Flat Tax

Bill Whittle, the "virtual president," observed the occasion of a recent tax filing deadline to make a succinct case for a flat tax. God bless him. Those readers who are unfamiliar with the flat tax will find this video helpful:

In my opinion, one of Whittle's key points is the statistic that shows the tax burden born by the top 1%, top 5%, and everyone else. When half the people pay no income tax they really have no investment in the nation's well-being. That's not a good situation - for them or for the country.

Three Warblers

Long time readers of Viewpoint will recall that from time to time I've posted photos of some of the more beautiful species of birds that I've had the good fortune to see in the field. With the spring migration in full swing I thought I'd share some pics (not taken by me) of some warblers I've seen this week:

This is a Prothonotary warbler. It famously figured in the in the late 1940s trial of Alger Hiss who was a State Department employee who was spying for the Soviet Union. Back then communists and communist spies were considered enemies of the United States. How times have changed.

This colorful little guy is a Cape May warbler. It really has nothing much to do with Cape May, New Jersey, but it's called that because a specimen was collected there and later described by the famous ornithologist Alexander Wilson. It nests in spruce trees in Canada and can be seen during migration in the eastern U.S. It is unique among warblers in that it has a tubular tongue for feeding on liquids when insects are scarce.

This is a Black-Throated Blue warbler. It nests in the north and at higher elevations wherever there's unbroken expanse of forest. Because of this habitat requirement the Black-Throated Blue is declining as North American forests are becoming more fragmented. It winters in the Caribbean and in Central America.

Most of our warbler species are undergoing population declines, largely because of habitat loss both in their breeding grounds and in their winter homes in Central and South America. It's a shame because they are beautiful creatures.

Theism, Atheism and Proper Basicality

Philosophers consider some beliefs justified even though the believer can mount no argument for them. They call these beliefs properly basic beliefs and they are the foundation upon which all our other beliefs are based. For example, we're justified in believing what our memory tells us we had for breakfast, we're justified in believing that we're experiencing a pain or seeing a tree or that other people have minds, etc. We're justified in holding these beliefs, prima facie, until an argument can be mounted compelling us to accept that we are mistaken.

Some philosophers, in what's known as the Reformed tradition of epistemology, argue that belief in God is properly basic as well. We're justified in believing in God, these philosophers argue, until and unless a compelling counterargument can be presented to us. Some non-theistic philosophers have claimed that just as theistic belief is properly basic, so, too, is atheistic belief. The atheist is justified in believing there is no God until and unless a persuasive counterargument is presented.

Rik Peels at the philosophy blog Prosblogion considers this claim and finds it unpersuasive. He writes:

I’ve recently been wondering whether atheism – the belief that God does not exist – could be properly basic. By that, I mean whether it could be a belief that is not based on arguments, but nonetheless formed by a reliable mechanism that is truth-oriented.

I doubt whether atheism could be properly basic. If I am right, then, in order for atheism to be warranted (or maybe even merely rational; see below), atheism has to be based on arguments—whereas, perhaps, such a thing is not required for theism.

After some helpful brush-clearing Peels gets to the crux of his argument:

On atheism, the most plausible explanation of why such beliefs are usually true is highly likely to be one in terms of our evolutionary history. It seems evolutionarily advantageous to form true perceptual beliefs about one’s environment. If we did not, we would not have been as successful at survival or we might not have survived at all. If we failed to see that a shark or tiger is approaching, our chances of survival would be comparatively low. Mutatis mutandis the same applies to other beliefs, such as beliefs based on memory or introspection, as well as on smell or touch.

Thus, our normal basic beliefs seem to be produced by cognitive mechanisms that are truth-oriented and generally reliable, because they have the right causal connection with the world (outside or inside) and having true beliefs contributes to survival (emphasis mine). There has been some debate about whether evolution selects for true beliefs, but it seems that virtually all atheists and even many theists embrace this thought, so I will not question that thesis here.

Now, the problem is that the basic belief that God does not exist seems to differ radically from perceptual beliefs, auditory beliefs, introspective beliefs, and our other basic beliefs. If God does not exist, he cannot cause anything in our physical environment, nor will he be exemplified in our physical environment in the way that properties like being such that there are three [sharks] within a range of twenty feet can be exemplified by the sharks circling around us.

Of course, believing that God does not exist may have survival value. However, even if it does, it does not seem to do so in virtue of its being true — this in opposition to, say, our perceptual and memorial beliefs. For, it seems that the belief that God does not exist is not and cannot be caused by the world inside or outside, in the way perceptual and memorial beliefs can. This is not to deny that atheism as a basic belief may have survival value: it may make one, say, courageous or independent. The point is: it seems it cannot have such survival value because of the causal interaction with the world. And such causal interaction does seem to be required in order for the mechanism that produces that belief to be truth-oriented and reliable.

Hence, even though, for all we know, the basic belief that God does not exist is true or even necessarily true, it seems it cannot be produced by a mechanism that is both truth-oriented and reliable. This means that whether or not God exists, it seems impossible that humans have a truth-oriented cognitive mechanism that reliably produces the basic belief that God does not exist. And that means that, to the extent that one’s atheism is a basic belief, it cannot be properly basic. Hence, in order for it to be warranted, it should be based on arguments against God’s existence. This may even imply that atheism cannot be rational if it is merely a basic belief, for instance, if rationality requires that it seems possible that the belief in question is produced by a reliable truth-oriented cognitive mechanism.

A non-existent God cannot have any causal connection with the world, thus our truth-oriented and generally reliable cognitive mechanisms could not lead to the properly basic belief that there is no God the way those mechanisms lead us to memory, perceptual, and other properly basic beliefs. Peels closes with this:

Thus, if something like Reformed Epistemology is correct, there is an important epistemic asymmetry between theism and atheism: theism can be properly basic, whereas atheism cannot—the theist does not need arguments for God’s existence, whereas the atheist does need arguments against God’s existence.

Interesting, at least for those interested in epistemological questions.

Popomo

Students have sometimes asked me what I thought would come after the postmodern (po-mo) infatuation which some say we're currently experiencing. Postmoderns tend to deny that there are objective truths about meanings or values and place the emphasis instead on "what's true for me". Truth is subjective. Right and wrong are whatever I or my peer group decides to accept as right or wrong. There are no objective facts, as Nietzsche said, only one's own feelings and interpretations.

My own "feeling" is that what will follow this unstable and untenable stage will be either a cultural and intellectual apocalypse or a return to more traditional views of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Philosopher Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College has given us his interesting take on what's coming next in the New York Times' Opinionator column. There he declares us to be on the cusp of "popomo," a post-post modern period in philosophy which will, in fact, amount to a return to realism.

