How We Might Address the Illegal Immigrant Problem

I first wrote this post back in 2010 and have reposted it several times since then. I've made a few minor changes and thought that, given the current controversy surrounding illegal immigration, it might be worthwhile to offer it again:

There are said to be 11 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S., most of whom were let into the country by the feckless Biden/ Mayorkis open border policy. President Trump campaigned on deporting them all back to their home countries, an ambition which would seem to be impossible to achieve, especially humanely, given the numbers of people that would have to be moved.

I'd like to offer a few suggestions as to how the Trump administration might proceed in a way that I believe finds the best balance between both justice and compassion.

The issue is contentious, to be sure, but I think the American people would be willing to accept a two-stage measure which looks something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border wall be completed where feasible and the entire border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform [1]. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking.

Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy authority or commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, any subsequent plan for what to do with those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living.

To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens would be required to apply for a government identification card, similar to the "green card." After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc. Nor would they be counted on the census.

They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other private charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes immigrant workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This might require amending the 14th amendment of the Constitution), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any felonious criminal activity, past or present, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation [2], as would multiple misdemeanors or any serious or multiple infractions of the motor vehicle code.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of the INS.

This is just an outline, of course, and there would be many details to be worked out, but what it proposes would be both simpler and fairer than either mass deportation or amnesty. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear of being caught.

The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants.

It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls by awarding illegal aliens with citizenship. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems to be a simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as would amnesty, and it conditions allowing immigrants to remain in the U.S. upon stanching the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, these conditions for being allowed to work in this country prove to be too onerous, if illegal immigrants conclude they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

[1] The border has been effectively secured since Mr. Trump took office.
[2] This process is currently underway.

Boys

Yesterday's post discussed an article on "girls" in the May 2025 issue of First Things. I want to talk today about another article in the same issue by a different writer whose topic is young men.

The writer is Liel Leibovitz, and he opens his piece with the observation that online podcasters popular with young men seem to be giving a platform to some pretty unsavory characters: anti-semitic conspiracy theorists like Ian Carroll who claimed that the Jews were behind the 9/11 attack; Darryl Cooper, who insists that the real villain in WWII was Winston Churchill, not the Nazis; Candace Owens who maintains that Judaism is a pedophilic religion; and misogynistic Hamas sympathisers like Andrew Tate.

He adds that, "Other examples of morally repugnant attention-seekers being feted on our best-lit public platforms abound. Which means, alas, that we have a very big problem on our hands."

He goes on:

To hear some of our more astute public intellectuals tell the story, the problem is the rise of anti-Semitism on the right, the equally frightening doppelganger of the anti-Jewish hate we’ve seen erupting this past year on progressive college campuses nationwide. The theory goes that, just like the woke left, the woke right sees the Jews as a uniquely malevolent and all-powerful force that must be crushed if we’re to make America virtuous again.

This explanation is partly right but mostly wrong. Tate, Carroll, Cooper, Owens, and their ilk may dislike Jews, but anti-Semitism isn’t the real issue. Nor, for that matter, is their deep distaste for America. Instead, what we’re looking at here is a rapidly escalating spiritual crisis.

Liebovitz's analysis seems right to me. The young men who tune in to listen to these characters and much more mainstream and salutary figures like Jordan Peterson, are searching for something to fill a void in their lives of which they may be only dimly aware but which gnaws at them nonetheless.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Tate and the others appeal mostly to men. As my Protestant rabbi Aaron Renn correctly observed, men have been abandoned by our culture. In liberal circles, they’re accused of toxic masculinity and told to check their innate privilege. In traditional spaces, they’re found guilty of being insufficiently devoted to their families and faith.

Nowhere do they receive much empathy or permission to engage in uniquely masculine virtues, which means they’re likely to fall for the first jaunty figure offering them a joyous vision of manhood, no matter how warped or depraved.

We've heard from radical feminists that women need men like fish need bicycles. We've been told by our progressive elites that men, particularly white men, are a pox upon the earth.

Young men used to be able to find meaning in occupations that only men could do, but there are very few such pursuits left to them today. Little wonder that boys, in search of an affirmation of their masculinity, turn to people like Tate who models a perverse version of it. Little wonder that they accept anti-Semitic canards that make them feel superior to another group. Little wonder that they often become violent.

Liebovitz has more in his column (subscription only), but he finishes with this:

We don’t want kids to take relationship advice from Andrew Tate and history lessons from Darryl Cooper. To prevent that from happening, we need to offer better alternatives.

Yes, we must insist that they take responsibility for their lives and do so in ways that honor their faith traditions and prioritize communal well-being over facile individual gratification. But we must also show them enormous love, show that we care about their very real predicaments, and that we have communal and spiritual resources to offer rather than empty pep talks about bootstraps and hustle.

Politics is aesthetics practiced by other means, which means that we shouldn’t be afraid to challenge the loathsome loudmouths in their own game. For every braying Tate advocating violence against women, let there be a steelier man roaring about respect. For every Carroll distorting history, let there be someone speaking the truth with as much confidence and more verve.

Put simply, then, the general idea is this: Everything is downstream of culture, and the kids who tire of the left’s insufferable preachiness and reflexive defeatism are going to look for more exciting heroes.

Unless we give them a King David for our time, they’ll turn to Conan the Barbarian. We need to get into the game. It is up to us believers to teach the pagans once again that faith triumphs in the end.

Indeed, that's a mission that the Church would do well to commit itself to with more discernment, zeal, and cultural sophistication than it often displays.

What Girls Need

Freya India writes a column on Substack devoted to the problems that girls face in our contemporary culture. She has an article in this month's First Things (paywall) that would probably click with a lot of young women.

