Does ISIS Represent Islam?

Noah Rothman at Hot Air, in the course of discussing a poll which found that 27% of Americans surveyed believe that ISIS represents Islam, disparages this opinion:

ISIS clearly does not represent Islam. Those who think it does are members of a minority, and that point of view does not withstand even modest scrutiny.

Well, maybe he's right, but I don't know how he can be so sure. Here's my problem. I've been involved in discussions with Muslims who insist that the radicals among them are heretics and that Islam does not condone the sorts of atrocities they commit. Very well, I reply, but what of the numerous Koranic passages which seem to suggest otherwise? All anyone who's interested need do is repair to Google and he or she will find examples that say things like:

• 9:5 "... fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war) ..."
• 9:14 "Fight them, and God will punish them by your hands, cover them with shame ..."
• 9:29 "Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and his apostle nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth (even if they are) of the people of the Book, until they pay the Jizya [religious tax] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
• 47:4 "Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers, smite at their necks, at length when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly (on them) ... but if it had been God's will, he could certainly have exacted retribution from them (himself), but (he lets you fight) in order to test you, some with others. But those who are slain in the way of God, he will never let their deeds be lost."

But these verses are being misinterpreted, my interlocutors protested. The best Muslim scholars assign such passages an interpretation that's different than the interpretation given them by the radicals. They then remind me, rightly, that Christian theologians disagree on how some of the more problematic passages in the Bible should be interpreted and that Christian doctrine has evolved over the centuries, just like Islamic doctrine.

At this point, not being a Koranic or Biblical scholar, I'm tempted to conclude that there's nothing left to say. Even so, it occurs to me that there's one thing more. It seems that one way to get at how these passages should be interpreted is to look at the founders of the two religions. Which of the competing interpretations of the problematic passages comports best with what we know of the lives of Jesus and Mohammad?

When we examine the life of Jesus we see nothing which would lead us to believe that he would ever condone violence. Indeed, we find quite the opposite. When we look at the life of Mohammad, however, we see some disturbing things, at least if the histories can be trusted. Among the most disturbing is his order to behead 700-900 Jewish men and boys who belonged to a tribe, Banu Qurayza, whose ruler Mohammad thought had betrayed him. In fact, reading some histories (see here, for example) of the life of Mohammad is pretty much like reading about ISIS today, including using captive women as sex slaves.

Or, put differently, ISIS has more in common with it's Islamic founding fathers than do moderate Muslims who practice peace and tolerance. It may be that peace-loving Muslims are in the majority today. One certainly hopes so, but they are living a life very much different than that of the founder they revere, at least according to the earliest biographies of Mohammad written by his own followers.

Perhaps, though, those critical biographies of Mohammad and histories of Islam are fraudulent. Perhaps Mohammad wasn't the cruel, rapacious tyrant those historians say he was (see the link above). I'm certainly not qualified to say, but there is an awful lot of scholarship, including Islamic scholarship, that says he was indeed all of that and worse, and more to the point, ISIS certainly believes he was. Whether that image of Mohammad is correct or not, that's the image they're emulating, and until it's clear that that's not who Mohammad was it's very difficult to say, as Rothman does, that ISIS does not represent Islam, at least as it was practiced by the man who founded it.

Random Ponderings

Here are a few questions I've pondered this week:

• Why are so many women outraged when they hear that the Bible says that wives should submit to their husbands, but they're eager to pay money to watch a woman submit to the demands of a cool looking guy who happens to be a sexual pervert who subjects her to sado-masochistic sex in the movie Fifty Shades of Gray? And why are feminists not picketing what is essentially the mainstreaming and celebration of the objectification and degradation of women?
  
  How many feminists are, so far from being incensed by the release of this film, instead eager to watch it, and why are we not hearing fulminating condemnations of Hollywood from progressives for the film industry's escalation of the "war on women"?



• Why does Wisconsin governor and possible presidential candidate Scott Walker get questions from the media about why he didn't finish college, as if that were a strike against his suitability to be president, but they were completely disinterested in how Barack Obama performed when he was in college? Are the journalists who attach so much importance to Walker's decision to leave college in his senior year to take a job (much like many college athletes do) as concerned about Joe Biden's record of plagiarism as an undergraduate? Were they as concerned about Ted Kennedy's cheating at Harvard or John Kerry's mediocre record at Yale? Why is it only Republicans whose college experience is deemed so crucial to their fitness for high political office?



• Speaking of Scott Walker, why is he being asked his views on evolution, of all things? Why do his views on this subject matter? If they do matter has any Democrat been asked for his/her views on evolution? What are Hillary Clinton's views on the subject? Does anyone in the mainstream media even know what they're asking when they ask the question? Or, as Jonah Goldberg once put it:

  Why does the Left get to pick which issues are the benchmarks for “science”? Why can’t the measure of being pro-science be the question of heritability of intelligence? Or the existence of fetal pain? Or the distribution of cognitive abilities among the sexes [or races] at the extreme right tail of the bell curve? Or if that’s too upsetting, how about dividing the line between those who are pro- and anti-science along the lines of support for ... nuclear power? Or Yucca Mountain? Why not deride the idiots who oppose genetically modified crops, even when they might prevent blindness in children?

  Each of these has far more relevance to public policy than does one's view on evolution, but each of them is a position on which liberal Democrats would generally fall on the side of "anti-science" so the question will never be asked.
  
  The response any politician asked by a journalist for his/her views on evolution should be: "What do you mean by evolution?" That'll end this stupid interrogation since probably 99 out of 100 journalists who cover politics have no coherent idea what they mean by the word evolution in the first place.



• Finally, why is the FBI investigating whether the tragic murders of three young Muslims in North Carolina was a hate crime [isn't every intentional homicide ipso facto motivated by hate?] even though the local police said the murders stemmed from a dispute over a parking space? Is this particular investigation prompted by the fact that the killer was white and the victims were Muslims?
  
  How many times have local police determined that a black on white (or Asian) crime of violence was not a hate crime, and no one, least of all the Department of Justice, questioned that judgment? It seems that the Holder Justice Department is only interested in hate crimes when the perpetrator is white and the victim is a racial or religious minority.

Winking at Lies

We come to learn lately that what Mr. Obama has been telling us for years about his position on gay marriage was simply not true. He was not telling us the truth when he told pastor Rick Warren that, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Nor were we told the truth by his acolytes when they told us that he had "evolved" on the issue. The truth, it turns out, is that Mr. Obama believed all along that gays should be able to marry, but for political reasons he felt it best to lie about is beliefs. As his former advisor David Axlerod reveals in his new book, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, that, "There’s no doubt that his sympathies were on the side of allowing gay couples to marry. He also recognized that the country wasn’t there yet—that we needed to bring the country along.” In other words, political expediency justified the lie.

One shame of this is that so many on the political left see nothing wrong with lying for the cause. They didn't see anything wrong with lying about Obamacare, as Jonathan Gruber boasted. Nor did they see anything wrong with telling people, as Mr. Obama did on numerous occasions, that they'd be able to keep their health care plans and their doctors, and that the cost of their plans would be cheaper, even though they knew these claims were false. Nor did they see anything wrong with lying to the nation about the reason for the violence and deaths of Americans in Benghazi.

The list could go on, but why bother? Most people shrug their shoulders at the president's mendacity because lying has become an accepted part of our discourse. Integrity doesn't matter, character doesn't matter, what matters today for many is achieving one's goals and those who wish to see those goals realized will countenance whatever it takes to get there.