His whole column is worth reading and the reader can get a sense of it in his summation. After discussing the postmodern anti-realism of thinkers like Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, Sartwell says this:

But the ‘80s heyday of Rorty and Fish is beginning to seem like a long time ago, and a backlash seems to be in progress. More recent work in philosophy includes various forms of realism about the world: the idea that reality is not the product of consciousness, or of human perceptual structures or languages or interpretive communities, but exists independently.

We don’t make the world, as one might put it; the world makes us. Where for decades or even centuries, philosophy has focused on our representations and descriptions of the world, on human consciousness and cultural systems, many are now turning to the external features of the world that constitute the content of our experiences and the context of our social practices.

Let’s call this phase after postmodernism post-postmodernism – “popomo” for short....

Some of the motivation for the realist turn has been ecological: Climate change isn’t just in our heads or in our descriptions, but a real-world situation that requires real-world physical transformations. Others have been political: defenses of the urgent truth of justice, or of the importance of material economic conditions and the treatment of physical human bodies.

And I think that, as our experience becomes in many ways increasingly mediated or virtual, we've simply started yearning toward the old-fashioned physical environment, which was always available and still is, and on which whatever we see on a screen depends utterly. Ideas are always an index of longings.

The period after the period after the end is the popomo era. But the “post” was always itself a symptom of a sense of decline and ending, and I do hope and think that our period of inquiry doesn’t just come after something, but that it is itself something, and that it comes before something.

The problem with realism is that it seeks to make the physical world, as well as human moral and aesthetic values, objectively real entities. The former, however, seems to be undercut by quantum physics and the latter seems to be undercut by naturalistic metaphysics.

Quantum physics seems to point to mind as being the fundamental reality and naturalistic metaphysics entails, in my view, an inescapable subjectivity of moral and aesthetic value. It'll be interesting to see how Sartwell's last line ultimately plays out.

Scientists Debate Materialism

TheBestSchools.Org is hosting an interesting dialogue between two well-known scientists, Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Shermer. The dialogue will extend over the next three months, but this month the two men submitted their opening statements on the first of three topics to be discussed, "Materialism in Science."

Sheldrake, who is a non-materialist, challenges Shermer, who is an atheistic materialist, to respond to ten fascinating questions. Here are five that I found to be especially intriguing:

Is matter unconscious?
The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century gave birth to modern science by creating a radical dualism between unconscious matter and conscious, non-material minds possessed only by humans, angels, and God. This duality was mirrored in the more or less peaceful coexistence of religion, the arts, and the sciences from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Religion and the arts were concerned with conscious experience, while the realm of science was the physical universe.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many people reacted against the power of churches by becoming atheists, especially in countries like France and Russia, where the established churches were allied with reactionary, authoritarian governments. Materialism provided arguments in support of atheism, and gave it scientific credibility. By denying the existence of immaterial consciousness, atheistic materialists got rid of God and angels at one stroke. There were no longer two realms of reality, matter and consciousness; there was only one reality, matter.

Materialism became the predominant orthodoxy of science by the end of the nineteenth century. Materialists got rid of God, or at least confined him to the brains of believers, but they were left with the “hard problem” of explaining how unconscious matter becomes conscious within human brains. This problem continues to haunt the neurosciences and the philosophy of mind. If consciousness is an illusion, or nothing but a by-product of brain activity, it cannot actually do anything, and hence we cannot make free choices.

Do you believe that you have free will?

Are the laws of nature fixed?
The idea of fixed “laws of nature” is a hangover from pre-evolutionary cosmology, which prevailed until the Big Bang theory became orthodox in 1966. In an evolving universe the laws themselves may evolve, or they may be more like habits—as I think myself, as the American philosopher C.S. Peirce suggested in the early twentieth century, and as the contemporary cosmologist Lee Smolin also proposes.

If you believe that all the laws and constants of nature came into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, how does the universe remember them? Where are they imprinted?

Is all biological inheritance material?
Genes have been greatly overrated. They do not code for” or “program” the form and behavior of organisms, like the shape of an orchid flower or the nest-building instincts of a weaverbird. They specify the sequence of amino acids in protein molecules, and some genes are involved in the control of the activity of other genes.

The Human Genome Project has been disappointing because it was based on a false conception of what genes do. The “missing heritability problem” is now provoking a crisis in modern biology, because it turns out that as much as 70% of inheritance does not appear to be explained by genes. Also, the recognition of the epigenetic inheritance at the beginning of this century means that the inheritance of acquired characteristics, once taboo, is now mainstream. For example, recent experiments have shown that mice can inherit the fears of their fathers. Male mice were made averse to the smell of a synthetic chemical, acetophenone, by being given electric shocks while they smelled it. Their sperm were used to fertilize female mice, and their children and grandchildren were terrified of the smell of acetophenone.

Findings of this kind mean we need to modify Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which was based on the primacy of genes and a denial of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Neo-Darwinism assigned creativity to random mutations of genes. But if organisms can learn and adapt to their environments, and pass on adaptations to their offspring, then evolution is affected by organisms’ own abilities to learn and adapt.

How have your views of evolution changed in the light of epigenetic inheritance?

Are memories stored as material traces?
The assumption that memories are stored as material traces in brains has dominated scientific research for more than a century, but the hypothetical memory traces have proved surprisingly elusive. There is plenty of evidence that particular parts of the brain become active when memories are being laid down and retrieved, but where they exist in between is mysterious. As I suggest in Science Set Free, memories may depend on a kind of resonance across time. Brains may be more like TV receivers, tuning into memories transmitted from their own past, than like video-recorders. Brain damage can affect the retrieval of memories, just as damage to a TV set can affect the sounds or pictures it produces, but this does not prove the damage has destroyed a storage system.

There is also a philosophical problem: the theory that memories are stored in material traces means there must be a retrieval system that recognizes the memories it is trying to retrieve. To recognize the memories, the retrieval system must itself have a memory. And if it has a material memory, then the retrieval system itself needs a retrieval system, and so on.

Doesn’t this standard explanation of memory either presuppose memory, or fall into an infinite regress?

Are minds confined to brains?
If minds are nothing but the activity of brains, then they must be confined to the inside of heads. But when I look at a tree, I do not experience the image of the tree inside my head; I experience it where the tree is. My image of the tree is in my mind, but it is not inside my head. Our minds may be extended beyond our brains every time we look at something.

Everyone agrees that vision involves light coming into eyes, causing activity in the retina, impulses up the optic nerves, and specific patterns of activity in brains. Most materialists assume that the nervous tissue then somehow generates a 3-D, full-color virtual reality display inside the skull. But since these virtual reality displays are invisible to objective observers, how do we know they are inside skulls? Instead, we may generate images that are projected out to where they seem to be. Our minds may reach out to touch what we are seeing—for example, a tree. We may affect what we are looking at. That may be why many people and animals often sense when they are being watched, even when looked at from behind. And, in my opinion, there is good evidence for the reality of the sense of being stared at, which we will probably discuss in our dialogue next month.

