Chuck Colson, R.I.P.

Chuck Colson was a man who fell suddenly from a life of privilege, power, and self-aggrandizement and subsequently committed himself to serving and helping others. He spent a bit less than a year in prison in the mid-seventies for his role in the Watergate scandal and upon release founded Prison Fellowship, a ministry to help convicts straighten out their lives.

His is a remarkable story, showing as it does the power of redemption and giving hope to thousands who despaired of ever being able to change their own lives.

Colson died today due to complications from surgery to relieve a clot on his brain. He was eighty years of age. Go here to read more on this extraordinary man.

Hume's Tacit Endorsement of Intelligent Design

One of the interesting paradoxes in the debate over whether living things are the product of intelligent agency or whether they have evolved through purely mechanical means from an organic broth in a primeval pond is that those who take the latter view also take as one of their heroes a man who sounds in some of his writings like an advocate of the former view.

The great skeptical philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), in arguing against the rationality of believing in miracles (in Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding), says that experience should be our guide in what we believe. If there is a uniform experience against the occurrence of miracles then that experience amounts to a proof that any report of an alleged miracle is likely to be bogus.

Well, if a uniform experience is to be our guide in determining what is credible and what isn't how can we believe that life arose from non-living matter apart from the agency of an intellect? We have, after all, absolutely no experience of such a thing happening. Even if living things are someday created in a laboratory we will still have no experience of life coming to exist apart from a purposeful mind.

A little further on in the Inquiry Hume writes:

We may observe in human nature a principle which, if strictly examined, will be found to diminish extremely the assurance which we might, from human testimony, have in any kind of prodigy. The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is that the objects of which we have no experience resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments we ought to give preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

One of the things that needs to be explained in any theory of origins is how biological information could ever have been produced by randomness and blind chemical action. Whenever we find information being produced today, whether in books or computer programs or whatever, it is always, without exception, produced by a mind. Thus, to the extent that one accepts Hume's principle as valid and reasonable one should assume that the information we find in living cells - in their DNA and in their architecture - was also the product of a mind.

Let me repeat Hume's words: Whenever there's a conflict of explanations "we ought to prefer the one based on the greatest number of past observations." Just as this principle rules out believing that information could be produced by anything other than intelligent agents it also rules out belief in any naturalistic theory of biogenesis. In order to believe that life arose from non-life we have to believe something we have never observed or experienced in all of human history. We have a uniform experience of life always and only arising from other living organisms. Thus as good Humeans we must conclude that whatever initially produced life on earth must itself have in some sense been alive.

Elsewhere (see his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion), Hume argues against the argument for God based on the design we find in the world, but his argument fails to discredit the notion that life and the universe are the products of design. To the extent that his argument is effective it is only so in showing that we can't conclude from the design of the world that the designer must be the God of the Bible. His argument does nothing to demonstrate that the world is not intelligently designed.

Though Hume's devotees would recoil in horror at the notion, the fact is that if we follow their champion we have no reason to think life was not intelligently designed and very good reason to believe that it was.

Stepping on the Gas

Political Math illustrates the silliness of the Obama administration's attempts to slough the national debt problem off on his predecessors:

As Morgen Richmond says at Hot Air:

If you ask me, this, even more than the economy, should be the defining issue of the 2012 election. The President was presented with multiple opportunities to address the long term deficit – including a bipartisan framework from his own commission – and each time he simply chose to walk away. This is one of the most remarkable failures of presidential leadership in history, and it’s time to take the keys away before we careen into an abyss we’ll never get out of. Which is apparently located somewhere south of Puerto Rico.

You Are Not Free

Evolutionary materialist and biologist Jerry Coyne insists that your belief that you have free will is an illusion. Here's Coyne:

The term "free will" has so many diverse connotations that I'm obliged to define it before I explain why we don't have it. I construe free will the way I think most people do: At the moment when you have to decide among alternatives, you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise. To put it more technically, if you could rerun the tape of your life up to the moment you make a choice, with every aspect of the universe configured identically, free will means that your choice could have been different.

Although we can't really rerun that tape, this sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics. Your brain and body, the vehicles that make "choices," are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment. Your decisions result from molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances transmitted from one brain cell to another. These molecules must obey the laws of physics, so the outputs of our brain—our "choices"—are dictated by those laws.

What Coyne has done here is surreptitiously smuggle in the assumption that materialism is true without ever arguing for it. He just assumes that everyone agrees that our physical self is all there is, that human beings are completely reducible to atomic particles. If, however, we possess immaterial minds or souls then everything he says is rendered irrelevant. In order to argue that our choices are determined by physics Coyne has to show that physics can explain everything about us, that we are purely physical machines, and this he doesn't even hint at doing. In his view we're pretty much just flesh and bone computers:

To assert that we can freely choose among alternatives is to claim, then, that we can somehow step outside the physical structure of our brain and change its workings. That is impossible. Like the output of a programmed computer, only one choice is ever physically possible: the one you made. As such, the burden of proof rests on those who argue that we can make alternative choices, for that's a claim that our brains, unique among all forms of matter, are exempt from the laws of physics by a spooky, nonphysical "will" that can redirect our own molecules.

