Supreme Incoherence

Here's a puzzler: The Supreme Court, which ruled in Obergefell (2015) that gay marriage was henceforth legal in the United States, declined last January to hear a challenge by reality TV polygamist Kody Brown and his wives to Utah's law against polygamy. It'd be interesting to read the Court's rationale for denying certeriori to the plaintiffs in the case, given the logic of legalizing same-sex marriage.

Kody Brown and His Wives

I've argued on a number of occasions on Viewpoint that extending the right to marry to gays cuts away the ground for laws against polygamy, polyamory, or almost any form of family structure one can think of. Here's why:

Marriage has for two thousand years or more been considered the union of one man and one woman, but enlightened folk in the last couple of years have decided that this traditional understanding is "oppressive" and the Supreme Court agreed. Justice Anthony Kennedy opined that opposition to gay marriage was rooted in an irrational animus against gays, and the Court took it upon themselves to rule that the gender of the individuals seeking holy matrimony no longer matters.

Very well, but if the gender no longer matters, how can the Court now decide that the number of individuals still matters? If marriage can now unite one man and another or one woman and another, why can it not unite one man and several women, or indeed any combination of people who wish to enter into the relationship? What logical grounds does the Court have for prohibiting such unions?

Perhaps there is a good reason for it, but if so it eludes me. I suspect that the Court realizes the muddle they've created and declined to hear the Utah case because they wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having to acknowledge that their decision in Obergefell was not based on the Constitution but was instead a purely arbitrary capitulation to sociological fashion. If they chose to hear Brown's case and strove to be consistent, they'd have to strike down Utah's statute and any other statutes which ban any variety of "marriage" which involves consenting adults.

Polygamy is not yet fashionable, but when it becomes so, and it probably will, the Court will doubtless find that they no longer have any logical reason to prohibit it, given the precedent they've set with Obergefell. Perhaps future generations will look back at Obergfell not as the end of an oppressive practice against gays but rather as the beginning of the end of marriage.

Intolerance Left and Right

An article at Politico discusses research that shows that intolerance is a human trait that neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on. The research contradicts the assumptions held by both groups that the other is the more intolerant:

So who’s right? Are conservatives more prejudiced than liberals, or vice versa? Research over the years has shown that in industrialized nations, social conservatives and religious fundamentalists possess psychological traits, such as the valuing of conformity and the desire for certainty, that tend to predispose people toward prejudice. Meanwhile, liberals and the nonreligious tend to be more open to new experiences, a trait associated with lower prejudice. So one might expect that, whatever each group’s own ideology, conservatives and Christians should be inherently more discriminatory on the whole.

But more recent psychological research, some of it presented in January at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), shows that it’s not so simple. These findings confirm that conservatives, liberals, the religious and the nonreligious are each prejudiced against those with opposing views. But surprisingly, each group is about equally prejudiced. While liberals might like to think of themselves as more open-minded, they are no more tolerant of people unlike them than their conservative counterparts are.

There's much more on this at the link, and much more about liberal and conservative attitudes that you might find surprising. One minor quibble I had with the article was that I didn't see anything that indicated how the researchers or the article's writers defined either prejudice or intolerance. For example, it's not made particularly clear whether intolerance is defined as simply disagreeing with the other side or actually trying to shut the other side up.

If it's the former then "prejudice" is unexceptional and anodyne. If, however, it's the latter then it's relevant to note that two places where prejudice is today manifesting itself as sheer intolerance of heterodox opinions is in the media and on university campuses. It may be that were these institutions dominated by conservatives they would be just as intolerant and narrow-minded as they are under liberals, but we have no way of knowing.

We do know, though, that in the contemporary world these institutions are dominated largely by liberals who flatter themselves to think that they are paragons of tolerance when in fact they're often as eager to punish deviations from liberal orthodoxy as was any medieval inquisitor. Indeed, totalitarian thought-control has always been, at least since the onset of modernity, a temptation and phenomenon of the left.

FGM

Here's a shocking statistic: Approximately 500,000 young girls in the U.S. have been subjected to FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) or are at risk of being mutilated. The practice was banned by federal law in 1996, but it's still being done in mostly Muslim communities. It involves the painful excision of most of a young girl's external genitalia so that she will be sexually "pure" as an adolescent and adult.

Apologists for Islam argue that it is not an Islamic practice, that it's also practiced in majority Christian countries and is relatively rare in Islamic countries outside Africa. These claims are misleading, as an article by Julie Roys in The Federalist points out.

Roys notes that although the problem may not be exclusively a Muslim problem it is surely primarily a Muslim problem:

To truly determine whether FGM is a Muslim problem or not requires careful statistical analysis. Dr. Oliver Scott Curry, a senior researcher at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, has conducted this analysis using data from the World Health Organization, the Pew Research Center, and Wikipedia.

Dr. Curry found that there is a “large significant positive correlation between the percentage of women subject to FGM and the prevalence of Islam.” Interestingly though, there is an almost equal negative correlation between the percentage of women subject to FGM and the prevalence of Christianity.

Dr. Curry reported his findings using something called the “Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient” (rs), which measures the statistical dependence between the ranking of two variables. He found that Spearman’s correlation between FGM and Islam was rs = .54 (p=.003). This means that we can be very confident (due to the low “p” value) that countries that rank high in their prevalence of Islam will rank fairly high in their prevalence of FGM.

However, Dr. Curry found that the correlation between Christianity and FGM was actually negative: rs = -.48 (p=.01). This means that we can be confident (due the slightly higher “p” value) that countries that rank high in their prevalence of Christianity will tend to rank low in their prevalence of FGM.

The Christian gospel of John (8:32) quotes Jesus as saying that those who believe in him will know the truth and the truth will make them free. One of the things that Christians are apparently liberated from are horrific practices like FGM. Roys goes on to quote Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali born woman who was herself mutilated as a young girl.

“In Muslim communities there is the demand that women, girls, should be virgins and a woman’s sexuality is to be controlled and (FGM) is an effective and brutal way of doing that,” said Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a Somali-born American citizen and activist who was subjected genital mutilation as a child. Ali heads the AHA Foundation, a group dedicated to protecting women and girls from FGM. According to the foundation, some 500,000 women and young girls in the U.S. have suffered genital mutilation or are at risk of being mutilated.

Sadly, the politics surrounding FGM has resulted in deafening silence on this issue, especially from the left and feminists who should be outraged. FGM became illegal in the U.S. under a federal law in 1996, but 26 states still do not have laws criminalizing FGM.

“The left can easily and comfortably condemn the misogyny of white men, but not of men of color, not of Muslims,” Ali said. “They are afraid of being shunned. They’re afraid of being put into a basket of deplorables. So they’re silent.”

They're more concerned, apparently, with being politically correct than with speaking out on behalf of those 500,000 young girls.

There's more on this in Roys' column. Check it out.

How Many Share These Views?

Imagine you were to discover that millions of people in this country believed that there's nothing wrong with slavery per se, that men should be able to demand non-consensual sex, and that concubinage is morally acceptable. Would you think that discovery shocking?

Well, these are apparently mainstream views among muslims, at least according to Jonathan AC Brown, who serves as director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown and who delivered his views in a recent lecture. His argument is that slavery, for example, was practiced by Mohammed himself. From the link:

“The Prophet of God had slaves. He had slaves. There’s no denying that,” he told a man during the Q&A session. “Was he — are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God? No, you’re not. I’ll answer your question for you.”

He also questioned what it meant to give “consent” to sex and to be autonomous, all in an attempt to defend Islam.

“It’s very hard to have this discussion because we think of, let’s say in the modern United States, the sine qua non of morally correct sex is consent. We think of people as autonomous agents. Everybody’s an autonomous agent and it’s the consent of that autonomous agent that makes a sexual action acceptable,” he said.

“If you take away the consent element, then everyone starts flipping out,” Brown continued, adding: “We fetishize the idea of autonomy to the extent that we forget, again who’s really free? Are we really autonomous people?”

To be fair, it doesn't seem that Johnson, who is a white convert to Islam, was actually calling for, or promoting, any of these things. Rather he was defending Islam, a religion in which such practices are permissible. How many muslims agree with him is hard to say, but even so, if a Klansman defended a worldview which permitted or tolerated slavery, forced sex, or concubinage he would be rightly excoriated for it, no matter how many people in the larger culture he represented.

It doesn't follow from the fact that we are a culturally diverse society that views which are unacceptable when endorsed by one group should be tolerated when endorsed by another. Why, then, do some wish to make an exception for muslims?

Materialist Taxonomy

Eric Anderson at Uncommon Descent presents an interesting analysis of metaphysical materialism, or, more precisely, the different forms materialism takes. He argues that there are three kinds of materialism (and materialists), or four if you count one that only exists theoretically. He has much to say about these, but here's an overview. Anderson writes:

There are essentially 4 categories of materialist:

1. Strong Materialists

These materialists assert a fully materialistic view of reality: everything, all reality, is just a confluence of matter and energy. Things are as they are – we are as we are – because of a long series of interactions and reactions of particles and energy over time. There is nothing more than the physical and the material.

These materialists are, typically, also determinists. Meaning, by Blackwell’s Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology, that “human actions and natural events are determined by what preceded them.” Blackwell’s also notes that for true determinists “free will would be an illusion.”

The majority of materialists, however, are not strong materialists:

Most materialists are of another stripe, which is why the well-made, knock-down, ever-so-carefully-crafted arguments against strong materialism don’t convince them....There are two other groups of materialists that are much more numerous.

2. Weak Materialists

Unlike the few well-known strong materialists, weak materialists are legion.

What they all share, however, is a general foundational premise. Like the strong materialists, they believe that reality began with only the physical and the material.... at some point the purely physical and material gave way to that which is not purely physical and material. At some point the physical and material transcended itself. Many weak materialists recognize the range of human experience: love, altruism, consciousness, intelligence, morality, free will. Unlike the strong materialists who argue (but never consistently act thusly) that all of these things are but an illusion, many weak materialists acknowledge that these things are real, that they form an important part of the fabric of our existence.

The materialist opponent, however, will quickly object, pointing out that there is no explanation, under materialism, for how such things came about. After all, what is it about the starting point of particles and energy that can ever ground love or free will or morality? How can the purely physical and material transcend itself? What law of physics and chemistry, what kind of particle or interaction, could possibly explain such a state of affairs?

The answer? Nothing....

There is no known, or even rationally-proposed, mechanism that will get you from particles to things like thought, intelligence, love, free will, morality.

The third kind of materialist, according to Anderson, are what he calls:

3. Unsure Materialists

Then there are materialists who are unsure about all of this, primarily because they have never really thought about these issues and have never deeply considered what grounds their morality. You’ve met many such individuals: your roommate from your freshman year of college, your work colleague at the water cooler, your uncle at the family reunion.

Many of these individuals don’t oppose the idea of morality, even perhaps an objective one. They just cling to the materialist storyline because perhaps it is what they heard in school, perhaps they are under the misimpression that a material explanation for living organisms is at hand or soon to be forthcoming, perhaps it gives them an excuse to avoid looking in the mirror and closely examining their own morality or behavior, perhaps they enjoy the provocative nature of the materialistic position, or perhaps being a materialist makes them feel more “scientific” than those Bible-thumping rubes.

Finally, Anderson mentions his "theoretical" category of materialists:

4. Grounded Materialists [G]rounded materialists are materialists who have carefully thought through the basis for their materialism, have discovered a causal connection from the purely physical and the material to the purposeful and the moral, and have offered a rational grounding for moral behavior – for what “ought” to be.

As far as is known, no materialist has ever fallen into this category.

This is gratuitously snarky, perhaps, but Anderson nevertheless makes a valid point. There really is no way to get from a materialist starting point to an objective ground for moral behavior. If materialism is true, then, morally speaking, we're all flying by the seat of our pants.

He has much more to say about each of these positions than what I've included here so you might check out his column at the link.

Mathematics Takes a Mind

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. It would indeed be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathphobic students may wince at a statement like this, but it gets worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises. In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

Human Rights and Other Weighty Topics

In my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of this page) I make the argument that belief in objective human rights, belief in an objective overarching meaning to one's life, and belief in objective moral values only makes sense on a theistic worldview. Naturalism offers no ground for any of these. On naturalism human rights, meaning and morality are all nothing more than subjective preferences, a state of affairs which essentially undercuts any significance any of them might have in our modern world.

I recently came across some short videos by a British philosopher named Andy Bannister which make this same point in an interesting fashion. His first video presents a discussion of why naturalism renders life meaningless:

The second video addresses the problem of how there can be objective moral values and duties given naturalism:

Bannister's last presentation makes the case for the claim that human rights, to be in any sense real, must be established by, and rooted in, a transcendent guarantor of those rights:

Bigotry

Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has made a name for himself as an advocate of infanticide, that is he believes a mother should have the right to have her newborn baby killed up until it's several months old. On Singer's view a newborn human is not much different than a newborn chimp, in fact, it's probably less capable than a chimp of the same age.

In any case, a newborn is not a person by Singer's definition. He defines a person as a being capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. On this definition, which is certainly arbitrary, severely retarded individuals are not persons and therefore should not be granted a legal right to life.

Wesley Smith at Evolution News and Views writes contra Singer: In his apologetics for infanticide, Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has used a baby with Down syndrome as an example of a killable infant based on utilitarian measurements. (He actually supports infanticide because babies -- whether disabled or not -- are, in his view, not "persons."). To Singer, moral value primarily comes from intellectual capacities, and that means developmentally and cognitively disabled human beings (also, the unborn and infants) have less value than other human beings, and indeed, a lower worth than some animals.

Were society ever to adopt Singer's bigoted anti-human exceptionalism views, it would mark the end of universal human rights, opening the door to tyrannical campaigns against the most weak and vulnerable -- you know, the kind of people that the Singers of the world deem resource wasters.

It would also break the spine of unconditional love, as our children would have to earn their place by possessing requisite capacities. Smith goes on to quote Singer:

But let's ... ask why someone would deny that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being is of less value than the life of a normal human being. Most people think that the life of a dog or a pig is of less value than the life of a normal human being.

On what basis, then, could they hold that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being with intellectual capacities inferior to those of a dog or a pig is of equal value to the life of a normal human being? This sounds like speciesism to me, and as I said earlier, I have yet to see a plausible defence of speciesism. After looking for more than forty years, I doubt that there is one.

In other words, if dogs and pigs are less intelligent than humans, and therefore less valuable, it would follow that severely disabled humans, who are less intelligent than dogs and pigs, should also be considered less valuable. One has to ask, though, why intelligence should be the crucial measure of value of any organism. Why not see humans as intrinsically valuable? Of course, if materialism (Singer is a materialist) is correct then we're just a collection of atoms and we have no intrinsic value, but then on this view any value we assign to our species as well as to other species is purely arbitrary and subjective.

Smith closes with these thoughts:

Invidious discrimination exists when equals -- e.g., all human beings -- are denigrated as unequal based on some category that the bigot believes reduces the status of the discriminated-against human, e.g., racism, sexism, and Singer-style discrimination against people with cognitive or developmental disabilities.

But human beings and animals do not inhabit the same moral realm. It is not wrong ... to view and treat us differently than we do them.

Moreover, the very concept of "speciesism" ... is inherently and invidiously anti-human because it reduces us to so many carbon molecules with no inherent value beyond our cognitive capabilities at the moment of measurement. To repeat myself, the idea of speciesism, like utilitarianism, makes universal human rights impossible to sustain intellectually.

Assuming such utilitarian values would destroy the principles of Western civilization. And never mind the real capacities of many people with Down [syndrome], whom Singer mischaracterizes, or their extraordinary loving natures -- which I have yet to see Singer opine much about. To Singer, intellect trumps all.

That's bigotry any way you look at it, no different from racism, except that his victims are less able to defend themselves.

I have always found it odd that Singer faces little of the opprobrium society metes out to other bigots. Indeed, he was brought to Princeton from Australia and given one of the world's most prestigious chairs in bioethics precisely because of these attitudes.

Roommate Discrimination

This is somewhat disappointing. A survey at Dartmouth College found that students who identified as Democrats are much less willing to room with someone who doesn't share their political views than are any other students on campus.

In the campus-wide field survey, students of all political identities were asked how comfortable they would be about the prospect living with a roommate who holds opposing political views. Of the 432 students surveyed, only 39 percent of students who identified as Democrats said they would feel comfortable living with a Republican while 45 percent, a plurality, said they felt uncomfortable.

A majority of students who identified as Republicans (69 percent) said they were comfortable living with someone of opposing political views and only 12 percent said they felt uncomfortable....Among Independent students, 61 percent said they felt comfortable living with someone with opposite views, and 16 percent were uncomfortable.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Does it mean that Democrat students are more likely to disdain fellow students who disagree with their politics? Does it mean that they're more insecure in what they believe and don't want it challenged by a roommate? Does it merely mean that Republican students don't take politics as seriously as do Democrats? Or does it mean that Republicans are such a minority on campus that they can't afford to be choosy about the politics of their roommates lest they find themselves rooming alone?

In any case, I wonder what the media narrative would be if a poll revealed that white students were uncomfortable rooming with minority students or that Christian students were uncomfortable rooming with Muslims. I'm pretty sure such a poll would be viewed as an indicator of bigotry and hatred on the part of the uncomfortable students and deemed by the university to be totally unacceptable. It would probably warrant mandatory sensitivity classes for the hapless offenders. So why shouldn't the actual poll be seen the same way?

Dubious Heritage

Quick question: If you had to name the political party in the U.S. which has historically been home to supporters of forced sterilization and other eugenicist schemes would you pick A. Republican or B. Democrat? If you answered B. give yourself an attaboy.

From The Federalist:

Most people close their eyes to unpleasantness in their past. Political movements do the same thing on a grander scale. Nowhere is this truer than in the willful blindness of twenty-first-century progressives to their early twentieth-century counterparts’ embrace of eugenics.

Eugenics, the theory that social policies must be enacted to cull the “bad genes” from society, was popular among progressives across the developed world, including the United States. What constituted “bad genes” was, according to its proponents, a matter of scientific consensus. Today we would call it racism and classism.

After seeing the end result of such ideas in the Holocaust, progressives naturally sought to bury their connection to this genocidal concept, and succeeded in doing so, at least when they can discredit conservatives who persist in mentioning it. That problem bubbled to the surface last week when Bloomberg’s economist and writer Noah Smith tweeted, “Apparently some people believe that eugenics was the scientific consensus 100 years ago. Sounds like a total myth to me.”

That historical denialism did not go unnoticed. The editors of The New Atlantis, among others, pointed out the dangerous historical ignorance at work in that statement. Indeed, they went further than Smith and cracked a book or two to back up their points.

So what did the New Atlantis come up with?

Citing from Edwin Black’s 2003 book, “War Against the Weak,” they described the scientific consensus on eugenics, with eugenicists “firmly entrenched in the biology, zoology, social science, psychology and anthropology departments of the nation’s leading institutions of higher learning.” The belief trickled down to high schools. A 1914 biology textbook, “A Civic Biology,” written by George William Hunter and issued by the nation’s largest book publisher, held that:

When people marry, there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. […] epilepsy and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well-born is called eugenics.

In case it is not clear what the author means, he goes on to describe what should be done about families that are not practitioners of “the science of being well-born.”

Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money…. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe, and are now meeting with success in this country.

There's much else in the Federalist article in this vein. The subtext, usually tacit rather than explicit, is that the people most in need of sterilization were minorities, and the people who held these views were the ideological grandparents of today's progressive left. It's not a heritage in which one can take much pride.

The article concludes with this:

Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a leading eugenicist. In 1921, she wrote that “the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’ [is] admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization” and that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” Time magazine sought to put this fact in context in a 2016 article, noting that in “the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics enjoyed widespread support from mainstream doctors, scientists and the general public.” Yes, yes it did.

Everything about 1910s and ‘20s progressives echoes in their modern intellectual descendants a century later. Absolute trust in government to do what is right. Certitude in their own scientific correctness, despite having seen “settled science” become unsettled with each generation. Knowing what is best for their fellow citizens, and the willingness to use force to overrule doubt and dissent....But most of all, there is the repeated theme, the fervent belief that some people are not people, not really, not in any way that would make them deserve rights and liberty.

The left is not only currently threatening free speech on university campuses, it has historically been the strongest advocate of racist eugenics ideas. Put those two together and it's easier to understand why people talk about liberal fascism.

The Templeton Prize

It has recently been announced that philosopher Alvin Plantinga has been awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize for 2017. The prize is valued at about $1.4 million, is one of the world's largest annual awards given to an individual and honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.

Plantinga is certainly worthy of the award and indeed, some of his fellow philosophers have thought it was long overdue. One of his more recent accomplishments has been his argument that there is a serious conflict between naturalism and evolution, but that theism actually supports evolution or is compatible with it.

The article at the link offers a brief summary of Plantinga's argument:

In contrast to the common claim that evolution is incompatible with theism, the EAAN (Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism) asserts that evolution is incompatible with naturalism. In standard evolutionary theory, traits of organisms are selected for because they facilitate survival and reproduction.

Plantinga shows that belief forming capacities can be perfectly adaptive even when the beliefs that they generate are false. As a result, if the only explanation for the formation of our belief forming capacities are random trait variation and natural selection, then it is unlikely that belief forming capacities are truth conducive (since there are many more ways to have false-but-adaptive beliefs than there are true beliefs). But it is incoherent to affirm that one’s beliefs are most likely false. As a result, it is incoherent to affirm evolution and naturalism and thus one must surrender one of these beliefs.

In his 2011 book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, he challenged the militant atheism and materialism that he found in the sciences. He argued that the real conflict is not between science and religion but between theism and naturalism – theism supports science while naturalism undermines it.

Plantinga is probably most famous for the revolution he wrought in philosophical epistemology with his trilogy of books defending the proposition that belief in God is rational and justified apart from evidence. It is, in other words, a properly basic belief, like one's belief that other people have minds, that one has free will, or that one is experiencing the color red. One is justified in holding these beliefs until confronted with a compelling defeater for them. In the same way, one is rationally justified in believing in God, if one does, in lieu of a compelling defeater for that belief. If no such defeater can be adduced one's theistic belief is perfectly rational.

This may not seem like such an extraordinary argument (although it took three books to establish it), but it was ground-breaking back in the 1970s and 80s when many philosophers simply assumed that theistic belief was irrational.

There's much more at the link on Plantinga, his life, work, and the Templeton prize.

The Decline of the West

David Brooks at The New York Times offers some thoughtful opinions on the vigor and viability of Western civilization. Much of what he writes is insightful, but unfortunately some of it, I think, misses the mark. 

Let's look at what I think he gets right first. He begins by describing the traditional narrative of Western civilization:

This narrative was confidently progressive. There were certain great figures, like Socrates, Erasmus, Montesquieu and Rousseau, who helped fitfully propel the nations to higher reaches of the humanistic ideal.

This Western civ narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most importantly provided a set of common goals.

Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western civilization narrative. They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke. Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western civilization is a history of oppression.

This neglect has had far-reaching effects:

The first consequence has been the rise of the illiberals, authoritarians who not only don’t believe in the democratic values of the Western civilization narrative, but don’t even pretend to believe in them....

Brooks focusses on authoritarians on the global stage, but then notes that the authoritarian spirit pervades much of the discourse on our modern campuses as well:

Finally, there has been the collapse of liberal values at home. On American campuses, fragile thugs who call themselves students shout down and abuse speakers on a weekly basis. To read Heather MacDonald’s account of being pilloried at Claremont McKenna College is to enter a world of chilling intolerance.

In America, the basic fabric of civic self-government seems to be eroding following the loss of faith in democratic ideals. According to a study published in The Journal of Democracy, the share of young Americans who say it is absolutely important to live in a democratic country has dropped from 91 percent in the 1930s to 57 percent today. The faith in the West collapsed from within. It’s amazing how slow people have been to rise to defend it....liberalism has been docile in defense of itself.

Perhaps the docility to which he refers is due to the fact that so many liberals seem to have lost confidence in their ability to make value judgments. For many liberal/progressives it's at best impolite and at worst culturally imperialistic to assert that some ways of life are better than others, that some systems of governance are superior to others, that a culture that produces Mozart, Bach and modern medicine is superior to a culture that produces nothing but increasingly innovative ways to murder people. 

Claims such as these are deemed hubristic by many moderns. They constitute an offense against the spirit of multiculturalism. Even so, they're still true for all that, even if many contemporary liberals, unlike their ideological forefathers, no longer have the heart to assert and defend them.

Brooks closes with this admonition:

These days, the whole idea of Western civ is assumed to be reactionary and oppressive. All I can say is, if you think that was reactionary and oppressive, wait until you get a load of the world that comes after it.

On all of that I think Brooks is largely correct. I think he veers off track a bit, though, in two places in his column. In one of these he says the following:

While running for office, Donald Trump violated every norm of statesmanship built up over these many centuries, and it turned out many people didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Well, this may be partly true, but it seems to imply that Trump won mostly because people who voted for him didn't care that he was boorish and crude.

I don't think this is quite right. People voted for him despite his manifest shortcomings because they deemed him a much better choice than Mrs. Clinton who was in any case just as crude, boorish and corrupt as Trump, if not moreso. Bernie Sanders was correct when he said recently that Trump didn't win so much as Hillary lost.

If Trump was a sexual predator Hillary Clinton defended sexual predators, including her husband, smearing her husband's accusers in the process. If Trump was a liar Hillary was just as bad, if not worse, lying to the American public about why their fellow Americans lost their lives in Benghazi, for example. For most people, though, the critical difference was that Hillary would have continued President Obama's slide toward socialism, open borders, and the arrant political correctness that so many Americans find objectionable. Mr. Trump, his juvenile behavior and ugly outbursts notwithstanding, at least offered those voters hope that that slide would be arrested and reversed.

Brooks also implies that Trump is an authoritarian leader like "Putin, Erdogan, el-Sisi, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un." For reasons I wrote about here, I disagree. Trump can be criticized for many things, but so far, at least, he hasn't shown many signs of being an authoritarian, and certainly not an authoritarian like the men Brooks lists him with.

An authoritarian seeks to arrogate power to himself and his government. Trump has done the opposite, seeking to devolve more power to the states. His appointment of a strict constitutional constructionist to the Supreme Court is telling evidence that he's not striving to concentrate power in his office but is chiefly concerned with re-establishing the rule of law and the separation of powers.

In any case, Brooks' column is worth perusing and I urge readers to check it out at the link.

Stop Digging

Democrats (and everybody else, probably) are doubtless stunned by the news that a recent WaPo/ABC poll shows that if there was a do-over election today Donald Trump would still beat Hillary Clinton by a 43-40 margin. In fact, he'd not only win the electoral college but he'd also win the popular vote:

Despite the public’s skepticism of Trump’s first 100 days, the survey finds little evidence voters would render a different verdict from last November, when Trump won key states needed to secure victory in the electoral college despite Clinton winning more votes nationwide.

The new survey finds 46 percent saying they [originally] voted for Clinton and 43 percent for Trump, similar to her two-point national vote margin. Asked how they would vote if the election were held today, 43 say they would support Trump and 40 percent say Clinton.

Add to this dispiriting news the finding in the same poll, a poll weighted toward Democrats (31% - D, 24% - R, 36% - I), that 67% of respondents feel that the Democratic party is out of touch with them (Republicans didn't fare much better with 62% saying that the GOP is out of touch) and things must be pretty gloomy at DNC headquarters.

Nevertheless, DNC chair Tom Perez has chosen to deepen the melancholy and put his party even further out of touch by announcing that there's no room in the Democratic party for pro-life candidates. Here's an excerpt from a story in the HuffPo:

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez became the first head of the party to demand ideological purity on abortion rights, promising Friday to support only Democratic candidates who back a woman’s right to choose.

“Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health,” Perez said in a statement. “That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.”

“At a time when women’s rights are under assault from the White House, the Republican Congress, and in states across the country,” he added, “we must speak up for this principle as loudly as ever and with one voice.”

To be sure, this declaration will certainly please the party elites on both coasts, but what effect will it have on rank and file pro-life African-Americans and Hispanics whose support for the Democratic party is already teetering? Twenty eight percent of Democrats are pro-life. How many of them will decide that maybe it's time for a divorce from a party that doesn't really represent their convictions on a matter of deep importance to many of them?

I also wonder whether the DNC will make an exception for elected officials like Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey who is ostensibly a pro-life Catholic, but who is also a reliable Democratic vote in the senate. I suspect Casey has already been on the phone to Perez asking him what in the world he thinks he's doing by alienating these voters and making life difficult for politicians like himself.

The first rule when your party is digging itself into a hole is to stop digging. Apparently Mr. Perez isn't yet ready to put down the shovel.

Naturalism and Ethics

VJ Torley at Uncommon Descent comments on a passage from Thomas Huxley's essay Evolution and Ethics (1893) in which Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for ethics. One popular candidate for such a ground is the evolution of our species, but Huxley, his arrant fealty to Darwinian evolution notwithstanding, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,” when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution.

I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Huxley's right, of course. If the inclination to be kind and tolerant has evolved in the human species then so has the inclination to be selfish, violent, and cruel. So if evolution is to serve as our "moral dictionary" what grounds do we have for privileging kindness over cruelty? Both are equally sanctioned by our evolutionary history and thus we can't say that either is better or more right than the other.

Huxley goes on to dispense with the notion that the evolutionary development of our ethical sensibility can provide us with some sort of guide to our behavior.

There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called “ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittest’; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.

The problem is that, for naturalists, the processes of nature are the only thing they can look to for moral guidance. Having rejected the notion that there exists a transcendent, personal, moral authority, the naturalist, if he's to avoid nihilism, is left trying to derive ethics from what he sees in nature, which leads to what I regard as the most serious problem with any naturalistic ethics: There's simply no warrant for thinking that a blind, impersonal process like evolution or a blind, impersonal substance like matter, can impose a moral duty on conscious beings.

Moral obligations, if they exist, can only be imposed by conscious, intelligent, moral authorities. Evolution can no more impose such an obligation than can gravity. Thus, naturalists (atheists) are confronted with a stark choice: Either give up their atheism or embrace moral nihilism. Unwilling to do what is for them unthinkable and accept the first alternative, many of them are reluctantly embracing the second.

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

I had 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 a shocking epiphany that religious believers 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, An Amoral Manifesto

----------------

The world, according to this new picture [i.e. the picture produced by a scientific outlook], is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….

Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative. W.T. Stace, The Atlantic Monthly, 1948

----------------

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality. Kai Nielson (1984)

What these thinkers and dozens like them are saying is that the project of trying to find some solid, naturalistic foundation upon which to build an ethics is like trying to find a mermaid. The object of the search simply doesn't exist, nor could it.

Nuclear Weapons

With things heating up on the Korean peninsula and the North Koreans threatening to "turn the US to ashes with a super-mighty preemptive strike" with their nuclear weapons it might be helpful to explain exactly what nuclear weapons are.

What, for example, is the difference between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen, or a thermonuclear, bomb?

Atomic bombs utilize nuclear fission to generate energy. Hydrogen bombs, also called thermonuclear bombs, utilize nuclear fusion. In fission, a nucleus of an atom of uranium or plutonium absorbs a stray neutron, becomes unstable, and splits apart, releasing energy and three more neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by more nuclei causing more splitting (or fissioning) releasing more energy and more neutrons and within a fraction of a second there's a chain reaction in which all the atoms of the fuel are split. A mass of plutonium the size of grapefruit can produce the energy equivalent of 13,000 tons (13 kilotons) of TNT. This was the approximate yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Hydrogen bombs are even more powerful. The average hydrogen bomb has a yield of about 1 million tons (one megaton) of TNT, but some can produce as much as 50 megatons. This is about 4000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast.

These weapons rely on the energy released in the process of nuclear fusion. When hydrogen nuclei are forced together under great pressure they fuse and convert a small amount of mass into energy according to the equation E=MC^2. The pressure is generated by first producing a fission explosion. This generates enormous heat which in turn generates enormous pressure which forces the hydrogen nuclei together producing a fusion explosion. Thus, a hydrogen bomb is actually a combination of a fission and a fusion explosion. Because these weapons are triggered by the intense heat produced in a fission chain reaction they're called "thermonuclear" weapons.

This is video of a 1954 test of a 15 megaton weapon:

It's not clear whether the North Koreans have thermonuclear weapons or only fission weapons (which are bad enough). What most nuclear nations do is mount these weapons on missiles (called nuclear missile warheads) as well as drop them from planes as bombs, and this capability is what both North Korea and Iran are trying to achieve. If they're successful it'll have a seriously destabilizing effect on the world as all of their neighbors seek to develop their own arsenals to counter those of Iran and North Korea.

The enormous blast power of a single one megaton warhead can destroy an entire city. The radioactive fallout from the blast could kill tens of thousands more downwind from the blast. Such weapons in the hands of fanatics and madmen is a frightening prospect which is why so much of the world insists that neither Iran nor North Korea must be allowed to develop the capability to mount these weapons on missiles.

Unfortunately, it may take war to prevent them from obtaining those nuclear missiles.

Another Missile Strike?

According to the occasionally reliable DEBKAfile another American missile strike is imminent, but not, as one might expect, against the North Koreans. Here are some excerpts from their report:

The US Mediterranean fleet is moving into position ready for a decision to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles for a crushing assault on the Islamic State’s mountain strongholds in central Sinai, DEBKAfile’s military and counterterrorism sources report.

The prospective American missile attack in Sinai ...would have been discussed during the Egyptian President Abdul-Fatteh El-Sisi’s visit to the White House on April 3. He explained to his host, President Donald Trump, the immense difficulty of overcoming the Islamic State’s affiliate when its headquarters were dug into an interconnected web of tunnels and caves in the central Jabal (Mount) Halal of the peninsula.

Nicknamed the “Tora Bora of Sinai,” approach roads to this mountain fastness are few and far between....

The last Egyptian assault on ISIS’ towering mountain stronghold took place on April 2, shortly before El-Sisi traveled to Washington. The Egyptian military announced that 31 terrorists had been killed and a number of caves holding arms and ammunition destroyed.

But the damage was not devastating enough to disrupt the Islamist terrorists’ operations, DEBKAfile’s military sources report. Most of the terrorists escaped with the help of allied Bedouin tribesmen who, familiar with every nook and cranny in the desert peninsula, guided them to safety in new caves in Jabal Halal that were even more inaccessible to Egyptian troops.

Their new headquarters can only be destroyed by cruise missiles capable of exploding underground.

There's more at the link. The report also claims that a final decision to go ahead with a US missile assault on central Sinai rests with Defense Secretary James Mattis who arrived in Cairo yesterday, April 19.

I suppose we'll know soon enough what the results of Mattis' consultations with the Egyptians are.

Information Enigma

The skeptical philosopher David Hume, in arguing against the reasonableness of belief in miracles, famously declared that,

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined....There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.

And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle....

Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature is deeply problematic, but let that go for now (see here for a discussion of some of the problems with that definition).

Hume goes on to say that,

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Hume would doubtless be aghast at the implications of this maxim (or rule) for the contemporary controversy over intelligent design. He employed the rule against belief in miracles, arguing that because we have an overwhelming experience against violations of the laws of nature we should reject any report that a "violation" occurred.

If we grant Hume his rule (which I don't - the rule only entails skepticism of the report of a miracle, it doesn't warrant outright rejection of it) there's no reason not to apply it to the discovery over the last fifty years that the universe and life are both information-rich.

Couple that discovery with the fact that we have a uniform experience of information, whether in a library, on a hard drive, or wherever, being produced by intelligent minds, and it would seem that Hume would have to grant that we should believe that the information contained in biological cells and organisms must be the product of an intelligent mind.

We have no experience, after all, of information being produced by random, impersonal processes and forces. Indeed, we have a uniform experience of random action degrades information and generates disorder.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer discusses the problem biological information poses for naturalistic evolution in this video:

The New Moral Absolutism

The Atlantic's Jonathan Merritt argues that our culture's fling with moral relativism, a fling that's persisted for at least sixty years, is over. Borrowing from a column by the New York Times' David Brooks, Merritt maintains that, at least among Millenials, we're seeing what may be described as a New Absolutism. He may be right, but I think the absolutism he sees having descended upon us like a smog is not really an absolutism at all, but rather an emotivist power play.

I'll explain shortly, but first some excerpts from Merritt's column:

In The New York Times last week, David Brooks argued that while American college campuses were “awash in moral relativism” as late as the 1980s, a “shame culture” has now taken its place. The subjective morality of yesterday has been replaced by an ethical code that, if violated, results in unmerciful moral crusades on social media.

A culture of shame cannot be a culture of total relativism. One must have some moral criteria [by] which to decide if someone is worth shaming.

“Some sort of moral system is coming into place,” Brooks says. “Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action.”

America’s new moral code is much different than it was prior to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Instead of being centered on gender roles, family values, respect for institutions and religious piety, it orbits around values like tolerance and inclusion. (This new code has created a paradoxical moment in which all is tolerated except the intolerant and all included except the exclusive.)

Although this new code is moral, it is not always designated as such. As Brooks said, “Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition.”

To be sure, there's a new wave of moral absolutism sweeping academia which sees things like racism, sexism, support for Israel, and reservations about gay marriage and global warming as absolutely wrong, but to simply point this out and then conclude that relativism (actually a more accurate term here would be "moral subjectivism") is dead is to miss the fatal weakness lurking in the moral passion to which Merritt alludes.

That weakness lies in the fact that the moral fervor with which the above positions are often held on campus and in the media today has no ground in any objective moral referent. These positions are based on nothing more than the ardent feelings of those who hold them. As such they may be regarded as absolutes by those convinced of their rightness, but, if so, they are arbitrarily chosen absolutes, which is to say they're not really absolutes at all.

For any moral principle to be absolute it has to be objectively grounded in something which transcends one's own feelings, indeed which transcends humanity altogether. Otherwise, how do we adjudicate between the passionate feelings of one person and the passionate feelings of another? We can't, of course, unless we have some standard to which we can compare those disparate passions. Lacking such a standard, when we say something is wrong all we're saying is that it offends my personal preferences, to which someone might well ask, "Why should your preferences be the standard of right and wrong for everyone else?"

The new moral absolutism to which Merritt and Brooks advert is not absolutism at all. It's simply a form of narcissistic subjectivism, or egoism, which presumes that anything which transgresses my personal moral preferences is wrong for everyone and anyone to do.

You, let's say, think it's right to help the poor. I, let's say, think we should adopt social Darwinism and let the poor fend for themselves. You insist I'm wrong. I ask why am I wrong? You say because I'm being selfish and greedy. I ask why selfishness and greed are wrong. You say because they hurt people. I ask why it's wrong to hurt people. You reply that I wouldn't want people to hurt me. I respond that that's true but it's not a reason why I should care about hurting others. You give up on me, judging me hopelessly immoral, but what you haven't succeeded in doing is explaining why it's wrong to let the poor suffer. You've simply given expression to your own subjective feelings about the matter.

For there to be any objective moral duties there has to be a transcendent moral authority from which (or whom) all moral goodness is derived. Take away that authority, as our secular society seems eager to do, and all we're left with is emotivism - people insisting that their emotional reactions to events are "right" and contrary reactions are "wrong," but lacking any non-arbitrary basis for making such judgments.

This is not to say that if one believes in a transcendent authority, a God, that one will know what's right. Nor is it to say that even if one knows what's right one will do what's right. What it is to say is that unless there is a God, or something very much like God, there simply is no objective right or wrong, and certainly no absolute moral duties.

As any meaningful belief in God fades from our social and cultural landscape belief in good and evil, right and wrong, will also fade until it's as insubstantial as the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland:

Haters

No doubt there are good reasons to be wary of President Trump. There were good reasons, indeed, to be wary of President Obama and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, but this level of viciousness and vitriol should have no place in our community, especially coming from a university professor:

A history professor at California State University, Fresno, appears to have advocated for the death of President Donald Trump on Twitter.

Tweets from an account purportedly operated by Professor Lars Maischak call for Trump to “hang” in order to “save American democracy,” and say the only “cure” for racist people is a bullet to their head. The account is not verified, although the bio and interactions between the user and other Twitter users indicate it belongs to the professor.

“To save American democracy, Trump must hang,” Professor Lars Maischak appears to have tweeted in February. “The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism.”

“Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?” the user wrote in another tweet a few days later, along with the hashtag “TheResistance.”

And in another: “#TheResistance #ethniccleansing Justice = The execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.”

The user has also said “mercy towards racists” is a “fatal weakness” of Americans.

“#TheResistance Mercy towards racists was always the fatal weakness of good Americans,” he tweeted. “1865, 1965, they left too many of them alive.”

There's more in this vein from the good professor at the link. It would be amusing were it not so pathetic that one of the biggest criticisms of President Trump by his opponents is that he is "a hater" yet so much of the protest against his administration has been characterized by much more hatred than Mr. Trump has ever displayed.

I'm sure there are individuals who despise President Obama and the Democrats, and I'm sure some of them issued disgusting tweets, but I can't imagine that had a prominent intellectual, a university educator, tweeted something this obscene about Mr. Obama or his supporters he'd be permitted to keep his job. Nor should he have been.

Vengeful rhetoric which encourages murder and violence should be condemned by all decent people on the left and on the right, and those who employ such language in our politics should be marginalized as mentally disturbed cranks, even as we pity them for allowing the corrosive acid of hatred to eat away at their hearts.

Resurrections and Other Miracles

The Christian world celebrates tomorrow what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false. Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from the circularity of basing the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible. But we can only know they're impossible if we know that all reports of miracles are unreliable.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if molecules of hot water are added to a pot of molecules of cold water the molecules will tend to eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules on one occasion to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident. They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that there could be an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. There's no evidence of other worlds, unfortunately, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist. The skeptic clings to this conviction because if these things aren't so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to his psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well? If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead. After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.