Can the Universe Be Infinitely Old?

One thorny problem for any naturalist metaphysics is that the consensus among scientists is that the universe came into being at some point in the past. If that's true then, for reasons discussed in a recent post, it's strong evidence for the existence of a creative, intelligent, transcendent, eternal, and personal first cause, i.e. either God or something very much like God.

If such a cause exists, of course, then naturalism is false, so naturalists, understandably chary about accepting the conclusion that their metaphysics is false, sometimes take refuge in the argument that the universe is infinitely old, past eternal, or beginning-less. The post linked to above offered scientific reasons for rejecting this argument, but there are philosophical reasons as well.

One of these is that an actually infinite set of any physical entities, whether they be moments, or atoms, or whatever, is probably impossible. Philosopher William Lane Craig explains in the following short video some of the paradoxes that arise in an infinite series of entities and why such a series is highly implausible:

Moreover, even if the universe were in fact infinitely old it still could never have arrived at the present moment.

Kirk Durston in an article at Evolution News and Views explains why:

The evidence from science points to a beginning for the universe. Some atheists, understanding the possible theological implications of a beginning, prefer to set aside science and assert that the past is infinite either in terms of the number of years this universe has existed, or in terms of a fantasized infinite series of universes in a multiverse....

In the real world, an infinite past means that if you were to set the current year as t = 0 and count back into the past, there would never be an end to your counting, for there is no year in the past that was the "beginning." No matter how long you counted, you would still have an infinite number of years ahead of you to count and, if you were to look back at the set of years you have already counted, it would always be finite.

In other words, if the universe is infinitely old then, if you began counting back from the present moment, you could never count back to a starting point. No matter if you counted forever you would never reach a first moment of the universe. This means, however, that neither could you count forward from infinity past to the present moment. If the universe extends infinitely into the past and contains an infinity of past moments then no matter how many of those moments tick by the present moment would never arrive.

Put differently, in order for a series of moments to arrive at the present there has to be a starting point, but if the past is eternal then the necessary starting point keeps receding further and further into the past and in fact does not exist at all. If there's no initial moment then there's no second moment, and if no second then no third, and so on, and if all this is so, then there is no present moment either. But obviously there is a present moment, so it would seem that the assumption of a past eternal universe is false.

Durston goes into more detail than this, but the implication is clear. If the universe is not past eternal then it had a beginning. And if it had a beginning it had a cause. And any cause of the universe must have the properties listed above, all of which is to say that a finite universe is strong evidence that theism is true.

Did Libet Prove Determinism?

This post is from the archive but is relevant to a topic my classes are currently discussing, or soon will be discussing, so I thought it'd be useful to post it again:

Students of psychology, philosophy and other disciplines which touch upon the operations of the mind and the question of free will may have heard mention of the experiments of Benjamin Libet, a University of California at San Francisco neurobiologist who conducted some remarkable research into the brain and human consciousness in the last decades of the 20th century.

One of Libet's most famous discoveries was that the brain "decides" on a particular choice milliseconds before we ourselves are conscious of deciding. The brain creates an electrochemical "Readiness Potential" (RP) that precedes by milliseconds the conscious decision to do something. This has been seized upon by materialists who use it as proof that our decisions are not really chosen by us but are rather the unconscious product of our brain's neurochemistry. The decision is made before we're even aware of what's going on, they claim, and this fact undermines the notion that we have free will as this video explains:

Michael Egnor, at ENV, points out, however, the remarkable fact that, so far from supporting determinism, Libet himself believed in free will, his research supported that belief, and, what's more, his research also reinforced, in Libet's own words, classical religious views of sin.

Libet discovered that the decision to do X is indeed pre-conscious, but he also found that the decision to do X can be consciously vetoed by us and that no RP precedes that veto. In other words, the decision of the brain to act in a particular way may be determined by unconscious factors, but we retain the ability to consciously (freely) choose not to follow through with that decision. Our freedom lies in our ability to refuse any or all of the choices our brain presents to us. Or, we might say, free will is really "free won't."

Egnor's article is a fascinating piece if you're interested in the question of free will and Libet's contribution to our understanding of it.

Clinics Closing at Record Pace

This news will delight some readers and disturb others:

Abortion access in the U.S. has been vanishing at the fastest annual pace on record, propelled by Republican state lawmakers’ push to legislate the industry out of existence. Since 2011, at least 162 abortion providers have shut or stopped offering the procedure, while just 21 opened.

The attempt to impute this trend to nefarious Republicans, though they'd be happy to take credit for it, seems misguided. The article makes clear that states like California which are controlled by abortion-friendly Democrats are also seeing dozens of clinics closing their doors. In any case, the article continues:

At no time since before 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, has a woman’s ability to terminate a pregnancy been more dependent on her zip code or financial resources to travel. The drop-off in providers—more than one every two weeks—occurred in 35 states, in both small towns and big cities that are home to more than 30 million women of reproductive age....

Typically defined by medical researchers as facilities that perform 400 or more abortions per year, the ranks peaked in the late 1980s at 705, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based reproductive-health research organization. By 2011, the most recent year for which Guttmacher has data, that number had fallen to 553.

State regulations that make it too expensive or logistically impossible for facilities to remain in business drove more than a quarter of the closings. Industry consolidation, changing demographics, and declining demand were also behind the drop, along with doctor retirements and crackdowns on unfit providers....

That just 21 new clinics opened in five years underscores the difficulty the industry has faced in replenishing the ranks of health-care providers willing and financially able to operate in such a fraught field. The impact of that challenge is likely to be long-lived: Even rarer than the building of a new clinic is the reopening of one that has shut.

One thing that perhaps everyone can agree upon is this: Clinics closing because of diminished demand is a good thing. Whether one is pro-life or pro-choice there's widespread agreement that every child should be a wanted child, and if there is reduced demand for abortion that would suggest that more women are deciding that they want their children.