This is a subtle move. Coyne seeks to shift the burden of proof onto those who believe that genuine alternatives do exist, but this seems to me to be precisely backward. When confronted with an apparent choice everyone, even Coyne, has the overwhelming sense that we're free to decide between options. The burden of proof is thus on the determinist who claims that this powerful sense of freedom is really just an illusion.

It's as silly to demand that those in thrall to this overwhelming conviction that they're free prove they are as it is to demand that someone convinced that he's reading this sentence prove that he's not imagining or dreaming it. If Coyne thinks my strong belief that I can choose to type this post or go take a nap is a delusion then it's incumbent upon him to demonstrate that it is. It's not incumbent upon me to demonstrate that it's not.

So what are the consequences of realizing that physical determinism negates our ability to choose freely? ... What is seriously affected is our idea of moral responsibility, which should be discarded along with the idea of free will. If whether we act well or badly is predetermined rather than a real choice, then there is no moral responsibility—only actions that hurt or help others. That realization shouldn't seriously change the way we punish or reward people, because we still need to protect society from criminals, and observing punishment or reward can alter the brains of others, acting as a deterrent or stimulus. What we should discard is the idea of punishment as retribution, which rests on the false notion that people can choose to do wrong.

This is naive. If moral responsibility no longer exists then neither does moral obligation. Actions that hurt or help others may be either approved by society or disapproved, but categories such as right or wrong are as meaningless when applied to us as they are when applied to computers.

Thus, if society approves of slavery, or genocide, or raping children, or infant sacrifice, or torturing animals, or squandering the planet's resources then those things are not wrong and we have no moral obligation to refrain from them. If society adopts a Darwinian view of the weak and the poor then allowing those unfortunates to suffer and perish would be neither right nor wrong and we have no moral obligation to ease their suffering and help them survive. Does Coyne really believe this? Does he really believe that someone who rapes or tortures a child isn't doing something deeply, profoundly wrong? Does he really believe that human beings have no moral obligations?

Coyne thinks we can give up free will and nothing will change, but in fact everything changes. Not only is reward and punishment never deserved, not only can there be no moral obligation, neither is there any ground for human dignity. Our dignity derives from our belief that we're different from other animals in that we can choose our behavior and that we're responsible for the choices we make. Take away choice and we take away the basis for human dignity (and human rights), and once we lose that we open the floodgates to being treated by the powerful as nothing more than cattle to be herded and slaughtered. After all, what would be wrong with that?

Least Racist Country in the World

Recent events have stirred the racial pot in the U.S. once again, and it's good to remind ourselves when the race-baiters and race-haters appear on our news outlets that America is one of the least racist countries, if not the least racist country, in the world. This is the message of a Dennis Prager column from a couple of weeks ago. Prager writes that everyone knows this except the ideological left and black Americans who are constantly reminded by those stirring the pot that they're still oppressed by a racist nation that wants only to exploit them. Prager opens with this:

In light of the tragic killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin -- and the manufactured hysteria surrounding it -- one thing needs to be stated as clearly and as often as possible: The United States is the least racist and least xenophobic country in the world. Foreigners of every race, ethnicity, and religion know this. Most Americans suspect this. Most black Americans and the entire left deny this.

Black Africans know this. That is why so many seek to live in the United States. Decades ago, the number of black Africans who had immigrated to the United States had already surpassed the number of black Africans who were forcibly shipped to America as slaves.

And members of other races and nationalities know this. Even Muslim and Arab writers have noted that nowhere in the Arab or larger Muslim world does an Arab or any other Muslim have the individual rights, liberty, and dignity that a Muslim living in America has. As for Latinos and Asians, vast numbers of them from El Salvador to Korea regard America as the land of opportunity.

And when any of these people come here - from anywhere, speaking any language, looking like a member of any race -- they are accepted as Americans the moment they identify as such. He or she will be regarded as fully American. This is not true elsewhere. A third-generation Turkish-German, whose German is indistinguishable from the German spoken by an indigenous German, will still be regarded by most Germans as a Turk. The same holds true elsewhere in Europe. On the other hand, a first-generation Turkish American, who speaks English with a heavy Turkish accent, but who identifies as American, will be regarded every bit as American as anyone else.

As is often the case, a foreigner pointed this out most clearly. On a visit to America in February, The president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, said: "The other day, I was in a small company -- and there were Asians, Koreans, Middle Easterners, some other people. And they had been in America for, like, two, three, four years. And they talk American. They look American. Body language is American. I'm sure they already think American. Go to Korea and become Korean in one or two years' time. Good luck with that. That's what's so special about this country."

