theist's views are inconsistent with what he professes to believe about God's moral will.

Of course, it may be true that the theist is not acting consistently with his fundamental moral assumptions, but that doesn't make those fundamental assumptions wrong, and it certainly doesn't make them inferior to the atheist's values which are grounded in nothing more authoritative than his own tastes.

This is the point I seek to make in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss. An atheist, if he's to be consistent, can either give up the pretense of holding to some non-arbitrary moral standard and admit that he's just making his morality up as he goes along, or he can admit that he believes that right and wrong are not merely matters of subjective preference but are real, objective features of the world.

If he admits that, however, then, to be consistent, he'd have to give up his atheism and become a theist.

He has to do one or the other, or he could simply do neither and admit that he prefers to live irrationally, which is the option many atheists apparently settle upon.

Totalitarian Novels

Hillsdale College features a range of free lectures on an array topics from literature, history, etc. Their latest is on "Totalitarian Novels" and the first lecture in the series is on George Orwell's 1984. The lecture is delivered by the college president, Larry Arnn, and is quite good. Other novels in the series are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength.

Many of us, perhaps, have frequently heard these books referred to but may not have read them ourselves. If anyone wishes to gain a good overview of what the novels are about or a good review of them if one has already read them, then give this lecture series a try. The lectures are each about 30 minutes long and are very well done.

From the novel 1984

 

 

 

Although each of these classics was written sixty or more years ago they're extremely timely today. In many ways the dystopian future they depict is with us now and every educated person should be familiar with their message.

You can register here and follow the links to get started on the course. Each lecture is accompanied by a quiz and a panel discussion with Hillsdale students to help reinforce what you heard in the lecture.

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick

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

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

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

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

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

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

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

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

Irish scriptoria

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Science and Atheism Are Incompatible

It's commonly assumed that most scientists are atheists and that in order to be a scientist one must banish from one's thinking the idea that there may be supernatural influences that have acted in the universe. This assumption would sound very strange, however, to the men who actually began the modern scientific enterprise.

According to historian Rodney Stark in his book For the Glory of God, 50 of the 52 men who were most influential in the development of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries were Christians, and over 60 percent of these were devoutly so, including some of the greatest names in the scientific pantheon: Boyle, Brahe, Descartes, Gassendi, Hooke, Huygens, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton, Pascal, Vesalius, et al.

Nevertheless, the notion became widespread in the 19th century that science and theism are incompatible and the practice of science, particularly biology, became increasingly the domain of atheists throughout the twentieth century.

This is ironic because as that century moved toward its end philosophers become increasingly aware that the real incompatibility is between science and atheism (or naturalism), at least on the philosophical level.

An article at Evolution News by the brilliant Oxford mathematician John Lennox, excerpted from his new book 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, explains why.

Lennox quotes several philosophers and scientists and then writes:

[N]aturalism, and therefore atheism, undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever, let alone a scientific one. In short, it leads to the abolition of reason — a kind of “abolition of man,” since reason is an essential part of what it means to be human. 

Why does naturalism lead to the abolition of reason? If naturalism is true then what we call rational thinking is simply a series of mindless chemical reactions in the brain, they bear no necessary connection to reality or to truth. Chemical reactions have no truth value, they are neither right nor wrong. 

Lennox quotes philosopher Thomas Nagel from his book Mind and Cosmos who writes that,

Evolutionary naturalism implies that we should not take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism depends.

He also cites Charles Darwin's fear that the conclusions of his reason are unreliable:

Charles Darwin saw the problem. He wrote: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

Lennox doesn't quote the following but he could have. They certainly support his argument:

• "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Atheist neuroscientist Steven Pinker
• Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Atheist philosopher Patricia Churchland
• "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." Atheist philosopher John Gray
• "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." Atheist biologist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis.

On the other hand science, which is based upon rationality, is very compatible with the notion that an intelligent rational Mind created the universe and imbued it with a logical structure, and that this Mind also created our minds to be able to apprehend that structure.

Lennox again:

Not surprisingly, I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But that is not my only reason. I also reject it because I am a mathematician interested in science and rational thought. How could I espouse a worldview that arguably abolishes the very rationality I need to do mathematics? By contrast, the biblical worldview that traces the origin of human rationality to the fact that we are created in the image of a rational God makes real sense as an explanation of why we can do science.