It would be interesting to know exactly what the reasons are for the lower demand for the services of abortion clinics. Is it, in fact, because of a greater desire on the part of young mothers to have children, is it simply that more couples are practicing contraception, or is it because more women are finding abortion to be morally problematic? Perhaps it's all three.

Fleebaggers vs. Taxpayers

Some readers may remember the political turmoil that beset the state of Wisconsin when Governor Scott Walker pushed a number of reforms five years ago that were designed, among other things, to weaken the grip public employees unions had on the state's taxpayers. The legislative effort was labelled Act 10, and in an effort to prevent its passage, many Democrat legislators fled the state so the legislature would be denied a quorum and couldn't vote on the bill. The fleeing legislators came to be called "Fleebaggers." There was tremendous pressure brought to bear on Walker and the Republican legislature - death threats, protesters filling the capitol building, nation-wide criticism in the media - but they remained firm and Act 10 passed.

The MacIver Institute has run the numbers and found that, in the ensuing five years, contrary to all of the predictions of doom, an amazing $5 billion has been saved by the state of Wisconsin as a direct result of Act 10:

Five years ago, Gov. Walker and the Republican legislature started their odyssey that resulted in the signing of Act 10, a milestone law that has saved Wisconsin taxpayers $5.24 billion, according to a new analysis by the MacIver Institute.

The analysis found that Wisconsin saved $3.36 billion by requiring [that] government employees contribute a reasonable amount to their own retirement. The analysis also estimates local units of governments saved an additional $404.8 million total by taking common sense steps like opening their employees' health insurance to competitive bidding. Milwaukee Public Schools saved $1.3 billion in long-term pension liabilities, and Neenah saved $97 million in long-term pension liabilities in addition to other savings.

Five years after Gov. Walker introduced it, Act 10 is still the gift that keeps on giving. The MacIver Institute analysis found that the Medford School District recently realized an 11 percent decrease in the cost of its health insurance business by opening it to competitive bidding....Similarly, the Appleton Area School District switched health insurance providers last October and local taxpayers will see up to $3 million in savings in the first year alone.

There's more at the link. Here's a chart that accompanied the article and which shows a breakdown of the money saved by Wisconsin through the courage and wisdom of its legislature and governor:

The lesson here seems simple enough. Competition, low taxes, and reasonable pension reform are economic panaceas for state governments, but they're anathema to legislatures controlled by liberals who are beholden to public employees unions. So, while states like California, Illinois, and New York continue policies which nudge them ever closer to insolvency, states like Wisconsin are following a wiser course. The question is, why can't those other states, and our federal government, for that matter, see the wisdom of what Wisconsin has done?

Three Simple Rules for Beating Poverty

Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers some advice to anyone who truly wishes to rise up out of poverty into the American middle class:

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law.

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.

There's much more worth reading in Haskins' essay and readers interested in the plight of the poor are urged to check it out. Here are a couple of suggestions, in addition to the three mentioned above, that Haskins is perhaps alluding to when he mentions other influences, but doesn't make explicit.

1. Get married before you have children.
2. Stay away from drugs, alcohol and pornography.
3. Strive to be the best employee at your workplace.
4. Never stop learning.
5. Limit your time on social media.

Sound too preachy? Consider #1 about which Haskins offers some statistics:

Today, more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage. This unprecedented rate of non-marital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood—and for a considerable number of these, all of their childhood — in a single-parent family.

As hard as single parents try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty. In turn, poverty is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes in children, including school dropout and out-of-wedlock births.

Sure, it's harder for some than it is for others, given the circumstances of their lives, to rise into the middle class, but someone who wants to do it can certainly make it much less difficult by following Haskins' advice.

Fundamental Reality

This is a post I've run before but am reposting since it's relevant to some topics my students and I have been discussing in class:

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries it was the consensus view among scientists and philosophers that reality, the universe, was fundamentally material. The belief was that everything was reducible to matter and energy and that if there was any immaterial substance, it was a property of matter. Thus, in this materialist view, there was no such thing as mind or soul that existed independently of matter. Mind, if it existed, emerged from matter.

All this began to change in the 20th century with the development of quantum physics, and as that century came to a close and the new century began a number of experiments were done which led physicists to believe that, in fact, mind is fundamental and that the material world is an emergent property of mind.

Rather than seeing the universe as a machine, as thinkers had done ever since Isaac Newton in the 17th century, the universe was now being viewed, in the words of Sir James Jeans, more like "a grand idea."

The following video gives a fairly good description of two experiments in physics which have led many (not all) scientists to agree with Jeans. The video moves quickly so you might wish to replay parts of it.

There's resistance to accepting the notion that the universe is a product of mind because such a view both refutes the materialism upon which atheism rests and fits nicely into a theistic view of the world (see the quote from physicist Alain Aspect below).

Nevertheless, this is the view accepted by a growing number of quantum physicists. Here are a few quotes to illustrate this:

• “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Max Planck (1944)
• “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Erwin Schroedinger.
• “It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality” Eugene Wigner 1961, Nobel Prize winner in 1963
• "If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history." Philosopher Thomas Nagel
• "What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving 'entanglement' (the phenomenon Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices, and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices...To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time." Antoine Suarez, 2013
• "Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist)." Alain Aspect, 2007

So far from mind being a product of a more fundamental material reality, these thinkers have concluded that matter actually is a phenomenon created by mind. Thus, in their view, the fundamental reality in the universe, and perhaps beyond, is mind.

What If the Russians Were Israelis?