She begins with this:

I’m not sure how I got here, into these pages. Lately I’ve found myself in a lot of unfamiliar places: in conversation with Orthodox Christians, buying old Chesterton and Scruton books, wandering into chapels and churches, stumbling into a world I have never known. There is something hopeful, comforting, and strangely familiar about it, like coming home to a place I had forgotten, a place for which I always felt homesick but could never find.

Growing up I never prayed, never went to church, never had political or theological discussions around the dinner table. I grew up in a place where Christianity—and conservatism—were seen as not only backward and archaic, but cringeworthy, embarrassing, belonging to another world.

But I also lived with a feeling of something missing, a gaping hole. A hunger; a hollowness. I was sensitive and sentimental, as many young girls are, and had this idea of love, of life, that kept getting broken and beaten out of me. My family fell apart and so did I. Dating was disorienting and inhumane; I felt things far too deeply to handle it.

I was disheartened by the commodification of everything, and felt that some things — my face, my body, friendships, falling in love — had to mean more, somehow. I wanted vows and commitments. I wanted guidance and guardrails. I wasn’t cut out for a world that offered no refuge, no haven or hiding place, and I thought the problem was me. I’m not sure anymore.

Girls and young women are hurting. They are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression. Some are starving themselves; others are self-harming until they end up in the hospital. Many feel alone, with few friends, little face-to-face interaction, often without a father or mother in the picture. They feel hopeless, powerless. Across the Anglosphere, suicide rates for young women have reached record highs.

India goes on to insist that what girls need is Christianity and a conservative way of life, but that in her experience, so many people who are in a position to help girls find these answers often try to appeal to a girl's reason when, in fact, what she needs - "community and belonging, certainty and stability, love and attachment, dignity and worth, purpose and fulfilment" - are more likely to be realized through her heart rather than her head, through feeling rather than intellect.

When I listen to conservative commentators today — columnists, podcasters, media personalities, some older than I am but many my own age — I notice an overreliance on intellect and argument, on numbers and logic. Charts on pornography use; statistics on loneliness; facts about birth rates. But the young women I’m talking about don’t care about your statistics on divorce. I know I wouldn’t have.

They don’t feel anything from your graphs on fertility rates. What they care about is the pain of their own families falling apart. They know how they feel, and they are hurting. I knew nothing about Burkean philosophy or social conservatism, but I knew that feeling of loss, knew it intimately. Dry lectures about social decline do not cut through. Describing feelings of hurt and homesickness might.

I think she overstates her case a bit and seems unaware of the plethora of books, speakers, pastors, and counselors who are doing exactly what she evidently sees too little of, but her main point is well-taken. People who are hurting don't need arguments and statistics. They need empathy and compassion.

I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart.... Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give expression to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain....

I see too little consideration given to the possibility that young women might make certain choices because this is the only world they have ever known—that they might sleep around to fit in, might objectify themselves to feel loved, might feel confused about their identity because the world gives them nowhere to belong to. Maybe young girls behave as they do because they are desperate, wired, to be seen, to be accepted, to belong. They need refuge, not ridicule.

While I think it often has the wrong answers, at least [the left] listens. Meanwhile the right stays silent, despite the fact that the issues Christians and conservatives care deeply about—moral decline, divorce, pornography, the loss of family, the loss of home — are painful, emotional things. Things to do with the soul.

She may be quite wrong about the right staying silent, but she's quite right about everything else:

The right has a chance to speak differently. Forget the neuroscience of what online porn does to the brain. Talk about how it makes young women feel, knowing that the men they love watch it. That feeling of worthlessness when they look at their own bodies, the insecurity and betrayal.

Forget what falling birth rates mean for the economy. Talk about what they mean for young women, how hard it is to grow old without a family to rely on—the future we might face. Forget what the loss of local community means for the “principle of subsidiarity” or “little platoons.” Tell me first how it feels to have no community left, the sorrow of scrolling for a sense of belonging on Instagram.

Argue from feelings. Sometimes it’s necessary. We mock people who get “emotional” during debates or discussions, urging them to calm down. But these are painful realities, these are matters of the heart.

We don’t need sources or studies to know that a mom and dad breaking apart and barely speaking again is a tragedy; that seeking love by swiping through people like products is a travesty; that spending a childhood wrenched from one parent and passed on to the next is a crisis; that young girls crippled with anxiety about how sexual and sellable they are is a catastrophe.

Christians wonder why young women aren’t going to church, and conservatives ask where all the good women have gone, but I don’t see much listening. Not sincerely. Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere.

Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it? And the cruelty is that this caricature of the modern woman — this callous, calculated, emotionally detached “girlboss” — seems to me very often a defense mechanism, a heart hardened to cope with how cold the world is.

Listen to young women long enough, you will often hear pain. They might be brave enough to ask you: Do you know how it feels? How it feels to hold on to hopes of love and loyalty in a world of Tinder and hook-ups? How it feels to be reserved and conservative in a world that punishes those qualities, makes you feel pathetic and frigid and childlike?

To try to feel beautiful, even just enough, in a world of endless edited Instagram influencers, where hypersexuality feels like the only way to be seen, where humility feels like invisibility? Where if you aren’t sexual straight away, you can’t expect him to stay — why would he, with so many other options?

The agony of knowing that pretty much every man you fall for has been raised on and is addicted to online porn and watches it behind your back because you can never be enough? The humiliation? How it feels to dream of romance, only to grow up and find it dead? That disappointment? I can’t begin to tell you.

There's much more at the link and it's too bad that the journal is only available via subscription, but if you can find a copy of it in your library (May 2025) you should read it.