Meanwhile, Michael, how do you interpret your own experience of seeing? When you look at the sky, do you think that you are seeing the sky inside your skull?

You can find links to the rest of the dialogues between Sheldrake and Shermer, as well as the topics they'll discuss in June and July, at the link above. You can find Shermer's opening statement there as well.

Peacock Spider

The video below shows the courtship dance (set to music) of an Australian species of spider, which for reasons which will become obvious, is called the Peacock spider. There are a couple of things about this which are amazing. One, of course, is the pattern of the spider's abdomen which looks like it was painted to look like a witch-doctor's mask. The other is the astonishing dance this arthropod, with a brain the size of a pinhead, performs.

Take a look:

The standard model in biology has it that DNA codes for proteins which in turn build tissues and enzymes. Thus, inheritance of physical structure seems explicable in terms of DNA. What's inexplicable is the inheritance of behavior. How do proteins synthesized by DNA produce a species-specific behavior, and how does behavior get transmitted from generation to generation? If there's an answer to these questions I've never come across it. Maybe someone with a deeper understanding of biology than I have can write in and explain it to me.

Meanwhile, I marvel at the behavior found throughout the animal kingdom that's somehow programmed into organisms - from the mass migrations of monarch butterflies, to the waggle dance of bees, to insect metamorphosis, to the nest parasitism of cowbirds, to the border collies' instinctive knowledge of how to herd sheep. How did these behaviors originate and how are they transmitted down the generations? And how can so many purposeful behaviors, which must number in the billions when every species of organism is inventoried, be produced by blind, purposeless serendipity? I suspect there's a Nobel Prize waiting for whoever answers this question.

There's more on the Peacock Spider at Evolution News and Views.

Euthyphro's Dilemma (Pt. III)

Yesterday we took a look at the challenge posed by the Euthyphro Dilemma to those who believe that God's existence is a necessary condition for any meaningful, non-subjective, non-arbitrary ethics. We began by considering the second horn of Plato's famous dilemma which we stated this way:

Is an act morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

In this post I'd like to reflect on the first of the dilemma's two horns: Is good simply whatever God commands such that cruelty or hatred would be good if God commanded it? If so, it seems that good is just the arbitrary choice of the deity which strikes most people as an unacceptable option.

The problem with this part of the dilemma, though, is that if we stipulate that God is omnibenevolent, and that "good" is that which conduces to human happiness, then the suggestion that God could command cruelty or hatred is an incoherent act description. Here's why:

The question of God commanding cruelty presupposes a state of affairs in which a perfectly good being, i.e. one whose essence it is to always do that which ultimately conduces to human well-being and happiness, nevertheless commands us to do something which produces gratuitous suffering and pain. There appears to be a logical conflict in that.

In other words, if goodness is as we've defined it, and if God is perfectly good, then it's logically impossible for cruelty to be part of his nature or for him to command cruelty or anything else which would conflict with ultimate human well-being and happiness. It would require of God that he issue a command that is opposed to his own nature. It'd be like asking whether there is something which a being who knows everything nevertheless doesn't know.

So, the proper answer to the question of whether God commands us to love because love is good or whether love is good because God commands it, seems to me to be: "neither." God commands us to love because it is his desire to have the world conformed to his own essential nature which is love.

If what's been said in this and the previous post is correct then the Euthyphro Dilemma fails as an objection to the moral argument outlined in the first post in this series. It certainly doesn't succeed in putting the theist in the kind of bind some have thought it does.

Euthyphro's Dilemma (Pt. II)

Many philosophy students find themselves confronted with the Euthyphro dilemma, a problem often posed to convince them that God's existence is superfluous for our moral lives. The dilemma gets its name from the fact that it first appears in Plato's dialogue titled The Euthyphro and has popped up frequently in the philosophical literature ever since.

I'd like to share some thoughts on it over the course of the next two posts with the caveat that much of what I say is not original with me and that whatever might be original I offer with the humble recognition that it could well be nonsense.

With that caution in mind let's look at the dilemma. It's often put in the form of the following question:

Is something - love, for instance - morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

The question seeks to offer theists, at least those who hold to a divine command theory of ethics, two unpalatable choices. If the theist chooses the first option then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

I think, though, that the choices with which the dilemma confronts us are unable to carry the weight placed upon their shoulders. To see why let's start with a definition for "moral good." Let's stipulate that moral good is that which conduces to human happiness and well-being.

It may be argued that we don't need God to know what conduces to human well-being and thus we can know what is good without having to believe in God. This may be true, but it misses the point in at least two ways.

First, our problem is not with recognizing good so much as it is with explaining why God is still necessary for good to exist. Just because we can recognize good without believing in God doesn't mean that God is not necessary for anything to be good. What is good is contingent upon the kind of beings we are, and the way we are is contingent upon God. We have the nature we do because God created us this way. Thus, what conduces to our well-being is a function of God's design. We can no more say that God is irrelevant to our well-being than we could say that just because we know that clean oil is conducive to our car's well-being that therefore the engineers who designed the car are irrelevant to our knowing that we should change the oil periodically. Oil is "good" for the car because that's how the engineers designed the car.

Secondly, even if belief in God is not necessary for one to know or recognize what conduces to well-being it is nevertheless necessary that there be a God, or something like God, in order for us to think we have a non-arbitrary duty to care about the well-being of others. If there is no God there is no moral obligation to concern ourselves with the good of others or to do anything else, for that matter. We may want to help others flourish, of course, but the belief that we should is completely arbitrary. If we didn't care about others, or if we acted against the good of others, we wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense.

Just because something is good for others doesn't mean we have a duty to do it, at least not unless we're assuming that we're obligated always to do what conduces to other people's happiness and well-being. But why should we assume such a thing? Where does this obligation come from? Purposeless, mindless natural processes and forces cannot impose moral duties upon us, so why should I not just promote my own well-being and let others fend for themselves? If God is off the table there's no real answer to these questions.

Thus, God's existence is crucial, not so that we can recognize good, perhaps, but rather as a ground for both the existence of good and for whatever duty we have to do good to others.

So, let's return to the dilemma. Consider again the second horn. Does God command love because love is good? Is the good of love independent of God? Does it exist apart from God?

I don't think so. Goodness is an essential element of God's being. Goodness is no more separable from God than the property of having just three angles is separable from triangles. Goodness is ontologically dependent upon God's existence much as sunlight is ontologically dependent upon the sun. If there were no sun, sunlight would not exist. If there were no God then moral goodness as a quality of our actions would not exist. Actions which lead to human well-being would have no moral value any more than a cat nursing her young has moral value even though her act conduces to their well-being. We would not consider the cat evil if it refused to nurse its young, nor, if there is no God, would we be able to judge a man objectively evil if he practiced cruelty.