I watched a panel on MSNBC the other night discuss Mr. Obama's dissimulations on his position on Gay Marriage. Not once in the entire segment did anyone condemn the fact that the president of the United States deliberately misrepresented his position on this issue to the American people. No one on the panel, apparently, thought this was an important part of the story. Yet, as David Harsanyi at The Federalist observes, those who are unperturbed at Mr. Obama's contempt for the truth would be incensed were it their own ox that was being gored:

But imagine, if you can, a president whose position on abortion “evolves” after the election. Imagine this president advocating that all innocent human life is worth protecting. Imagine that she appoints judges to solidify her new pro-life attitude. And then imagine the president’s top advisor informs us that the president was a pro-lifer all along. I imagine that would be a pretty big story.

Indeed, it would. Those who adopt a pragmatic view of morality when it's liberals who are doing the lying, and when the lies are being told to promote a cause they favor, would be instantly transformed into moral absolutists were it a pro-lifer who had deceived them by posing as a pro-choicer.

The other day I put up a post on an interview with Michael Shermer, an atheist who argues that human survival and flourishing are the starting point for all moral valuations. If this truly is the starting point, if there really is no Divine moral authority, where does such a view lead? The answer, I suggest, is that it leads straight to the view that lying is morally right if it promotes the right political causes because these causes will surely result in greater "human flourishing." Yet if lying is deemed acceptable today something else, something even worse, will be accepted tomorrow. Perhaps those whose unpopular views on climate change or Darwinian evolution, views judged by those in power to be an obstacle to human flourishing, will find themselves forced to wear the equivalent of a yellow star.

A society so corrupt and perverse that it not only accepts lying from its leaders but actually applauds it will not long remain one that most people would want to live in.

Campus Speech

Public universities no longer police drinking on campus, they no longer even house men and women in separate dorms, and they certainly don't object to anyone on campus tossing around the old F-bomb, but don't call someone Mrs. or Mr. and don't use words like insane or crazy else you might be hauled before the campus inquisition and be lucky to emerge without having been stretched on the rack of political correctness.

The College Fix reports on the state of free speech at the University of Michigan:

Dozens of posters plastered across the University of Michigan caution students not to say things that might hurt others’ feelings, part of a new “Inclusive Language Campaign” at the state’s flagship public university that cost $16,000 to implement. Words declared unacceptable through the campaign include “crazy,” “insane,” “retarded,” “gay,” “tranny,” “gypped,” “illegal alien,” “fag,” “ghetto” and “raghead.” Phrases such as “I want to die” and “that test raped me” are also verboten.

University spokesman Rick Fitzgerald told The College Fix in an email the campaign aims to “address campus climate by helping individuals understand that their words can impact someone and to encourage individuals to commit to creating a positive campus community.” Students have been asked to sign a pledge to “use inclusive language” and to help their peers “understand the importance of using inclusive language,” according to campaign materials.

Though only in existence for one semester, the Inclusive Language Campaign has maintained a strong presence throughout the university. Students roaming the campus frequently encounter posters of all sizes reminding them: “YOUR WORDS MATTER,” and asking questions such as: “If you knew that I grew up in poverty, would you still call things ‘ghetto’ and ‘ratchet’?”

I'm not sure why a person raised in poverty would object to the word "ghetto," but then I admit to being pretty much out of the loop on these matters. I mean, I have no idea what "ratchet" even refers to other than a kind of wrench.

Anyway,

Junior Kidada Malloy, who helps promote the program on campus, told the Michigan Daily the campaign “is a great program because it will improve the day-to-day language of students on campus by providing education around words that are offensive.”

Students living in university housing are urged to take part in a Change It Up! workshop, which “brings bystander intervention skills to first-year housing residents for the purpose of building safe, inclusive, and respectful communities.” Before and after completing these workshops, students fill out surveys in which they reflect on internal biases that may pose a threat to an “inclusive campus.”

When I read this I thought maybe Kidada was putting us on. The paragraph (as well as the rationale at the link for purging the particular words the students are aggrieved by) sounds so much like a parody of liberal muddle-headedness I thought it was really a piece from The Onion, but no:

As the Inclusive Language Campaign has enlarged its influence on campus through various kick-off events, interactive programming and provoking visuals, some students have called into question how it reconciles with the university’s policy on free speech, which “encourages open and vigorous discussion and strives to maintain an environment where the free exchange of ideas and opinions can flourish.” Asked if the campaign stifles free speech, Fitzgerald said “we believe this program has just the opposite effect. We believe it will make discourse more constructive by respecting the views and perspectives of others,” he said. “A campus conversation about the impact of words is good for everyone.”

Yes, and as Orwell put it, war is peace, love is hate, and freedom is slavery.

Actually, I have no objection to students working together to elevate the level of speech on campus, in fact I think it's a good thing. But I find it curious that the list of words to be eschewed are mostly words that only a liberal or someone who is hypersensitive (which may be the same thing) would find offensive. Why is there no effort to get students to eliminate from their public discourse words traditionally considered vulgar, scatalogical, or obscene? After all, they're certainly offensive to most people of good breeding. And why omit words that are employed as racial epithets or words like "fatso" and "obese" that demean the morphological extremists on campus or words like "skinny" which is certainly hurtful to those who are skinny? And what about words that hurt the feelings of conservative students, words like "reactionary", "right-winger," and "white privilege"? Perhaps the liberal students who put this list together simply don't know how devastating it can be to a young man or woman's self-esteem to be called a reactionary. Many is the adult who still bears the scars of the trauma such words inflicted on him or her while in their college years. In fact, it just occurred to me that it may be hurtful to liberal students to be called "liberals" since many liberal politicians flee from the label as though it were the herpes virus when the media identifies them as such.

At any rate, the point is that there are a lot more words that could, and should, be banned, and I don't think the U of M students are really thinking this project through. They need to get to work and expand their list to include all the words that anyone anywhere might find offensive. Of course, if they succeed the English lexicon will probably be pared down to about fifty words, none of which will be adjectives.

Good Without God Pt. II

Writer and philosopher Sam Harris interviewed his fellow naturalist Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, about Shermer's book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.

Shermer made a couple of statements in the interview that I thought tied in well with the recent post on Viewpoint titled Good Without God? Here are some excerpts. Shermer states:

The criterion I use [for moral judgment]...is “the survival and flourishing of sentient beings.” By survival I mean the instinct to live, and by flourishing I mean having adequate sustenance, safety, shelter, bonding, and social relations for physical and mental health. I am trying to make an evolutionary/biological case for starting here by arguing that any organism subject to natural selection—which includes all organisms on this planet and most likely on any other planet as well—will by necessity have this drive to survive and flourish. If it didn’t, it would not live long enough to reproduce and would therefore not be subject to natural selection.

By sentient I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and therefore able to feel and to suffer. Here I’m following the argument made by Jeremy Bentham with regard to animals: It isn’t their intelligence, language, tool use, or reasoning power that should elicit our moral concerns, but their capacity to feel and suffer.

In this sense, my argument is one for natural rights. I know that Bentham called “rights” nonsense and “natural rights” nonsense on stilts, but he came before Darwin and all the rights revolutions.

There are several points to be made in reply to this. First, it's very difficult to espy the difference that Darwin's theory would make for Bentham's observation. Indeed, on naturalism, Bentham is surely correct. How can an impersonal process like evolution confer rights on individuals? The notion of human rights, given the truth of naturalism, is simply a comfortable fiction we live by. It doesn't refer to anything in the real world. Natural rights can only exist if they're conferred by a transcendent person who possesses the authority to confer them and the power to enforce them.

Thomas Jefferson, following John Locke, wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights derive from our Creator. These we possess by virtue of the fact that we are created in his image and loved by him. Take this away and all talk of natural rights is, as Bentham aptly put it, "nonsense on stilts."

Shermer continues:

By extension, I then make the case that social problems such as homicide and violence ought to be—and in fact are—treated as public health issues. Over the centuries the rates of violence in general and homicide in particular have plummeted, primarily as a result of better governance, better policing, and numerous other social policies grounded in reasoned arguments and empirical data. If you agree that millions of lives have been saved over the past couple of centuries by a reduction in violence due to improved technologies and policies, then you might well concur that applying the methods of the social sciences to solving problems such as crime and violence is also something we ought to do.