What Exactly Is Matter?

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe - including our bodies, our brains, our thoughts, our sensations - all of it is reducible in principle to material "stuff." There's no mental substance, no mind, just brains and the functions the brain performs. But if that's so, then what is the material stuff everything is made of? What, exactly, is matter?

Physicists, many of whom are materialists, tell us that matter is made up of particles which are themselves simply a "wave function," but then what's a wave function? What's it made of? No one seems to have an answer.

This video takes the viewer down to the smallest bits of matter, but when we ask what these smallest bits are comprised of the only reply from physicists is a shrug of the shoulders.

At some point matter just seems to dissolve into energy, forces, and fields which are themselves inscrutable. They can be measured, but if we ask what it is, precisely, that we're measuring we just get another shrug for an answer. The fundamental nature of matter is a riddle:

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor helps us understand the provenience of the idea that everything is made of matter. He writes:

The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.

Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia [our sensory experience of, for instance, pain or color] and intentionality [the fact that something like ink on paper can be about something, can have meaning], were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?

In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right. Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.

Modern materialists have discarded Descartes’ mental substance, and have tried to explain nature and consciousness via matter alone. Modern materialists are Descartes’ descendants: although they have discarded Cartesian dualism, they retain Cartesian materialism. To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter. Hence the bizarre cornucopia of materialist theories of mind, such as philosophical behaviorism, identity theory, computer functionalism, and eliminative materialism.

Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:

How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?

The nature of matter is a profound mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.

Naturalism holds that there are no supernatural entities. If there were supernatural entities they'd be immaterial, thus naturalism cannot allow something like an immaterial mind into its ontology because that would lead to the conclusion that humans, at least, have souls. And once souls are allowed to exist then the naturalist fears he will have stepped onto a slippery slope leading to an affirmation of the existence of God and other things supernatural.

In other words, naturalism is heavily reliant for support upon materialism. Without it naturalism loses much of its ability to persuade.

Nevertheless, there's no reason not to believe that the fundamental stuff of the universe isn't material at all but rather mental. Indeed, this is the direction in which modern physics has been moving since the early years of the twentieth century.

Perhaps, so far from mind arising from matter, our perception of matter actually is a product of mind.

Just as Copernicus sparked a revolution in science by getting us to look at the solar system from a different perspective - a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective - looking at the world from the perspective of mental substance rather than material substance could spark an analogous revolution not only in science but also in metaphysics.

The Stolen Body

Saturday's post was a comedic look at the argument that the disciples conspired to steal Jesus' body from the tomb thus leaving the tomb empty on the first Easter morning.

Today's post, courtesy of Marc Tapscott, offers a more scholarly look at the significance of the empty tomb for the Resurrection of Jesus.

Tapscott asserts that the empty tomb of Jesus is the single most consequential fact in all of history. I'd quibble with him on a technicality. It wasn't the empty tomb per se which was the most significant fact but rather what the empty tomb signified, i.e. the resurrection of Jesus, but set that aside.

What of the possibility that the body was stolen from the tomb? Tapscott writes:

There are only three candidate groups who logically might have had a motive for stealing the body of Jesus. First, there are the disciples themselves. Critics have long claimed the disciples stole the body and then invented the Resurrection myth.

Here's why that claim is preposterous: the disciples scattered when Jesus was arrested. They were terrified that they would be next. Peter's thrice denial of even knowing Jesus is indicative of the group's cowardice.

Why is that significant? None of the disciples is known to have had any military training, yet we are to believe that this scattered crew of cowards somehow found the courage to overcome a crack unit of the Roman Legion that was guarding the tomb, or buy them off, then hide Jesus' body where it would never be found, and afterwards go out and tell everybody that Jesus was God?

The second candidate group would be Jesus' enemies, chiefly, the Pharisees and Sadducees who were the religious leaders of Israel. Throughout His three-year ministry, Jesus had tangled with these religious leaders who accused Him of blasphemy for claiming to be God-become-man. That's why they demanded that Pilate order Jesus crucified.

But let's say they did steal Jesus' dead body because they were quite aware that He had said He would "rise again." (Mark 9:31). Weeks after Jesus' crucifixion and burial Peter spoke to thousands of people on the Day of Pentecost, explicitly claiming Jesus was alive. Three thousand people became Jesus's followers that day and the Christian church was born.

But if they had stolen His body from the tomb, as soon as Peter began claiming the Resurrection, Jesus's enemies would have rolled his stinking, rotting corpse down Jerusalem's Main Street to prove He was dead, not alive.

Then they would likely have arrested Peter and any of the rest of the disciples they could lay their hands on and crucified them. Instead of the day it was born, Pentecost would have been the day the Christian church died.

And the third candidate group for stealing Jesus' dead body? Grave robbers had been around for centuries and robbing the tombs of famous people was not uncommon. After all, as with the Pharaohs, who loaded up their tombs with valuables for the next world, robbers could make one big hit and be set for life.

But here's the problem: Nobody ever accused Jesus of being rich, so they had no reason whatsoever to think His tomb would be stuffed with gold, silver and precious jewels. Remember: He was so poor, He had to be buried in somebody else's tomb!

That tomb was owned by Joseph of Arimathea, who, being a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, might well have been wealthy. So maybe the local robbers figured it was at least worth a shot?

But how likely was it that a band of grave robbers that would have been made up of only two or three men could have overcome the [soldiers] guarding Jesus's tomb?

One point I might add to Tapscott's argument: If thieves stole the body why would they take the time to unravel the grave cloths and remove the body from them, leaving the grave linens in the tomb? Wouldn't they have been in a great hurry to get out of there before the guards found them out?