God commands love because he has made us to be the sort of beings which flourish, generally, when nurtured in love, and he has made us this way because it is his essential nature to be loving. Love is not one thing and God another. God is love.

But what of the first horn of the dilemma? What if instead of God being love, suppose he were hateful and cruel? Would hatred and cruelty then be good? We'll consider those questions next time.

Euthyphro's Dilemma (Pt. I)

One family of arguments among the dozen or so which, taken together, make a strong case for the claim that theism is a better explanation for our experience of the world than is naturalism or, alternatively, that it's more probable that theism is true than that naturalism is true, are the arguments lumped under the heading of The Moral Argument. One version of this argument goes like this:

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

In this argument God is taken to be a transcendent, perfectly good moral authority who is able to hold us accountable. The argument is not a proof since when faced with it the skeptic has a couple of options:

A. He can reject the first premise and argue that even though there's no God there could still be objective moral duties.
B. He could accept the first premise but deny the second premise and thus embrace ethical subjectivism or nihilism.

Of course, if he accepts both premises he's logically bound to accept the conclusion.

The problem is that, as I argue in my novel In the Absence of God (see link at upper right of this page), either option he selects to avoid having to accept the conclusion creates difficulties. If he chooses A then it's incumbent upon him to show where objective moral duties could come from if not from a divine law-giver. Neither society at large nor the cosmos itself is a suitable source of moral value, and any moral duties the skeptic embraces are arbitrary choices.

If he therefore chooses B and embraces some form of subjectivism he has to recognize that his moral choices are simply an arbitrary preference or taste and that he must forfeit the ability to make judgments of anyone else's behavior which are also based on their own preferences which are no more right nor wrong than his are.

This suspension of moral judgment may sound good to someone of a post-modern inclination, but only until one gets down to cases. If our moral duties are all subjectively imposed we can't say that a child molester or rapist, or even the torture of children is "wrong." The most we can say is that these things certainly seem wrong to us, but if they don't seem wrong to the person doing them then in what sense are they really wrong? The idea that these things are not really wrong for the person doing them is extremely difficult to live with consistently. The subjectivist option leads at best to moral egoism, i.e. the view that the right thing for me to do is whatever increases my pleasure and contentment in life, and at worst to moral nihilism, i.e. the view that nothing is really right or wrong in a moral sense.

But, the skeptic will reply, relying on God creates problems for the theist as well. One famous attempt to show that the theist is in no better position than is the skeptic with regard to a foundation for morality first appeared in one of Plato's dialogues (The Euthyphro) in which Plato has Socrates pose the following question to an interlocutor named Euthyphro: "Is something morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?" This is called the Euthyphro Dilemma because it seeks to confront the advocate of the moral argument with two unpalatable choices between which he must choose.

If the theist chooses the first option, that good is whatever God commands, then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems to be at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen, that God commands us to do what is good, then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

Over the next couple of days I'd like to explain why I think the The Euthyphro Dilemma, for all it's popularity, doesn't do the work that some skeptics think it does. More tomorrow.

Testing Worldviews

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live consistently with it. On this test the worldview called naturalism, i.e. the view that nature is all there is, fails since many if not most naturalists find that they have to give up some things that are very difficult if not impossible to give up. Among the things for which there is no room in a naturalist ontology are the following:

1. ultimate meaning in life
2. free will
3. objective moral right or wrong
4. intrinsic value of human beings
5. mind/consciousness
6. an adequate ground for beauty, love and truth

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in a classical Christian worldview, it could be argued that they're actually entailed by that view. The logic of naturalism, however, compels one to regard them all as illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that. They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives do have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if they do have free will.

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but in the way they live their everyday lives they affirm their reality over and over again. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage, because their own worldview has no room for them.

But when one has to poach from competing visions of reality in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to holding to a rational, coherent worldview. To be consistent a naturalist should be a nihilist and accept the emptiness that that entails, yet even though some naturalists see that, few bring themselves to accept it. For those who do, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that naturalism requires, but this is a liberation from the only adequate ground for those needs.

For many others, though, who wish for that same liberation, either the consequences don't occur to them, or if they do, they're often simply ignored as though they don't exist. Naturalists are free to do this, of course, but they're not free to declare their worldview rational if they do.

The (Latest) Clinton Scandal

Ever since the Clintons burst onto the national stage in the 1990s the odor of scandal has hung heavily in their wake. Whitewater, the Rose Law Firm records, the Lincoln bedroom, Monica Lewinsky, Benghazi, deleted official emails, and now apparent influence-peddling during Mrs. Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. More conspiracy-minded folk might also mention the strange run of mysterious deaths associated with the Clintons (Vince Foster, Ron Brown, et al). The Clintons are either the most corrupt political couple since the Macbeths reigned in Scotland or they are the unluckiest - although how unlucky can they be when their net worth is in the hundreds of millions and no one knows how they could have (legitimately) amassed such a fortune.

Anyway, for those who catch their news on the fly The Blaze helpfully lists six important things to keep in mind about the latest putridity to surround the Clintons. Here's a summary of The Blaze's summary:

1) The Clintons Failed to Report Millions of Dollars in Contributions From a Uranium Company Linked to Russia
The New York Times reported early Thursday morning that while Clinton was secretary of state, a Russian energy company called Rosatom was working to take over a Canadian company, Uranium One, that had stakes to uranium around the world, including some in America. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling $2.35 million, which, despite Mrs. Clinton's promise to the Obama White House to disclose any such income, she never reported. Additionally, Bill Clinton was then paid $500,000 for a speech in Moscow, which was paid by “a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.”

2) The State Department Helped Approve the Sale of Uranium One When It was Led by Clinton
According to the Wall Street Journal, the State Department plays a role on the government committee that examines whether the sale of a company to a foreign company has an impact on U.S. national security. That committee approved the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom in 2010, when Clinton was Secretary of State.

3) Clinton’s Camp Is Denying Any Wrongdoing
While the uranium deal looks like Rosatom gave money to the Clintons in exchange for allowing the sale of Uranium One, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton, said no one has produced “a shred of evidence” that this is the case.

4) The Clinton Foundation Is Redoing Its Tax Returns
Reuters reported Thursday For example, the foundation had said that from 2010 to 2012, it received no funds at all from any government. But those claims were “errors.” that based on its own review of the Clinton Foundation, several tax errors are apparent, that that news is forcing the foundation to refile “at least five annual tax returns.” “[S]everal foreign governments continued to give tens of millions of dollars toward the foundation’s work on climate change and economic development through this three-year period,” Reuters wrote. A spokesman for the foundation told Reuters that they were “prioritizing an external review” of its tax forms, and said it’s possible returns from the last 15 years might have to be corrected. The Clinton Health Access Initiative is also refiling tax returns from 2012 and 2012 after finding “typographical errors.”