You may not be aware of this if you get your news from the establishment news media, but it's a pretty safe bet that if the Israelis did what the Russians have apparently done the media and the progressive left in this country would be screaming their larynxes into shreds over it. For the left, atrocities in the Middle East are only atrocities when committed by Israel. The Palestinians can do whatever they wish to innocent Israelis and the left yawns. The Russians can bomb hospitals and the left snores. But if the Israelis, in the course of defending themselves against Palestinian terror, inadvertently kill civilians the left wants them brought up on charges of crimes against humanity.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

A shocking video shows an entire district destroyed by Russian cluster bombs in Aleppo as air strikes hit five hospitals and two schools. The death toll after the attacks in Syria today has risen to 50 with many more expected to be wounded. It is believed that among the dead are children with the bombings condemned by U.N. chiefs.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haqsaid said the attacks were 'blatant violations of international laws' that 'are further degrading an already devastated health care system and preventing access to education in Syria.'

The video emerges after activists say ballistic missiles, thought to be Russian, hit a children's hospital and school in Azaz, near the Turkish border, with three children and a pregnant woman among the dead. They said at least five missiles hit the rebel-held town where refugees fleeing a major Syrian army offensive in the Aleppo area were sheltering.

A resident said another refugee shelter south of the town was also hit by bombs dropped by jets believed to be Russian. Juma Rahal, a medic, told Reuters: 'We have been moving scores of screaming children from the hospital.' Several children were killed and ambulances ferried scores of injured people to Turkey for treatment, he said.

French charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) claims that at least eight staff are missing after rockets hit a hospital that it supported in the province of Idlib in north western Syria. In a statement, MSF said the hospital was hit four times in at least two attacks. It said the attacks were minutes apart, adding that at least eight members of staff are currently missing. 'This appears to be a deliberate attack on a health structure, and we condemn this attack in the strongest possible terms,' said Massimiliano Rebaudengo, MSF's mission chief.

'The destruction of the hospital leaves the local population of around 40,000 people without access to medical services in an active zone of conflict.' The aid group said the hospital had 30 beds, 54 staff members, two operating theatres, an outpatients department and an emergency room. Opposition activist Yahya al-Sobeih said: 'The entire building has collapsed on the ground. All members of the medical team inside are believed to be dead.'

Here's the video. There are more pics at the link:

So why doesn't the left demonstrate the same level of outrage, complete with demands for disinvestment and sanctions, against Putin as they do against Netanyahu? Why are we not hearing from those in the "peace-community" who inveigh tirelessly against the Israelis for blockading Gaza to prevent the importation of weapons and concrete used to build tunnels into Israel? Why is it that for the left it's only Israeli "atrocities" that matter?

Boko Haram

Readers are probably familiar with the Islamist terror group Boko Haram which operates in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, kidnapping young girls to serve as sex slaves, burning down churches, and murdering Christians. It appears, however, that these fine devotees of the religion of peace are falling on hard times as Strategy Page explains:

Captured Boko Haram men report growing morale problems. Many members oppose the current strategy of carrying out bombing attacks against any target that can be reached. Until late 2015 the Boko Haram mainly attacked security forces, government officials, non-Moslems and non-religious schools. All those targets are now much better protected and Boko Haram leadership goes after targets it can reach rather than suffer a lot of failed attacks. Now the victims tend to be Moslem women and children and that has caused more Boko Haram men to criticize their leadership (a dangerous move) or desert (also dangerous but less so).

Going after the corrupt government and non-Moslems attracted a lot of recruits, and still does. But over a year of defeats and much improved security around acceptable targets has left Boko Haram with few alternatives to targeting whatever victims they could hit. This often includes market places or refugee camps and a disproportionate number of victims are women and children. The raiding and looting is one thing, because even Holy Warriors have to live. But killing Moslem women and children has always been a hard sell for Islamic terrorist leaders and is usually a warning sign that a particular Islamic terrorist group is on its way out.

That’s because this mindless mayhem means it can no longer get enough new recruits to replace losses and also turns helpful civilian populations into hostile ones. This is what happened to al Qaeda in Iraq during 2005-7 and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan a little later.

Another source of plunging morale is how Boko Haram recruits a lot of its current suicide bombers. These are often kidnapped teenage girls who are brainwashed into believing that God wants them to be suicide bombers and that this will get them right into the afterlife paradise. Those who resist this indoctrination are killed, often in front of other young women. It is one thing for a young Moslem man or woman volunteering to be a suicide bomber, but this brutal method of coercing and using girls who remind many young men of their sisters or cousins has backfired within Boko Haram.

There's more at the link. No doubt American military assets - special ops people and surveillance platforms - are also taking a toll on this despicable organization. Few civilized people will be sorry to hear of their impending and condign demise.

Conservative Ants, Liberal Grasshoppers

People who don't pay much attention to politics, and even some who do, are often confused about the difference between conservatives and liberals. If, for example, you poll folks on the question "who are the most staunch advocates of individual liberty, conservatives or liberals," many would reply that it's the liberal and would look at you incredulously if you told them they were mistaken. Yet, they would be mistaken all the same.

Perhaps one of the earliest illustrations of the difference between the two political views is a famous fable by Aesop titled The Ant and the Grasshopper. It goes like this:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

The moral, of course, is that we should all work hard and be responsible for ourselves. That's the conservative view.

A more contemporary version of the venerable tale, however, goes something like this:

The ant works hard in the withering heat and rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The ant worked hard in school as well, earned an education, waited until he was married before having children, and remained faithful to his ant-wife. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. The grasshopper couldn't care less about school, sleeps with whichever other grasshopper will have him, and lives life in a haze of drugs, alcohol, cheese curls and television reality shows.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he's cold, hungry and without health insurance. The major networks all show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant snug in his comfortable home with a refrigerator filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Labor unions and activist groups stage demonstrations in front of the ant's house where news stations film them loudly condemning the ant for his lack of compassion.