Prager argues that the left in general and the Democratic Party in particular are deeply invested in the narrative of white oppression:

The political aspect is this: The Democrats and the left recognize that if blacks cease viewing themselves as victims of racism, the Democratic Party can no longer offer itself as black America's savior. And if only one out of three black Americans ceases to regard to himself as a victim of racism, and votes accordingly, it will be very difficult for Democrats to win any national election.

The other issue is black memory. Apparently, most blacks either cannot or refuse to believe that the vast majority of whites are no longer racist.

I think Prager is right about this. Many if not most white Americans don't want to be, or be thought to be, racist, and they bend over backwards to not give offense and to not even entertain thoughts that might be construed as bigoted. On the other hand, it's black organizations like the New Black Panthers and black individuals like Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, et al. who seem determined to keep blacks and whites from ever getting to the point where they live harmoniously with each other.

Racial rapport will remain out of reach as long as blacks and whites are held to different standards of behavior. When the New Black Panthers put bounties on "whites" like George Zimmerman for shooting a black kid under ambiguous circumstances, when black on white violence that occurs every day in our cities is met with silence by the black community, when whites are outraged when blacks are treated with possible injustice but blacks express no discernible outrage at unjust treatment of whites by blacks, all that's going to happen is that white resentments will be stoked and the gulf between the races is going to widen.

This would be a tragedy for our nation after all these years of progress, but it'll be inevitable unless we start holding everyone to the same standards of justice and civility. Right now we don't.

Dog Eat Dog Campaign

The Democrats and their allies in the major media are laboring to convince us that Mitt Romney would make a terrible president because he's a terrible human being. As proof they submit the fact that on a family vacation a quarter century ago they transported their dog in a carrier strapped to the roof of the car. This is a chilling demonstration, we are to believe, of Romney's fundamental inhumanity and his unsuitability for office.

Meanwhile, as the media busies themselves uncovering these atrocities in Romney's past, the incumbent has not been able to submit a budget worthy of a single Democrat vote for two years, has amassed more national debt than all other presidents combined, and has been helpless to bring unemployment down to where it was when he took office. His primary achievement, Obamacare, teeters on the brink of being thrown out by the Supreme Court, and we are more divided as a people today than we were even under the Bush administration. Things seem to be in dire disrepair and the media is all aflutter about a faux war on women and dogs on the tops of cars.

But worse. Romney supporters slyly point us to the fact that Mr. Obama admits in his autobiography that as a lad he actually ate dogs. Oh, the horror! Not only this, but we actually have documentation of Adolf Hitler being given the news that his own beloved Fluffy was one of Mr. Obama's repasts.

We can be sure that the liberal media will do all they can to suppress this footage lest people who yawn at skyrocketing debt and unemployment grow outraged that Mr. Obama consumed Fluffy:

Biocomplexity

Want to know what scientists are referring to when they talk about the complexity of living things? Go here.

You can click on any region of the map, and it'll give you a blow-up of that region.

A word of caution: You must keep in mind that all of this amazing intricacy, organization, and plain genius just looks designed, but the appearance of design is an illusion. All intelligent people know that blind chance and chemistry are responsible for having built these pathways serendipitously from scratch. It happens all the time.

Keep telling yourself that as you look at it, because if you don't you're likely to find yourself wondering if those nefarious intelligent design people, who foolishly think this sort of thing is evidence of the creative activity of an intelligent agency, aren't on to something.

Minds, Free Will, and Materialism

An article in Psychology Today by Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles named Matthew Lieberman caught my eye. Lieberman is a materialist who writes an interesting piece about the connection between a belief in free will and the belief that we have a mind. Here's part of his article:

It is impossible to take a materialistic view of the universe (i.e. the view that there is nothing but physical material in the world, atoms bouncing off one another in perfectly predictable patterns) and not come to the conclusion that free will is an illusion because your will must ultimately be caused by events in your physical brain which were caused by previous events in your brain, body, environment and so on. It makes no sense to talk about a will that is disconnected from causal chains of biological events.

Given a materialist view of the universe, it makes no sense to talk about consciousness or experience at all. We have absolutely no idea what it is about the three pounds of mush between our ears that allows it to perform this trick of being conscious. If you damage one spot in visual cortex, a person will cease to see motion. If you damage another spot, they may lose the ability to see things in the right side of their visual field. But we have no idea why those regions cause us to have conscious experience of motion or the right side of the visual field in the first place. Knowing that an engine can’t run without a particular part is not the same as knowing why it can run because of that part.

In other words, we have no idea how consciousness can arise from mere chemical reactions in matter, but he believes that it does despite the powerful intuition that there's something more to us than just the material aspect of our nature. He even acknowledges that his belief in materialism is a "leap of faith":

I am a neuroscientist and so 99% of the time I behave like a materialist, acknowledging that the mind is real but fully dependent on the brain. But we don’t actually know this. We really don’t. We assume our sense of will is a causal result of the neurochemical processes in our brain, but this is a leap of faith.