Anyway, there's really only one reason for thinking that Jesus' body was stolen and that the Resurrection didn't really happen. That's the belief that miracles aren't possible, but we can only be sure that miracles aren't possible if we already believe that there's no God. If God exists then miracles surely are possible, and we should judge each report of a miracle on the basis of the historical evidence.

And the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus is about as strong as any evidence for any historical event could possibly be.

Tapscott has more about this evidence for the Resurrection at the link.

The Resurrection "Plot"

One of the explanations promoted over the years by skeptics to explain how Jesus' tomb came to be empty after His crucifixion and burial was that the disciples managed somehow to steal His body. In his book The DaVinci Code, author Dan Brown seems to support this theory, and many others have advocated it as well.

Given all of what history records about these events the idea seems implausible at the very best. For example, the "stolen body" theory doesn't explain how the disciples overcame their fear, formulated a plot to steal the body, managed to overwhelm an armed guard, and why they were never arrested for their crime.

Nor does it explain why they really believed Jesus had risen from the dead and were prepared to suffer and even die for that belief. It also fails to explain how such a plot could've been kept secret among so many conspirators.

The theory that Jesus' corpse was hidden somewhere by the thieves also fails to explain why so many people, in diverse circumstances, believed that they had seen Jesus alive after His death. For example, the fact that Paul, who was an enthusiastic persecutor of Jesus' followers, and James, the brother of Jesus, who was skeptical of his brother's sanity, both became committed followers of "The Way." The New Testament states that it was an appearance by Jesus that convinced them that He really had come back from the dead.

Anyway, the Babylon Bee has a little fun mocking the "stolen body" theory in the video below, and I wish all our readers a wonderful Resurrection Day tomorrow. Enjoy the video:

John Updike on the Resurrection of Jesus

As Christians around the world prepare for Easter this coming Sunday I'm reminded of the American novelist John Updike (1932-2009). Updike was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but despite his flaws he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively, literally, physically, and historically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. The miracle of the Resurrection is the guarantee that the Christian's faith in Christ is not misplaced. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Most-The Bridge

Tomorrow Christians observe the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday. Given the importance of the day for Christians it might be helpful to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film titled Most-The Bridge.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on the first "Good Friday."

It might be well today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son, and who those passengers on the train were - and are.

Thoughts on Miracles and Easter

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable.

It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from a circularity. He seems to base the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident.

They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that it's possible that there are an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist.

The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it's not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well?

If there are a near-infinite array of universes, a multiverse, as has been seized upon as a means of avoiding the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead.

After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

The New Yorker's Misguided Attempt to Ruin Easter

As we approach Easter and the celebration of the greatest event in human history, the resurrection from death of the Son of God, the secular media is once again doing what they can to discredit either that particular event, miracles in general, or Christian belief in toto.

An example is a recent article in The New Yorker which has triggered a fine response from the Catholic bishop Robert Barron. You can watch Barron's remarks about the New Yorker piece below.

Sophisticated folks at venues like the New Yorker aren't content with reducing the Resurrection of Jesus, the most significant event to have ever occurred, into a celebration of the Easter bunny. They want to empty the day of any and all transcendent meaning.

The apostle Paul says of such people that "professing themselves wise they make themselves fools." Bishop Barron's brief remarks illustrate why:

Friends, the mainstream media typically uses Easter as a time to “debunk” Christianity with old, tired arguments. After reading a rather annoying article in The @NewYorker, I’d like to share my thoughts with you. pic.twitter.com/EVZKKZaDcY

— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) April 1, 2025

Five Major Political Outlooks among Protestants

For those readers who are Protestant Christians Mark Tooley has written an interesting piece at Juicy Ecumenism in which he offers a taxonomy of American protestantism. As I read it I was curious to see where I fit in. Maybe you will be, too.

He begins by noting that there are currently five major streams of Protestant political outlook and activism. Here are the five with a brief excerpt from Tooley's description of each each:

The old Religious Left which is comprised chiefly of clergy from what’s left of Mainline Protestantism. It has little political influence but sometimes gets attention because it can stage rallies with berobed clergy in clerical collars....It rejects or minimizes historical Christian ethical teachings about human sexuality and the human body and endorses identity politics. It largely equates God’s Kingdom with an ever-expanding federal entitlement and welfare state.

The old Religious Right which was founded in the 1970s and 1980s by parachurch groups like the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. It advocated moral renewal through political action to defend “traditional values.” It is pro-life, pro-traditional family and pro religious expression in public life. It has been mostly Reaganite, backing tax cuts, limited government, a strong U.S. national security posture, and free market economics.

The neo-Anabaptist left resembles the old Religious Left but is more adamant about pacifism, peacemaking and rejecting American “empire.” It has professed to be more theologically orthodox. And it was originally pro-life and affirmed traditional Christian sexual teaching but later mostly liberalized on these issues.

MAGA Christianity crystalized around the rise of Donald Trump over the last decade. Unlike the old Religious Right, it does not necessarily favor limited government but exalts in increased executive power vested in a strong man who can fight The Left. It is nostalgic for America’s past but not necessarily for America’s founding constitutional principles, which can impair its ambitions. It mostly hat tips to traditional Christian views about abortion and marriage but is willing to subordinate those stances to wider political ambitions.

The TheoBro right which wants a Christian confessional state that legally privileges Christianity as the only remedy for defeating the Left. Some of its leaders openly denounce voting rights for women as a liberal, modern corruption that undermines the family. Its denizens are not very numerous but have a high profile through social media. And its influence exceeds its numbers because it is aligned with much of MAGA Christianity.