Progressive politicians publicly chastise the ant and blame his Republican sympathies for the grasshopper's plight. They exclaim on the Sunday morning talk shows that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and they call for a tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share and "spread the wealth around."

No longer able to pay his employees or his mortgage because of the tax burdens that have been imposed on him, the ant has to sell both his business and his home which the government buys and gives to the grasshopper because a job and a home are human rights.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his friends, sleeping till noon, and then finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the business fails and the house crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.

The ant has dropped out of sight, never to be seen again. The grasshopper is eventually found dead in a drug-related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful neighborhood.

The moral of the story, of course, is that we get what we vote for.

Progressives are determined to make the ants, which comprise about 25% of the population and which pays about 87% of the nation's income taxes, pull the wagon full of grasshoppers which make up about 50% of our nation and pay almost no income tax. On top of that the top 25% will now have to pay the health insurance costs for 30 million people (50 million if they pass amnesty for illegal aliens). Ants are strong. They can carry loads a hundred times their own weight, but they can't carry all those grasshoppers.

Not a few people labor under the misapprehension that conservatives are cold, heartless, stingy and lack compassion for the poor. This, too, is manifestly untrue. Indeed, studies have shown that conservatives give more to charity than do liberals. What conservatives do believe, though, is that until the grasshopper changes his grasshopper ways, no amount of charity will help him rise up out of his poverty.

The classic 1934 Walt Disney version of Aesop's fable does a nice job of depicting this truth:

Gravity Waves and the Cosmological Argument

The scientific community has been greatly excited by the recent detection of gravity waves which had been predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity one hundred years ago. Their detection is yet another confirmation of the truth of Einstein's theory and this, in turn, has an interesting philosophical consequence. It reinforces one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God, or something very like God.

Bruce Gordon at Evolution News and Views explains:

The gravity waves detected at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) were produced by the collision of black holes about a billion years ago and say nothing about the truth or falsity of inflationary cosmology. What this discovery really provides is additional and exceedingly strong confirmation of Einstein's already well-confirmed theory of general relativity by directly establishing the existence of gravity waves and giving further evidence of the existence of black holes.

The significance of discoveries confirming general relativity relate to one of the implications of the theory itself. As Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking demonstrated in the late 1960s, regardless of which solution of Einstein's equations is embraced, all backward-traced spacetime geodesics in classical general relativity terminate in a singularity, implying that space-time, matter, and energy all came into existence at some point in the finite past. This, of course, is the essence of Big Bang cosmology.

In other words, the universe began to exist, and there is no physical explanation in cosmology or physics for why this happened. This opens the door to various cosmological arguments, including, of course, the Kalam argument....

The Kalam argument, whose most notable modern defender has been philosopher William Lane Craig, goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause of its beginning to exist.

The argument is superficially very simple although arguing for the two premises can get pretty technical. The discovery of gravity waves adds another layer of confirmation on top of the already well-confirmed second premise. Philosophers who wish to avoid the conclusion of this argument have to cast doubt on either the first or second premise, and the progress of science keeps making it harder and harder to do that.

One common, but misplaced objection, is that the argument does nothing to show that the cause of the universe is the God of traditional theism, but this is not correct. The universe is the sum of all contingent entities (i.e. entities which could possibly not exist), including all space and time. Thus, whatever caused such a thing to exist must itself be non-contingent (i.e. it cannot not exist), must be immaterial (since matter is contingent and came into being when the universe did), must transcend space and time (both of which came into existence when the universe did), must be incredibly powerful and intelligent (to cause such a thing as our vast universe), and must be personal.

One reason for imputing this last trait to the universe's cause is that the only potential entities which might at least partially fit the description stated above are either abstract objects, like numbers or platonic forms, or a mind. But abstract objects do not have causal powers and are not intelligent. The number three, for example, can't bring anything into existence. Only minds, which are personal, can do that.

Now it's true that the above description is not an exact fit with the God of theism who is also believed, at least in Christian theism, to be a trinity and perfectly good, but it's pretty close. Too close, in fact, for an atheist to take any comfort in the fact that the argument doesn't lead all the way to the God of Christian theism. It still leads to a being which is very much like the Christian God and which, if such a being exists, renders atheism false.

Here's a short video illustrating the foregoing argument:

Driving the Decisive Nail into the Coffin

Democrats and their media allies have been beside themselves over signals from Republicans that they will be loath to approve any Supreme Court nominee advanced by President Obama to fill the vacancy left by the sudden passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. All the usual rhetorical artillery has been wheeled out to be fired at the obdurate, obstructionist, racist Republicans, but the barrage has been thus far ineffectual given past statements by Senators Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer who urged that Democrats follow exactly the same policy they're now condemning when it was a Republican president who may have had an opportunity to make an appointment to the Court in his last year in office.

Now, however, comes the coup de grace to all claims by Democrats to be righteously doing the statesman-like thing while Republicans play an egregious game of partisan politics. C-Span has unearthed video of then Senate Judiciary Chairman Joe Biden calling for the Senate to refuse to approve a possible nomination by President George H.W.Bush in 1992. This video nails the coffin shut on the Democrats' pretense of nobility in the face of Republican scurrility.

Current Judiciary Charirman Charles Grassley had some fun with this the other day:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley held his ground on the Senate floor on Monday, putting forth the words of former senator and current Vice President Joe Biden — what Grassley called the “Biden Rules” — as support for the legislative body’s decision to block any replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia until after the 2016 election.

Grassley’s floor statement came immediately after Minority Leader Harry Reid argued that respect for the Constitution demanded that the Senate not block the nominee. In 1992, then-Senator Biden argued that if a seat on the Court opened up, then “what is fair to the nominee and is central to the process” would be for President George H.W. Bush to postpone nominating a replacement until after the 1992 election. As Chair of the Judiciary Committee, Biden occupied the same position now held by Grassley. Emphasizing Biden’s honesty and sincerity, the Iowa senator put forth eight “Biden Rules” to guide the Senate during the nomination process.