5) Companies Lobbying State Department While They Donate to the Clinton Foundation
These facts are in addition to ongoing reports that dozens of companies were lobbying the State Department for various reasons while Clinton was in office, and were giving money to the Clinton Foundation at the same time. The Wall Street Journal reported that “at least 60 companies” were doing this, and gave the foundation “more than $26 million.”

6) Companies Paying Speaking Fees to the Clintons While They Donate to the Clinton Foundation
According to the Washington Post, Bill Clinton was paid $26 million in speaking fees by companies that were also donating to the Clinton Foundation. “The amount, about one-quarter of Clinton’s overall speaking income between 2001 and 2013, demonstrates how closely intertwined Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable work has become with their growing personal wealth,” it said.

We might add to this that only 15% of the Foundation's income went to charity (most legitimate charities have a "pass through" rate of over 90%), 25% went to "expenses," and 60% went to "other." To borrow another Shakespearian reference, something's rotten in Denmark, but with the Clinton's that's been the case for a long, long time.

Whale Evolution

This animated video depicts a sperm whale hunting prey, including a giant squid, by echolocation.

Until recently the consensus opinion among biologists was that whales evolved from land animals, but recent finds have made this view increasingly untenable. Not only is the window of available time for all the requisite changes to adapt a terrestrial creature to a marine environment very narrow, but the sheer number and scope of the changes strains credulity. Here are a few of the changes that would need to have occurred within the span of about 3-5 million years:

• Counter-current heat exchanger for intra-abdominal testes
• Ball vertebra
• Tail flukes and musculature
• Blubber for temperature insulation
• Ability to drink sea water (reorganization of kidney tissues)
• Fetus in breech position (for labor underwater)
• Nurse young underwater (modified mammae)
• Forelimbs transformed into flippers
• Reduction of hindlimbs
• Reduction/loss of pelvis and sacral vertebrae
• Reorganization of the musculature for the reproductive organs
• Hydrodynamic properties of the skin
• Special lung surfactants
• Novel muscle systems for the blowhole
• Modification of the teeth
• Modification of the eye for underwater vision
• Emergence and expansion of the mandibular fat pad with complex lipid distribution
• Reorganization of skull bones and musculature
• Modification of the ear bones
• Decoupling of esophagus and trachea
• Synthesis and metabolism of isovaleric acid (toxic to terrestrial mammals)
• Emergence of blowhole musculature and their neurological control

Here's another video, courtesy of Uncommon Descent, which highlights some of the problems with the consensus view:

Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Fossil Evidence from Philip Cunningham on Vimeo.

The problem of transitional forms remains a serious difficulty for any kind of "molecules to man" evolutionary hypothesis, as this article at Evolution News and Views illustrates. It may have happened that all forms of life on earth are descended from a single ancestral form, but it seems that the more we discover the less evidence there is for it.

Deadbeats

If someone complains that your taxes are too low, as do many liberals, and then tries to limit his or her own tax liability by taking every deduction to which he/she is legally entitled, as do many liberals, it's not unfair, I don't think, to conclude that this person is being hypocritical. But, if that's so, how might we describe those who insist that we all pay higher taxes while they themselves don't even pay their own taxes? That's evidently the situation at the very liberal MSNBC cable news station where four of their personalities owe a ton of money in unpaid taxes to the IRS.

According to Jillian Kay Melchior at National Review Online. Melchior tells us that Touré Neblett, co-host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, tweeted in January 2014, that, “Regressive taxation & tax-avoidance & union crushing & the financial corruption of legislation has fueled inequality more than hard work.” In 2012, he also criticized Republican politicians, saying they were “all afraid to vote for a modest tax increase of people who can totally afford it.” Now it turns out that Neblett himself owes the IRS more than $59,000 in taxes.

Joy-Ann Reid, who serves as managing editor of theGrio.com and until earlier this year hosted MSNBC’s The Reid Report has called taxes on the wealthy “a basic fairness argument,” also arguing for “smart spending and smart tax increases” to create economic growth, but last month New York filed a $4,948.15 tax warrant against Reid and her husband.

Melissa Harris-Perry, who hosts an MSNBC show named after herself, has claimed that, “We actually do better as a country when we spread the wealth around.” She has also quoted President Obama, calling income inequality “the fundamental threat to the American dream.” She called for Republican lawmakers to acknowledge that “the growing income disparity in America is, in fact, you know, a real thing,” but Ms Harris-Perry is herself a whopping $70,000 in arrears to the IRS.

Then there's Al Sharpton whose tax delinquency is almost legendary. In November, the New York Times estimated that Sharpton and his various enterprises owed as much as $4.5 million in taxes, penalties, and interest to the government.

These folks all think you should be paying more than you are, but think themselves somehow exempt. There's something delightfully schadenfreudeish in reading about people who lecture us about how we should all be forking over more of our income to the government, how we should be paying our "fair share," while they get caught trying to get away with paying nothing at all.

Wisconsin's Shame

There's been a lot of news coverage about the abuse of force by police in the last few months. In most of these incidents I have wanted to give the police the benefit of the doubt, in some of them that was exceedingly difficult as in the case of a South Carolina officer shooting an unarmed man in the back eight times or in the case of a female officer near Hershey, Pennsylvania who shot and killed a man in the back as he lay prone on the ground. Both of these officers have been charged with murder.

But one of the worst systematic abuses of police power I have ever heard about in this country has occurred in the state of Wisconsin where a prosecutor named John Chisolm has misused his authority to have police conduct terrifying raids on the homes of families who have done absolutely nothing wrong, nor were they suspected of having done anything wrong.

David French has the story at National Review Online. Here's his lede:

Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking. She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram. She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door. “I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police.

The dogs were still frantic. “I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.” She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee. “I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”

They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off. The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.” Then they left, carrying with them only a cellphone and a laptop.

Unfortunately, Archer's story was repeated dozens of times. French continues:

“It’s a matter of life or death.” That was the first thought of “Anne” (not her real name). Someone was pounding at her front door. It was early in the morning — very early — and it was the kind of heavy pounding that meant someone was either fleeing from — or bringing — trouble. “It was so hard. I’d never heard anything like it. I thought someone was dying outside.” She ran to the door, opened it, and then chaos. “People came pouring in. For a second I thought it was a home invasion. It was terrifying. They were yelling and running, into every room in the house. One of the men was in my face, yelling at me over and over and over.”

It was indeed a home invasion, but the people who were pouring in were Wisconsin law-enforcement officers. Armed, uniformed police swarmed into the house. Plainclothes investigators cornered her and her newly awakened family. Soon, state officials were seizing the family’s personal property, including each person’s computer and smartphone, filled with the most intimate family information. Why were the police at Anne’s home? She had no answers. The police were treating them the way they’d seen police treat drug dealers on television. In fact, TV or movies were their only points of reference, because they weren’t criminals. They were law-abiding. They didn’t buy or sell drugs. They weren’t violent. They weren’t a danger to anyone. Yet there were cops — surrounding their house on the outside, swarming the house on the inside. They even taunted the family as if they were mere “perps.”