A friend told me that didn't recognize himself in any of these and suggested that Tooley should've included a sixth stream characterized by the ministries of Tim Keller, Al Mohler, and some PCA churches.

In any case, Tooley has more on each of these groups in his article. If you read it you may ask yourself, if you are a Protestant, where, if anywhere, you would fit most comfortably.

What's Wrong with CRT

The following was been posted a few years ago, but because the topic has been so contentious for so long, I thought it might be helpful to repost it:

News reports from around the country have revealed a great deal of discontent among parents with their local school board members who've introduced Critical Race Theory (CRT) into their children's curricula. A number of its defenders of CRT, like the erstwhile talk host at MSNBC, Joy Reid, have insisted that the objectors who criticize its implementation in schools and businesses don't really know what it is.

She and others of her progressive ideological leanings would have us believe that CRT is just a benign attempt to educate students about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. It is that, of course, but it's much more than that.

CRT, its own advocates have written, seeks to radically revolutionize America in the name of ending "oppression." It rejects the values of the earlier Civil Rights movement such as the belief that people can, or should, strive to be "color-blind." Race is paramount. To not consider race in any interaction is an instance of "white supremacy."

CRT also repudiates racial integration because, proponents argue, it leads to "cultural genocide" as the minority group is inevitably absorbed into, and assimilated by, the dominant (white) group.

It rejects classical liberalism and the notion of human equality, substituting instead an emphasis on "equity," i.e. the idea that if there are disparities between races in any metric such as mortality rates, life expectancies, incarceration rates, disciplinary actions in schools, etc. they are necessarily the consequence of racism. No other explanation is allowed.

CRT rejects logical reasoning, objectivity, standpoint neutrality, and fairness in discussions about race as "white values," and the attempt to adopt these values by People of Color (POC) is to adopt "whiteness" and to betray one's own race by tacitly affirming the superiority of white values to the values of the oppressed class.

It furthermore dismisses the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the principle of blind justice. These ideals, too, are "white."

Its emphasis is on the subjective "lived experience" of POC. Their stories are self-validating. To question them is to engage in an act of white supremacy or racism. The idea that truth is objective is rejected. Knowledge is experiential and feelings are self-validating.

Science and reason are tainted by "whiteness." Statistics are meaningless if they conflict with what a member of the "oppressed class" feels deep in her soul to be true.

It also teaches that whites, and only whites, are inherently racist, and no matter how hard they may try, they're helpless to expunge the stain. All they can do is submit to the moral superiority of the oppressed, do some kind of penance, and plead for forgiveness, which, if it is granted at all, is only tentative.

Moreover, according to CRT the structures of our society are irremediably saturated with racism and must be torn down. What will replace them, they don't know or say, but, like the Jacobins in 1789 and the Bolsheviks in 1917, it's enough at this point to destroy the old order. The new non-racist order will somehow arise of itself.

Further, anyone who benefits from this "structural racism" is ipso facto a racist and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist.

"Whiteness" refers to anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society regardless of the beneficiary's skin tone. If you're black, but you integrate into the white status quo then you're "white" regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

But don't take my word for any of this. Instead, watch this video produced by a very bright young man who did his homework and dug into the original sources. His name is Ryan Chapman, and he presents the main points of CRT in a dispassionate, objective fashion that CRT proponents would doubtless dismiss because, after all, Chapman is a white person seeking to be objective, neutral, and fair.

Even so, the video is quite good and is a very helpful explication of what the major figures in CRT are themselves saying about it. Joy Reid should watch it:

How Modern Culture Dehumanizes Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As with sex, so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent.

Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it. When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males along the bell curve undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling more men onto the other side of it than would have been there otherwise.

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

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

Is it Possible to Know That God Does Not Exist? (Part II)

I ended yesterday's post on Gary Gutting's interview with UMass philosopher Louise Antony with the claim that there are dozens of good reasons for believing that God exists. One such reason is the modern argument from design, but Professor Antony tries to anticipate that argument in the interview:

Many theists think they’re home free with something like the argument from design: that there is empirical evidence of a purposeful design in nature. But it’s one thing to argue that the universe must be the product of some kind of intelligent agent; it’s quite something else to argue that this designer was all-knowing and omnipotent.

Why is that a better hypothesis than that the designer was pretty smart but made a few mistakes? Maybe (I’m just cribbing from Hume here) there was a committee of intelligent creators, who didn’t quite agree on everything. Maybe the creator was a student god, and only got a B- on this project.

The problem with this objection is that the concession that the designer exists but is a bit incompetent is that it concedes too much. Once we grant the existence of a designer (or a committee of designers), even if the designer(s) seems to be unable to create a perfect world, then the atheist has essentially lost the argument. She's conceding that something beyond this universe exists which is powerful enough and intelligent enough to create this universe, even though the creation is imperfect.

That's a concession that an atheist cannot afford to make. It puts her on a very slippery slope to theism since it'd be plausible to believe that any designer of the universe would have to have the minimal qualities of transcending space, time and matter, be unimaginably powerful and unimaginably intelligent. It might also be plausible to assume that this creator is personal, since it would've created personality embodied in beings like you and I. If so, we're getting pretty close to the God of traditional theism.

Too, close, certainly, for the comfort of most atheists.

Even a less than perfect designer is still a designer that transcends this universe and possesses the traits listed above. Even a team of designers is still comprised of designers which possess those traits.

Such a designer is not the God of theism, to be sure, but the existence of a transcendent designer(s) of any sort is certainly much more compatible with theism than it is with the naturalists' claim that the universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. Moreover, if there's a plausible answer to the problem of an imperfect creation or the problem of suffering, theism becomes even more likely.