Perhaps the brain is something like a complex radio receiver that integrates consciousness signals that float around in some form. Perhaps one part of the visual cortex is important for decoding the bandwidth that contains motion consciousness and another part of the brain is critical to decoding the bandwith that contains our will. So damage to brain regions may alter our ability to express certain kinds of conscious experience rather than being the causal source of consciousness itself.

I don’t actually believe the radio metaphor of the brain, but I think something like it could account for all of our findings. Its unfalsifiable which is a big no-no in science. But so is the materialist view — its also unfalsifiable. We simply don’t know how to reverse engineer consciousness. Saying that the complexity of the brain explains why we are conscious is just an article of faith — it doesn’t explain anything. We don’t know why our brains are associated with conscious experience and nothing else in the universe besides brains seems to be.

If we acknowledge just how much we don’t know about the conscious mind, perhaps we would be a bit more humble. We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good. So we will go on acting like free-willing creatures no matter what. Its what we're built to do.

Reflect for a moment on how much one must deny in order to avoid the conclusion that we are something more than just a lump of protoplasm. We must deny the overwhelming sense that we make free choices and that we are responsible for those choices. We must also deny the powerful intuition that we have a conscious mind that is something other than the brain with which it is integrated. We must deny this in order to maintain belief in a metaphysical position which is not, as Leiberman points out, scientific, which is strongly counterintuitive, and which must be accepted not because there's evidence for it but purely on faith.

It's true, of course, that free will and conscious minds are illusions if materialism is correct, but how do we know materialism is correct? We don't. Materialists, as Leiberman admits, simply believe it by faith, and they do so, in my opinion, largely because to acknowledge the existence of a mind is to acknowledge a key element in the worldview of Christian theism, a step they're loath to take.

That'd be their business, of course, except that so many of them - unlike Lieberman - insist on telling those who believe these powerful intuitions exist in us precisely because they correspond to reality, that they're irrational.

In order to sustain their materialism the materialist has to deny what everything in their experience is telling them is true, and then they try to persuade us that the worldview which most comfortably accommodates and explains this experience, Christian theism, is a non-rational and superstitious alternative.

It's very odd.

What's Not to Like?

Gary Jason is a philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. In an essay at American Thinker he reviews the state of play between the EPA and the natural gas industry. He writes that after concerted attempts to limit or stop the use of fracking technology to drill for gas, the EPA seems to be backing off their earlier opposition. Here are a few of the important points he makes in the essay:

[The EPA] has withdrawn its lawsuit against Range Resources Corporation wherein, it had alleged that the company was polluting water wells near Fort Worth, Texas. Moreover, the EPA will now retest water in Wyoming about which it had earlier raised questions.

Add to this the fact that the Agency has tested well water in Pennsylvania, once found to be polluted, and now (like the state's own similar agency) declares the water to be safe, and you begin to sense that the EPA is being forced to retreat from its ... opposition to the new technology.

One good sign is that the extremist environmentalist groups are beginning to come down hard on the EPA, long considered an agency that belonged to them.

What is emerging here is a consensus among scientists that to the extent that gas from fracking gets into a water supply -- and that is relatively rare as it is -- the cause is not the fracking itself (i.e., the injection of water, sand, and small amounts of chemicals into shale to release the gas), but rather wells that are not properly constructed.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection recently worked with Chesapeake Energy to come up with a greatly improved well design....Chesapeake agreed to those improvements (which increase the drilling costs per well by about 10%, or half a million dollars) after one of its wells leaked natural gas into the water supply. But it is important to note that the leakage in this one well occurred before any fracking had been done.

Add to this the realization that the production of natural gas made possible by fracking should actually reduce atmospheric greenhouse gasses and it seems as if it would be environmentally foolish to stop it.

How does fracking reduce CO2? Jason explains: Fracking (and horizontal drilling) have led to a massive increase in the production of domestic natural gas, driving the prices dramatically down. In fact, from 2008 to the present, the price of natural gas has plummeted over 80% from $12 to $2.30 per million Btus (MMBtu). This has led to natural gas being used to generate power formerly generated by coal-fired plants, and burning natural gas emits less CO2 than does burning coal.

Summing up, Jason writes:

Fracking is ecologically safe, helps America achieve energy independence, provides great-paying jobs for blue-collar workers in an era of seemingly endless rates of high unemployment, and lowers greenhouse gas emissions.

If the first part of that really is true, and there are those who contest it even if the EPA is no longer among them, then what's not to like about it?

Well, it seems that the Obama administration is still not convinced.