As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren’t enough, next came ominous warnings. Don’t call your lawyer. Don’t tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends. The entire neighborhood could see the police around their house, but they had to remain silent. This was not the “right to remain silent” as uttered by every cop on every legal drama on television — the right against self-incrimination. They couldn’t mount a public defense if they wanted — or even offer an explanation to family and friends. Yet no one in this family was a “perp.” Instead, like Cindy, they were American citizens guilty of nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights to support Act 10 and other conservative causes in Wisconsin. Sitting there shocked and terrified, this citizen — who is still too intimidated to speak on the record — kept thinking, “Is this America?”

It's the America we get when completely amoral men are in positions of power. French gives a final example:

“They followed me to my kids’ rooms.” For the family of “Rachel” (not her real name), the ordeal began before dawn — with the same loud, insistent knocking. Still in her pajamas, Rachel answered the door and saw uniformed police, poised to enter her home. When Rachel asked to wake her children herself, the officer insisted on walking into their rooms. The kids woke to an armed officer, standing near their beds. The entire family was herded into one room, and there they watched as the police carried off their personal possessions, including items that had nothing to do with the subject of the search warrant — even her daughter’s computer. And, yes, there were the warnings. Don’t call your lawyer. Don’t talk to anyone about this. Don’t tell your friends. The kids watched — alarmed — as the school bus drove by, with the students inside watching the spectacle of uniformed police surrounding the house, carrying out the family’s belongings. Yet they were told they couldn’t tell anyone at school. They, too, had to remain silent. The mom watched as her entire life was laid open before the police. Her professional files, her personal files, everything. She knew this was all politics. She knew a rogue prosecutor was targeting her for her political beliefs. And she realized, “Every aspect of my life is in their hands. And they hate me.”

The rogue prosecutor was John Chisolm, who, along with the judge who granted permission for the raids, a woman named Barbara Kluka, should be put in jail. The reason for this atrocious violation of police power is that Chisolm is a progressive leftist who was and is determined to destroy Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, and since he was unsuccessful stopping him from being elected and re-elected, he has chosen to use his power to go after Walker's supporters, people who contributed to his campaign and worked for organizations seeking to advance a conservative agenda. The terrors to which these people and their children were subjected in these raids has soured them completely on the police, as well they might. The officers who participated should be deeply ashamed of their conduct. French explains how Chisolm's vendetta got started:

It all began innocently enough. In 2009, officials from the office of the Milwaukee County executive contacted the office of the Milwaukee district attorney, headed by John Chisholm, to investigate the disappearance of $11,242.24 from the Milwaukee chapter of the Order of the Purple Heart. The matter was routine, with witnesses willing and able to testify against the principal suspect, a man named Kevin Kavanaugh. What followed, however, was anything but routine.

Chisholm failed to act promptly on the report, and when he did act, he refused to conduct a conventional criminal investigation but instead petitioned, in May 2010, to open a “John Doe” investigation, a proceeding under Wisconsin law that permits Wisconsin officials to conduct extensive investigations while keeping the target’s identity secret (hence the designation “John Doe”). John Doe investigations alter typical criminal procedure in two important ways: First, they remove grand juries from the investigative process, replacing the ordinary citizens of a grand jury with a supervising judge. Second, they can include strict secrecy requirements not just on the prosecution but also on the targets of the investigation. In practice, this means that, while the prosecution cannot make public comments about the investigation, it can take public actions indicating criminal suspicion (such as raiding businesses and homes in full view of the community) while preventing the targets of the raids from defending against or even discussing the prosecution’s claims.

Why would Chisholm seek such broad powers to investigate a year-old embezzlement claim with a known suspect? Because the Milwaukee County executive, Scott Walker, had by that time become the leading Republican candidate for governor. District Attorney Chisholm was a Democrat, a very partisan Democrat. Almost immediately after opening the John Doe investigation, Chisholm used his expansive powers to embarrass Walker, raiding his county-executive offices within a week.

When that didn't work, Chisolm expanded his phony "John Doe" investigation to include citizens who supported Walker. This is what a police state looks like, and it's a vivid picture of what the country would be like if unprincipled thugs like Chisolm ever achieved sufficient power.

Read the full article at the link, if you have the stomach for it, and then ask yourself why you're not hearing about any of this from the liberal media. You sure would if a conservative prosecutor had used the police in this fashion and for this purpose. The sheer malevolence of the left, of which we catch a glimpse in Wisconsin and in Lois Lerner's abuses at the IRS, should cause everyone inclined toward aligning themselves politically with these people to ask themselves if these are the sorts of human beings with which decent people really want to be identified.

One other thing is for sure. Reading this has certainly made it a lot more difficult to continue to respect the people who have sworn to protect us and whom we pay to do it.

Molecular Machines

Among the phenomena which support the claim that life is the product of intentional, intelligent design is the sheer number of complex molecular machines that operate in each of the trillions of our body's cells to ensure that these cells carry out the functions that keep us alive.

One of these machines is the system of proteins that synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Here's a short video animation that describes how this machine, called ATP synthase, works:

There are thousands of such machines in the cell, all of which, on the standard Darwinian account, somehow developed - through random, undirected, processes - not only their structure, not only the coordination with other systems in the cell necessary for proper function, but also the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control how and when the machine operates. If it happened, it's a near-miraculous achievement for blind, undirected processes.

David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely. Applying the principle to the present case, when confronted with a structure like ATP synthase we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that such an astonishing thing came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

It seems to me that the only way one can assert the former is if they've already, a priori, ruled out the possibility of the existence of the intelligent engineer, but, of course, that begs the question. Whether the intelligent engineer exists is the very matter we're trying to answer by asking whether blind chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the existence in living things of such machines as ATP synthase.

If we allow the evidence to speak for itself rather than allow our prior metaphysical commitments to dictate what the evidence says then I'm pretty sure most people would say that the kind of specified complexity we see in this video points unequivocally to the existence of a designing mind.

If this video has whetted your interest here's another that pushes us toward the same conclusion. It's an animation of just a few of the structures and processes in a living cell. Note the amazing motor protein that carries the vesicle along the microtubule:

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it somehow a product of intelligence? Which is more probable?

Gift Idea

Graduation is right around the corner. Mothers' Day is even closer. If you're trying to think of a gift to give the family member or friend who's about to graduate, or if mom's a reader, perhaps you might consider presenting them with a copy of In the Absence of God.

If you're not familiar with it you can read about it by following the link at the upper right of this page.

Absence is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Berean, BAM, Lifeway, and my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds.