C,S. Lewis puts it like this in his book On Miracles:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God [Who gave us a reliable rational faculty], I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

As Lennox says in conclusion, Science and God mix very well. It's science and atheism that don't mix.

Are Comatose Patients Conscious?

Anyone who has had a family member in a coma from a brain injury has probably wondered whether their loved one could hear them and wondered what it must be like for someone to be conscious but completely unable to express themselves. We've discussed this on VP on several occasions in the past but whenever I come across an article on the topic, I feel like I should mention it again.

In a partial transcript of a podcast interview with neuroscientist Michael Egnor, Egnor elaborates on the work of Adrian Owen who discovered about fifteen years ago that many comatose patients were capable of thinking and could hear what was being said to them.

Subsequent research has determined that in a significant number of cases, as high as 40%, comatose patients are indeed able to hear what is being said to them and, with modern MRI techniques, even able to respond.

Here's part of Egnor's discussion of Owen's work:

Owen took a woman who was in a persistent vegetative state—she’d been in a car accident and had severe brain damage, and she’d been in this state for several years—and he put her in an MRI machine and did what’s called a functional MRI test. A functional MRI test looks at changes in blood flow in the brain that we believe correspond to activation of parts of the brain. So you can kind of tell what’s going on inside the brain during the time they’re in the machine.

So he put her in the machine and he put headphones on her and he asked her to think about things. Now remember, she’s a woman who, supposedly, is the deepest level of coma, just a hair above brain dead. And he said, “Imagine you’re walking across the room.” “Imagine you’re playing tennis.” “Think of things.” And he found activation in her brain. Even though she had massive brain damage, there were patterns of activation.

So he then took fifteen normal volunteers, put them in the machine, and asked them the same questions. And her patterns of activation were identical to theirs. So he said, well, to a first approximation, it looks like she can think just like they can think.

But, he said, you know, maybe the activation that we are seeing in the brain isn’t because she understands. Maybe it’s just the brain’s reaction to sound. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand, maybe just the noise from the headphones is causing this activation. So he scrambled the words so, instead of saying, “Imagine walking across a room” he would say “across walking imagine room your”. So it made no sense. And the activation went away in her brain and in the volunteers’.

So he showed that the only time she had activation in her brain was when what was asked of her made sense. And her activation was completely indistinguishable from the activation of completely conscious people. So he concluded that she was able to understand and think about things that he was asking her to understand and think about, even though she was in the deepest level of coma.

This alone is astonishing, but there's more:

His research has been repeated by a number of other laboratories on many, many patients with persistent vegetative state. And about forty percent of people in persistent vegetative state show high levels of intellectual functioning even in deep coma.

There are ways of conversing with people in deep coma where you can, for example, look at the activation state representing "Yes" and the activation state representing "No" and you can ask them questions. You know, “Are you lonely?” “Do you wish your mother were here?” “Would you like something to eat?”, stuff like that, and they can answer you, with these brain states.

In addition, some people can do mathematics in a coma. You can ask them “Is the square root of 25, 6?” and they do a "No." And “Is it 5?” and they do a "Yes." So there can be very high levels—not in all patients that we have found—but in many patients, forty percent, at least—of mental function in profoundly damaged brains. To the point where the medical profession has actually added a category to this list of ways you can be in a coma, and this is called minimally conscious state.

So patients who have evidence of intellectual functioning in deep coma are called “minimally conscious,” although, frankly, they’re not really minimally conscious, they’re quite conscious.

I've always wondered whether the comatose patient was in pain but unable to communicate their suffering to anyone. If so, it would be hellish. These sorts of developments give hope that medical professionals will be better able to care for and comfort those who appear to be unconscious but aren't.

Naturalism's Daunting Difficulty

Within the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty, the belief that nature is all there is (i.e. naturalism) and that everything in the universe can be explained by natural processes, has run up against a serious, and perhaps fatal, difficulty. 

The problem is that biologists have come to realize that the fundamental substrate of living things is not matter, as naturalism has always held, but information. Information is contained in codes like the amino acid sequence in proteins or the nucleic acid sequence in DNA and RNA, and the origin of information, especially in the first living cell, is inexplicable in terms of random, unguided, unintelligent natural processes.