Breaking News: Philosophy Doesn't Exist

Following the lead of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who claim to have demonstrated that God almost certainly doesn't exist, a pair of Copenhagen philosophers have constructed a proof that philosophy doesn't exist either. You can read the report that has rocked the academic world here.

Just for the sake of cheap titillation I'll share with you the lede:

Two philosophers based in Denmark have apparently come up with a proof that shows that philosophy doesn’t exist and their discovery is rocking the philosophical community. For centuries, philosophy has been at the core of just about every discipline and has provided a foundation for most of Western thought. From Plato to Kripke, philosophers have been tackling the universe’s toughest problems. But in 2012 Dr. Soren Filosht and another thinker who wants to be known only as “Dagmar” have developed a complex argument that ostensibly shows that philosophy is merely the product of wishful thinking and has no basis in reality.

The two Danes are arguing that disciplines like metaphysics and epistemology are a crutch that the weak-minded have used to better understand the world, and their proof casts serious doubt on whether these things actually exist. “It’s necessarily true that everything is just real and reality consists of properties, relations, sets, and facts and you can study them. No metaphysics required.” claims Dagmar.

Epistemology, too, is a chimera and these thinkers are calling on all philosophers to give it up. “Look, we just know stuff. If you are justified in believing a statement is true, then you know it. People who believe they’re doing ‘epistemology’ just confuse the matter and the sooner they come to believe that, the better off we’ll all be.”

They developed their proof while sampling the wide variety of local plant life in Christiana (a small community inside of Copenhagen). As with most discoveries of this kind, they weren’t looking for it. They were functioning as working philosophers developing a paper that attempted to show that Kripke’s possible worlds have no basis in anything actual.

“We were close. Real close.” Dagmar recalls. “Then we got a brainwave, as if we were in some kind of psychotic hallucination.” Not only are possible worlds not actual, they hit upon the striking fact that philosophy itself isn’t real. “We kind of felt like modern-day Descarteses; we thought philosophy out of existence: cogito ergo non philosophia.” Filosht added, visibly shaken as he spoke.

"Visibly shaken" probably doesn't begin to describe what's being felt in humanities departments all across the world. Read the rest of this revolutionary achievement - an achievement to rival that of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al. - at the link.

Cohabiting

Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now. In an essay in the New York Times she says that she neither favors nor opposes cohabitation, but couples should know that as a prelude to marriage it's fraught with hazards. Nor does it make divorce unlikely once the cohabiting couple does marry. In fact, it actually increases the chances that divorce will eventuate. She writes:

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation.

This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

But that belief is contradicted by experience. Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Much of the problem with cohabitation stems from the different ways in which it is viewed by women and men:

Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

Couples often feel they wasted years of their lives living with someone when their relationship would probably have ended after only a few months had they just been dating. The live-together relationship acquires a certain inertia due to what Jay calls setup and switching costs:

Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs. Living together can be fun and economical, and the setup costs are subtly woven in. After years of living among roommates’ junky old stuff, couples happily split the rent on a nice one-bedroom apartment. They share wireless and pets and enjoy shopping for new furniture together. Later, these setup and switching costs have an impact on how likely they are to leave.

Jennifer said she never really felt that her boyfriend was committed to her. “I felt like I was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife,” she said. “We had all this furniture. We had our dogs and all the same friends. It just made it really, really difficult to break up. Then it was like we got married because we were living together once we got into our 30s.”

There's more at the link. Any young person contemplating moving in with his or her significant other ought to read it. It'll at least help to have one's eyes open when one makes the move. It'll also help to know that couples shouldn't expect living together to strengthen their relationship. It may, but based on statistics, it probably won't.

Out of Touch

Supporters of President Obama are frequently heard making the claim that Mitt Romney is "out of touch" with the average American. He has been insulated by his wealth from the sorts of concerns and exigencies faced by middle class Americans, they say.

Well, perhaps this is true, but it sounds awfully strange coming from people who are striving to reelect a man who spent much of his childhood in distinctly unAmerican Indonesia and then in Hawaii, who spent his college years in the insular cocoon of ivy league schools, who then taught law students at the university level, and who worked as a community organizer dealing mostly with inner city poor. From there he was catapulted into the state legislature, then into the U.S. Senate, and finally into the White House.

So, when in his adult life has Mr. Obama rubbed elbows with middle class Americans? What does he know of their values and problems? How is he any more "in touch" with average people than is Mitt Romney? He's never worked a blue-collar job. He's never sent his kids to a public school. He's never had to meet a payroll. He's probably never had to worry about making a mortgage payment.

There's nothing wrong with any of this, of course, but there is something wrong with one of the most out of touch presidents in modern history having his surrogates fault his opponent for being out of touch with average Americans.

Tax the Rich

CNBC's financial analyst Rick Santelli expresses quiet doubt (I'm kidding) that raising taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" as the president keeps insisting we do will do any good at all:

I suggest that anyone who wants others to pay higher taxes should be asked whether they themselves take any of the deductions to which they're legally entitled. If they do, then they should be asked why they do. There's something hypocritical about saying on the one hand that we should all be willing to pay more tax to the government and on the other ensuring that one pays as little tax as he can.