For examples of some plausible responses to the problem of suffering watch the following five minute video:

Gutting's interview continues:

G.G.: Would you say, then, that believers who think they have good reasons for theism are deceiving themselves, that they are actually moved by, say, hopes and fears — emotions — rather than reasons?

L.A.: I realize that some atheists do say things like “theists are just engaged in wishful thinking — they can’t accept that death is the end.” Theists are insulted by such conjectures (which is all they are) and I don’t blame them. It’s presumptuous to tell someone else why she believes what she believes — if you want to know, start by asking her.

When atheists allege that theism is an expression of wishful thinking it should be noted that if so - and I have little doubt that that's at least part of why many theists hold to their convictions - it must also be the case that atheism is also an expression of wishful thinking. If wishful thinking lies behind the faith of some believers then it also lies behind the lack of faith manifest in many unbelievers. In other words, many atheists disbelieve because they simply don't want there to be a God.

You can read a couple of very bright atheists admitting this themselves here.

The claim that theism is just wishful thinking is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways. As such it reminds me a little of mathematician John Lennox's retort to atheist biologist Richard Dawkins in a debate between the two. Dawkins averred that theists believe in God because they're afraid of the dark. Lennox responded by saying that atheists disbelieve in God because they're afraid of the light.

Is it Possible to Know That God Does Not Exist? (Part I)

At the Opinionator philosopher Gary Gutting of Notre Dame interviews atheist philosopher Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The interview is interesting for a number of things Ms Antony asserts, including her claim that she knows there is no God:

Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God. But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic?

Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.” I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean.

G.G.: That is what I mean.

L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.

With due respect to Ms Antony, I simply don't see how anyone can know such a thing. It's a bit like saying that one knows there are no living beings elsewhere in the universe. One can believe this, one can be skeptical or doubtful that there are any such beings, but how one can know that a transcendent mind does not exist is not at all clear, at least not to me.

Nevertheless, she doubles down on her claim a bit further on in the interview:

G.G.: O.K., .... But the question still remains, why are you so certain that God doesn’t exist?

L.A.: Knowledge in the real world does not entail either certainty or infallibility. When I claim to know that there is no God, I mean that the question is settled to my satisfaction. I don’t have any doubts. I don’t say that I’m agnostic, because I disagree with those who say it’s not possible to know whether or not God exists. I think it’s possible to know. And I think the balance of evidence and argument has a definite tilt.

But a "definite tilt" to the evidence, even if such a tilt existed, hardly warrants a claim to knowledge. Gutting goes on to ask her what sort of evidence she has in mind:

L.A.: I find the “argument from evil” overwhelming — that is, I think the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being is a zillion times lower than that it is the product of mindless natural laws acting on mindless matter.

Prof. Antony is surely speaking here of a psychological probability rather than a statistical probability since the latter is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, it's true that evil and suffering often make it difficult to believe that God exists, and if that were the only evidence we had then the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent deity would seem unlikely.

But the evil in the world is not the only evidence we have. It's only one element in what philosophers call our evidential set.

Imagine, for example, that every Chinese man you met on a trip to China was under six feet tall. If that experience was the only relevant evidence you had you might be justified in doubting that there are seven footers in China. But suppose you subsequently acquired several other bits of evidence. You learn, for example, that some Chinese play basketball, that some have even played in the NBA, and that some have even played center in the NBA. Perhaps you also read about a man named Yao Ming who was 7'6" and played for the Houston Rockets until 2011. As your evidential set expands, the force of the original piece of evidence begins to diminish.

Likewise with the argument from evil. Evil is only one element in our evidential set. There are dozens of good reasons for thinking that a God exists, and there are also ways of answering the argument from evil which greatly lessen its force. When considered as just one part of the entire body of evidence the existence of evil is not nearly as dispositive as Ms. Antony suggests.

We'll talk more about Gutting's interview with Professor Antony on tomorrow's Viewpoint.

Blinders

I'm sure we all have mental blinders that keep us from seeing what we don't want to see, especially on matters of religion and politics. I'm sure I do, and it'd be good for all of us to be made aware of what we're not seeing.

Since those best positioned to make us aware of what we're overlooking are those who stand on the other side of the political divide and can see our blind spots more clearly, I offer the following to my friends on the left:

Friends and family have asked how anyone could vote for a liar like Donald Trump. This would be a fair question were it not for the fact that these friends and family would have people vote for the same administration who for the last five years lied to us about Joe Biden's mental acuity.

Donald Trump has an uneasy relationship with the truth, to be sure, but at least there's no doubt that he's the president. Who has actually been the de facto president for the last two and a half years of the Biden administration? Ron Klain? Jeff Zients? Jill Biden? Hunter Biden?

Why did the Biden people lie about the president's debility so adamantly and for so long?

Speaking of lies and Hunter Biden how many times did Joe Biden tell us he had no conversations with Hunter about his business dealings? How many times were we lied to about Hunter's sleazy laptop being Russian disinformation so that it wouldn't diminish Joe's chances in the 2024 election?

How many times has Biden lied about the circumstances of his son Beau's death? How many times has he just made up stories about his life? How many times did he or his administration tell us the border was under control and to the extent that it wasn't there was little he could do about it?

One of his most egregious lies was telling the American people that no American servicemen and women had been killed abroad during his presidency. This despite the loss of thirteen Americans in the Abbey Gate debacle in Afghanistan and three more to a missile attack in Jordan. Is it only Trump's lies that matter to people? Is a lie worse if it comes from Trump and less bad if it came from Biden?