“The Biden Rules recognize ‘the framers intended the Senate to take the broadest view of its constitutional responsibility. The Biden Rules recognize the wisdom of those presidents – including another lawyer and former state lawmaker from Illinois — who exercised restraint by not submitting a Supreme Court nomination before The People had spoken.

The Biden Rules recognize the court can operate smoothly with eight members for some time, and ‘the cost of such a result, the need to re-argue three or four cases that will divide the Justices four to four, are quite minor compared to the cost that a nominee, the President, the Senate, and the Nation would have to pay for what assuredly would be a bitter fight.’

The Biden Rules recognize that under these circumstances, ‘[the President] should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not name a nominee until after the November election is completed.’

The Biden Rules recognize that under these circumstances, ‘[It does not] matter how good a person is nominated by the President.’ The Biden Rules recognize that ‘once the political season is under way … action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over. That is what is fair to the nominee and is central to the process.’

The Biden Rules recognize that ‘Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the President, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself.’

The Biden Rules recognize that under these circumstances, ‘the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.’”

Grassley closed his statement by saying: “If the President of the United States insists on submitting a nominee under these circumstances, Senator Biden, my friend from Delaware, the man who sat at a desk across the aisle and at the back of this Chamber for more than 35 years, knows what the Senate should do.”

Here's the video of Biden in 1992:

It might be noted in passing that Senator (now Vice-President) Biden may well be, among those still living, one of the men most responsible for the ugliness and polarization of our modern politics. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, one of the most eminently qualified jurists in the nation, to serve on the Supreme Court. Biden presided over hearings in which Senator Ted Kennedy and others savaged Bork, ultimately resulting in his rejection by the full senate.

It was the first time in our nation's history that a president's nominee for the Court was rejected, not for reasons of character or qualification, but simply because his judicial philosophy did not suit the majority party nor their special interest friends and donors. Ever since the Democrats tarnished a good man (and did it again to Clarence Thomas in 1991) there's been a deep antipathy between the two parties, an antipathy which has been exacerbated under Barack Obama.

Living in Flatland

To paraphrase Hamlet there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our view of reality. We observe the world with our five senses and take for granted that the world we perceive is exactly as we perceive it and exactly what's there. We simply assume that our senses give us an accurate and exhaustive picture of reality, but why should we think that?

Why, for example, should we suppose that just because our minds can only apprehend three dimensions (four, if you count time) that that's all there are? Could the world not consist of numerous dimensions that we can not only not perceive, but not even be capable of imagining? Could there not actually be entire worlds integrated with our world but closed off to us because our minds lack the necessary structure to perceive them?

One way to imagine what reality might be like if there actually are more than three dimensions of space is to think of ourselves as living in a two-dimensional world, a flatland, that's visited by a three-dimensional being as illustrated in this short video:

If we actually do consist of more than three dimensions we would look completely different to a being who could perceive those other dimensions than we do to each other. There could quite literally be, in other words, far more to us, and to reality, than what meets the eye.

Dawkins' Argument

News that biologist and uber atheist Richard Dawkins has suffered a stroke (apparently minor) brought to mind his attempts to undermine religious belief, specifically in his book titled The God Delusion. The book rocketed to the top of the best-seller charts and influenced who knows how many young people who lacked the skills to analyze the arguments it advanced against belief in God. Philosophers, however, even many who were sympathetic to Dawkins' naturalism, derided the book for its philosophical superficiality and, worse, its blunders.

For example, Dawkins claimed that the central argument of the book goes something like this:

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect is to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself, i.e. an intelligent designer.
3. The temptation is a false one because the hypothesis raises the larger problem of explaining who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious explanation for the complexity of life is Darwinian evolution.
5. We don't have an equivalent explanation in physics for cosmic fine-tuning.
6. We should not give up hope of finding a better explanation in physics for cosmic fine-tuning.
7. Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.

Dawkins' conclusion appears like a rabbit pulled magically out of a hat. Nothing in the premises leads to it. In fact, even if all six premises were correct, there's no logically possible world in which that conclusion follows from them. The most that might be inferred from this set of propositions is that perhaps we'll someday discover a good physical explanation for cosmic fine-tuning, but even if that were to happen it still wouldn't justify Dawkins' conclusion that God almost certainly does not exist.

As it happens, the conclusion is not only a non-sequitur but it's based on at least one premise which is patently false. Premises 1, 2, 5, and 6 are uncontroversial, and I'm willing to grant 4 just to be easy to get along with, but premise 3 is clearly erroneous.

Dawkins tries to support premise 3 by arguing that if the world's complexity requires an explanation then the designer of the world must itself be even more complex than the world it designed, and must itself require an explanation a forteriori. There are, however, at least three things wrong with this:

1. If it were concluded that a designer was the source of the complex design of the cosmos (or of living things) that conclusion stands whether we can explain the designer or not. We believed, for example, that gravity existed long before there was any explanation for it, and if some future astronauts landed on Mars and discovered there a six foot platinum cube with nearly perfect angles and facets as smooth as glass they'd certainly be justified in believing that the cube was left there by some intelligent beings even if the astronauts had no idea who they were, how they made the cube, how they got it to Mars, or how long ago they did it. None of that would be relevant to the inference that the cube was an artifact of intelligent agents.

2. Complexity is a property of physical, material things which have parts. If there is a designer of the space-time-matter universe it would transcend the universe and thus itself not be material, physical, or spatial. It would be pure, immaterial mind. Mind doesn't have parts, and Dawkins commits a category error when he argues that minds must be complex. The products of minds might be complex, but it doesn't follow that minds themselves are complex.