Books aren't a gift appreciated by everyone, of course. A lot of people, unfortunately, don't read, and if they do they sometimes shy from reading anything that might be a little demanding, but if you know someone who enjoys books and who's not averse to having a little metaphysics mixed in with their drama (or vice versa), you could do a lot worse than putting a copy of Absence in their hands.

Aside from making a good gift for a thoughtful graduate or mom, In the Absence of God would also make a fine selection for book clubs, reading groups, or youth groups. Here's what one reader said about it:

Thanks for telling me about your book, In the Absence of God. I bought it last Tuesday for my Kindle and finished it in two evenings, although the last evening lasted until 3:05 a.m.. I could not put it down. Thought provoking, good story lines and characters, entertaining reading, and very educational. Absolutely loved the book and have been talking about it to my kids, family and friends.

If you order a copy from Hearts and Minds I'll autograph it if you request it.

What it Would Take

If you believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming it's a reasonably safe assumption that you think those who don't are at best benighted and at worst a danger to humanity, deserving at the very least society's reproach and ridicule and maybe even imprisonment. You are probably perplexed at how otherwise intelligent people can be so obdurate when it comes to this issue. What would it take, you may wonder, to convince the skeptics that we are headed for eco-catastrophe, which, after all, we must be because Al Gore says so.

Well, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist offers a detailed response to just that question. He prefaces his answer with this:

Recently, Reason‘s Ronald Bailey asked what it would take to convince conservatives and libertarians that global warming is real. If generally rising temperatures, decreasing diurnal temperature differences, melting glacial and sea ice, smaller snow extent, stronger rainstorms, and warming oceans are not enough to persuade you that man-made climate [change] is occurring, what evidence would be?

This has since been picked up by Jonathan Adler at the Washington Post‘s token right-leaning blog, the Volokh Conspiracy. There’s no pressure: Bailey and Adler merely insinuate that you are “obscurantist”—that is, you hate new knowledge—if you don’t agree.

That, by the way — the smug insistence of global warming alarmists on presenting themselves as the embodiment of scientific knowledge as such — is one of the reasons I stopped taking them seriously. In fact, I have thought about what it would take to convince me global warming is real. And it’s pretty clear that Bailey has not thought about it.

After a brief elaboration on the unfortunate shortcomings exhibited by Messers Bailey and Adler, Tracinski lays out what it would take to convince him that global warming or climate change is real, anthropogenic (caused by humans), and catastrophic. Needless to say, the current state of both rhetoric and evidence falls far short of a rigorous demonstration:

1) A clear understanding of the temperature record.

The warmists don’t just have to show that temperatures are getting warmer, because variation is normal. That’s what makes “climate change” such an appallingly stupid euphemism. The climate is always changing. The environmentalists are the real climate-change “deniers” because they basically want global temperatures to maintain absolute stasis relative to 1970—not coincidentally the point at which environmentalists first began paying any attention to the issue.

That’s what makes ‘climate change’ such an appallingly stupid euphemism. The climate is always changing.

So to demonstrate human-caused global warming, we would have to have a long-term temperature record that allows us to isolate what the normal baseline is, so we know what natural variation looks like and we can identify any un-natural, man-made effect.

A big part of the problem is that we only have accurate global thermometer measurements going back 135 years — a blink of an eye on the time-scales that are relevant to determining natural variation of temperature. Within that, we only have a few decades of warming that could conceivably be blamed on human emissions of carbon dioxide: a minor run up in temperatures from the 1970s to the late 1990s. Since then, warming has leveled off (despite strenuous attempts to pretend otherwise). I think it’s impossible to claim, on that basis, that we even know what natural temperature variation is, much less to demonstrate that we’ve deviated from it.

In other words, small increases in global mean temperatures since 1970 are really pretty meaningless and are certainly not proof that human activity is the cause of those increases which brings Tracinski to his second criterion:

2) A full understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms.

We have to know what physical mechanisms determine global temperatures and how they interact. The glibbest thing said by environmentalists — and proof that the person who says it has no understanding of science — is that human-caused global warming is “basic physics” because we know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is a very weak greenhouse gas and there is no theory that claims it can cause runaway warming all on its own. The warmists’ theory requires feedback mechanisms that amplify the effect of carbon dioxide. Without that, there is no human-caused global warming. But those feedback mechanisms are dubious, unproven assumptions.

Basic questions about the “sensitivity” of the climate to carbon dioxide have never been answered. Even Bailey admits this:

In recent years, there has [been] a lot of back and forth between researchers trying to refine their estimates of climate sensitivity. At the low end, some researchers think that temperatures would increase a comparatively trivial 1.5 degrees Celsius; on the high end, some worry it could go as high as high 6 degrees Celsius…. In a 2014 article in Geophysical Research Letters, a group of researchers calculated that it would take another 20 years of temperature observations for us to be confident that climate sensitivity is on the low end and more than 50 years of data to confirm the high end of the projections.

If I understand this correctly climatologists don't know how much the temperatures are rising and disagree on how long it will take to find out. In other words, this is not at all the settled science we've been repeatedly told that it is.

3) The ability to make forecasting models with a track record of accurate predictions over the very long term.

We don’t know whether current warming departs from natural variation, nor have scientists proven the underlying mechanisms by which humans could cause such an increase. But even if we did know these things, we would have to be able to forecast with reasonable accuracy how big the effect is going to be. A very small warming may not even be noticeable or may have mostly salutary effects, such as a slightly longer growing season, whereas the impact of a much larger warming is likely to cause greater disruption.

I should also point out that the “catastrophic” part of “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” is a much larger question that is even harder to forecast. For example, global warming was supposed to lead to more hurricanes, which is why movie posters for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth featured a hurricane emerging from an industrial smokestack. Then hurricane activity in the Atlantic promptly receded to historical lows.

It’s pretty clear that scientists aren’t any good yet at making global climate forecasts. Current temperatures are at or below the low range of all of the climate models. Nobody predicted the recent 17-year-long temperature plateau. And while they can come up with ad hoc explanations after the fact for why the data don’t match their models, the whole point of a forecast is to be able to get the right answer before the data comes in.

Given the abysmal record of climate forecasting, we should tell the warmists to go back and make a new set of predictions, then come back to us in 20 or 30 years and tell us how these predictions panned out. Then we’ll talk.

So given all this what reason is there for the urgent demands to act now? Why are the Obama administration and so many others, particularly on the left, so desperate to do something now to reverse a trend that may not even exist or, if it does, may not be at all deleterious? Perhaps one answer is that if enough people are convinced there is an imminent crisis they'll be willing to cede more of their individual freedom and more power to the government to resolve it.

In any case, Tracinski closes with this:

So yes, I know exactly what it would take to convince me that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is really happening. And no, the warmists haven’t even come close.

Read the whole essay at the link, especially if climate change is an issue that, one way or another, interests you.

The End of Science

Back in 1996 science writer John Horgan, then with Scientific American, released a book that created a major stir in the scientific community. In the book, titled The End of Science, Horgan argued that for the most part science had come to the end of the age of great discoveries and that all that was left was to fill in the details. As might be expected, scientists bristled at the idea that the golden age of their discipline was over, but Horgan remains unrepentant to this day, and his publisher has recently produced a new paperback edition of his book.

He wrote the following for the preface of the new edition defending his thesis:

Here’s what a fanatic I am: When I have a captive audience of innocent youths, I expose them to my evil meme.

Since 2005, I’ve taught history of science to undergraduates at Stevens Institute of Technology, an engineering school perched on the bank of the Hudson River. After we get through ancient Greek “science,” I make my students ponder this question: Will our theories of the cosmos seem as wrong to our descendants as Aristotle’s theories seem to us?

I assure them there is no correct answer, then tell them the answer is “No,” because Aristotle’s theories were wrong and our theories are right. The Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa, and our world is made not of earth, water, fire and air but of hydrogen, carbon and other elements that are in turn made of quarks and electrons.

Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smart phones. But their scientific version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours… is in many respects true; most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries—Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?–might be unsolvable.

That’s my end-of-science argument in a nutshell, and I believe it as much today as I did when I was finishing my book 20 years ago. That’s why I keep writing about my thesis, and why I make my students ponder it—even though I hope I’m wrong, and I’m oddly relieved when my students reject my pessimistic outlook… So far my prediction that there would be no great “revelations or revolutions”—no insights into nature as cataclysmic as heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, the big bang–has held up just fine.

In some ways, science is in even worse shape today than I would have guessed back in the 1990s. In The End of Science, I predicted that scientists, as they struggle to overcome their limitations, would become increasingly desperate and prone to hyperbole. This trend has become more severe and widespread than I anticipated. In my 30-plus years of covering science, the gap between the ideal of science and its messy, all-too-human reality has never been greater than it is today.

Horgan is certainly courageous. The fate of Francis Fukuyama's thesis, published four years before Horgan's book, that with the defeat of communism history had come to an end, should give Horgan pause. After all, the history of science is littered with examples of people who said that we'd never be able to do or know something. In the 1800's, for example, August Comte claimed that we'd never know what the sun was made of. Just a few years after his death in 1857 spectroscopic analysis was invented and revealed that the sun was made mostly of hydrogen.

In our present day there appears to be a revolution brewing in science regarding the fundamental nature of the universe. For a couple hundred years it had been assumed to be fundamentally comprised of material stuff, but a lot of people today are having second thoughts about that. According to some, it looks as if matter is reducible to information which, if so, suggests that mind, not matter, is fundamental. If this idea catches on it would certainly produce a revolution in science comparable to the Copernican revolution, maybe even more revolutionary than that. Perhaps Horgan will be proven wrong after all.

C. elegans

One of the most fascinating fields of study in biology is the field of embryology - the study of how a zygote develops into an adult organism. For most animals our knowledge of their ontogenetic development is still incomplete, but a team of scientists has worked out the complete developmental history of a nematode called C. elegans and has won a Nobel Prize for their achievement.

The ontogeny of this tiny worm, so small that you need a microscope to see it, is programmed to follow a specific pathway, but several mysteries surround attempts to determine what it is that controls that ontogeny as well as attempts to elucidate how undirected processes could ever have produced such a control system in living things. Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson discusses some of the problems in this 10 minute video.

Perhaps there's a materialist explanation for embryological development such as we see in C. elegans and even more astonishingly in higher organisms, but if there is it's not very widely publicized. What we see in this presentation seems to point to a teleology that many scientists insist on ruling out a priori, but I wonder if they're not missing something by refusing to admit the possibility of teleological explanations into their scientific work.

I've quoted before in this context a passage from William James that I think is particularly apt. James wrote that, "Any rule of thought that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." If the purpose of science is to discover truth why rule out ahead of time certain kinds of explanations just because they're incompatible with a particular metaphysical commitment?

The refusal to permit the hypothesis that a mind may be somehow responsible for what we see in C. elegans reminds me of another quote, this one from geneticist Richard Lewontin who once said that,

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Scientists used to declare that they were committed to following the evidence wherever it leads, but now that at least some evidence seems to lead away from materialism and toward mind as the fundamental substance underlying reality, that declaration is apparently no longer operative.

VEST

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has been working with a team of engineers to design a device that will convert the frequencies of sound waves into vibrations that deaf people will be able to feel and interpret. These vibrations will allow the deaf to actually "hear" words that are spoken to them. This sounds like an amazing technological development, and I've posted some excerpts from the article in The Atlantic:

The VEST, or the Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer, is a wearable tool that allows the deaf to, as Eagleman puts it, "feel" speech. An app downloaded onto a smartphone or tablet with a microphone will pick up sounds and send them via bluetooth to the vest. The vest will then "translate" those sounds into a series of vibrations that reflect the frequencies picked up by the mic by using a network of transducers — devices that can convert the signals into vibrations. So, if you spoke to the person wearing the vest, that person would "feel" what you're saying through vibrations on their back, instead of through their ears.

But Eagleman is quick to point out that the vest isn't just translating the sounds into a code — the patterns felt aren't a "language" to be interpreted like braille. In fact, the device doesn't use a specific language; it responds to all ambient noises and sounds.

"What you're feeling is not code for a letter or a word...you're actually feeling a representation of the sound."

"The pattern of vibrations that you're feeling [while wearing the VEST] represent the frequencies that are present in the sound," he said. "What that means is what you're feeling is not code for a letter or a word — it's not like morse code — but you're actually feeling a representation of the sound."

So far, it all works, Eagleman said. The team tested a prototype on a 37-year-old deaf man who, after five days of wearing the VEST, understood the words said to him out loud by feeling the vibrations because, as Eagleman put it, "his brain is starting to unlock what the data mean."

That "unlocking" phenomenon, like adding a new sense, is hard to explain. How do a series of vibrations that supposedly reflect sound eventually have meaning when there's no language assigned to them? How does the brain on the first day have no idea what a couple of vibrations on, say, the lower back means, but by the fifth day, know that they form a specific word?

This leads me to wonder whether a bat's sonar system might work this way and whether something similar could be designed to aid blind people in navigating their environment.

"My view is that the brain is a general-purpose computational device," Eagleman told me. "You could take any kind of data stream and the brain will figure it out. I consider it the biggest miracle no one's heard of."

How does the brain perform this astonishing miracle? More specifically, how did such an ability ever evolve through chance and natural selection since clearly there was no need for the brain to be able to manipulate data streams in this fashion until now? I suppose we should put our doubts aside and just will ourselves to have faith in the capability of blind, purposeless forces to effect such miracles.