I have a couple of friends who claim to be strongly pro-life. Yet they can't understand why anyone would vote for a man as flawed as Donald Trump who, despite those flaws, is perhaps the most pro-life president in our history, rather than voting for Kamala Harris who supports removing almost all restrictions on a woman's right to kill her unborn child.

A lot of folks are sure that Donald Trump is a fascist, and perhaps he does list toward authoritarianism, but I've heard very little from those who condemn his and his supporters' alleged penchant for fascism about contemporary political violence perpetrated by the left. Why are so many liberals so silent about the BLM riots, the Antifa violence, the assassination attempts, the Tesla bombers, and so on?

Political violence is the trademark of fascism and is at least as common on the left as it is on the right. Indeed, in our current political moment it seems to be much more a feature of the left.

What would those who are willing to spend years in jail for vandalizing Teslas and assaulting Tesla owners say if asked why they harbor such a deep hatred for Elon Musk? What exactly has Musk done that makes him the object of so much loathing? That he has trimmed the bureaucracy? That he has saved taxpayers billions of dollars by finding and eliminating waste and fraud? What?

Speaking of taxes, why is it that people who think we should all pay more in taxes often take all the deductions to which they're legally entitled? If they think we should all pay more, why don't they?

Why is it that those who demand that we throw open the doors of our country to whomever wishes to come in nevertheless lock the doors of their homes and cars when they leave them? Why open the doors to the country to those in need but close the doors to our homes to those in need?

It's ironic that those who are most vocal in their desire for peace are often the most vocal in their disdain for the one president who has probably done more to bring peace to the world than any of his predecessors. If Trump fails to get a ceasefire in Ukraine and a satisfactory conclusion to Hamas' war against Israel it won't be for lack of trying. Would peace be any more likely were Kamala Harris our Commander in Chief?

I asked a relative once why she so despises Trump. Her answer was that E. Jean Carroll accused him of having assaulted and raped her (he was found not guilty of rape) some years ago and that he was in general an odious human being. Perhaps so, but had Biden stayed in the race she would've voted for him despite his perverse weirdness around women and children and despite the fact that he was credibly accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, and despite the fact that he was accused by Jill's first husband, Bill Stevenson, of having had an affair with her while she was still married to Stevenson.

My relative did vote for Kamala Harris whose husband once publicly slapped a woman so hard it almost knocked her down and who hired a secretary solely because of her looks and "friendliness." Is there a significant difference between these cases on the "odious" scale?

As I said above, I'm sure we all have political blinders that keep us from seeing what we don't want to see. It'd be good for all of us, including those hostile to Trump and Musk, to recognize ours.

Free Will Skepticism (Pt. II)

I posted Part I of this topic on Saturday (see the post below this one). I concluded that entry by noting that the consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion. The Guardian's Oliver Burkeman offers Saul Smilansky as an example:

Saul Smilansky, [is] a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, [but that] although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise ....“On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on...it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said.

“For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”

Smilansky is right about the consequences of a deterministic view of human choice. Not only would it do away with the idea that humans deserve reward and punishment, it would also do away with the idea of moral guilt. It would also strip our species of any notion of human dignity, equality, or rights.

Here's Burkeman:

By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces. “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts,...“it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”

Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.

For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified....Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.”

The preceding paragraph illustrates why so few philosophers believe we can live consistently as determinists. Caruso uses words like "unjustified" and "capricious," but if determinism is true there are no acts which are justified or unjustified, and there certainly is no caprice.

Everything happens as the inevitable consequence of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. To complain that an act is unjustified is meaningless and to allege that an act is capricious is to imply that it could have been otherwise than it was, which is nonsense if determinism is true.

Caruso commits the same inconsistency in the next section. Burkeman writes:

Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.

You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat.

But how, assuming the truth of determinism, can we speak of a "right" to do something and an "obligation" to do something else? These words are meaningless if there are no genuine choices. If at every given moment there's only one possible future how can people have a right or an obligation to do other than what they've been determined to do?

Like so many philosophical questions, the question of free will really comes down to the question of God. If one doesn't believe in God then it's indeed difficult to see how we could have free will even though we'd find it impossible to live consistently as a determinist.

But if God does exist then it's possible that He has endowed us with an immaterial self (mind or soul) not subject to physical law and out of which not only conscious experience but also genuinely free choices arise.

Put differently, if you believe that there are at least some moments in your life when you're genuinely free to choose between two alternatives, then to be consistent you should be a theist. If you are a naturalistic materialist then free will certainly would seem inexplicable, but if determinism is true why are the implications so disturbing and why can't we live consistently as determinists?

As Burkeman admits, he has to live as though determinism is false:

I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option.

In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.

Burkeman has much more to say about "Free will Skepticism" at the link. The article's a bit long, but worth reading in that it does a good job of presenting the determinist challenge to those who believe in libertarian free will.

Free Will Skepticism (Pt.I)

There's an interesting article at The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman a couple of years back on the topic of free will.

Although Burkeman writes the article in such a way as to suggest that he himself is a determinist, or what he calls a "free will skeptic," he admits at the end of the piece that he "personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life."

Nevertheless, almost all of the people he cites in the article are determinists with the opinions of some compatibilists* mixed in, but he doesn't mention any arguments from those philosophers who believe we have libertarian free will*.

I've pulled a few passages from Burkeman's article that help to give a sense of it. Let's start with this one:

Nothing could be more self-evident [than that we make free choices]. And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

It's important to note that each of these thinkers is a naturalistic materialist. Their determinism is a derivative of their prior belief that all that exists are matter and the physical laws which govern it. Being committed to that ontology it's not surprising that they would be free will skeptics, since materialism allows no room for any deviation from physical law. As Burkeman says at one point, "Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock?"

If, however, naturalistic materialism is false, if there's more to us than just our material bodies and brains, if we also possess an immaterial mind or soul, then the strength of the argument for determinism is substantially diminished.

Burkeman explains why the free will question is crucially important:

...the stakes could hardly be higher. Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.

Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness.

And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

The consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion. I'll talk about that when I post Part II on this topic on Monday.

*Compatibilism is the notion that even though our choices may be determined, it makes sense to say we’re free to choose as long as our choices are caused by internal causes like reasons, rather than external constraints. Compatibilists think determinism and free will are both true. Libertarian free will is the view that there are some moments in which one can genuinely choose between two or more possible futures.

Politics In Church

Ryan Burge is a sociologist who specializes in religious matters. He recently put together some data on how eager preachers are to deliver political sermons and how eager Christians are to hear such messages in Church. The short answer to both is "not very much."

Here are a couple of charts he put together based on his data:

Burge writes:

I get the very clear sense from this data that any pastor who chooses to speak up about political division in the United States is going to anger a whole lot of their flock. In most churches, 40-50% of people think that their clergy should avoid discussions of political division completely.

Then, another 30-40% mostly think that this is a bad idea. You just don’t see a lot of church-going folks who are keen on their pastor talking about what is going on in the world of politics, just the opposite.

This is interesting because the perception among a lot of secular folk is that churches are hotbeds of political indoctrination. Burge mentions this:

Doing a lot of public facing work on religion has taught me that a significant number of people who aren’t religious or don’t attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning.

The vast majority of pastors aren’t talking about politics on a regular basis and when they touch on anything that may be in the political realm it’s about topics like racism and income inequality. Both can be discussed in fairly apolitical ways.

I wonder if this is true of African American churches. Many people have the impression that they're more political than churches that are mostly white, but if Burge has any data on this he didn't present it in his article.

He closes with this:

The other side of this is that huge majorities of congregations just want to avoid politics entirely from the pulpit. They don’t want their pastor or priest to try and discuss the political divides that we are facing. Being around church people my entire life, that’s the clear impression I’ve always gotten.

They see Sunday worship as a respite from all the Culture Wars and the talking heads and the political battles that seem to consume our every waking moment.

Yes, there are pastors who are expressly political. You often see them on social media - but this data makes the point clear: these religious leaders are outliers. They must be understood in that context.

Burge has more on this topic at the link.

A Biologist Confronts Wokeness

Outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he states his reasons (and those of fellow atheistic scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker) for resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).

Coyne explains that the organization has abandoned science by capitulating to those who insist that a woman is "whoever she says she is." Coyne wrote a letter rebutting transgender ideology, which the Foundation published but then removed from their website because, they declared, its publication was "an error of judgment," “does not reflect our values or principles,” and had caused “distress.” The FFRF, they insisted, stands “firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community.”

Coyne sees this as misguided and the Foundation's censorship as a betrayal of science.

There's an irony in Coyne's complaint, however. As David Klinghoffer relates at Evolution News, Coyne has omitted two relevant points from his WSJ article. Here's Klinghoffer:

First, he has himself been an enthusiastic censor, seeking, if I may borrow his own words, to “silence critics who raise valid counter arguments.” In fact, he won the Censor of the Year Award from the Center for Science in Culture back in 2014 for his efforts to silence a Ball State University astrophysicist, Eric Hedin, for teaching a course on “The Boundaries of Science.” The course pointed students to, among other things, some literature on intelligent design.

In his war on Dr. Hedin — a younger, less powerful, and untenured scientist — Dr. Coyne joined forces with none other than his good buddies at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRP). They went over Hedin’s head and succeeded in getting the course canceled. Hedin tells the story in his book Canceled Science.

Has Coyne come to regret any of this, now that he’s winning plaudits as a defender of free speech? As recently as 2022, nine years after the fact, he was still mocking Hedin at Coyne’s blog, "Why Evolution Is True" (“Eric Hedin beefs about being ‘canceled’ at Ball State by the FFRF and me”).

Using his power and the prestige brand of his university to bully someone like Hedin was nothing less than loathsome. Coyne was a pioneer of “cancel culture” well before the term came into vogue.

Indeed, Darwinians, so far from being champions of free speech, have been among the most censorious people in our culture, demanding that all university instructors toe the Darwinian line or suffer unhappy professional consequences.

Klinghoffer continues:

And second, what about the gender binary position that Coyne also champions? If it’s mistaken to believe a man can become a woman, fairly competing against women in women’s sports, using women’s locker rooms and restrooms, demanding to be housed in women’s prisons, and all the rest, how did this mistaken way of thinking arise? What forces in the culture help us understand where it came from?

In his op-ed, Coyne blames existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. He complains that “some forms of feminism” hold that “sex is a social construct.” Coyne harrumphs, “This is a denial of evolution.”

Klinghoffer wants to argue that transgender ideology is not at all a denial of evolution but rather is perfectly compatible with it which is true, but I'd go one step further. I'd agree with Coyne that transgenderism is a product of existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory, but these are all, in many respects, outgrowths of the atheism Coyne himself embraces.

Atheism leads to skepticism about the possibility of absolute truth, and that epistemic skepticism manifested itself in the 20th century in existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. If Coyne believes that transgender ideology is a betrayal of science, perhaps he should examine how and why the atheism on which he stands has resulted in the ideas that have produced it.

You can read the rest of Klinghoffer's piece at the link.