This 21 minute video does an excellent job of explaining the problem in terms that are easy to understand and follow. It features a protein chemist (Doug Axe) and a philosopher of science (Stephen Meyer), both of whom have played prominent roles in bringing the significance of biological information in the origin of life to public attention.

Any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life has to show how the enormous improbabilities of evolving just a single protein can be overcome by mindless chance. It's a daunting task. Watch the video to see why:

What They Oppose

Hot Air has posted a list compiled by FOX News of all the things that Democrats refused to applaud or approve in the president's speech last week to the joint session of Congress.

Even to one who watched the speech and witnessed the Democrats' behavior the list is startling. One wonders how a major party in the United States can proudly take a stand against any of the items on it, yet, by sitting on their hands as each of these was introduced by Mr. Trump, approximately half of our elected leaders implicitly registered their disapprobation.

Here's the list:

• The capturing of an ISIS terrorist that masterminded the Abbey Gate attack
• A young boy fighting brain cancer
• A call to lower taxes for middle-class Americans
• Americans joining the military in record numbers
• Law and order
• Taking down illegal revenge porn
• Protecting women’s sports
• The United States of America
• Working together to Make America Great Again
• Ending the harmful electric vehicle mandate
• Cutting regulations to unleash American prosperity
• Ending censorship and bringing back free speech
• Ending discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion”
• Recognizing only two sexes
• Defeating inflation
• Unleashing American energy
• Ending waste, fraud, and abuse in government
• Ending taxes on tips, overtime, and seniors’ Social Security
• Bringing manufacturing home to America
• Securing historic investments in American chip manufacturing
• Removing illegal alien killers, rapists, and drug dealers from our streets
• Securing our border
• Declaring the brutal Tren de Aragua gang as a Foreign Terrorist Organization
• Waging war on the deadly cartels trafficking deadly drugs into our country
• Punishing cop killers with the death penalty
• Promoting health and wellness among Americans
• Protecting our kids from radical gender ideology
• Ending the sexual mutilation of America’s youth
• The return of American Marc Fogel
• Declaring America’s youth are perfect as God made them
• Ending wokeness in the U.S. military
• Restoring American shipbuilding
• A student getting accepted to West Point
• Improving America's defenses
• Pursuing peace in Ukraine

It's very disappointing to think that approximately half of the nation's voters are in agreement with their representatives' repudiation of this list.

Thinking about Time

A friend wrote to talk about time and some of the weird consequences of quantum mechanics. Regarding time he asked about what's called the B-theory, the idea that time is static and that our consciousness is "moving" from one event to the next in our lives.

Here's part of what I wrote back, slightly edited:

Thinking about quantum effects at 1:30 in the morning can certainly twist one's mind and push lots of fascinating questions into our consciousness. I wish I knew more and was able to respond intelligently to your late-night ruminations.

On the other hand, I don't know whether anyone knows enough to give intelligent answers to questions about the interface between the quantum and the macro levels of reality. Is that interface a sharp line or is it more like the gradual transition of colors from one to another in a rainbow?

Is the temporal transition from the past to the present like the transition from one frame of 16mm film to the next with indiscernible (as long as the film is moving at sufficient speed) spaces in between, or is it seamless? If it's the former, then is time quantized like light (which is comprised of photons)?

And if it's seamless then the only thing I can think of to compare it to is space which is just a big, continuous block that fills the universe. Everything else I can think of is made of either subatomic particles or photons.

And if time is like space, a continuous block, it's hard to grasp how it could flow. After all, space doesn't flow (or does it?). So, if time fills the universe as a continuous simple "substance," how would it flow, since it'd already be everywhere all at once? On this view, space and time would be static and we would somehow move through time like we move through space.

Perhaps we're like a passenger looking out the window of a train trying to discern whether we're moving or what we see outside the window is moving. If the train was traveling at constant velocity and the ride was perfectly smooth we'd really have no way to tell.

If we're "moving" and space and time are static then maybe the events of our lives are like the railroad ties, embedded in the space-time world, that we pass over in what seems to be a continuous blur.

That's weird to think about.

It is weird, but then time is weird. In my opinion, time and consciousness are the two most mysterious things in the universe.