Reflections on the News

If I had my way there are two terms upon which I'd have the media place a moratorium, those being lone wolf and radical extremist. The first is used as promiscuously by media talking heads as some millenials use the word "like." Listening to media grandees discuss terrorist incidents is a variation on the infamous Chinese water torture. One finds oneself gritting one's teeth in anticipation of the next mention of a "lone wolf" much as the torture victim tenses himself in anticipation of the next drop of water striking his head with the force of a hammer. Surely the vocabularies of these ladies and gentlemen is not so depauperate as to prohibit them from employing from time to time a synonym.

The second term, radical extremist, is simply inapt. Islamic terrorists who seek to kill non-Muslims are no more radical extremists than are Christian Amishman or missionaries radical extremists. The pacifist Amishman and the evangelical missionary are simply trying to live out what they believe the New Testament calls Christians to do. They're seeking to emulate the one whose followers they desire to be. In precisely the same way the Islamic terrorist is simply striving to fulfill the injunctions imposed upon him by the Koran, among which are the duty to hate the infidel and kill him wherever he can, and to emulate the example of violence and terror set by the one whose followers they desire to be. The Islamic terrorist is not an extremist, he's a purist.

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There's been another tragic police shooting. A female police officer appears to have shot and killed an unarmed man, apparently for no very good reason. It's national news now, and the Federal Department of Justice is even investigating. This is interesting because a couple of years ago in a town near where I live another female officer shot and killed an unarmed man, apparently for no very good reason, and it never became more than a local story and no federal investigation took place. So what's the salient difference between the two cases? Why does the media promote one story into the national headlines and onto nationwide evening news shows but not the other one?

Could it be that it's because the media never misses an opportunity to stir up racial hostility? I ask this because the only difference between the earlier case and the more recent one is that, although in both instances the officer was a white female, in the earlier case the victim was a white male and in the latter case he was a black male. Apparently, it's media policy when a cop kills a white man to yawn and roll over, but when a cop kills a black man, the media rouses itself to herald the news so that maybe they can incite a protest or, with luck, a violent riot. I know this sounds harsh, but what else could be their motive for treating these two stories so differently?

The fact is that the media is largely a liberal institution and the left has a vested interest in keeping the racial pot simmering. Racial unrest and dissatisfaction gets other liberals elected to political office, aggrandizes the left's power, and gives media folks lots of conflict narratives, their favorite theme, to write and talk about. Racial tension is not so good for the rest of us, but it's bread and butter for liberal politicos and journalists.

The Language Problem

I've been enjoying Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the theory of evolution and/or the history of the study of linguistics. Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views concurs with this commendation, and goes even further. Rather than me telling you what the book is about, I'll quote Egnor:

Tom Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and it's superb. Wolfe's theme is that human language is unique and is not shared in any way with other animals. He argues forcefully that evolutionary stories about the origin of human language are not credible.

In the first chapter of his book, Wolfe describes an article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology from 2014, co-authored by leading linguist Noam Chomsky. Wolfe declares that:

"The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever," [the authors] concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we'll keep trying, they said gamely... but we'll have to start from zero again. One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. "In the last 40 years," he and the other seven were saying, "there has been an explosion of research on this problem," and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia....

One hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced, and they had learned...nothing...In that same century and a half, Einstein discovered the speed of light and the relativity of speed, time and distance... Pasteur discovered that microorganisms, notably bacteria, cause an ungodly number of diseases, from head colds to anthrax and oxygen-tubed, collapsed-lung, final-stage pneumonia... Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the so-called building blocks genes are made of ...and 150 years' worth of linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline discovered... nothing...about language. What is the problem? What's the story?...What is it that they still don't get after a veritable eternity?

Wolfe provides a précis of his argument:

Speech is not one of man's several unique attributes -- speech is the attribute of all attributes!

Yet despite almost two centuries of speculations and hypothesizing we're no closer today to being able to explain what language is or how we come to have it than we've ever been. Indeed, Darwin and his votaries tried to come up with a plausible explanation and failed so utterly that scientists gave up for almost eighty years trying to explain it. Says Wolfe:

It is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man - language - was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

It's also hard to believe that it's been 67 years since 1949 and still no progress has been made on this question. Egnor writes:

And yet, as Wolfe points out, Darwinists are at an utter loss to explain how language -- the salient characteristic of man -- "evolved." None of the deep drawer of evolutionary just-so stories come anywhere close to explaining how man might have acquired the astonishing ability to craft unlimited propositions and concepts and subtleties within subtleties using a system of grammar and abstract designators (i.e. words) that are utterly lacking anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Egnor, who is himself a neuroscientist, closes his piece with these words:

I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities -- the intellect's ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing -- and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language -- a simulacrum of our abstract minds -- has no root in the animal world.

Language is the tool by which we think abstractly. It is sui generis. It is a gift, a window into the human soul, something we are made with, and it did not evolve. Language is a rock against which evolutionary theory wrecks, one of the many rocks -- the uncooperative fossil record, the jumbled molecular evolutionary tree, irreducible complexity, intricate intracellular design, the genetic code, the collapsing myth of junk DNA, the immaterial human mind -- that comprise the shoal that is sinking Darwin's Victorian fable.

The charm of Wolfe's book is that it reads like a novel, which is the metier for which Wolfe is famous. It's free of scientific jargon, it's funny and contains some fascinating insights into several of the major figures in the history of the search for an explanation for the origin and nature of language. Plus, it's only 169 pages long. All in all a great read.

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. III)

This is the third in the series of reflections on Joseph Bottum's essay titled Christians and Postmoderns. Scroll down for the two previous posts on his essay.

Bottum writes that:

[Theists] should not become entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the key - the postmodern attack on modernity is right: without God, essences are the will to power. Without God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful or good is actually an attempt to compel other people to agree.