3. If everything needed to be explained before it could count as an explanation then nothing would ever be explained. We'd be caught in an infinite regress of explanations, none of which would be satisfactory until it, too, was explained.

I wish Prof. Dawkins well in his recovery and hope that his health fares much better in response to the ministrations of his doctors than has the central argument of The God Delusion in response to the ministrations of his philosophical critics.

The Diversity Myth

One of the many myths rampant in our modern politics is that the Democrat party is the party of diversity and inclusion and the Republican party is comprised of rich, white, red-necked bigots. This is what Progressives would like us to believe, but it simply doesn't conform to the facts. Consider, to take one example, the composition of the respective presidential fields. The Democrats are running two white, progressive/socialist candidates, neither of whom has ever accomplished anything outside of politics and whose average age is almost 72. The only diversity in this field is that one of them is female and the other male. Other than that it's hard to distinguish between them.

Compare that to the original Republican field which boasted an accomplished woman CEO (Carly Fiorina), an accomplished African American surgeon (Ben Carson), an Indian American governor (Bobby Jindal), two Hispanic senators (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio), an accomplished businessman (Donald Trump), and assorted other successful state governors (John Kasich, Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee).

Moreover, if we want to administer another kick to the diversity myth while it's down, consider what has just happened among Republicans in South Carolina: A female governor of Indian descent (Nikki Haley) was joined by an African American senator (Tim Scott) to endorse a Hispanic senator (Marco Rubio) for the Republican nomination for president. And this, mind you, in the heart of Dixie.

As for which party is in thrall to wealthy donors keep in mind that one of the scandals hanging around Mrs. Clinton like a bad odor is the fact that she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs just to give speeches, speeches the transcripts of which she is loath to make public. Remember, too, that many of the wealthiest people in the country are Democrats and wealthy labor and service unions pump millions of dollars into the Democratic party. The GOP does not have a monopoly on fat cats.

I'm not shilling here for the Republican party, with which I have my own disagreements, and in whose company I sit very uneasily. Nevertheless, though I personally don't see gender, race, and ethnicity as particularly important qualifications for elective office, if those things are important to people, if diversity is what voters are looking for, then the Republican party is where they'll find it.

Building Walls

Well. Pope Francis has decreed that anyone who wants to build a wall across America's southern border is no Christian. Christians don't build walls, they build bridges, the Pope has pontificated. A lot of people have interpreted his remarks to be aimed at Donald Trump who avers that he will build a wall, but actually most of the Republican candidates want to build the wall (or a fence) and so do a lot of other Americans who no doubt resent a Catholic Pope casting aspersions on their faith.

Francis' criticism is especially hard to take because, as many have already observed, he himself lives in the security afforded him by a massive wall whose size to be seen to be appreciated, a wall that almost encircles all of Vatican City.

Vatican Wall

Not only does the pope criticize Americans for wanting the same control over who comes into their country as he enjoys, but the Vatican has some of the strictest immigration and citizenship laws in the world.

Moreover, as far as I know, Vatican City is housing none of the Syrian refugees. They have plenty of space in St. Peter's Square and lots of space in the papal gardens that could be used for this purpose. Why doesn't the Holy Father insist that shelters be erected and refugees be allowed into these spaces where they can be fed and clothed?

Wouldn't you think that people who publicly disparage the sincerity of the Christianity of those who want to control who and how many immigrants are accepted into their country be themselves more assiduous in exhibiting the virtues they find lacking in those they criticize? Particularly if, like Pope Francis, they've been praised in the past for admitting that they're not in a position to pass judgment on others?

Advise and Consent

The President, Democrats in general, and the left-wing media are all in a swivet over statements by Republican leaders that they wouldn't look favorably on an attempt this late in the Obama presidency to appoint a Supreme Court justice to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia. Republican reluctance to cooperate has been called obstructionism, unconstitutional, unconscionable, unprecedented, and even, of course, racist. These are just some of the objections that have been raised in mighty chorus against the Republican plan, but, in truth, it's none of those things. In fact, not only is it not unprecedented, it's the very tactic endorsed by Senator Obama himself when George Bush nominated Samuel Alito, it was employed by a Democratic senate during the Eisenhower presidency, insisted upon by The New York Times during the Reagan presidency and by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer during the Bush presidency.

An article in The Federalist helpfully reminds amnesiac Democrats and their allies of their attempts over the years to block Republican presidents from making judicial appointments.

Senator Schumer (D, NY), for example, said in 2007 that, President George W. Bush shouldn’t get to pick any more Supreme Court justices because Schumer was afraid the bench leaned too far Right. Schumer made this remark a whole 19 months before the next president was inaugurated.

“We should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, except in extraordinary circumstances,” Schumer said in a speech to the liberal American Constitution Society. “They must prove by actions, not words, that they are in the mainstream rather than we have to prove that they are not.”

His remarks in 2007 weren’t the only time Schumer vowed to stop a Republican nominee. In 2004, he said he would do everything in his power to stop Bush from elevating Charles Pickering to a federal appeals court in 2004.

“I’m prepared to do everything I can to stop the nomination of Justice Pickering,” Schumer said. “We can do a lot better.”

The Federalist mentions other instances in which Schumer was involved in efforts to prevent the president from naming judges, but let's pass on to Senator Obama who supported the Democratic-led filibuster to stop Justice Samuel Alito from making it to the Supreme Court. In 2006 he said this:

There are some who believe that the president, having won the election, should have complete authority to appoint his nominee…that once you get beyond intellect and personal character, there should be no further question as to whether the judge should be confirmed. I disagree with this view.

Obama wasn’t the only Democratic senator to oppose Alito’s nomination, The Federalist notes. The late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) led an opposition coalition, which attempted to filibuster to block the confirmation process. Kennedy was joined by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who publicly stated they opposed Alito’s confirmation.