Why? Because saving lives is moral. Why is saving lives moral? Because the survival and flourishing of sentient beings is our moral starting point.

Several more questions assert themselves here. Such a starting point seems arbitrary. Given his Darwinian presuppositions it's strange that he wouldn't say that in fact it's only his survival and flourishing, the survival and flourishing of the individual, which is the moral starting point. Indeed, elsewhere in the interview he makes it very plain that he believes that it is the individual, not the species, which is the relevant focus of evolutionary pressures.

Shermer takes as an axiom that we should care about others, but this is the very point at which all naturalistic ethics falters because it can't give us a reason why it would be wrong to care only for oneself. Why would it be wrong, on Shermer's view, to not care about others except insofar as their welfare benefits oneself? And if their welfare doesn't benefit oneself why is it wrong simply to ignore them, or even, as many try to do today to those whose existence they find inconvenient, kill them?

Shermer would doubtless be aghast at such a question, but I doubt he could give a convincing answer to it. As naturalistic philosopher Richard Rorty once said, "The secular man has no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?' "

Here's another question for Shermer. On atheism, what does it mean to say that an act is "wrong"? If there's nothing or no one to hold us accountable and no non-arbitrary standard of behavior, what does it mean to say that a behavior is wrong to do? If a dictator has the power to enslave, torture, and kill his subjects with impunity what makes his deeds wrong? It can't just be that his subjects don't like what he does. Why should he care what they like? Nor can it be that the dictator is wrong because he's violating the Golden Rule. Who or what obligates him to follow the Golden Rule? Who or what enforces it? As naturalistic biologist Richard Dawkins once pondered, "What's to prevent us from saying that Hitler wasn't actually wrong? That's a genuinely perplexing question."

Shermer tacitly admits that there's no good answer to this question when he says further along in the interview that,

[M]ost people act in what they consider to be moral ways, so when we can clearly see (and measure) that they are in fact behaving in ways that lead to the suffering or death of sentient beings, it is probably more accurate to say that they are mistaken in their beliefs than that they are simply immoral or evil. And the solution is not so much that we need to make them more moral as it is that we need to correct their mistaken beliefs. Science and reason are the best tools we have for doing just that, so ultimately moral progress comes about from generating better ideas rather than better morality.

In other words, according to Shermer, our hypothetical dictator suffers from an epistemic deficiency, not a moral deficiency. His crimes are really not wrong in a moral sense, they're not evil, they're only wrong in the same way that saying 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong. I can't think of a way to more effectively trivialize what human beings have done to each other throughout history than to say that the perpetrators of great misery simply had mistaken beliefs and needed more science. But science is silent about moral value. Science can tell us what is, but it cannot, despite Shermer's protestations to the contrary, tell us what ought to be. As Physicist Steven Weinberg put it,

The worldview of science is rather chilling, Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature.... We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

Shermer himself seems to intuit this. He starts out the interview using moral language and winds up denying, as we saw above, that there really is any immorality or moral evil.

This is precisely where naturalism leads. Apart from a transcendent moral authority there can be no objective moral duties. To quote Dawkins again, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

Afghanistan Was a Success!

Who would have thought it?

From Strategy Page:

While most Americans and the mass media worldwide have declared the 13 year U.S./NATO effort in Afghanistan a failure, most Afghans disagree. Although over 100,000 died during those 13 years nearly half the deaths in the 13 year war were Taliban, other Islamic terrorists and their drug gang allies. Another 30 percent of the dead were civilians, usually the targets of Taliban or gang intimidation. The Afghan security forces (mostly the police, plus the army) suffered 18 percent of the deaths. A little over three percent of the deaths were foreign troops, who gave the government forces an edge in firepower, support, intel and tactical leadership. The death toll since 2001 is a lot less than the millions who died during the decade of fighting the Russians and less than suffered during the 1990s when Afghans fought each other.

Most Afghans are well aware that in many ways their lives are much better since the Americans arrived. GDP has grown continuously since 2001 with average family income increasing noticeably each year. In early 2001 only a million children were in school, all of them boys. Now there are eight million in school, and 40 percent are girls. Back then there were only 10,000 phones in the country, all very expensive land lines in cities. Now there are 17 million inexpensive cell phones with access even in remote rural areas. Back then less than ten percent of the population had access to any health care, now 85 percent do and life expectancy has risen from 47 years (the lowest in Eurasia) to 62 (leaving Bangladesh to occupy last place in Eurasia). This is apparently the highest life expectancy has ever been in Afghanistan and the UN noted it was the highest one decade increase ever recorded. Afghans have noticed this even if the rest of the world has not.

Opinion polls show 60 percent of Afghans believe the country is going in the right direction and 90 percent respect the army (and 70 percent the police). Only ten percent respect the Taliban, despite foreign media predicting that the Taliban will soon regain control of the country. Afghans scoff at that, if only because most would rather die fighting rather than submit to Taliban rule again. Foreigners tend to forget that angle, but the Afghans don’t. While many Afghans are saving to pay a smuggler to get them to the West (where they can make a lot more money and live even longer) most are staying and see better prospects than have existed for decades.

What other country in history has done more good for more people than has the United States? It's a remarkable record. Since WWII we have rebuilt Europe and helped our erstwhile enemies in Germany and Japan develop strong, relatively free economies and polities. We also helped Israel and South Korea do likewise. In addition, we've rendered valuable economic and humanitarian aid to Africa, Egypt, Haiti and those nations devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami. Our assistance has been a factor in India's emergence as an economic power. What we've done for Afghanistan, Jordan, and Iraq, though tenuous in the case of Iraq, is nonetheless a marvel. Despite all our flaws, which our president seems fixated on reminding us of and apologizing for, the United States is still the greatest blessing the world has ever had.

If that grates on the ears of progressives who prefer to focus on our national sins, I challenge them to name another nation which has done half as much. And if this sounds like unsophisticated chauvinistic boosterism to those same progressives, well, I urge them not to insist on holding their collective breath waiting for an apology.

High Horses

So much has been written about Mr. Obama's admonition to Christians at the Washington Prayer Breakfast against mounting their "high horse" (I've always wondered what, exactly, that expression was supposed to mean) and waxing judgmental of the Islamists who are beheading, immolating, and burying people alive in Syria and Iraq, that there's not much I can contribute to the conversation. Even so, there is one thing.

Mr. Obama's quote was this:

"And lest we get on our high horse and think this [Islamist atrocities] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

The president has been roundly, rightly, and humorously criticized for both botching his history and for having resorted to historical events of a thousand years ago as if they had happened just last week to make the point that we should be reluctant to express our moral horror at these barbarians (or even call them barbarians, for that matter) because we're bad people, too. Or something like that.

My biggest problem with what Mr. Obama said, though, was that I think it's not a little hypocritical. I doubt, for instance, that he would have issued a similar lecture to those who condemned the evil of South African apartheid. I can't imagine him wagging his finger at those who were morally outraged at the injustice of apartheid, telling them to get off their high horse and remember that America once enslaved blacks and enforced Jim Crow. Nor can I imagine him rebuking those who sit on their "high horse" reproaching the Nazis for the holocaust by reminding them that Americans did some bad things to the American Indians.

I doubt he'd censure those people, not because Mr. Obama doesn't think apartheid and the holocaust were great evils, but because their evil is so great that to refrain from condemning them as cruel and barbaric because of things that happened in this country centuries ago would be just silly. It'd be an instance of taking moral equivalence to such an extreme that it becomes moral paralysis. It'd be a bit like lecturing a Native American that before he criticizes the use of enhanced interrogation techniques against terrorists (if he's inclined so to do) he should remember that Indians slaughtered and scalped a lot of settlers in the 18th century.