Warren Buffet, the multibillionaire who complained that his secretary pays at a higher rate than he does and urged that the wealthy be required to pay more than they do, is a good example of this hypocrisy. Buffet is ten years delinquent in his own tax obligation, he owes the IRS a billion dollars, and he's fighting them to keep from having to pay it. What a guy.

Closing of the American Mind at 25

Those of a certain age and intellectual appetite might remember the amazing stir caused in 1987 by the publication of professor Allan Bloom's devastating critique of modernity titled The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom set out in the book to chronicle the demise of American higher education and culture and to lament the relativism that had seeped into every interstice of the modern American university.

His critique led to howls of execration from humanities professors whose toes he stepped upon, but surprisingly, Americans (and others) bought his book in prodigious quantities, making him, by the time of his death five years later, a very wealthy man.

Even so, despite the popular reception of his cultural indictment, not much has changed. The charges he leveled against American education in 1987, seem in many ways to be just as valid today.

Now his publisher, Simon and Schuster, is releasing a 25th anniversary edition of Closing and Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard observes the occasion by offering an essay on Bloom, the reception of his book, and the themes it addressed. Here's an excerpt from early on in Ferguson's fine retrospective:

It’s useful to recall the world Bloom and his book broke into and riled so. In material ways, the United States of America of 1987 seems as remote as Republican Rome. Our national wealth has more than tripled in the last 25 years. The digital revolution, with its upending of commerce, communication, and the habits and patterns of everyday life, was just getting underway.

Music lovers delighted in the portability and convenience of their book-sized Walkmans, never imagining the tiny wonders they would be slipping into their shirt pockets a decade hence. Cars, on the other hand, seem to have been roughly half their present size, at least in memory. You couldn’t carry around a telephone unless you yanked it off the wall. Atari was as sophisticated as gaming systems came. And nobody used the words “gaming system.”

Culturally, the country fretted. Culturally, of course, all countries, or some segments of them, are always fretting, and have been doing so since Cicero grieved, “O tempora, O mores,” up to and beyond Yeats’s insistence that the center cannot hold. But by the end of the 1980s in the United States, there were numbers to underscore the worry. In the previous 30 years, violent crime had increased 500 percent, the divorce rate had doubled, the teen suicide rate had tripled, and the number of “illegitimate births” (this was the last era when you could use the term) had increased 400 percent.

Beyond the numbers, the worriers readily found signs of the culture’s degradation, if not its imminent collapse. On TV, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael had introduced a new kind of freak show that would have been unthinkable a decade before and proved enormously popular, banishing modesty and discretion, making a virtue of exhibitionism, inviting adulterers and wifebeaters and cross-dressers to strut their hour upon the stage set. (Eerie fact: Exactly nine months after Closing’s publication date, Snooki Polizzi was born.)

Popular fiction chronicled a generation of pampered youth lost to anomie and cocaine. As the Iran-contra scandal shook the executive branch, pundits discovered among the people a loss of faith in their institutions. A devastating crash on Wall Street was credited to greed unchecked by law or moral obligation.

And as if all that weren’t sufficient cause for alarm, consider this: Madonna.

Here's another:

He asked readers to consider contemporary students as he encountered them. They arrived ill-equipped to explore the large questions the humanities pose, and few saw the need to bother with them in any case. Instead, he said, they were cheerful, unconcerned, dutiful, and prosaic, their eyes on the prize of that cushy job. They were “nice.” You can almost see him shudder as he writes the word. “They are united only in their relativism,” he wrote. “The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate.”

Relativism, in fact, was the only moral postulate that went unchallenged in academic life. Defenders of relativism often defend it by denying it exists: No one, they say, truly believes that one idea is ultimately as good as another. And of course they’re right that none of us in our own lives act as though we believed this. But most of us profess it nonetheless, especially if we’ve got a college education, in which case we will be careful to use air quotes when we are forced to say the word “truth” in polite company.

In a genial but harrowing review of Closing, a professor at Carleton College, Michael Zuckert, told of canvassing the students in his class on American political thought. He asked whether they agreed that the truths in the first lines of the Declaration of Independence were indeed “self-evident.” Seven percent voted “yes.” On further conversation, he wrote, it turned out “that they were convinced there is no such thing as ‘truth,’ self-evident or otherwise, in the sphere of claims of the sort raised in the Declaration.” He would have gotten the same response in almost any college classroom today, and I’m not too sure about the 7 percent.

What follows when a belief in objectivity and truth dies away in higher education? In time an educated person comes to doubt that purpose and meaning are discoverable​—​he doubts, finally, that they even exist. It’s no mystery why fewer and fewer students in higher education today bother with the liberal arts, preferring professional training in their place.