Of course believers are tempted, when they hear postmodern deconstructions of modernity, to argue in support of modernity. After all, believers share with modern nonbelievers a trust in the reality of truth. They affirm the efficacy of human action, the movement of history towards a goal, the possibility of moral and aesthetic judgments. But believers share with postmoderns the recognition that truth rests on a faith that has itself been the sole subject of the long attack of modern times.

The most foolish thing believers could do is to make concessions now to a modernity that is already bankrupt (and that despises them anyway) and thus to make themselves subject to a second attack - the attack of the postmodern on the modern. Faithful believers are not responsible for the emptiness of modernity. They struggled against it for as long as they could, and they must not give in now. They must not, at this late date, become scientific, bureaucratic, and technological; skeptical, self-conscious, and self-mocking.

A better word in the previous sentence might have been "scientistic" rather than "scientific," scientism being the belief that only science can give us knowledge and that any questions science can't answer, such as metaphysical questions, aren't worth worrying about.

In any case, "premoderns" are torn between modernity and postmodernity precisely because they share so much in common with both. They bristle at the withering assaults of the postmoderns on modernity's belief in objective truth, particularly truth about morals. Yet they are in fundamental agreement with the postmodern critique of the futility of modernity's attempt to ground meaning and truth in the philosophical quicksands of positivism, naturalistic metaphysics, the scientific method, or whatever. They recognize that modernity reduces man to a machine and thus robs him of his dignity and worth and inevitably his human rights.

We live in a tragically empty age, one in which the promises of secular reason to usher in a golden era of enlightenment and knowledge were dashed on the rocks of two world wars and the bloodiest century in human history. Postmoderns rightly ridicule the impotence of reason, it's utter inability to offer human beings meaning or to lead us into a humanist nirvana, but they offer nothing in its place other than subjectivity and nihilism.

We can't go back to the premodern era, of course, nor would many of us want to. Modernity, despite its failures and shortcomings, has made the physical burdens of life immeasurably easier to bear. Perhaps, though, we could, if we really set our minds to it, import the crucial assumptions of the premodern age about the necessity of a transcendent foundation for knowledge, meaning, morals, and human nature into our present era. Then not only would the physical burdens of life be easier to bear but so, too, would our spiritual and existential burdens.

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. II)

I'd like to continue our look at the First Things essay (Christians and Postmoderns) by Joseph Bottum that I began yesterday.

Bottum writes that:

[T]he massive scientific advance of modernity reveals how easy it is to discover facts, and modernity's collapse reveals how hard it is to hold knowledge. We have an apparatus for discovery unrivaled by the ages, yet every new fact means less than the previously discovered one, for we lack what turns facts to knowledge: the information of what the facts are for.

Precisely so. Modernity offers us no satisfying interpretive framework for assigning meaning to the facts discovered by science. It attempts to supply the need for such a framework by interpreting everything in terms of evolutionary development, but the view that each of us is just a meaningless cipher in the grand flow of time and evolution fails somehow to quench our deepest longings. According to the modern worldview there really is no purpose for the existence of anything. The facts discovered by science, as important as they may be for the furtherance of our technology, don't really have any metaphysical significance. Like everything else, they're just there.

Bottum continues:

And so "we must learn to live after truth," as a group of European academics wrote in After Truth: A Postmodern Manifesto. "Nothing is certain, not even this . . . The modern age opened with the destruction of God and religion. It is ending with the threatened destruction of all coherent thought." Nietzsche may have been the first to see this clearly .... But, even in the fundamental thinkers of high modernity, hints can be found that knowledge requires God: Descartes uses God in the Meditations in order to escape from the interiority where the cogito has stranded him; Kant uses God as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to hold on to the possibility of morality.

What [theistic] believers have in common with postmoderns is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge. To be a believer, however, is to be subject to an attack that postmoderns, holding truthlessness to themselves like a lover, never have to face. The history of modernity in the West is in many ways nothing more than the effort to destroy medieval faith. It is a three-hundred-year attempt to demolish medieval (especially Catholic) claims to authority, and to substitute a structure of science and ethics based solely on human rationality.

But with the failure to discover any such rational structure - seen by the postmoderns - the only portion of the modern project still available to a modern is the destruction of faith. It should not surprise us that, in very recent times, attacks on what little is left of medieval belief have become more outrageous: resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic broadsides, vicious mockery of evangelical preaching, desecrations of the Host in Catholic masses. For modern men and women, nothing else remains of the high moral project of modernity: these attacks are the only good thing left to do. The attackers are convinced of the morality of their attack not by the certainty of their aims - who's to say what's right or wrong? - but by opposition from believers.

I take Bottum to be saying here that modernity, in its death throes, wishes only to finish the business of killing off God, or at least belief in God. Modernity has nothing else to offer. It cannot give answers to any of life's most gripping existential questions. Nowhere in the writings of the anti-theists at large today do we find an answer to any of the following: Why is the universe here? How did life come about? Why is the universe so magnificently fine-tuned for life? Where did human consciousness come from? Why do we feel joy when we encounter beauty? How can we prove that our reason is reliable without using reason to prove it? How can we account for our conviction that we have free will? What obligates us to care about others? Why do we feel guilt? Who do I refer to when I refer to myself? What gives human beings worth, dignity, and rights? If death is the end justice is unattainable, so why do we yearn for it? Why do we need meaning and purpose? What is our purpose?

Ask the Richard Dawkins' of the world those questions and all you'll get in reply is a shrug of the shoulders or a recitation of the alleged historical crimes of the Church. They dodge the question because they have no answer. This is a bit ironic: Neither modern nor postmodern naturalism has an answer to the most profound questions we can ask. The only possible answer lies in the God of the "premodern," and this is the one solution to man's existential emptiness that the modern and postmodern naturalist simply cannot abide.

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. I)

Having just this week finished talking about the philosophical distinctions between premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews in my classes I thought it might be useful to rerun some posts on the subject from earlier this year. This one is the first in a three-part series:

There are in the West three basic ways to look at the world, three worldviews which serve as lenses through which we interpret the experiences of our lives. Those three worldviews are essentially distinguished by their view of God, truth, and the era in which they were dominant among the cultural elite. We may, with some license, label these the premodern, modern, and postmodern. The premodern, lasting from ancient times until the Enlightenment (17th century), was essentially Christian. The modern, which lasted until roughly WWII, was essentially naturalistic and secular, and the postmodern, which has been with us now for a couple of generations, is hostile to the Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and objective truth.

I recently came across a wonderful treatment of the tension between these three "metanarratives" in an essay written by medieval scholar Joseph Bottum for First Things back in 1994. FT reprinted his article in an anniversary issue, and I thought it would be useful to touch on some of the highlights.

Bear in mind that although the terms premodern, modern and postmodern refer to historical eras there are people who exemplify the qualities of each of these in every era, including our own. Thus though we live in a postmodern age due to the dominance of postmodern assumptions among the shapers of contemporary thought, especially in the academy, there are lots of premoderns and moderns around. Indeed, outside our universities I suspect most people are either premodern or modern in their outlook.

About a quarter of the way into his essay Bottum, writing on behalf of the Christian worldview, says this:

We cannot revert to the premodern, we cannot return to the age of faith, for we were all of us raised as moderns.

And yet, though we cannot revert, we nonetheless have resources that may help us to advance beyond these late times. The modern project that attacked the Middle Ages has itself been under attack for some time. For some time, hyper-modern writers have brought to bear against their modern past the same sort of scarifying analysis that earlier modern writers brought against the premodern past. These later writers, supposing the modern destruction of God to be complete, have turned their postmodern attacks upon the modern project of Enlightenment rationality.

The postmodern project is, as Francois Lyotard put it, a suspicion of all metanarratives based on reason. It rejects the Enlightenment confidence that human reason can lead us to truth about the world, particularly truth about the important matters of meaning, religion and morality. Indeed, postmodern thinkers are skeptical of any claims to a "truth" beyond simple empirical facts.

Bottum continues:

In some sense, of course, these words premodern, modern, and postmodern are too slippery to mean much. Taken to refer to the history of ideas, they seem to name the periods before, during, and after the Enlightenment, but taken to refer to the history of events, they seem to name the period from creation to the rise of science, the period from the rise of science until World War II, and the period since the war. It is tempting to define the categories philosophically, rather than historically, around the recognition that knowledge depends upon the existence of God. But the better modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes and Kant, as opposed to, say, Voltaire) recognize that dependence in some way or another.

Perhaps, though definitions based on intent are always weak, the best definition nonetheless involves intent: it is premodern to seek beyond rational knowledge for God; it is modern to desire to hold knowledge in the structures of human rationality (with or without God); it is postmodern to see the impossibility of such knowledge.

In other words, premoderns believe we can have knowledge of God through direct experience apart from reason. As Pascal put it, "The heart has reasons that reason can never know." Moderns believe that knowledge can only come through the exercise of our reason. Postmoderns hold that moderns are deluding themselves. None of us can separate our reason from our biases, prejudices, experiences and so on, all of which shape our perspective and color the lenses through which we view the world. For the postmodern there is no such thing as objective reason or truth.

Bottum again:

The premoderns said that without God, there would be no knowledge, and the postmoderns say we have no God and have no knowledge. The premoderns said that without the purposefulness of final causation, all things would be equally valueless, and the postmoderns say there is no purpose and no value. The premoderns said that without an identity of reality and the Good, there would be no right and wrong, and the postmoderns say there is neither Good nor right and wrong. Though they disagree on whether God exists, premoderns and postmoderns share the major premise that knowing requires His existence. Only for a brief period in the history of the West-the period of modern times-did anyone seriously suppose that human beings could hold knowledge without God.

Here is an interesting insight. Christians hold in common with modern atheists that there is objective truth, that there is meaning to life, and that there is moral right and wrong. At the same time they hold in common with postmodern atheists (not all postmoderns are atheists, it should be stressed) that none of those beliefs can be sustained unless there is a God. Does this, as Bottum alleges, put Christians closer to postmoderns than to moderns?

More tomorrow.

The Sniper and the Sadist

Here's a story particularly difficult, I think, for those who believe that war is never the answer. I don't recount the story to belittle anyone's principles, but rather to suggest how difficult it is to hold consistently to our principles, whatever they are, in the world in which we live.

The story unfolded in Syria where a sadistic ISIS executioner was going from town to town gleefully killing prisoners that ISIS had labelled as spies. He did this by burning them to death with a flamethrower.

The U.S. had placed this monster on its "kill list" several months ago and he was finally tracked down near Raqqa in Syria where he and several of his assistants were preparing to immolate twelve terrified hostages, eight men and four women. The assistants were setting up camera equipment to film the grisly deaths.

A British sniper was positioned almost a mile away, and just as this horrid ISIS executioner was about to fire his flamethrower the sniper fired his rifle. Here's the account in the New York Post:

A sharpshooter killed a top ISIS executioner and three other jihadists with a single bullet from nearly a mile away — just seconds before the fiend was set to burn 12 hostages alive with a flamethrower, according to a new report.

The British Special Air Service marksman turned one of the most hated terrorists in Syria into a fireball by using a Barrett .50-caliber rifle to strike a fuel tank affixed to the jihadi’s back, the UK’s Daily Star reported Sunday.

The pack exploded, killing the sadistic terrorist and three of his flunkies, who were supposed to film the execution, last month, the paper said.

The ISIS butcher — who reportedly delighted in burning hostages alive — had been on a US “kill list” for several months, sources told the paper, which did not identify the sniper or the executioner.

He and his band of wicked men had been traveling around ISIS-held compounds in Syria slaughtering civilians labeled as spies. Their prisoners were tied to stakes or thrown in cages before being torched by the executioner, according to the report. ISIS started using flamethrowers after the torture method was popularized in North Korea.

The ISIS killer was so feared that his victims would beg to be shot rather than be set on fire.

Just before the sniper rescue operation outside of Raqqa, Syria, “the SAS team moved into an overwatch position above a village where they were told the execution was going to take place,” a source told the Star.

“Up to 12 civilians were going to be murdered — eight men and four women.

“The executioner gave some sort of rambling speech . . . then when he finished, the SAS sniper opened fire,” the source said. The captives were then rescued by British and US special forces.

So, here's a question to mull over. Was the sniper morally wrong to kill the jihadi?

Repeat After Him

"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." So cautioned Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

Why did Crick feel it necessary to admonish his fellow biologists to resist the temptation to think that what they study was not designed? Well, perhaps because of phenomena depicted in videos like this:

One of the puzzling questions this video raises is how the complex of proteins which works in tandem with the DNA could have arisen in the first place. DNA produces the proteins but DNA can't work without them, so if DNA can't work without them how did it produce them? It's very puzzling.

Here's another question. DNA codes for proteins, but what is the source of information that directs the proteins to the proper regions of the cell or the body and then instructs them to build the structures they do? If DNA codes for proteins what codes for this information and where in the cell does this coding mechanism reside? Moreover, how is the information that directs the proteins mediated? How are the information translated into the action of the proteins?

One more question. DNA codes for proteins, but what is the source of the information that controls an animal's behavior? Where does that information reside and how is it passed from generation to generation?

These are baffling questions so we must just shove them aside and not think about them. Instead we should all close our eyes real tight and repeat after Professor Crick: "These things were not designed. These things were not designed. These things were not ..."

Deplorables

What was most dismaying about Hillary Clinton's recent "Basket of Deplorables" faux pas was not that she said that there are some deplorable people supporting Trump because there are (and some supporting her as well), nor that she went so far as to say that those undesirables comprise fully half of his support and, by implication, roughly 25% of the nation's voters (which they surely don't, but Hillary, like The Donald, has never been known to be punctilious about facts).

The truly regrettable aspect of what she said is that it reflects the left's skewed, tendentious definitions of the pejoratives she used.

Here are her words:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their Web sites that used to only have eleven thousand people—now have eleven million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.

Listening to some of the liberal talk shows on cable the last couple of days it was clear that to many of Hillary's supporters, and quite probably Hillary herself, a racist is anyone who thinks voters should have an ID, a sexist is anyone who disparages the first female nominee for president, a homophobe is anyone who opposes gay marriage, a xenophobe is anyone who thinks we should take control of our borders, an Islamophobe is anyone troubled by the fact that devotees of sharia do not share the values upon which this country was founded, and a bigot is anyone so old-fashioned as to suspect that 40 year-old men do not belong in your ten year-old daughter's restroom.

Perhaps I've exaggerated, but if so, not by much. To define people as Hillary supporters are trying to define Trump voters is neither accurate nor helpful to our public discourse. It's not only slanderous, but it's, in fact, a form of censorship of ideas, and it explains in part why a buffoonish prevaricator like Donald Trump is so popular with average Americans. People are tired of leftist elitists defining them as "deplorables" when they know that they and their families and friends are good, decent people. Trump is a deeply flawed candidate, many of his supporters reason, but at least he's not going to misrepresent and slander them.

Moreover, it's unseemly for a woman who recklessly made our national secrets available to anyone with the technical expertise of a high school hacker, who refused to grant extra security to the diplomats in the Benghazi consulate, who accepted huge contributions to her foundation from foreign governments while serving as the chief foreign policy officer of the United States, and who consistently and persistently lied about all of this, to question the character of Americans who have done none of those things.

Who should be calling whom a "deplorable"?

Fire

It's easy to take things for granted as we go through our everyday lives, but when we stop and think about some of those things it can just take our breath away.

Consider, for example, fire. When we reflect upon all the things about earth that have to be just right for fire to exist and then think about all the physical characteristics of an animal that have to be just right for that animal to be able to use fire, and then contemplate what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed, it just leaves one shaking his head in amazement.

In this 21 minute video Australian geneticist Michael Denton walks us through the astonishing series of properties and characteristics of the earth, fire, and mankind that have to be precisely calibrated in order for humans to have developed the culture that we have today. Had any of those properties been other than what they are humans might never have survived at all, much less developed an advanced culture.

Someone hearing all this for the first time might well be astounded by the fortuity of it all.

The book on which the video is based is available here.

How the West Blessed the World

I find myself often referring in conversation with friends to Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won. Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had it's genesis in the West.

His theory, convincingly defended, to my mind, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were. He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they imposed "modernity" on much of the non-Western world. It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anti-colonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, never having made anything better for anyone, blithely and foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

Woodberry's paper can be read in pdf here.

Receding Tide

Pat Buchanan suggests that the Clinton campaign is losing momentum and a lot of people, including people in her campaign, are puzzled as to why she's not running away with this race given Trump's uncanny ability to shoot himself in the foot whenever he's given the opportunity.

Here's Buchanan:

Sixty days out, one senses she has lost momentum – the “Big Mo” of which George H.W. Bush boasted following his Iowa triumph in 1980 – and her campaign is in a rut, furiously spinning its wheels.

The commander in chief forum Wednesday night should have been a showcase for the ex-secretary of state’s superior knowledge and experience.

Instead, Clinton looked like a witness before a grand jury, forced to explain her past mistakes and mishandling of classified emails at State.

“Of the two candidates,” the New York Times reported, “Mrs. Clinton faced by far the tougher and most probing questions from the moderator, Matt Lauer of NBC, and from an audience of military veterans about her use of private email, her vote authorizing the Iraq war, her hawkish foreign policy views...”

On defense most of the time, Clinton scored few points.

And with a blistering attack on Lauer, the Times all but threw in the towel and conceded that the Donald won the night. “Moderator of Clinton-Trump Forum Fields A Storm of Criticism,” was the headline as analyst Michael Grynbaum piled on: “Mr. Lauer found himself besieged on Wednesday evening by critics of all political stripes, who accused the anchor of unfairness, sloppiness, and even sexism in his handling of the event.”

When your allies are ripping the refs, you’ve probably lost the game.

Moreover, when it comes to her strongest suit, foreign policy, before Clinton can elaborate on her vision, she is forced to answer for her blunders.

Why did she vote for the war in Iraq? Why did she push for the war in Libya that produced this hellish mess? Does she still defend her handling of the Benghazi massacre? What happened to her “reset” with Russia?

Most critically, when facing the press, which she has begun to do after eight months of stonewalling, she is invariably dragged into the morass of the private server, the lost-and-found emails, her inability to understand or abide by State Department rules on classified and secret documents, and FBI accusations of extreme carelessness and duplicity.

Then there are the steady stream of revelations about the Clinton Foundation raking in hundreds of millions from dictators and despots who did business with Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

And with thousands of emails still out there, the contents of which are known to her adversaries, she will likely have IEDs going off beneath her campaign all the way to November.

My hunch is that polls will continue to show Trump gaining, especially in the battleground states. Hillary seems to be casting about for a way to damage Trump but, despite the fact that he offers so many targets for her to aim at, he seems so far to be made of teflon. This must be galling for the Clintonites because every time Trump opens his mouth he seems to say something that should make him a laughingstock, yet Clinton can't effectively criticize him because every accusation made by her or her supporters seems to boomerang back on her or her surrogates.

For example, George Stephanopolous, a Clintonite and host of a Sunday talk show on ABC, asked Trump's campaign manager, Kelley Ann Conway, whether she thought it was a good idea to have a sexual harasser (i.e. Roger Ailes) advising Trump. This might have been an effective question if made on behalf of any other candidate, but an obvious retort to the Clintons, if anyone presses Ailes' access to Trump, is to ask whether it's a good idea for Hillary to be taking advice from the sexual harasser to whom she's married.

Again, Hillary avers that Trump is lying about his university, Trump U, and he probably is, but when Hillary calls someone else a liar people laugh out loud at the absurdity and chutzpah of an allegation of mendacity coming from the woman whose name is almost synonymous with duplicity.

Others have said that Trump's not qualified to be president, and of the 17 original Republican candidates he's surely the least qualified, but most of the people scoffing at Trump's qualifications voted for Obama in 2008, a man whose qualifications for serving as president could have been listed on a post-it note in 50 pt. font.

A final example: Daughter Chelsea has called Trump a misogynist which would be a serious charge indeed were she not the daughter of one of the most notorious users and abusers of women ever to walk the halls of the White House.

"Meanwhile," Buchanan writes, "Donald Trump’s message has begun to come through – loud, clear and consistent."

He will secure the border. He will renegotiate the trade deals that have been killing U.S. manufacturing and costing American jobs. He will be a law-and-order president who will put America first. He will keep us out of wars like Iraq. He will talk to Vladimir Putin, smash ISIS, back the cops and the vets, and rebuild the military.

Other than being the first woman president, what is the great change that Hillary Clinton offers America?

Unfortunately for Trump, Hillary may well start off the evening on November 8th with 240 of the 270 electoral college votes she needs to win just because she's a Democrat and all but certain to carry big states like California and New York. It'll take some tectonic events between now and then to overcome that math and shift it into Trump's favor.

Metaphysical Freeloader

Note: This post ran on VP three years ago, but, given what my students and I are talking about in class, I thought it'd be helpful to run it again.

P.Z. Myers is a very devout atheist. He's committed to an evolutionary view of life so it's perplexing that he makes so many moral pronouncements in his recent condemnation of atheistic fellow-traveler Richard Dawkins' latest transgressions against Myers' moral sensibilities. Myers quotes from an article in The Times magazine in which Dawkins discusses an incident from his childhood:

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

That was Dawkins saying that being briefly fondled by his teacher as a child was no big deal. Well, it is to Myers. Note the moral outrage in his criticism of Dawkins:

I can think of some lasting harm: he seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children. He was a victim of an inexcusable violation; that he can shrug it off does not mean it was OK, or ‘zero bad’, or something trivial.

Should I have raised my children with such a lack of self-respect that they should have allowed dirty old men to play with their genitals? I would have wanted them to inform me, so that such behavior could be stopped.

Just when did it stop being OK for acquaintances to put their hands inside Richard Dawkins shorts? I presume it would be an utterly intolerable act now, of course — at what age do the contents of childrens’ pants stop being public property?

Should we be giving pedophiles the idea that a “mild touching up” is reasonable behavior? It’s just a little diddling...it does no “lasting harm”. [T]hat sounds like something out of NAMBLA.

And that all Richard Dawkins experienced was a brief groping does not mean that greater harm was not being done. That man was a serial child molester; do we know that he didn’t abuse other children to a greater degree? That there aren’t former pupils living now who bear greater emotional scars?

We do not excuse harm to others because some prior barbaric age was indifferent to that harm. Furthermore, the excuse doesn’t even work: are we supposed to believe that a child-fondling teacher would have been permissible in the 1950s? Seriously? Was that ever socially acceptable? And even if it was, in some weird version of British history, it does not excuse it. It means British schools were vile nests of child abuse, just like Catholic churches.

Thanks for swapping the moral high ground for a swampy mire of ambiguity, Richard. I’m not going to argue that compelling kids to memorize Bible verses and fear hell, as stupid an excuse for education as that is, was child abuse, while getting manhandled by lascivious priests was a trivial offense, to be waved away as harmless. I’m sure many Catholics are quite gleeful that Richard Dawkins has now embraced the same moral relativism that they use to rationalize crimes against children.

Myers is incensed that Dawkins would pooh-pooh what Myers sees as a terrible wrong. He condemns the act because of the harm it does, and expresses disdain, while he's at it, for Dawkins' moral relativism.

Now I share all of these sentiments with Myers, but what I'd like to know is where does Myers think his moral sensibilities come from? If he says they've evolved in us over the eons then why, exactly, should we pay them any heed? Evolution molded us for life in the stone age, not the modern age. Besides, if our sense of moral aversion to pedophilia is a product of evolution then so is the urge to indulge in pedophilic behavior. Why does the aversion take precedence over the indulgence? Why is the antipathy toward molestation any more "right" than the desire to fondle children if both are the products of evolution?

Moreover, how can an impersonal process like evolution impose a moral duty on us to refrain from molesting children in the first place? Moral duties cannot be imposed upon us by an impersonal force or process. They can only be imposed by the personal Creator of the universe, but Myers is absolutely hostile to the idea that such a Creator exists. Yet the fact is that for someone who shares Myers' worldview there are no grounds whatsoever for saying that pedophilia is wrong because in the absence of a personal, transcendent moral authority we have no moral duties at all.

Myers can say he doesn't like what happened to the young Dawkins and doesn't like Dawkins' minimizing of it, but for him to talk as if there's something terribly wrong with it, for him to talk as if there's much more than a simple expression of his personal distaste involved, is just silly.

As I argue in my novels (see links above right) when an atheist makes a moral judgment, he's essentially acting as if God existed. On atheism there are no grounds for such judgments, but man can't live consistently with the nihilism his atheism entails so he temporarily piggy-backs on Christian theism in order to favor us with his moral pronouncements and hopes all the while that no one will notice that he is, in effect, a metaphysical freeloader.

Atheism's Moral Dilemma

Lincoln Mullen has a review in Books and Culture of Peter Watson's The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.

In the course of his review, Mullen makes a point which I think needs to be clarified. He writes that:

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals.

He might be correct that this is a common charge, but even so, the moral problem that Christians (and theists in general) have with atheism is not that atheists don't have moral values but rather that they have no ground for making moral judgments beyond their own subjective preferences.

Take a concrete example. A tobacco company lies about the danger its product poses to the consumer. A theist would say that such deception is objectively wrong because it violates the will of the Creator who commands that people be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness - a command that imposes a clear moral duty not to harm people.

The atheist may also be outraged that the tobacco company has lied to people about the hazards of using its product, but the only reason they could have, if atheism is true, for condemning the company's behavior is that they simply don't like it. If an atheist were to respond to this by insisting that it's just wrong to hurt people, the question then needs to be asked, "Why is it wrong?" If atheism is true then we are here as a result of a blind, impersonal, evolutionary process, and blind, impersonal processes cannot impose a moral duty on anyone to do anything. Nor can such processes prescribe or proscribe behavior, nor pronounce a behavior wrong in any meaningful moral sense.

Lots of thoughtful atheists have admitted this. Consider the following quotes by thinkers all of whom are, or were, atheists:

• What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. ~ Richard Dawkins
• What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after. ~ Ernest Hemmingway
• This philosopher (Joel Marks is speaking of himself) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. ~ Joel Marks
• Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs....The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways. ~ Margaret Sanger
• For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel. ~ Richard Rorty.
• The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower. ~ Leo Tolstoy
• Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. ~ Karl Marx
• One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best. ~ Charles Darwin
• As evolutionists, we see that no justification (of morality) of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place. ~ E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... ~ Will Provine
• I would accept Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that if you do not believe in God, you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do. ~ Richard Rorty

So, the problem atheism has with morality, as the theist sees it, is not that atheists can't choose to adopt the sort of values of which society approves. Of course, they can. The problem is that they wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense had they chosen to adopt completely opposite values. Their choice is purely a matter of personal preference, like choosing to paint their house brown instead of green.

Thus, it's puzzling when atheists adopt the view that they hold to a superior morality than that of Christians as Mullen asserts in a later passage:

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

The most the atheist can claim, however, is that, on the Christian's own assumptions, the atheist's views on these issues might be closer to what God wills than are the Christian's views, but in order to make this claim the atheist has to piggyback on the theist's belief that both God and objective moral duties exist.

Moreover, the atheist cannot say that the theist is wrong in holding the views on these issues that perhaps he does. The most the atheist can say is that the theist's views are inconsistent with what he professes to believe about God's moral will. Of course, it may be true that the theist is not acting consistently with his fundamental moral assumptions, but that doesn't make those fundamental assumptions wrong, and it certainly doesn't make them inferior to the atheist's values which are grounded in nothing more authoritative than his own tastes.

This is the point I seek to make in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss. An atheist, if he's to be consistent, can either give up the pretense of holding to some non-arbitrary moral standard and admit that he's just making his morality up as he goes along, or he can admit that he believes that right and wrong are not merely matters of subjective preference but are real, objective features of the world. But, if he admits that, then, to be consistent, he'd have to give up his atheism and become a theist. He has to do one or the other, or he could simply do neither and admit that he prefers to live irrationally, which is the option many atheists apparently settle upon.

Will Obama Voters Go for Hillary?

Among the many things that must be worrying the Clinton campaign team nowadays - in addition to her health concerns, a possible embarrassing Wikileaks dump, more indications in her emails of poor judgment or criminality, her husband's penchant for sexual scandal, and so on - is that it's doubtful that she'll be able to match Barack Obama's voter turnout among young people in general and African Americans in particular in November.

It's hard to imagine that either of those groups will be as enthusiastic for the nearly septuagenarian, uncharismatic Hillary as they were for Obama, and it's largely on the strength of the support of these two groups that Obama won in both 2008 and 2012. It's not that these erstwhile Obama voters will migrate en masse to Trump, certainly, but rather that they just won't be sufficiently inspired to turn out on election day at all.

In fact, an article in the New York Times which describes the Clinton campaign's fretting over the lack of enthusiasm for their candidate among younger black voters:

When a handful of liberal advocacy organizations convened a series of focus groups with young black voters last month, the assessments of Donald J. Trump were predictably unsparing.

But when the participants were asked about Hillary Clinton, their appraisals were just as blunt and nearly as biting.

“What am I supposed to do if I don’t like him and I don’t trust her?” a millennial black woman in Ohio asked. “Choose between being stabbed and being shot? No way!”

“She was part of the whole problem that started sending blacks to jail,” a young black man, also from Ohio, observed about Mrs. Clinton.

“He’s a racist, and she is a liar, so really what’s the difference in choosing both or choosing neither?” another young black woman from Ohio said.

Young African-Americans, like all voters their age, are typically far harder to drive to the polls than middle-aged and older Americans. Yet with just over two months until Election Day, many Democrats are expressing alarm at the lack of enthusiasm, and in some cases outright resistance, some black millennials feel toward Mrs. Clinton.

A majority of African Americans is convinced - unfairly, I think - that Trump is a racist, so it's doubtful he can win as many of their votes as did George W. Bush, but Trump's surely counting on the possibility that African Americans and young people just won't turn out for Hillary in Obama-sized numbers either.

The question of just how many young African Americans will show up to vote carries profound implications for this election. Mrs. Clinton is sure to dominate Mr. Trump among black voters, but her overwhelming margin could ultimately matter less than the total number of blacks who show up to vote.

To replicate President Obama’s success in crucial states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, she cannot afford to let the percentage of the electorate that is black slip far below what it was in 2012. And while a modest drop-off of black votes may not imperil Mrs. Clinton’s prospects, given Mr. Trump’s unpopularity among upscale white voters, it could undermine Democrats’ effort to capture control of the Senate and win other down-ballot elections.

Adding to the worries is a separate poll of African-Americans that Mr. Belcher conducted earlier in the summer indicating that Mrs. Clinton is lagging well behind Mr. Obama’s performance among young blacks in a handful of crucial states.

“There is no Democratic majority without these voters,” Mr. Belcher said. “The danger is that if you don’t get these voters out, you’ve got the 2004 John Kerry electorate again.”

There's much more analysis of Hillary's difficulties in sparking enthusiasm in minority communities at the link. Maybe she'll soon be dusting off her southern patois again in order to pander to young blacks:

The Unemployment Rate Is Misleading

Since it's Labor Day it's appropriate to post something about jobs and unemployment.

Politicians like to boast when the unemployment rate is down, and on the surface a lower unemployment rate (called the U3) is good news, but not necessarily. What the politicos and their media fanboys often leave out is something called the labor participation rate. When this is also down the unemployment numbers look deceptively good.

That may sound confusing so I recommend this short video to help you understand why the unemployment rate is a meaningless number unless placed in the context of the labor participation rate:

To recap, if ten out of a hundred able-bodied adults are unemployed and looking for work the unemployment rate is 10%. If five of those just drop out and stop looking that means that there are now only five people unemployed and still looking for work. The unemployment rate is now 5% but there are no more people working than there were before. The unemployment rate has been cut in half but the actual job situation in the country has gotten worse, not better, since some people have given up even trying to find a job.

The actual unemployment rate, called the U6, factors in all those who are unemployed or underemployed.

The official unemployment rate in August, the U3, was 4.9%, but if the labor participation rate is factored in the U6 was 9.7%. The U6 is a better indicator of the employment situation in the country, but the U3 is the one we usually hear about.

There's a helpful interactive graph here which shows how the U3 and U6 have varied over the last couple of decades.

One thing that should be kept in mind is that not all of the drop in the labor participation rate is due to a weak economy. Some of it is due to large numbers of baby boomers taking early retirements.

At any rate, remember the next time the media gives the impression that the economy is getting better because unemployment is down that there's more to the story that they may be leaving out.

Paying Their Fair Share

One thing we're almost guaranteed to hear between now and the election in November, and even afterward, is that in this country the rich need to pay their fair share of taxes. The implication, of course, is that the rich, whoever they are, are not now shouldering a just proportion of the nation's tax burden and can afford to pay more.

We often hear the richest 1% disparaged for shirking their duty to pay more of their income in order for the tax burden to be fairly distributed.

A UCLA economics professor takes on these claims and gives us some surprising (perhaps) statistics on what the rich actually do pay in federal taxes. The upshot is that the rich are already contributing their fair share by any reasonable definition of the word "fair."

This video is about five minutes long and paints an easy to understand and helpful portrait of how federal taxes are distributed across various income groups:

Leaving Science Behind

An article by Kirk Dunston at Evolution News and Views illustrates the blurry line that's often separates science and metaphysics. Dunston discusses some of the calculations that have been done by astronomers to assess the probability of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos and quotes scientists who think those chances are incomprehensibly miniscule:

[I]n his book The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin has shown that the probability of merely attaining RNA replication and translation (a necessary requirement for even the simplest life) is less than 10^-1018. He concludes that it is highly unlikely to occur anywhere in the universe. His preferred explanation is that we are one of the lucky universes among a near-infinite number of universes.

In other words, the odds against just one molecular function necessary for life to arise purely by chance are so unimaginably small if our universe is the only one that exists as to be all but impossible.

Koonin's solution is to posit a near infinite number of different universes, a multiverse, in which every event, no matter how improbable, will happen somewhere. Just as the likelihood of rolling double sixes in dice increases the more times you try, so, too, the likelihood of life arising somewhere increases the more universes there are. If the number of different universes approaches infinity, even the most incredibly improbable events will happen in at least one of them.

One (of many) difficulties with the multiverse theory, however, is that it's out of place in a scientific setting. There's no empirical evidence for a multiverse, nor could there be any since any observations we could make would be of objects in this universe. It's not that we're limited by the power of our telescopes, it's that even in principle we can't observe anything outside our universe. Thus the multiverse hypothesis is an example of a metaphysical idea. It can't be verified and it can't be falsified.

Dunston goes on to say:

From a materialistic, evolutionary perspective, our technologically advanced civilization is almost certainly unique in the universe. Indeed, if the origin of life is so improbable that we should not even be here, then it seems we are faced with an interesting choice. The first option is to grant Koonin's theory that we won a lottery against mind-staggering odds, requiring a near infinite number of unseen, untestable universes. The second option arises out of our observation that the universe and this particular planet seem to be incredibly fine-tuned to support life.

Those are the only live options. One either believes that the universe was created by an intelligent agent or one believes that there are a near infinite number of universes out there. There's evidence for the first option but none for the second. Moreover, the first option has the philosophical virtue of being a lot simpler than the second.

In any case, the belief that life is a naturalistic phenomenon, a product of purposeless natural forces and processes, is, at bottom, a metaphysical, not a scientific belief because to be at all plausible it must rely on belief in a multiverse.

Cosmic Voyage

Have you ever wondered how big the universe is or how small the smallest things are? Morgan Freeman takes us on a journey in this an eight and a half minute video to plumb the vastness of space as well as its incredible minuteness.

Take a look:

Some insist that our universe is all a grand fluke, an accident, others insist it's intentionally designed. Some believe that there are a near infinite number of universes (the multiverse), others argue that ours is the only one for which we have any evidence.

Most scientists agree, though, that the universe described in this video started out as a point-like object which contained within its tiny circumference all the mass-energy the universe now possesses. This miniscule point, called a singularity, expanded with unimaginable rapidity at the moment of the universe's origin in an event that has come to be known as the Big Bang, and it's still expanding today.

It's all very fascinating.

Poverty and Bad Decisions

An interesting piece by Emily Badger at CityLab cites research that suggests that, contrary to common opinion, poor people are not poor because they make bad decisions but rather they make bad decisions because they're poor. The exigencies of poverty, some research shows, exert such a powerful pull on people that unwise choices are practically inevitable. Here's part of her essay:

Researchers publishing some ground-breaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little [cognitive] bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort. This research suggests that the reality of poverty actually makes it harder to execute fundamental life skills. Being poor means, as the authors write, “coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.”

I don't know how reliable this study is, but I hope it's conclusions are not true. If they are true then the plight of the poor is almost hopeless. According to the study the poor make unwise decisions because they're poor, but they can't get out of poverty until they stop making unwise decisions. They're caught in a vicious cycle. Indeed, this study provides those living below the poverty line with a good reason to just give up.

Badger thinks, though, that taxpayers should give the poor financial independence so they can be freed from the stressors that drive them to make bad choices:

Conversely, going forward, this also means that anti-poverty programs could have a huge benefit that we've never recognized before: Help people become more financially stable, and you also free up their cognitive resources to succeed in all kinds of other ways as well.

Unfortunately, we've already conducted that experiment. Since the 1960s we've spent $22 trillion on the War on Poverty and there are still millions of our fellow citizens living in relative poverty (I say "relative" because poor people in America are only poor relative to their contemporaries in the U.S. Relative to the vast numbers of people who've inhabited the planet throughout history our poor are fabulously wealthy). How much more can, and should, we give and what reason do we have for thinking that we're not now at the point of diminishing returns? When the government subsidizes something we get more of it. That goes as much for poverty as it does for anything else.

Reading Badger's column raises a question: If it's true that poverty makes people choose actions that perpetuate their poverty how do we account for the fact that so many poor people have surmounted their circumstances, especially before there were any social welfare programs in place to help them? Irish and Asian immigrants had nothing but the shirts on their backs when they landed on these shores, and the latter didn't even speak English. Yet many of them, despite suffering brutal discrimination, made the choice to work hard, and they overcame tremendous odds to succeed. Moreover, much of the American population was impoverished during the Great Depression, yet they rose out of it, and still today many are lifting themselves out of poverty and achieving middle class status or higher.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but all of this taken together causes me to wonder if maybe it's not Ms. Badger and the study she cites that are missing something.

Reasons for Unbelief

A recent Pew survey found that the number of Americans who don't believe in God or who are unaffiliated with any religion is continuing to increase. The survey listed the reasons, and I have to say (and I hope no one is offended by this) the reasons seem pretty weak for such an important epistemic commitment:

Consider just the reasons for unbelief (I'm surprised, btw, that the problem of suffering didn't make the list since it's probably the best reason for skepticism out there.).

1. Learning about evolution. There's no incompatibility between evolution and God. Many theists believe in both. In fact, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga points out, the conflict really lies between naturalism (atheism) and evolution. If evolution is true then our rational faculties have evolved to help us survive, not necessarily to lead us to truth. Those who believe both atheism and evolution to be true have no basis for trusting their reason to lead them to truth, especially metaphysical truth. But if that's so they have no basis for trusting their reason when it leads them to conclude that either atheism or evolution are true. If God exists, however, then we have grounds for thinking that God has caused our reason to evolve to lead us to truth.

2. Too many Christians doing unChristian things. Even if it were granted that many people fall short of what we might expect of them (who doesn't?) what does that have to do with whether or not God exists? God's existence doesn't depend on whether people who believe He exists live consistently with that belief. One shouldn't confuse belief that God exists with a particular religious expression of that belief.

3. Religion is the opiate of the people. Even if it were granted that religion misleads or stupefies many people that's also irrelevant to the question whether God exists. The truth of theism is one thing, the truth of a particular religion, or religion in general, is something entirely different. It's ironic, parenthetically, that the opiate claim is taken from Karl Marx. If anything has stupefied the masses, as well as the intelligentsia, over the last one hundred years it has been atheistic Marxism.

4. Rational thought discredits religious belief. Even if it were granted that many religious beliefs cannot withstand rational scrutiny that has nothing to do with whether theism itself is rational. The claim that theism is discredited by rational thought is simply false as many, if not most, philosophers, both theist and atheist, have acknowledged.

5. Lack of evidence for a creator. This objection is as puzzling as it is common. There are numerous arguments that constitute evidence for a creator. At least two forms of the cosmological argument (the kalam argument and the argument from contingency of the universe), the argument from cosmic fine-tuning, and the moral argument are all strong arguments whose conclusions assert the existence of God.

6. Just don't believe it. I think this objection might better be stated, "I just don't want it to be true that God exists." If someone doesn't want theism to be true, of course, nothing will persuade him or her that it is.

I suspect this deep desire for a naturalistic world is the fundamental reason for most unbelief today. The other reasons listed above certainly don't seem to constitute adequate explanations of it.