There are more examples at The Federalist link. The other day President Obama was asked about how he justified his own filibuster of Alito in light of his complaints about Republicans threatening to do the same thing. Having no good answer he awkwardly sought refuge in gobbledygook:

It seems that to refuse consent to a lame duck president who will throw the Court's ideological composition out of balance is perfectly sensible if the president is a scoundrel Republican and his noble opponents are Democrats. But, we are to surmise, such tactics are unseemly, obstructionist, unconstitutional, unconscionable, racist, and unprecedented if the president is a saintly Democrat and the refuseniks are demonic Republicans.

These people have evidently never heard about gooses and ganders, nor do they seem to comprehend the meaning of the word "hypocrisy."

Please Don't Vote

I read recently that the fifth most frequently googled question about Jeb Bush during the GOP debate prior to the New Hampshire primary election was whether the Republican candidate was related to former president George Bush (Exactly which George Bush they were asking about wasn't made clear):

... according to Google, a lot of people watching the CNN Republican presidential debate were curious about Bush's background — specifically, whether Jeb Bush is related to George Bush. It is the fifth-most Googled question about him.

Reading this causes one to wonder how many people who'll be voting in November know that Hillary Clinton is former president Bill Clinton's wife.

Recalling the words of Thomas Jefferson that "any nation which expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be," the fact that so many American voters had no idea as to the relationship between Jeb and George generated a feeling of despair for the future of our democracy.

Then came word from Gallup that their polling found that the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whom one prominent legal scholar named "the most influential justice of the last quarter-century," was nonetheless unknown to nearly a third of Americans (32%) and generated no opinion from another 12% in 2015, Scalia's 29th year on the nation's top court.

In any case, between now and November we'll be hearing lots of people tell us that it's our duty as citizens of a free republic to vote, that the right to vote is a precious privilege that we're morally obligated to exercise, etc. This is not exactly true. It is not our duty as citizens, at least not our primary duty, to vote. It's our first duty as citizens to be informed about who our leaders are and what they are about. It may not be interesting or "sexy," indeed, politics may strike us as tedious, but we have a duty as citizens to be informed about it nonetheless.

We also have a second duty, in my opinion. If we have not taken the trouble to learn at least the basics of how our government works, who the major players are, what their character is like, and what their guiding principles have been throughout their careers then to vote would be irresponsible. It would only compound the failure to fulfill our first duty.

So here's my plea: If your vote is based on a candidate's looks, eloquence, charm, ethnicity, or gender - none of which have anything to do with whether the candidate will be a good president - if you're attracted to a candidate because he or she is good at insulting people and/or making grandiose but empty promises, and if you know nothing much else about the candidate, please find something else to do on election day. Please don't vote.

What Difference, at This Point, Does it Make?

Every election cycle, it seems, there's a debate over whether the voting franchise should be extended to convicted felons. It appears now, according to former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, that during this cycle the debate could be over whether a felon should be permitted to serve as President of the United States. The Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, has almost certainly committed at least two felonies by violating two different federal statutes each of which carries a ten year prison sentence for each offense.

Here are some of the relevant excerpts from McCarthy's essay.

For all the surreal projection of normalcy, the race is enveloped by an extremely serious criminal investigation. If press reporting is to be believed — in particular, the yeoman’s work of Fox News’s Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne — Hillary Clinton, the likely nominee of one of the two major parties, appears to have committed serious felony violations of federal law.

So these Democrats play Russian roulette: hopefully assuming that the FBI won’t dare recommend criminal charges with the stakes so high; that the Obama Justice Department won’t prosecute if charges are recommended; that Obama will figure out a way to intervene with a pardon that won’t do Clinton too much damage, and that the public can be spun into thinking an investigation led by Obama appointees and career law-enforcement officers is somehow a Vast-Right-Wing-Conspiracy plot dreamt up by Republicans.

To take the simplest of many apparent national-security violations, it is a felony for a person “being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any . . . information relating to the national defense” to permit that information “through gross negligence . . . to be removed from its proper place of custody” or to be “delivered to anyone in violation of his trust” (Section 793(f) of Title 18, U.S. Code).

Mrs. Clinton was entrusted with national-defense information and knew that working with such classified intelligence was a substantial part of her duties as secretary of state. Despite this knowledge, she willfully, and against government rules, set up a private, non-secure e-mail communication system for all of her government-related correspondence — making it inevitable that classified matters would be discussed on the system.

This was gross negligence at best. And the easily foreseeable result is that classified intelligence was removed from its secure government repository and transmitted to persons not entitled to have it — very likely including foreign intelligence services that almost certainly penetrated Mrs. Clinton’s non-secure system.

The penalty for violating this penal statute is up to ten years’ imprisonment for each individual violation. Mind you, there are already 1,600 reported instances of classified information being transmitted via the Clinton server system, and the latest indications are that at least twelve, and as many as 30, private e-mail accounts are known to have trafficked in our nation’s defense secrets. Many of these account holders were certainly not cleared for access to the information — and none of them was permitted to access it in a non-secure setting.

[Then there are] the unknown e-mails. What has been revealed about Mrs. Clinton’s disclosed e-mails has been so shocking that we often forget: There are 30,000 other e-mails that she attempted to destroy. We do not know what’s in them, so it is only natural that we have focused instead on what is knowable — the e-mails that have been disclosed. But there have been media reports that the FBI, to which Mrs. Clinton finally surrendered her private servers some months ago, has been able to retrieve many of the “deleted” e-mails, perhaps even all of them.

Mrs. Clinton told us she destroyed these e-mails because they were private and unrelated to government business. Basically we are to believe that one of the busiest, highest-ranking officials in our government had time to send tens of thousands of e-mails that were strictly about yoga routines, her daughter’s bridesmaids’ dresses, and the like. This, from the same Mrs. Clinton who looked us in the eye and insisted that none of her e-mails contained classified information.

... wholly apart from any classified information crimes, there is another penal law defining an offense that is very easy to prove: the federal embezzlement statute (Section 641 of Title 18, U.S. Code). This provision targets anyone who, among other things, embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use . . . , or without authority . . . conveys or disposes of any record . . . of the United States or of any department or agency thereof . . . ; or . . . conceals, or retains the same with intent to convert it to his use . . . knowing it to have been embezzled, stolen, purloined or converted.

As with the afore-described crime of mishandling classified information, the penalty for violating this statute is up to ten years’ imprisonment for each instance of theft.

To the extent Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails involved government business, they were not private — they were government records. When she left the State Department, however, she took these government records with her: She didn’t tell anyone she had them, and she converted them to her own use — preventing the government from complying with lawful Freedom of Information Act disclosure demands, congressional inquiries, and government-disclosure obligations in judicial proceedings, as well as undermining the State Department’s reliance on the completeness of its record-keeping in performing its crucial functions.

There's more at the link. If Mrs. Clinton's elected to the presidency, as wits have suggested, we may have to move the Oval Office out of the White House and into the Big House.

Exit question: If Mrs. Clinton does become president could she pardon herself?

Epistemology 101

Professor Laurence A. Moran, a biochemist at the University of Toronto and evangelistic atheist, recently found himself in conversation with a theologian named Denis Alexander. He subsequently posted a critique of their conversation on his blog Sandwalk. Whatever the merits of Moran's overall criticism of Alexander may be he certainly takes a misstep at the start when he says this:

If you believe in such a being [as God] then that conflicts with science as a way of knowing because you are believing in something without reliable evidence to support your belief. Scientists shouldn't do that and neither should any others who practice the scientific way of knowing. Denis Alexander thinks there are other, equally valid, ways of knowing but he wasn't able to offer any evidence that those other ways produce true knowledge.

There are several problems with what Prof. Moran says in this paragraph.

1. He conflates knowing and believing. He oscillates between talking about beliefs and talking about knowledge, but knowledge and belief are not the same thing. One must believe something in order to claim to know it, but merely believing something isn't the same as knowing it. You can believe something and not know it, but you can't know it and not believe it. To be knowledge the belief must be warranted somehow, and it must have a high probability of being true.

2. He assumes evidence is required to justify a belief. That is something he himself apparently believes, but what evidence could he offer to justify believing it? He simply believes this claim without any evidence at all. Presumably, he means that our beliefs must be supported by sensory evidence, but this is surely false. Scientists as well as laymen hold all sorts of beliefs for which there's no sensory evidence whatsoever.

Many believe, for instance, that life originated purely naturalistically although there's not a shred of evidence that it did or that such an origin is even physically possible. They often seek to avoid the implications of cosmic fine-tuning by promoting the existence of a multiverse for which there's no empirical evidence. They believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and spend their careers searching for it, despite the utter lack of any evidence for such life. They believe that it's wrong to falsify data on a scientific paper, but cannot explain scientifically why anything at all is wrong.

Put another way, I can know that I'm experiencing pain even if I have no way to prove it to you; I can know that, despite much evidence against me, I'm innocent of a crime of which I've been accused; I can know that as a young boy I found a dollar bill, though I'd be helpless if asked to present evidence of the fact. These are all things that I can know despite my inability to produce evidence that I could offer to anyone else, especially to someone predisposed to doubt me.

If Prof. Moran were to reply that I have the evidence of my own internal states, the subjective experience of pain, the assurance of my innocence, the memory of finding the money, and that these states count as evidence, he'd be putting himself in an awkward position. He'd have to explain why these states warrant the relevant beliefs, but the internal assurance one might have of experiencing God does not warrant believing that God exists.

3. He's simply mistaken to assert that there's no reliable evidence to support theism. It's been argued on this site for the past twelve years that as Pascal said, there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not dead set against it. Alvin Plantinga gives a couple dozen arguments for theism among which, in my opinion, the best are certain forms of the cosmological, moral, and cosmic fine-tuning arguments as well as the argument from the contingency of the universe.

I'm sure Professor Moran is a fine biochemist, but perhaps he'd do well to stick to his field and avoid dogmatic philosophical pronouncements.

For a more extended critique of Prof. Moran's argument against Alexander see philosopher V.J.Torley's piece here.

Three and a Half Problems

One of the most fascinating problems philosophers wrestle with is the problem of consciousness. What exactly is consciousness? How is it produced? What is its relationship to the brain? Etc.

Usually we think of consciousness as a state of being aware, but how does awareness arise from inanimate matter? How can atoms and molecules make us aware of ourselves and of the world external to ourselves? How does this all happen? How, for example, does an electro-chemical reaction in the brain generate the sensation of red?

Peter at Conscious Entities has an interesting discussion of what he calls the Three and a Half Problems of Consciousness.

The problems he discusses are the problems of Qualia, Intentionality, Morality, and Relevance. The article is a good primer on what is one of the most cutting edge fields in contemporary philosophy and also one of the most vexing because the problems seem so intractable.

Qualia are the sensations that we experience as part of our conscious awareness of the world. The sensations of color, sound, emotions, etc. are the qualia of our experience.

Intentionality refers to the fact that thoughts are about things. How is it that a particular flow of atoms, chemicals, and electricity can be about something.

The problem of moral responsibility concerns, among other things, the question of how we can be responsible for our actions unless we somehow cause them, but if we are bound by the laws of physics then in what sense is it us who causes our actions rather than the laws of physics which constrain us?

Anyway, read what Peter has to say on these things and you'll be well on your way to a graduate degree in the philosophy of mind.