Deprived of their traditional purpose in the pursuit of what’s true and good, the humanities could only founder. The study of literature, for example, was consumed in the trivialities of the deconstructionists and their successors. Philosophy curdled into positivism and word play. History became an inventory of political grievances....

I strongly urge those unfamiliar with Closing to first read Ferguson's piece at the Weekly Standard for background and then get a hold of a copy of the new edition. It's worth it.

Thomas Nagel and the Inadequacy of Materialism

Thomas Nagel is a prominent philosopher who once wrote that he didn't want God to exist. It wasn't just that he didn't believe that God existed, it was that he didn't want God to exist. Stern stuff, but despite that earlier sentiment he seems recently, perhaps, to have taken a step closer to changing his mind. He's now arguing that materialism is a philosophically inadequate and sterile metaphysics and that there must be something more to evolutionary history and cosmology than just physics.

This will be seen by many of his fellow atheists as a scandalous betrayal, leading as it does to intimations of the Divine, but he feels so strongly about it that he's written a soon-to-be-released book on the topic. The volume is titled Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False and is published by Oxford University Press. Nagel argues in the book, inter alia, that materialism simply cannot explain the phenomena of consciousness.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history.

An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one.

The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.

I think it's fair to sum up the implications of Nagel's thinking with a simple syllogism:

1. Either the universe is ultimately the product of mind or it is solely the product of natural forces acting on matter.
2. It is not solely the product of natural forces acting upon matter (Nagel's argument).
3. Therefore, the universe is ultimately the product of mind.

If this is indeed the conclusion toward which Nagel is listing a lot of New Atheists will be sorely vexed.

Racism and Double Standards

When Washington, D.C. Councilman Marion Barry offered his opinion recently that Asian shopkeepers should get out of D.C. the racial geiger counters in the liberal media registered hardly a click. Perhaps that's because although most of the racist rhetoric nowadays, particularly the most vicious forms of it, is coming from the (Listen to this if you can stomach the hatred) black community it's not politically correct to make a big deal of it, and besides everybody's pretty much grown accustomed to it.

Here's what Barry said:

We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops. They ought to go. I’m going to say that right now. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too.

It's only when a white, preferably a Republican, makes a relatively mild or innocuous comment like Trent Lott made in comforting Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist, on his 100th birthday that he'd have made a great president, or when George Allen refers to a swarthy Middle-eastern heckler as "macaca", or when a "white Hispanic" who's getting his head bashed against the concrete shoots his black attacker, that the progressive left and the race-hustlers go ballistic.

When the former D.C. mayor says he wants Asians out of the black community so that blacks can take over their businesses, that's scarcely worth a comment on the evening talk shows. Does Barry really think that if Asians leave his neighborhood that their businesses will be taken over by African-Americans? Why are there so few African-American businesses now in a community that's almost 95% black?

Barry laments that shopkeepers and restauranteurs in D.C. have been first Jews, then Italians, and now Asians, but why haven't African-Americans stepped up and started businesses of their own? What's stopping them? Racism? That excuse is getting very tired, very fast.

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On a perhaps not completely unrelated note this video describes some amazing advances in biotechnology:

What does the video have to do with Marion Barry's racism? Well, Ada Poon, the scientist featured in the video, the scientist who is developing a technology that may someday save Marion Barry's life, appears to be an Asian. I wonder what Mr. Barry thinks about that.

Animals Are People, Too

Wesley Smith writes an article in The Weekly Standard that describes the ongoing effort to secure human rights for animals, or more specifically to get animals treated under the law as persons. Here are a few excerpts:

For years, animal rights activists have been preparing the intellectual ground to overcome the “animals aren’t persons” legal impediment to their goal of allowing animals to sue their owners—a concept known as “animal standing”—by which they plan to destroy animal industries and eventually end all domestication of animals. They know that no legislature will pass laws elevating even the most intelligent animals to the status of persons. So they plan to file multitudinous lawsuits, hoping judges will bootstrap animals into the moral community.

It has already started. The European Court of Human Rights agreed in 2008 to hear the appeal of an Austrian Supreme Court ruling denying personhood to a chimp. More such cases could soon be filed in the United States. Law professor and animal rights activist Steven Wise was quoted in the New York Times recently promising to file lawsuits starting in 2013 with the goal of using “the latest science to help persuade state court judges that such creatures as whales and chimpanzees should be accorded common law personhood and rights.”

It would be easy to roll one’s eyes and dismiss this as simply what radical lawyers do, to little effect. That would be a mistake. “Animal personhood” has become a respected idea in philosophy, the life sciences, the academy generally, and among some within the highly politicized science establishment.

But animal personhood is a real and present threat. Indeed, as Wise has written, it would only take one judge ambitious to make history to open the floodgates of litigation, first demanding inclusion of ever more animals in legal personhood, and from there, granting those animal persons standing to sue their owners for violations of their fundamental rights.