I can't imagine Mr. Obama saying such a thing, so I wonder why he felt it necessary to reach back a thousand years to find a justification for admonishing Christians not to criticize the Islamic terrorists for the horrors they're committing today. Either he believes that the sins committed in the name of Christ centuries ago are as relevant today as are the quotidian atrocities being practiced by ISIL in the Levant, or he's just very afraid to say anything that would suggest that there's something unique about Islam that induces its votaries to perpetrate particularly hideous evils. I suspect it's the latter.

Truth and Credibility

Want to know why it's so hard to trust the media? Read the story of Brian Williams, NBC News evening anchor, and considered by many to be the most upright guy on television news.

The quick version is that Williams confessed to fabricating a tale about how a helicopter in which he was riding in Iraq took fire from enemy ground forces during the Iraq war. He had recounted this concoction a number of times in the twelve years since he went to Iraq to report on the war for NBC. It turns out, though, that it wasn't true, and it's almost impossible to believe, given the manner in which he has repeated it over the years, that he wasn't deliberately prevaricating.

Williams joins a long list of journalists and politicians who have told stories about war-time experiences (Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) or about political foes (former CBS newsman Dan Rather) that were subsequently shown to be blatantly false. The question is, why do they do it?

A partial answer, perhaps, is that lying is no longer considered morally wrong. Our post-modern culture has abandoned the notion of objective truth, and embraced the concept that whatever narrative you can tell about yourself that you can get others to believe becomes your truth. It's true for you because you want it to be true, even if there's not a shred of objective fact in the story.

There is, too, the post-modern concept of moral right and wrong according to which whatever works to help you achieve your goals is right. If lying works then lying is justified.

Thus, Dan Rather insisted that George Bush had been AWOL during the Vietnam war and when the evidence he was found to be relying upon was shown to be a forgery he bizarrely declared that the story was "fake but accurate." He meant by this that even though the evidence was phony it still pointed to the larger truth that Bush was a shirker, an allegation for which there was no evidence but which Rather desperately wanted the public to accept.

The same notion of truth as a purely subjective preference was in play in the recent University of Virginia rape case. The story, run by Rolling Stone, was found to be completely unsubstantiated, but feminists still said that that didn't matter because it reinforced a narrative about campus rape that those feminists wanted the general public to accept. So, if the charges of rape were "fake," so what? They were still "accurate" even if the alleged perpetrator had his life ruined by them.

Hillary Clinton has claimed several times that during the Bosnian war a plane she was on had to take evasive action to avoid sniper fire as the pilot tried to land at a Bosnian airport, and that the ceremony at the airport had to be cancelled as they ran to their cars with their heads down. Her fable unraveled when video of her being greeted on the tarmac by children bearing poems emerged.

There are perhaps a near infinite number of other examples we could cite, including the numerous claims by Barack Obama that under the Affordable Care Act we'd be able to keep our doctors, keep our insurance, and that our insurance would get cheaper. None of this is true, and one has to be extraordinarily gullible to think that he didn't know the claims weren't true when he uttered them. Just as one has to extraordinarily gullible to believe that the White House didn't know that the narrative they foisted on the nation about the cause of the Benghazi embassy attacks (an obscure anti-Islam video) was false.

Sadly, perhaps tragically, we no longer place a premium on truth, and people don't seem to mind being lied to by their leaders and peers. It's no longer considered a big deal. Indeed, we seem to expect it. Senator Blumenthal told a whopper of a tale about his service in Vietnam until it was discovered that he never set foot in the country. The people of Connecticut shrugged and elected him to the U.S. Senate in 2010.

If the only thing wrong with lying is getting caught we can assume that we're going to be lied to an awful lot by the people who are convinced that their ends justify whatever means they must employ to achieve them. We can also assume that those who wish to somehow burnish their reputations by claiming to have survived experiences they never had will also proliferate. Brian Williams isn't the first, and he surely won't be the last.

Proof of Evolution

When pious people pray and what they pray for comes to pass they sometimes cite this happy circumstance as proof that God exists and answers prayer. If what they pray for doesn't happen they still sometimes insist that God exists and answers prayer but that his answer in this case was "no."

Skeptics scoff at this. They argue, understandably, that you can't use the conjunction of a prayer and the realization of the hoped for outcome as confirmation of God's existence if you refuse to accept the conjunction of prayer and the failure to realize the hoped for outcome as a disconfirmation of God's existence.

This imperviousness to falsifiability, we're told, is what makes religion inferior to science as a means of discovering the truth about things. Science does not permit the sorts of evasions illustrated by the above example. Unless, that is, the scientific topic is evolution. When evolution is at issue science often becomes indistinguishable from religion.

Consider a recent story in the Washington Post about a study of bacteria found off the coast of Australia:

Far beneath the ocean’s surface, buried in a layer of murky sludge, communities of ancient bacteria have existed virtually unchanged for nearly half of Earth’s history. In what researchers call the “greatest absence of evolution ever reported,” these deep-sea creatures have taken a pass on the chaos of biological progress for the past 2.3 billion years.

A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said these communities offer evidence of “extreme evolutionary stasis” — a total lack of evolution in response to a lack of change in the surrounding environment. Populated by sulfur-cycling bacteria that derive energy from processing dissolved sulfate in the surrounding water, the communities were found in nearly identical forms at two distinct points in the fossil record and still exist today.

“The microbes we see in the fossils are almost identical to what we see in the ocean now,” study co-author Malcolm Walter, a professor of astrobiology at the University of New South Wales, told The Washington Post in a telephone interview. “They have similar shapes and are doing similar chemistry.”

But the fact these particular organisms successfully avoided evolving for billions of years doesn’t disprove the theory of evolution — quite the opposite.

Darwin’s theory states that species evolve through natural selection in response to environmental changes — increased threats from predators, new competition from other animals, changes in access to water or air. But the inverse is also true: If there is no change in the environment of a balanced ecosystem, the organisms that constitute it should remain similarly unchanged — a principle dubbed evolution’s “null hypothesis.”

But how do the study's authors know that the ocean environment has been stable for billions of years? How do they know there haven't been subtle physical and chemical changes in the habitat of these bacterial organisms? After all, other creatures in the same marine environment have apparently evolved. It seems that we're being told that we can know the environment has been stable because the bacteria haven't changed and the bacteria haven't changed because their environment has been stable.

This not only has about it a whiff of circularity, it also happens not to be true that evolution only responds to changes in the environment. Evolution, according to theory, can occur whether the environment changes or not, purely through genetic drift.

Anyway, the article goes on:

“These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and biological environment,” the study’s lead author, University of California at Los Angeles professor William Schopf, said in a university press release. “If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed.”

So, If organisms change over time that's strong evidence of evolution, and if they don't change at all throughout the entire history of life on earth, well, that's also evidence for evolution. This sounds a bit like a religious person insisting that if he gets what he prays for that's evidence that God exists, and if he doesn't get what he prays for that's also evidence that God exists.

Who says scientists aren't religious?

How Your Government Deceives You

The new unemployment figures have given the White House and its media allies much occasion for high fives and end zone dances. Unemployment is down, we're assured, people are going back to work, and all's well with the economy. Unfortunately, it's not true, as Jim Clifton, the CEO of the Gallup polling organization, informs us:

Right now, we're hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is "down" to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.

None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job -- if you are so hopelessly out of work that you've stopped looking over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn't count you as unemployed. That's right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news -- currently 5.6%.

There's another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you're an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you're not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

Yet another figure of importance that doesn't get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find -- in other words, you are severely underemployed -- the government doesn't count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

There's no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.

The official unemployment rate, called the U3, measures the number of people out of work but still looking for full-time employment. The actual unemployment rate is measured by something called the U6. The U6 includes discouraged workers who've stopped looking for work plus all other marginally attached workers as well as those workers who are working part-time purely for economic reasons.

The U6 takes into account everyone of working age who is not working, not merely those who are out of work and still looking for a job. According to the U6 the actual unemployment rate is about 11.5%. Right now, as many as 30 million working age Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Neither the administration nor its media groupies will tell you that either. It's better from their point of view to let you think that things aren't nearly as bad as they really are.

Good Without God

Among the arguments that philosophers have advanced in support of the claim that there is a God are those which seek to show that God's existence is more probable than his non-existence. Since, therefore, we should always believe what is more probable than what is less probable, belief in God is rationally warranted. One class of arguments of this type which doesn't receive as much exposure as it deserves, at least in my opinion, are arguments based on the existence of objective morality.

The following short video illustrates one version of this type of argument:

In other words,

1. If there is no God then there are no objective moral duties (OMD).
2. There are objective moral duties.
3. Therefore, there is a God.

Of course, this is not a proof that God exists because a skeptic could certainly deny either premise 1. or premise 2., but there's a steep cost for so doing.
For example, if one chooses to deny 1. and claim that OMD can exist without there being a God, then it's incumbent upon the denier to explain how anyone, in the absence of a transcendent moral authority, could have an objective duty to perform any act at all. Who, or what, can impose such duties upon us? Where do they come from? The only adequate source of moral obligation must be both personal and morally qualified, and there's nothing other than God that can fulfill those requirements.

On the other hand, if one chooses to deny 2. then one must either embrace some form of moral subjectivism or acquiesce to moral nihilism, i.e. the denial of the existence of any moral duties at all. Either option entails that one has no grounds for making any moral judgment regarding the conduct of others. Subjectivism may seem more attractive than nihilism, but it leads to it in any case since it puts one on a slippery slope to to the view that there really is no right or wrong, just different feelings and opinions held by different people.

Thus, if a person believes that each of us has a duty to refrain from things like molesting children, abusing women, torturing animals, rape, murder, robbery, slavery, etc., and if one believes that those who do these things are morally guilty of having done a great wrong, the person is neither a subjectivist nor a nihilist. In fact, that person is tacitly acknowledging that there are moral principles which are objective and binding on all of us.

But how do we account for the existence of OMD? Surely, the existence of such duties is more probable on the hypothesis that God exists than on the hypothesis that he doesn't. Indeed, if naturalism is true OMD are inexplicable.

Who's Anti-Science?

Who's anti-science, conservatives (who tend to be Republicans) or liberals (who tend to be Democrats)? Perhaps surprisingly, according to Hank Campbell at Science 2.0 it's the liberals who overall are most strongly opposed to the scientific consensus.

Conservatives tend to disagree with the scientific clerisy on some highly publicized issues like evolution and climate change, but liberals more strongly disagree with the scientific consensus on more issues that receive less scrutiny in the media. Because conservatives tend to disdain the opinions of scientists on prominent issues on which the media agrees with what the scientists say the media likes to paint conservatives as anti-science ignoramuses and liberals as science sophisticates, but, like a lot of media generated myths, it's not true.

Campbell states that,

It's a fine narrative, it just takes ignoring inconvenient truths, like that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is only 9 percent on that topic (evolution), and that in areas other than evolution and climate change, Democrats are much farther from the science consensus than Republicans are - of 55 politicians in Congress who wanted to put warning labels on GMOs, 53 were Democrats. That is real anti-science belief that correlates with a political party. The most anti-vaccine hotbeds of the most anti-vaccine state, California, are all 80 percent Democratic so that also correlates to political party if evolution and global warming belief does.

Compared to those levels of anti-science thinking, evolution is doing quite well. A new pair of surveys by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) finds that evolution acceptance, at 65% of the public, is nearly twice that of acceptance of other well-established biology, such as genetic modification of food, where only 37% of people think it is safe, or pesticides, where only 28% think it is safe, despite the consensus of science and all regulatory bodies. The people that are against agricultural science (and vaccines and energy) are overwhelmingly Democrats.

Campbell could have included in this paragraph nuclear power production as something generally favored by scientists but strongly opposed by Democrats. At any rate, he concludes:

Scientists understand that genetic modification has been done by humans for 10,000 years and by nature long before that - random mutation, though completely natural, can be dangerous, even if it is a part of evolution. Whole Foods shoppers may believe that mutagenesis, the less-precise genetic modification done before GMOs that has resulted in 2,000 strains of food - including many organic foods - is natural while modern GMOs are not, but scientists know that calling one a GMO and one not is just an arbitrary legal definition that has nothing to do with science. Scientists certainly know that dousing crops with organic Bt spray is not healthier than a Bt gene - or a synthetic pesticide.

Evolution and climate change still get plenty of traction among the demographic that needs to promote their notion of superiority over conservatives - it rationalizes why conservatives can't seem to get tenure jobs in academia - but if we really cared about science and the public, and not just putting one over on the other party, we'd stop fighting a fake culture war about evolution and the right wing and take a more honest look at all the people on the left promoting anti-science ideas about food, energy and medicine.

One interesting thing about this is that those issues on which conservatives tend to be skeptical are issues which either blur the distinction between empirical science and speculative metaphysics (evolution) or on which the evidence for the scientists' claims seems ambiguous (climate change). Those issues on which the liberals dissent, however, seem to be pretty straightforwardly scientific.

It doesn't matter, though, to our media which either lacks the wit or the integrity to get the story right. As we head into the next presidential election cycle we might expect a lot of stories ridiculing Republicans as a bunch of ignorant rubes because they dare question the authority of our scientists on evolution and climate change. We can also expect that there will be few to no stories written about the unscientific views held by Democrats.

The Air War So Far

News reports on the war on ISIL have been very sketchy so when I came across this summary of the air war at Strategy Page I thought it'd be helpful to post it since it gives some idea of what's going on:

Since August 2014 allied (mostly U.S. but also NATO and Arab) air strikes in Iraq and Syria have destroyed nearly 3,500 targets during some 1,700 separate attacks using about 5,000 smart bombs and missiles. This destruction included nearly 300 military vehicles (about 20 percent of them armored), nearly 700 bunkers and other fortifications plus over a thousand buildings.

In addition over twenty command posts, at least a hundred checkpoints and nearly as many parking lots and assembly areas were hit and destroyed or made unusable. Over 270 oil industry targets were destroyed. More than 700 civilian vehicles were hit, nearly half of them because they were armed (like the pickup trucks with heavy machine-guns mounted on then and often called “technicals”) or carrying men who obviously were. At least fourteen boats were also destroyed, as these were often armed and used for transportation on the Euphrates River.

Not all nations, for political reasons, are hitting targets in both countries. In Iraq the U.S., Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France and the Netherlands are flying while in Syria it’s the U.S., Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE (United Arab Emirates). American warplanes have flown most of the missions and in December alone American warplanes carried out 26 percent of all the air strikes so far. That averaged about 15 American air strikes a day in December.

Extreme measures are taken to avoid civilian casualties, which means a lot of military targets have to be left alone because ISIL uses civilians as human shields. For this reason it’s important to have friendly, and competent, troops on the ground to positively identify enemy targets that have a very low probability of causing civilian casualties if hit.

There was no data on the number of enemy casualties, but such a pounding must be taking a serious toll on ISIL's morale. Hopefully, the Kurds and Iraqi ground troops will be able to push them back across the Syrian border and bottle them up there. The trail of civilian slaughter they've left behind is one of the ghastliest atrocities since the Nazi holocaust, a horrific crime which ISIL would love the chance to duplicate.

Gaps

ABC News reports on a survey that reveals that the American public is skeptical of many things scientists are assured of and assured of many things scientists are skeptical of.

For example,

Scientists are far less worried about genetically modified food, pesticide use and nuclear power than is the general public....Scientists were more certain that global warming is caused by man, evolution is real, overpopulation is a danger and mandatory vaccination against childhood diseases is needed.

In eight of 13 science-oriented issues, there was a 20-percentage-point or higher gap separating the opinions of the public and members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), according to survey work by the Pew Research Center. The gaps didn't correlate to any liberal-conservative split; the scientists at times take more traditionally conservative views and at times more liberal.

In the most dramatic split, 88 percent of the scientists surveyed said it is safe to eat genetically modified foods, while only 37 percent of the public say it is safe and 57 percent say it is unsafe. And 68 percent of scientists said it is safe to eat foods grown with pesticides, compared with only 28 percent of the general public.

Ninety-eight percent of scientists say humans evolved over time, compared with 65 percent of the public. The gap wasn't quite as large for vaccines, with 86 percent of the scientists favoring mandatory childhood shots while 68 percent of the public did. Eighty-seven percent of scientists said global warming is mostly due to human activity, while only half of the public did.

What to do about climate change is another issue. Nearly two-thirds of scientists favored building more nuclear power plants, but only 45 percent of the public did. But more of the public favored offshore drilling for oil and fracking than scientists did. More than four out of five scientists thought the growing world population will be a major problem, but just less than three out of five members of the public did.

All of this is interesting and asking why the gaps exist might be instructive. I was struck, in this regard, by something the article attributed to the CEO of the AAAS, Alan Leshner. Leshner is concerned about the disparity between how the public and scientists look at these issues and remarked that, "Science is about facts; science is not about values. Policies are made on facts and values and we want to make sure that the accurate, non-distorted facts are brought in to any kind of discussion."

Well, ideally this may be true, but we don't live in an ideal world. Scientists bring suitcases full of assumptions and values to their observations of the data and the conclusions they draw are often skewed, even if only subliminally, by those values. Philosophers of science refer to this as the "theory-ladenness of observation." The ideal of a completely objective scientist doesn't exist and probably never did. Scientists have metaphysical commitments and political and economic agendas that all bear on how they interpret the data they uncover and even what they count as data.

For example, if a scientist has a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism then he will insist that man has evolved from other primates, not so much because of the evidence for such a transition is so striking, but because if naturalism is true then that's the only plausible explanation there can be.

This is the reason for the gaps, I think. Laypeople recognize that scientists often have agendas and philosophical commitments at odds with their own, and thus they're skeptical of the ability of the scientist to set those agendas and commitments aside and be objective. Their skepticism is probably often warranted.

Nihilism

French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to take atheism to its logical conclusion. Many atheists are reluctant to do this because they can't live consistently with their belief that man is all alone in the cosmos. The thought of our "forlornness," many have concluded, leads to a kind of despair and emptiness. It leads to nihilism.

Some there are, though, who call upon their fellow non-theists to face up to the gloomy entailments of the belief that nature is all there is. Philosophers Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist's Guide to Reality, and Joel Marks are two who seek to face squarely the logic of their unbelief. Another example is a commenter at Uncommon Descent who lays out clearly and with no sugar-coating what one should also believe if one embraces atheism.

He/she (It's not clear which) writes:

I’m a nihilist because it shows reality. If there is no higher power, then everything humanity holds dear was constructed by humanity and therefore not real.

There is:

• No objective, absolute, inherent meaning in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent purpose in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent value in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent morality in life or the universe. No good, no evil, no right, no wrong
• No objective, absolute, inherent truth in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent knowledge in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent logic in life or the universe

There's more:

• We are the cobbled together Frankensteins of billions of years of trial and error
• We have no free-will, mind, consciousness, rationality or reason. They are illusions and [the notions of] personhood, identity and humanity are not real.
• The emotions we express are just chemicals in our brain. The very things we seek in life like happiness, peace, contentment, joy are just chemicals reducing us to nothing more than chemical addicts.
• We are no more important than other animals. A dog is a rat is a pig is a boy.
• There is no afterlife. Once we die, we fade from existence and all our memories, experiences, knowledge etc goes with it. In time, we are forgotten.
• All the things we do in life are just for survival. Learning, loving, seeking, being positive, eating, relating, having fun are created for the sake of ignoring the real reason we are here and that’s to live as long as we can.
• There is no help coming to save humanity as a species or as individuals. We are all alone and on our own. If you can’t survive, you die.

The reader might wonder why anyone would embrace such a melancholy set of beliefs, but if the only alternative is to accept that there's a God, then nihilism, as depressing, hopeless, and dreary as it may be, will still be more appealing to a lot of people than that alternative.

Reflecting on the utter despair that infuses the above assertions, I thought of a character in Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed named Kirillov. Kirillov was an atheist and a nihilist. He says at one point in the story shortly before taking his own life, "I don't understand how a man can know there is no God and not kill himself on the spot."

Science and Metaphysics

One misconception a lot of people have about science is that it's free of the sorts of metaphysical baggage that burdens other enterprises like religion and philosophy. I talked about this a few days ago in a post in which I discussed the "Demarcation Problem." There is among lay people and even some scientists the conviction that science is based on hard, empirical evidence and experiment, and is free of the speculative gobbledy-gook of the philosophers.

Unfortunately, this belief is not only untrue, it couldn't possibly be true. In order to do science the scientist must make a host of metaphysical assumptions, and moreover, many of the theories that pass as science and are taught in schools are more metaphysical than they are empirical. Here's a partial list of some of the things that either many scientists believe or that all scientists pretty much must believe, and none of them are themselves scientific. That is to say there's no way to verify or to falsify any of them:

1. The Many Worlds Hypothesis: The idea that ours is just one of a nearly infinite number of universes, all of which are closed off from each other thus defying detection.

2. The Oscillating Universe Hypothesis: The theory that our universe has expanded and collapsed an infinite number of times.

3. String theory: The idea that the fundamental units of material substance are unimaginably tiny vibrating filaments of energy.

4. The existence of other dimensions: The theory that the four dimensions of space-time are only part of physical reality.

5. Principle of Uniformity: The assumption that the laws and properties of the universe are homogenous and constant everywhere throughout the cosmos.

6. Assumption of Uniformitarianism: The idea that the same processes and forces at work in the world today have always been at work at essentially the same rates.

7. The Scientific Method: The idea that there is a particular methodology that defines the scientific process and which ought to be followed.

8. The Law of Parsimony: The principle that assumes that the simplest explanation which fits all the facts is the best.

9. The assumption that human reason is trustworthy: The notion that a faculty which has evolved because it made us better fit to survive is also a dependable guide to something else, truth, which has no necessary connection to human survival.

10. The assumption that we should value truth: The idea that truth should be esteemed more highly than competing values, like, for instance, personal comfort or group advancement.

11. The preference in science for naturalistic explanations: This is a preference based upon an untestable assumption that all knowable truth is found only in the natural realm.

12. Naturalistic Abiogenesis: The belief that natural forces are sufficient in themselves to have produced life.

13. The assumption that if something is physically possible and mathematically elegant then, given the age of the universe, it probably happened.

14. The assumption that the cosmos is atelic. I.e. that it has no purpose.

15. The assumption that there's a world external to our own minds.

16. Materialistic Reductionism: The conviction that all phenomena, including mental phenomena, can be ultimately explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry.

17. Assumption that the universe arose out of a "vacuum matrix" rather than out of nothing.

18. Ethical claims regarding the environment, nuclear power, cloning, or genetic engineering.

19. The Concept of the Meme: According to biologist Richard Dawkins memes are the cultural analog to genes. They are ideas or customs that are believed by Dawkins and others to get passed along according to their survival value rather than their truth value (see #9, above). An example of this, unfortunately, is the concept of the meme itself.

20. The criteria by which we distinguish science from non-science.

21. The assumption that science is the only way, or at least the best way, to arrive at truth.

Mention of none of these in public school science classrooms precipitates the levitation of a single eyebrow among the custodians of science purity yet every one of them is a matter of metaphysical preference, not empirical fact. Why, then, do those custodians suddenly wax squeamish when the topic of discussion turns to the possibility that incredibly complex information-based systems in the living cell are the product of intentional engineering? Why are some metaphysical claims permitted and others not?

Christianity and Islam

One of the more inane comments made in the wake of the recent massacre in Paris, according to Robert Tracinski at The Federalist, is that Islam is not inherently any more violent than any other religion. Tracinski, who is himself an atheist, argues cogently that when people cite the alleged misdeeds and atrocities committed by Christians they actually prove that in fact there's really no comparison. In order to find anything in the history of Christianity remotely comparable to the horrors being perpetrated by contemporary Muslims the critic has to go back 500 years to find them.

In any case, there are vast differences between the Christian religion and Islam that account for the fact that no one fears violence at the hands of Christians, but people throughout the world have ample reason to fear violence at the hands of Muslims.

Tracinski's column is a little long, but it's very good. Here are some excerpts:

The Charlie Hebdo massacre once again has politicians and the media dancing around the question of whether there might be something a little bit special about this one particular religion, Islam, that causes its adherents to go around killing people.

It is not considered acceptable in polite company to entertain this possibility. Instead, it is necessary to insist, as a New York Times article does, that “Islam is no more inherently violent than other religions.” This, mind you, was in an article on how Muslims in the Middle East are agonizing over the violent legacy of their religion.

As an atheist, I have no god in this fight, so to speak. I don’t think the differences between religions make one more valid than another. But as the Charlie Hedbo attack reminds us, there is a big practical difference between them. In fact, the best argument against the equivalence of Christianity and Islam is that no one acts even remotely as if this were true. We feel free to criticize and offend Christians without a second thought — thanks, guys, for being so cool about that — but antagonizing Muslims takes courage. More courage than a lot of secular types in the West can usually muster.

So it’s a matter of some practical urgency to figure out: what is the difference? What are its root causes?

As I see it, the main danger posed by any religion to its dissenters and unbelievers lies in the rejection of reason, which cuts off the possibility of discussion and debate, leaving coercion as an acceptable substitute....But all religions are different and have different doctrines which are shaped over their history — and as we shall see, that includes different views on precisely such core issues as the role of reason and persuasion.

Tracinski proceeds to discuss some of the differences between these two faiths, the first and perhaps most important of which is the difference between the life of Christ and the life of Mohammed:

Mohammed was a conqueror who gained worldly political power in his lifetime and used it to persecute opponents and impose his religion. He also fully enjoyed the worldly perks of being a tyrant, including multiple wives. Jesus, by contrast, was basically a pacifist whose whole purpose on earth was to allow himself to be tortured to death.

He even explicitly forbade his followers to use force to defend him. Here’s John, Chapter 18: “Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear…. Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?”

This does not imply that all Christians ought to be pacifists. But it certainly sets a tone for the religion. The life of the founder of a religion is held up to his followers as a model for how they should live their own lives. The life of Mohammed tells the Muslim that he should expect to rule, whereas the life of Christ tells the Christian he should expect to sacrifice and serve.

Another difference that Tracinski didn't cite is that between the teaching of Jesus in the parable of the wheat and the tares (Mat.13:24-30) in which Jesus emphasizes that it's not for his followers to punish those who reject the faith. Contrast this with the belief of many Muslims, based on passages in the Koran, that infidels should be put to the sword.

Another difference is that Christianity teaches that each individual is loved by God and of enormous worth. Tracinski contrasts this view with Islam which has no such notion of the value of the individual:

This is a very profound idea that goes against the grain of most of human history. I’m a big fan of the Classical world, but the pagans still regarded it as normal, right, and natural that the physically strong set the terms for everyone else. Thucydides famously summed it up in the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do as they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Thucydides was clearly critical of that view, but the Classical world didn’t have a clear alternative. As far as I know, Christ was the first to insist that even the lowest, least significant person has value and that we will be judged by how we treat him.

Islam has no corresponding idea. The news is constantly bringing us a story of some imam somewhere declaring it consistent with Islam for a man to beat his wife, and the rise of the Islamic State in Syria has provided us current examples of Islam sanctioning slavery, including the capture and systematic rape of sex slaves. This is a religion that is still very much in the “rights of the conqueror” mode, in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

There's much more of interest in Tracinski's essay which would certainly repay an investment of fifteen minutes of the reader's time. For those who know little about either Christianity or Islam It's quite an education.

Can Torture be Moral?

Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting interviewed Oxford University moral philosopher Jeff McMahan for his column at the New York Times' Opinionator. The topic was whether torture can ever be moral. McMahan had some interesting things to say on the topic and as regular readers of VP will note, he comes down about where I do, at least on the matter of the morality of torture (For a more detailed explication of my thoughts see here, here, and here). I'm a little more dubious about his views on what the law should say about torture.

At any rate, here are a few excerpts:

Jeff McMahan: I think that torture is almost always morally wrong and that, for moral reasons, it ought to be prohibited absolutely in law. Torture has been used to extract confessions, to terrorize people associated with the victims, to punish presumed wrongdoers, and even to gratify and amuse sadists and bullies. These uses are always morally wrong.

The only use of torture that has any chance of being morally justified is to gain important information. But even when torture is used to gain information, the torturers are usually wrongdoers seeking information that will help them to achieve their unjust aims. And even when those seeking information have just aims, their victims are often innocent, or lack the information sought, or are sufficiently strong-willed to mislead their torturers, so that the torture is ineffective or counterproductive.

Still, both those pursuing unjust aims and those pursuing just aims will continue to be tempted to engage in torture if they can do so with impunity. Hence, torture has been widely practiced, though its use has almost invariably been wrong. This means that the overriding goal of the law ought to be to deter the wrongful use of torture, even at the cost of forbidding the use of torture in those rare cases in which it might be morally justified. The legal prohibition ought therefore to be absolute; for those who think that torture would be advantageous to them will always be tempted to try to exploit any legal permission to use it.

It's this last sentence where McMahan and I part company. There may be instances where torture is not only morally justified, but to refrain from its use may make someone morally culpable. It seems peculiar that McMahan recognizes this but would nevertheless make it illegal to do the very thing he says below that one could be obligated to do.

G.G.: But you do agree that torture can, in extreme cases, be moral. Why do you reject the absolute view that any instance of torture is immoral? J.M.: Torture can be morally justifiable, and even obligatory, when it is wholly defensive – for example, when torturing a wrongdoer would prevent him from seriously harming innocent people. It could do that by forcing a person to reveal the location where he has planted a bomb, or hidden a hostage who will die if not found.

It can be morally justifiable to kill a person to prevent him from detonating a bomb that will kill innocent people, or to prevent him from killing an innocent hostage. Since being killed is generally worse than being tortured, it should therefore be justifiable to torture a person to prevent him from killing innocent people. In cases in which torture is defensive in this way, the person tortured is not wronged. Indeed, he could avoid the torture simply by doing what he is morally required to do anyway – namely, disclose the location of the bomb or hostage.

McMahan goes on to explain that,

I think this is the explanation of why many people who aren’t absolutists about any other moral issue say they are absolutists about torture. They rightly want to avoid giving any aid or comfort to those who seek to justify torture in the circumstances in which it is actually practiced. But there is a dilemma here, for it can seem morally obtuse, and therefore discrediting, to deny that torture is permissible in those cases in which it obviously is permissible – for example, when it would in fact force a kidnapper to reveal the location of hostages who will otherwise die.

There's more from the interview at the link, and I encourage anyone interested in the question of the moral justification of torture and the legal treatment of its practice to peruse it.

One thing that struck me in reading the discussion is that McMahan makes such strong moral judgments. I understand how society may choose to make torture illegal, but on what grounds does McMahan conclude that it's immoral? He states in the passage cited above that,

Torture has been used to extract confessions, to terrorize people associated with the victims, to punish presumed wrongdoers, and even to gratify and amuse sadists and bullies. These uses are always morally wrong. The only use of torture that has any chance of being morally justified is to gain important information...

I have to ask, why are the motives he lists immoral and what is it about gaining important information that makes torture in that instance moral? It may seem obvious that torturing for amusement is immoral, but that's a holdover from an era when morality was grounded in the will of a transcendent moral authority. In our secular age when such authorities are banished from our public discourse, moralists have to come up with a secular justification for the decision to call something immoral, and it's not at all clear what such a justification could be in this case.

After all, if we're merely the accidental product of blind, impersonal evolutionary forces how can we have any objective moral duty to refrain from causing others pain? How can blind, impersonal forces impose a duty on us to do anything?

It seems to me that if we can no longer situate our moral judgments in a divine will then we can no longer make meaningful moral judgments at all. To say "torture is wrong" is simply to express the state of our feelings, to say that torture produces negative emotions in us, and such revelations about our interior states tell us nothing about whether torture is really in any significant sense right or wrong.

Such are the consequences of a rigid secularism. It in effect strips us of the ability to say anything meaningful about anything important.

Science and Philosophy

An interesting debate is beginning to take shape among scientists and philosophers over something called the "demarcation problem." This is the problem of defining exactly what criteria a theory has to meet in order to be considered a scientific theory.

Most people are of the opinion that scientific theories are theories that can be tested and which make predictions which can be confirmed or falsified, but a number of scientists, having grown fond of theories that don't lend themselves to these critieria, wish to exempt those favored theories from the criteria that apply to the rest of science. An article at Motherboard discusses the debate. Here's their lede:

Physics, cosmology in particular, is at an interesting and potentially dangerous crossroads, as argued in a ​recent, sharp piece in Nature by physicists Joseph Silk and George Ellis. In short, it would appear that theory, particularly neat-o ideas like string theory and the multiverse, has reached the outer limits of provability. We can't access the higher dimensions of string theory, nor can we observe (or not observe) our would-be sibling universes. Their fate is idea limbo, forever between notion and fact.

String theory and the multiverse are concepts that by definition defy experimentation, and yet a small movement within cosmology is attempting to make the case that they should be exempt. At stake, according to Ellis and Silk, is the integrity of science itself.

"This battle for the heart and soul of physics is opening up at a time when scientific results—in topics from climate change to the theory of evolution—are being questioned by some politicians and religious fundamentalists," the pair writes. "Potential damage to public confidence in science and to the nature of fundamental physics needs to be contained by deeper dialogue between scientists and philosophers."

Ellis and Silk are right about this, I think, but their examples are unfortunately ill-chosen. The reason both climate change and evolution are questioned by a lot of people - not just politicians and religious fundamentalists - is precisely because predictions of the former and the basic claims of the latter disqualify themselves from being considered scientific.

Climate change proponents predicted twenty years ago that global temperatures were going to rise steeply during the ensuing decades, but they haven't. The failure of the prediction should cause a reassessment of the theory, but so far there's been no apparent inclination on the part of proponents to undertake such a reassessment which suggests that the theory is being held more as a religious conviction than a scientific belief.

Evolutionary theory, at least of the sort which goes under the name "Neo-Darwinian," holds as its fundamental claim that natural processes and forces alone have produced all the various forms of life on earth without any input from any intelligent agent. This is not a scientific claim because there's no way to test it, nor can one imagine any empirical data which would conclusively show it to be false. It's therefore a metaphysical theory not a scientific hypothesis.

In any case, Motherboard continues:

Another voice within this movement [to broaden the criteria for scientific theories] is that of philosopher and theorist Richard Dawid. Dawid argues that we can use probability as a stand-in for experiment. That is, using Bayesian analysis, it's possible to determine the probability that a set of facts fits a theory. If the probability is good enough, we can chuck testability.

This is another unfortunate illustration because if Bayesian analysis is allowed to replace empirical testability then claims for the existence of God must be counted among scientific hypotheses, since many arguments for God's existence rely on Bayesian analysis. These arguments show, rather compellingly in my view, that God's existence is more probable than His non-existence. That being so, if being analyzable in terms of Bayes' Theorem is to provide us with an adequate crierion for determining what's scientific then much of natural theology, and certainly Intelligent Design, must be included under the rubric of science.

In essence, [Dawid is] arguing that theorized discoveries can be taken as evidence for fundamental theories. If we had the capability of conducting some experiment, it would probably have this outcome because the mathematics works out. Ellis and Silk argue simply that that's not good enough, for theoretical physics or any science.

The situation is similar for multiverse theories, which explain the fundamental constants of the universe (why everything is "just right" for human life) away as unspecial by claiming that in fact there are an infinite number of parallel universes composed of not just every alternative for those constants, but also any possibility for anything. Choices are never made in this reality, only new universes. There is an entire realm that exists in which I got two slices of pizza for lunch instead of three, and there is an entire realm that exists in which the strong force isn't strong enough to form atomic nuclei. Cool.

"Billions of universes—and of galaxies and copies of each of us—accumulate with no possibility of communication between them or of testing their reality," Ellis and Silk write. "But if a duplicate self exists in every multiverse domain and there are infinitely many, which is the real 'me' that I experience now? Is any version of oneself preferred over any other? How could 'I' ever know what the 'true' nature of reality is if one self favours the multiverse and another does not?" Stoners, beware.

"Post-empirical science is an oxymoron," the pair concludes.

Motherboard finishes their piece with a very interesting statement:

The scientific high-ground is at stake, with an ocean of pseudoscientists ready to flood the landscape, taking the public with them. The answer, according to the current paper, lies in a simple question. What observational or experimental evidence is there that would convince a theorist that their theory is wrong? If there is none, then the theory is not a scientific theory.

Precisely. Which is why so much of macroevolutionary darwinism is thought to be unscientific by such a large number of people.

The Hard Problem

Why can't the most brilliant minds, The Guardian asks, solve the mystery of consciousness?

In a nutshell, the problem of consciousness is the problem of trying to explain what consciousness is and how it is produced in the brain.

When we look at a piece of red fabric, for example, all sorts of electrochemical reactions ensue causing us to perceive red, but that perception, the experience of redness, is not an electrochemical reaction, it's not physical at all. No one examining the brain of a person looking at the fabric would see red anywhere in the brain, so what exactly is going on when we see a color, or smell a fragrance, or hear a sound? No one knows.

This is called the "Hard Problem" of consciousness (as opposed to the easier problems such as mapping which parts of the brain are active when we have various experiences). The Hard Problem is explaining what those experiences are in the first place.

The Guardian piece is a little long, but it gives some interesting background on how the problem gained the attention of philosophers back in the 1990s. Here's the lede:

One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.

The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.”

He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.”

The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out.

There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

Not all philosophers are as impressed with this problem as Chalmers is, of course. Those philosophers who are materialists (who believe that everything is reducible to matter) don't think there's a problem here at all. They argue that your sensations, ideas, self-awareness, etc. are all just the product of neurons firing in certain ways. They may be right, but they have no explanation for how the physical, material phenomena of an electrical current flowing along a nerve and transmitted across a synapse by molecules results in the experience of pain. Indeed, it's hard to see how the sensation of pain can be simply a material phenomenon.

Anyway, there's a lot more on this fascinating topic at the link.