The lawyers who would take those cases are ready and waiting for the judicial go-ahead, their legal briefs already written. For years, professors have been busily training students in animal law courses and seminars at more than 100 of America’s top law schools, preparing an army of legal minds for the day they can represent whales, dolphins, chimps, elephants, pigs, and other animal “clients” in court.

I couldn't help wondering, as I read this, whether once animals are given the same rights as persons there will be prisons for animals which kill or steal from each other. Will entire species be considered irredeemably vicious and thus either exterminated or imprisoned? Will animals be entitled to health care? Will surrogates be appointed to cast votes on their behalf?

Mostly, though, I wondered why these people are trying so hard to extend personhood to animals but not to unborn humans? Did they file amicus briefs in those states which tried to pass personhood laws that would protect the unborn under the Fifth Amendment?

But set all that aside. The personhood for animals movement makes a certain amount of sense in a post-Christian world. After all, traditionally the only reason human beings had for thinking that they were qualitatively distinct from animals was that human beings were believed to be created in the image of God and animals weren't. There was an ontological chasm between mankind and animals that separated us from each other, but as that view faded in the 19th and 20th century enthusiasm for Darwinian materialism the chasm narrowed to a ditch and then pretty much disappeared altogether.

Perhaps the crucial blow was struck by Desmond Morris in the 1960s with his book titled The Naked Ape. Man, Morris argued, is nothing more than an ape without all the hair. That being the case there's no reason, at least in the minds of the secular elites, for not conferring legal rights upon animals.

Once we embark down the road of a secular, materialist vision of man there's no end to the absurdities we find ourselves logically compelled to accept.

Photo ID

States all across the country are trying to impose voter photo ID laws to protect the integrity of the voting process. The Obama administration in general, and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular, have argued that such laws are unnecessary, that there's no evidence of voter fraud occurring in the U.S., that photo ID laws are a solution in search of a problem.

After this video of a bit of surreptitious investigative journalism by James O'Keefe, I'm not so sure. O'Keefe presents himself to the poll worker and asks if they have a registration under the name of Eric Holder. Watch the rest, his "goodbye" line is clever:

It's ironic, as the video shows at the end, that the Department of Justice is fighting efforts to require photo ID for voters, but they require photo ID to gain admission to their office building.

The Talk

John Derbyshire was until recently a writer for the conservative journal National Review. He is an atheist and a Darwinian (the significance of which I'll explain below) which is unusual among political conservatives, and he was recently fired for writing a racially insensitive column based on "The Talk" that a number of African-Americans are saying that they have at some point with their children.

"The Talk" could be construed to be racially offensive to whites, in my opinion, but few commentators seem to want to say that out loud. Derbyshire was an exception. He satirized "The Talk" by writing down advice he has given to his own children over the years.

Some of what he said was wise, some of it was simply sociological fact, but some of it was seen as unfair, inaccurate, and gratuitously insulting to blacks, and for that he was fired. I'll leave it to you to read his essay and judge it for yourself. For my part, I'd like to focus on an aspect of it that no one else has remarked upon, at least so far as I am aware.

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that Derbyshire was indeed motivated by racial animus and eager to insult blacks qua blacks. Let's suppose that he really is a racist. If one is an atheistic Darwinian like Derbyshire why would one think that there was anything wrong with that? Darwin himself believed that blacks were an inferior race and as we've argued here on numerous occasions atheism entails moral nihilism, the idea that there is no right or wrong.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with racism unless there's an obligation binding each of us to love our neighbor, i.e. to treat him with dignity, respect and kindness, but there can only be such a duty if there's a transcendent moral authority who imposes it. Since, on Derbyshire's metaphysical presuppositions, there is no such authority, neither he nor anyone who shares those presuppositions can say that he was wrong to say what he said, or to think what he thinks. The most that can be said is that he violated some social taboo, but what's wrong with that?

Put simply, unless there is a Divine law-giver who imposes upon us the duty to treat each other the way we want to be treated then there's no basis whatsoever for saying that racism is wrong. One may find racial bigotry distasteful, of course, just as one may find the thought of eating dog food distasteful, but it's not morally wrong.

Thus, when an atheist pontificates about the evils of racism he's just blowing hot air. Only a theist has any grounds for saying that racism is evil.

Whether Derbyshire really is a racist or whether he's just a contrarian who refuses to truckle to the politically correct pieties of our age, I can't say, but it's hard to imagine a black writer being fired for writing similar things about whites, and it's hard to imagine, in any event, why secularist progressives would be outraged at what Derbyshire wrote even if they are racist.

Parental Warning

Paul Pardi at Philosophy News features this poster warning parents of alarming studies that find that one in five kids will experiment with philosophy.

Parents - be sure you're able to recognize the warning signs: