More Perspective on the Pandemic

After a month or so of the media seemingly trying to convince us that we are on the cusp of a pestilential apocalypse a lot of Americans are beginning to wonder exactly how bad the nationwide coronavirus situation really is.

Matt Margolis, from whom we borrowed in an earlier post to give us some perspective on where the U.S. stands relative to other nations in per capita cases and per capita deaths from covid-19 has another interesting post at PJ Media on what our numbers would look like if we bracketed out downstate New York where the bulk of the cases have occurred.

In other words, what is the situation in the huge expanse of territory that comprises the United States if we treated downstate New York as a separate country? Margolis shows that the numbers from downstate New York are heavily skewing the statistics for both New York state and the country as a whole.

For perspective I borrowed this graphic from his post:

Downstate New York is in blue

Using the latest data, Margolis finds that the U.S. as a whole ranks 7th in the world in covid cases per million people, but if you exclude the 12 million or so residents of eight downstate counties that encompass New York City and surrounding areas, that ranking drops to 13th in the world. In fact, if we treat those counties as a separate country they would rank #1 in the world in covid cases per million people.

Of course, actual cases are hard to determine because there simply isn't enough testing being done to measure how many people have or have had the virus. A more accurate indicator is fatalities, so when Margolis looks at fatalities per million he finds that the United States as a whole would rank 8th in the world.

Removing the fatalities in downstate New York, however, drops the U.S. to 11th and makes those eight New York counties #1.

None of these comparisons, by the way, includes Iran, Russia or China whose cases and fatalities reports are deemed untrustworthy.

Margolis concludes with this:

What we can see from the data is just how much downstate New York is skewing the data for the United States. What this tells us is that there shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all approach to social distancing or reopening the country. I feel pretty safe where I live, but because I'm in New York State, and Governor Cuomo is treating the whole state like it is downstate, I have to abide by the same statewide restrictions.

Further, if the media ever chose to look at the country's numbers the way I have, they'd see that the overwhelming majority of the country is doing much, much better than it appears to be when you include downstate New York in our numbers. The media wants you to believe that President Trump botched the federal government's response to the coronavirus. This is clearly not true. Even with downstate's tallies we don't lead the world in cases or deaths per capita.

Treating downstate as its own country shows just how much local leadership impacts containment and mitigation.

Check out his post at PJMedia for details. What Margolis says about having to abide by statewide restrictions is true not only of residents of New York but of many other states which have counties of denser populations where restrictions make more sense than they do in the rest of the state. Yet the state governments don't make distinctions when they impose their restrictions.

Nor, in some cases, do they make any attempt at consistency or rationality. Michigan's governor, Gretchen Whitmer, has decreed that you can shop in a Home Depot, but you're prohibited from buying certain items in the store, like garden plants, that are deemed "inessential."

If you're allowed into the store what's the point of telling you you can't buy garden plants? Do garden plants make people more vulnerable to covid?

Her policy also allows one to canoe on Michigan waterways but ban the use of motorized craft. What's the rationale for that? Are outboard motors known to harbor the virus? Do they somehow fling the virus across the water to other boaters?

Examples of arbitrary and poorly conceived restrictions are not hard to find. They do nothing to minimize risk but do a lot to diminish even further the trust and confidence people have in their government.

Staggering Improbabilities

I've several times in recent posts made the claim that scientists have no idea how life could have arisen through blind, undirected processes like chance and the laws of chemistry.

The folks at Lad Allen have put together an eleven minute video which starkly illustrates the difficulties any such theory of the origin of life (abiogenesis) must surmount in order to be plausible.

They discuss the probability of getting just a single useful medium-sized protein purely by the action of mindless chance, and it turns out that you can't. It would quite literally take a miracle, and, as is mentioned at the end of the video there's a huge gap between having a single, medium-sized protein and having a living cell that has the ability to metabolize nutrients and reproduce itself. The simplest living cell requires hundreds of different proteins whose functions all must be coordinated by some sort of information software, and no one has any idea at all where that comes from.

The task of discovering how nature, unaided by intelligence, could have accomplished this astronomically improbable feat seems hopeless, and one feels for those researchers who have spent their lives trying to come up with the means by which nature could've accomplished it, laboring all the while under the conviction that it surely must've happened somehow.

Perhaps it did, but no one who has ever placed a bet on anything would ever wager on something so staggeringly improbable as what's depicted in this video:

Comatose But Conscious

Anyone who has had a family member in a coma from a brain injury has probably wondered whether their loved one could hear them and wondered what it must be like for someone to be conscious but completely unable to express themselves. We've discussed this on VP on several occasions in the past but whenever I come across an article on the topic, I feel like I should mention it again.

In a partial transcript of a podcast interview with neuroscientist Michael Egnor, Egnor elaborates on the work of Adrian Owen who discovered about fifteen years ago that many comatose patients were capable of thinking and could hear what was being said to them.

Subsequent research has determined that in a significant number of cases, as high as 40%, comatose patients are indeed able to hear what is being said to them and, with modern MRI techniques, even able to respond.

Here's part of Egnor's discussion of Owen's work:

Owen took a woman who was in a persistent vegetative state—she’d been in a car accident and had severe brain damage, and she’d been in this state for several years—and he put her in an MRI machine and did what’s called a functional MRI test. A functional MRI test looks at changes in blood flow in the brain that we believe correspond to activation of parts of the brain. So you can kind of tell what’s going on inside the brain during the time they’re in the machine.

So he put her in the machine and he put headphones on her and he asked her to think about things. Now remember, she’s a woman who, supposedly, is the deepest level of coma, just a hair above brain dead. And he said, “Imagine you’re walking across the room.” “Imagine you’re playing tennis.” “Think of things.” And he found activation in her brain. Even though she had massive brain damage, there were patterns of activation.

So he then took fifteen normal volunteers, put them in the machine, and asked them the same questions. And her patterns of activation were identical to theirs. So he said, well, to a first approximation, it looks like she can think just like they can think.

But, he said, you know, maybe the activation that we are seeing in the brain isn’t because she understands. Maybe it’s just the brain’s reaction to sound. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand, maybe just the noise from the headphones is causing this activation. So he scrambled the words so, instead of saying, “Imagine walking across a room” he would say “across walking imagine room your”. So it made no sense. And the activation went away in her brain and in the volunteers’.

So he showed that the only time she had activation in her brain was when what was asked of her made sense. And her activation was completely indistinguishable from the activation of completely conscious people. So he concluded that she was able to understand and think about things that he was asking her to understand and think about, even though she was in the deepest level of coma.

This alone is astonishing, but there's more:

His research has been repeated by a number of other laboratories on many, many patients with persistent vegetative state. And about forty percent of people in persistent vegetative state show high levels of intellectual functioning even in deep coma.

There are ways of conversing with people in deep coma where you can, for example, look at the activation state representing "Yes" and the activation state representing "No" and you can ask them questions. You know, “Are you lonely?” “Do you wish your mother were here?” “Would you like something to eat?”, stuff like that, and they can answer you, with these brain states.

In addition, some people can do mathematics in a coma. You can ask them “Is the square root of 25, 6?” and they do a "No." And “Is it 5?” and they do a "Yes." So there can be very high levels—not in all patients that we have found—but in many patients, forty percent, at least—of mental function in profoundly damaged brains. To the point where the medical profession has actually added a category to this list of ways you can be in a coma, and this is called minimally conscious state.

So patients who have evidence of intellectual functioning in deep coma are called “minimally conscious,” although, frankly, they’re not really minimally conscious, they’re quite conscious.

I've always wondered whether the comatose patient was in pain but unable to communicate their suffering to anyone. If so, it would be hellish. These sorts of developments give hope that medical professionals will be better able to care for and comfort those who appear to be unconscious but aren't.

Materialism, Theism and Abstract Ideas

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? Is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It is clear, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be. For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed?

In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God. If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems obvious that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would, or could, exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me. If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing. Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left. Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

Metamorphosis

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies show the incredible difficulties metamorphosis poses to any account which insists that the genesis of the process be completely unguided and naturalistic.

There are a number of biological phenomena for which a plausible explanation in standard Darwinian terms is difficult to imagine. Metamorphosis is one, but others include the origin of life, the development of eukaryotic life, the origin of the DNA code, the evolution of irreducibly complex molecular machines and systems, sexual reproduction, the origin of multicellular life, the sudden appearance of the various body plans of living things in the cambrian era, and, perhaps most enigmatic, the emergence of human consciousness.

Why such phenomena would have ever evolved in the first place and how they could have done so are questions for which naturalistic Darwinism, or Neo-Darwinism, has no convincing answer.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process, as well as the others mentioned above, evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

It's All in How You Look at It

The media as is their habit is being a bit disingenuous in their claims that the U.S. is leading the world in covid-19 deaths. As a piece at PJ Media by Matt Margolis points out, it all depends on which statistics you use.

Here's Margolis:

Last month, when President Trump said the United States had done more coronavirus tests than South Korea, the media pounced on the claim and pointed out that the United States’ population is more than six times that of South Korea, and when you looked at testing per capita, the United States was still behind South Korea.

Fair enough, but now it's being widely trumpeted in the media that the United States has the unenviable distinction of leading the world in coronavirus deaths. Political attack ads are using this statistic to discredit Trump's response to the plague, but, as Margolis points out, this is bogus for two reasons.

The first is, of course, that anyone who trusts the numbers produced by the Chinese authorities is being extraordinarily naive, and the second is that the media, which insisted that we use per capita statistics when the talk was about testing, has now abandoned that measure since it evidently no longer suits their purpose.

Margolis again:

The United States does not lead the world in coronavirus cases per capita — which is the best way to compare how the pandemic is being contained in each country. For much of the pandemic, Italy has been overwhelmed by the coronavirus, but Italy has fewer cases and deaths than the United States.

The United States has nearly six times the population of Italy, and when you measure cases and deaths per capita it’s easy to see why Italy was overwhelmed and the United States is not.

Margolis features some dramatic graphs in his column, and the interested reader should check them out. What they show is that if cases and deaths are ranked per capita, the standard the media derided Trump for not using when he talked about testing, the United States is actually fourth in the world in terms of cases of infection, trailing Spain, Italy and France, and fifth in the world in terms of deaths. Spain, Italy, France and the U.K. all have more deaths per capita than does the U.S.

And these numbers don't include China which is doubtless lying about both their cases and deaths, just as they've lied about this virus from the beginning.

Moreover, Margolis' graphs show that in per capita terms we are not just behind, but we're far behind those nations with the highest morbidities. This is glum news in any case, but it would be a little more helpful if the media would be a little more honest in how they report these statistics. Of course, when the summum bonum is discrediting Trump what does a bit of dissimulation matter?

One caveat: If you check the graphs the plot line for France in the graph that shows cases per million doesn't correspond to the numbers given in the table, but the table is more likely than the graph to be accurate.

True for Me But Not for You

Perhaps the most calamitous of the casualties of our postmodern age is the loss of belief in objective truth.

The notion that all truth, except, perhaps, for mathematical truths, is conditioned by race, gender and economic class has become axiomatic in contemporary discourse. What's true for you, we often hear, isn't true for me. The underlying assumption is that truth is socially constructed and subjective, and that each of us possesses our own personal truth.

I ask students in my classes for a show of hands of those who believe that something can be true for them but not for me, and it frequently happens that over half the class raises a hand.

These students, I believe, are a victim of muddled thinking. When I then ask them to give me an example of something that's true for them but not true for me they'll often say something like, "I'm 19 and you're not," or "I was born in Europe, but you were born in the U.S."

What they don't see in the examples they give is that if it's true for them that they are 19 years old then it's true for everyone that they are 19 years old. How could it be true for Joe that he's 19 but not true for Mary that Joe is 19? How could it be true for Mary that she was born in Europe but not true for Joe that Mary was born in Europe?

As I said, this is muddled. If it's true that Mary was born in Europe then it's an objective truth. It's not just true for Mary, it's true for everyone.

What I think the students really mean to say is that there are things that are true about them that are not true about others. This, of course, is quite right, but it's an entirely different proposition.

Here's another illustration of the same confusion. Sometimes we hear people say, in a rather inchoate way, that, "It's true for Joe that God exists, but it's not true for me." But, if it's true for Joe that God exists, then it's true for everyone that God exists. How could it not be? God doesn't just exist for some people and not for others.

What the speaker is actually trying to say is that, "It's true that Joe believes that God exists, but it's not true that I believe that God exists." This might well be so, but it's a different claim altogether. Moreover, if it's true that Joe believes that God exists then it's objectively true for everyone that Joe believes that God exists.

The notion that everyone has his or her own truth is really quite absurd. All of us may have our own opinions, our own beliefs, our own memories or our own eye color, etc. but no one has his own truth. Whatever is true for any of us is objectively true for all of us, even if it's not true about all of us.

The notion that truth is subjective, that it's whatever we feel strongly, and that my truth isn't necessarily your truth is a product of intellectual slovenliness. The sooner we all get over it the better off we'll be for it.

John Updike's Meditation on the Resurrection

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes for a meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

Father and Son

As Christians observe this the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday, it might be helpful for both Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on Golgotha.

It might be good today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and the people on the train.

The Easter Miracle

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday 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 a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will 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 it is not 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 the skeptic's 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 of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly 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.

Kantian Man

Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970) describes in vivid accents the modern man who prides himself in his rational approach to life unencumbered by the silly superstitions believed in by gullible religious people. The modern rational man, typified in her telling by someone like the 18th century philosophical icon Immanuel Kant, is a man who ...

...confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason . . . . This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d’être of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek . . . .

He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it.

In fact Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Lucifer? Why such a harsh judgment? Perhaps because the modern, "rational" man believes only what science and his senses tell him. The rational man looks at himself and his fellows as little more than flesh and bone machines, animals, whose only real "purpose" is to reproduce, experience pleasure and avoid pain.

He regards morality as an illusion. His reason affords him no basis for caring about the weak or the poor, no basis for human compassion, no particular point to conserving the earth's resources for future generations.

Whereas Kant thought that reason dictated the categorical imperative, i.e. the duty to treat others as ends in themselves and not merely as a means to one's own happiness, the fact is that reason, unfettered from any divine sanction, dictates only that each should look to his own interests.

In practice modern man may care about the well-being of others, but he must abandon his fealty to science and reason to do so because these provide no justification for any moral obligations whatsoever.

Indeed, the purely rational man is led by the logic of his naturalism to the conclusion that might makes right. The pursuit of power frequently becomes the driving force of his life. It injects his life with meaning. It leads him to build abattoirs like Auschwitz and Dachau to eliminate the less powerful and less human.

Would Kant have agreed with this bleak assessment. No, but then Kant wasn't quite in tune with the modern, rational man. Kant believed that in order to make sense of our lives as moral agents we have to assume that three things are true: We have to assume that God exists, that we have free will, and that there is life beyond the grave.

The modern man, of course, rejects all three, and in so doing he rejects the notion of objective moral value or obligation. That's why reason has led men to embrace ideologies that have produced vast tracts of corpses, and that's why, perhaps, Murdoch uses the name Lucifer to describe them.

The Origin of Life

Yesterday we took a brief look at a new book by physicist Paul Davies titled, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life. I observed in that post that Davies, an agnostic, occasionally walks right up to the brink of acknowledging that life must be the product of an intelligent designer but at the last moment veers away from drawing that conclusion.

Toward the end of this fascinating read he not only walks up to the line, he actually sticks his toe over it. Here's how:

On page 172 Davies replies to the question posed in the title of this post by exclaiming that, "The short answer is, nobody knows how life began!" He goes on to explain that nobody even has a plausible theory for how the enormous difficulties involved in generating even the simplest living cell could have been surmounted by natural processes. 

 He writes that, "An explanation for the origin of life as we know it has to include an explanation for the origin of...digital information management and - especially - the origin of the [genetic] code," as well as the entire translation system necessary for converting the information inscribed in DNA into proteins. The translation system is comprised of numerous kinds of proteins, but where did they come from before there was a DNA to code for them and a translation system to produce them and the information to choreograph the whole process?

In other words, this complex system had to pretty much exist in order to bring itself into existence. Davies states that this is the most formidable and perplexing problem in all of evolutionary biology.

Moreover, each step in the evolution of a living cell must somehow be conserved in a kind of ratchet effect which allows for its preservation before the next step occurs. What constituted the ratchet and where did it come from?

So many are the conditions that need to be satisfied to produce life that Davies and many other scientists are beginning to think that it may have arisen only once in the entire history of the universe. Contrary to what we often read in the popular media, the discovery by astronomers of an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of some star is scarcely reason, by itself, to assume that life could exist there.

Davies voices his skepticism of the enthusiastic claims that often surround these discoveries:

Suppose the transition from non-life to life involved a sequence of a hundred chemical reactions, each requiring a particular temperature range (for example, 5-10°C, for the first, 20-30°C, for the second, and so on). Perhaps the transition also demanded tightly constrained pressure, salinity and acidity ranges, not to mention a host of catalysts....habitability does not imply inhabited.

And these conditions are just a few of the requirements that must be met for a planet, even one with water on its surface, to give rise to living things.

Even if some day a researcher manages in a laboratory to synthesize a living organism from a residue of raw chemicals it would demonstrate only that life can be created by an intelligent researcher who can establish all the necessary, tightly controlled conditions in her laboratory. It would prove nothing about what could actually happen in nature in the absence of an intelligent scientist.

Davies again:

To attain even the modest successes [creating life in the lab] announced so far requires special equipment and technicians, purified and refined substances, high fidelity control over physical conditions - and a big budget. But above all it needs an intelligent designer (aka a clever scientist).

And that clever scientist must have a purpose or goal in mind toward which he is striving, but, he writes, "Astrobiologists want to know how life began without fancy equipment, purification procedures, environment-stabilizing systems and - most of all - without an intelligent designer." (p.179) (emphasis mine).  

As Davies goes on to say, just because an intelligent agent can easily manufacture an artifact doesn't mean that nature could do it even given a billion or more years: "...organic chemists can readily make plastics, but we don't find them occurring naturally. 

Even something as simple as a bow and arrow is straightforward for a child to make but would never be created by an inanimate process." Indeed, but nevertheless many scientists have faith, a blind faith, that the unimaginably complex and purposive processes in the cell, plus both the material hardware and the informational software, have been created by just such an inanimate process.

And why do they believe that with such conviction? Not because there's evidence for it, but because they're committed to a naturalistic worldview, or at least a naturalistic methodology, that excludes apriori the possibility of the existence of an intelligent designer. If the possibility of a designer is automatically ruled out then some naturalistic theory, no matter how implausible, must be true.

Davies' Demon

Physicist Paul Davies is a prolific popularizer of science, having written numerous books on scientific topics, most of which are accessible to the layman. His most recent offering is titled The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life and in it Davies makes a strong case for the emerging view among scientists and philosophers that the fundamental characteristic of life is not any of the biological processes that occur in living organisms, but rather information.

Davies discusses numerous cellular processes - the amazingly complex procedure by which the DNA code is translated into proteins, how signals are transmitted along neurons and many others - and argues that all of these marvels are choreographed, coordinated and controlled by information. If a cell is like a computer the molecular constituents are like the hardware and information is like the software.

In several places throughout the book the author pauses to remind us that all of these wonders as well as the information necessary for them to function are the product of eons of evolution, that mindless nature serves the same role in designing life as a computer engineer serves in designing a computer.

The analogy that Davies tacitly promotes, however, is of a computer that guides the development of its own hardware and software, from the fabrication of the substances used in the hardware components all the way to the construction of a functional PC and all without any input from an outside intelligence.

To continue the analogy, this computer starts out with minimal software capabilities but is able to develop more complexity with time, developing the ability to correct errors, repair itself, duplicate itself and program the increasingly complex computer to create more parts of itself as well as interface with peripherals. And all of that would be necessary just to produce the very first computer. There are no precursors.

That's somewhat analogous to what must have happened to get life started, but how does software, information, produce itself?

The primitive computer, would on Davies' telling, had to have had both foresight and knowledge (!) of its internal states, being able not only to sense when certain processes needed to be turned on and off, but also to both recognize damage to its organelles and sense threats to its well-being.

He acknowledges that this is not standard Darwinism, insisting that it's instead a "refinement" of standard evolutionary theory, but it seems that so far from being a refinement it's in fact a total falsification of the Darwinian hypothesis.

Regrettably, Davies never explains how evolution could have produced the wonders he describes. He never defends the theory. He simply waves a magic wand and declares it a fact.

He mentions that there are indeed mysteries along the evolutionary progression from prebiotic chemicals to human life. Scientists are at a loss, for example, to explain any of the following in standard Darwinian or naturalistic terms: The origin of life (abiogenesis), the origin of nucleated cells (eukaryogenesis), the origin of sexual reproduction, the origin of multicellularity and the origin of human consciousness.

We could add to this list the origin of metamorphosis, the link between genes and behavior and the origin of language, none of which has, as far as I'm aware, ever received a plausible Darwinian explanation.

It's also a mystery as to why humans haven't evolved longer life spans with longer periods of reproductive fertility. It would certainly would seem that both of these would be child's play for a process that has accomplished such astonishing wonders as metamorphosis and photosynthesis. The evolutionary selection pressure to extend human life spans and fecundity should've been immense, yet it's never happened to any significant extent. Why not?

Finally, he neglects to discuss the origin and source of biological information itself. Information is always generated by a mind. It doesn't arise by chance. Astrobiologists looking for extraterrestrial life have said that were they to find something as simple as a radio signal that repeated a sequence of prime numbers they would consider the information content of that signal to be dispositive evidence of an alien intelligence.

Yet whole libraries of information are found in even the simplest cells and are far more complex than a sequence of prime numbers, but that information is not considered to have an intelligent provenience. Why not?

Davies occasionally comes close to admitting that the wonders he describes must somehow have been the product of intelligent engineering. Several times he walks right up to that admission but at the last moment dances back away from it.

In fact, reading the book I had the feeling that Davies is either an undercover intelligent design provocateur seeking to undermine the Darwinian edifice from within or else he's a man who can look at the noonday sky on a clear summer's day and fail to see the sun.

Egoism at Shantung Compound

Langdon Gilkey was a theologian and philosopher who, as a young man with a degree from Harvard, went to China to teach English and philosophy. While he was there WWII broke out and the Japanese invaded China. Gilkey was detained and held in a facility with 2000 others under very trying conditions.

He writes about his experience in his 1966 memoir titled Shantung Compound. In the book he describes himself at the time as holding the belief that human reason would enable him and his fellow prisoners to transcend their conditions and build a community based on their common humanity and solidarity. He also believed that religion was a "frill" that wasn't necessary for people to seek to advance the common good, a goal that "any unbelieving naturalist (atheist) can easily avow."

For a while his optimistic humanism was affirmed, but as time wore on he began to experience disillusionment. His worldview, his view of his fellow man, suffered a series of blows, but one in particular was especially jarring.

Gilkey was chosen by his fellows to head up the committee in charge of housing. Conditions were extremely cramped and the closeness led to a lot of friction. One particular housing unit had eleven inmates in a room that could comfortably accommodate only half that number, and Gilkey learned that an adjacent unit of exactly the same size had only nine inmates. The unit with nine was crowded but not as badly as the unit with eleven.

Gilkey thought that there was an obvious and rational solution: Send one of the inmates from the more crowded unit to the less crowded unit and both would have ten inmates and be on equal terms. This was a just and moral solution, he thought, that any reasonable person would accept.

But he was disappointed to find that the less crowded unit refused to accept a tenth inmate. They told Gilkey in so many words that it was not in their self-interest to make their quarters more crowded than they already were. Gilkey argued passionately that they were being irrational and unfair, but his appeals fell on deaf ears. They even threatened Gilkey with physical violence if he persisted.

He concluded from this that if rationality conflicts with self-interest men will often choose self-interest. Rationality and logic were insufficient to move men to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

In other words, although Gilkey doesn't put it in these terms, he was confronted with a conflict between utilitarianism and egoism, and he found to his dismay that egoism frequently prevailed, even among otherwise rational men.

I disagree, though, with his conclusion that these men were being irrational. I think they were acting perfectly rationally. Gilkey simply assumed that utilitarianism is the rational ethical stance, that we should always seek to promote the greatest good for all, but why should we? Why should anyone care about the well-being of others? Why is it not rational to promote the greatest good for oneself? This is indeed the default position in a secular society. In the absence of any transcendent source of moral imperatives the rational course is to look out for #1, to put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others.

This could only be wrong if there actually is a transcendent moral authority with the power to hold us accountable for our choices and who demands that we care about others at least as much as we care about ourselves. If no such authority exists then egoism makes perfect sense.

People who are repelled by this conclusion and who are convinced that we have a moral obligation to do what is fair for all are tacitly making a case, whether they realize it or not, for the existence of God because such an obligation can only exist if God imposes it upon us.

This is not to say that those who do not believe that God exists will necessarily be egoists. People can certainly choose arbitrarily to live any way they wish. What it means, though, is that there's nothing in atheism that requires one to care about the welfare of others. On atheism egoism is perfectly rational, and any other ethical outlook is purely a matter of subjective preference.

Atheists who think this repugnant should probably rethink their atheism.

Christianity and the Abolition of Slavery

One of the peculiarities of our current cultural moment is that many African Americans, associating Christianity with slavery, repudiate their "Christian" name and adopt an Arabic or Islamic identity. I say this is peculiar because according to Rodney Stark in his book For the Glory of God, Africans suffered as badly, if not worse, from Islamic slavery as they did from the European variety.

This is especially true if Islamic slavery is compared to slavery as it was practiced in North America.

Muslim slave-trading began many centuries before Europeans discovered the New World and carried at least as many Africans into bondage, and probably more, as were eventually shipped across the Atlantic. By 1600 more than 7 million Africans had been transported to Islamic countries, and another 1.2 million more were transported there between 1800-1900.

These numbers only reflect the number of Africans who arrived at the destination. The death toll while being transported (by African slavers, it should be noted) from the interior to the African coast was somewhere between 20%-40%. Another 3%-10% died while waiting to be shipped, and 12%-16% died in transit on hellish slave ships. Altogether, of those initially taken as slaves, 35%-66% died before reaching the Islamic slave markets.

This pic and the one below show the horrible conditions to which African slaves
were subjected on slave ships. The filth, heat, and stench would've been overpowering.

It's sometimes said that Africans were treated better by Muslims than they were in the West, but Stark argues that this is dubious. Although roughly equal numbers of Africans arrived in both the West and in the Islamic world there's no substantial black population today in the "land of Islam." This is attributed in large measure to very low fertility due to the practice of castrating black males and of killing any infants who show black ancestry. Castration not only meant that black males who survived it couldn't reproduce, it also created a very high mortality rate among males due to infection and blood loss.

Just as science arose only once, so too, did effective moral opposition to slavery, and, like science, it arose only in the West and by Christians. Slavery has existed in every society able to afford it, including Native American societies, but of all the world's religions only Christians developed the belief that slavery was a great sin and must be abolished.

Antislavery efforts began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and eventually led to its disappearance in all but the fringes of Christian Europe by the end of the 16th century. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World they did so over strenuous papal opposition. Unfortunately, by this time in history Rome was too weak to exert its influence over slave-owners in the Western hemisphere.

It's an interesting detail that relatively few slaves were imported into North America. From 1626 to 1808 when it became illegal to import slaves in the U.S., the total number of imported African slaves was about 400,000. By contrast, 3.6 million went to Brazil, 1.6 million were imported by the Spanish colonies, and about 3.8 million wound up in the horrific Caribbean sugar plantations. Eventually, due to the efforts primarily of Quakers in North America, like William and Sarah Lay, and the Clapham Sect in England, most notably William Wilberforce, the slave trade was first abolished and then ultimately done away with in the West.

There was, however, no similar abolition movement in the Islamic world. Slavery was only ended in the Muslim world because of Western pressure to do so, but it persisted nevertheless well into the 20th century (Saudi Arabia banned it in 1962, Mauritania in 1981). The British navy embargoed Muslim slave ships and British and French colonial troops intercepted countless slave caravans, freeing the slaves and sometimes executing slave traders on the spot. In North America a catastrophic civil war was fought, primarily over the issue of slavery.

Stark notes how the people who finally ended the moral scourge were acting essentially altruistically. They themselves had nothing to gain from their efforts and some paid dearly for their commitment to the cause of blacks.

He concludes that although a Christian culture was certainly not a sufficient basis for ending slavery, it was nonetheless a necessary one since it was almost solely Christian thinkers and activists, working within the unique Judeo-Christian understanding of human rights and equality, who reached anti-slavery conclusions and influenced the larger culture to recognize that they were participating in a great evil.

Perhaps if this history were more widely known fewer African Americans would be inclined to reject their Christian heritage in favor of an Islamic one.

Christianity and the Rise of Modern Science

Baylor historian and sociologist Rodney Stark is one of my favorite authors. His books are always both fascinating and contrarian. One of my favorites is his For the Glory of God which, as the subtitle states, is the story of how monotheism led to the Reformation, science, witch-burnings, and the end of slavery.

It's specifically about Christian monotheism and it's all very interesting, but one of the most interesting aspects of the book was how Stark debunks some of the enduring myths about the interplay and significance of Christianity for both the emergence of modern science and the abolition of slavery.

I'd like to briefly summarize some of what he says about the alleged science/religion conflict in this post and talk tomorrow about what he says about the role of Christianity in ending slavery.

Ever since the 17th century opponents of Christianity have sought to perpetuate the myth that religion and science have been locked in mortal combat. The myth culminated in the work of Andrew Dickson White, author of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), a book whose themes are still influential today even though they've been almost entirely discredited by subsequent scholarship.

Stark shows how White's account of Columbus being impeded by religious men in Spain who thought the world was flat is totally false, as is belief in an epoch of "Dark Ages" which descended upon Europe like a shroud over the minds of men.

There were no "Dark Ages," nor did anyone with any learning in Columbus' day think the world was flat. His proposal to sail across the Atlantic to India was resisted because it was believed, rightly, that Columbus had seriously underestimated the circumference of the globe and that he would never be able to make it to his destination.

Indeed, he would not have made it had he not serendipitously come upon the New World.

So, too, traditional accounts of the theories of Copernicus and the persecution of Galileo by the Church are often riddled with misinformation intended to make Christianity and Christians look like benighted fools and frame the founders of modern science as secular heroes struggling against an oppressive Church.

The facts are otherwise. As Stark points out, 50 of the 52 men who were most influential in the development of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries were Christians, and over 60 percent of these were devoutly so, including some of the greatest names in the scientific pantheon: Boyle, Brahe, Descartes, Gassendi, Hooke, Huygens, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton, Pascal, Vesalius, et al.

Stark observes that so far from being inimical to science, the Church made it possible for science to flourish by building and staffing universities where men could pursue learning centuries before the "Enlightenment," but perhaps even more important than centers of scholarship was the pervading worldview in Europe that gave rise to modern science.

The theological assumptions that the cosmos had been created by an intelligent being, that it was logical, law-like and designed, and that its secrets could be unlocked through the application of human reason, all provided the impetus to explore and investigate the world and led to the burgeoning of scientific discovery.

This, Stark argues, is why "science arose only once in history - in medieval Europe - because only there was found a culture dominated by a belief in a rational, conscious, all-powerful Creator," and only in Christian Europe were men free to investigate nature and to "think God's thoughts after Him."

Martyrdom, Modern and Ancient

Raymond Ibrahim at PJMedia.com notes that it was five years last February since 21 young men were taken by Muslim fanatics onto a beach and beheaded. They were all of them Christians, 20 Egyptian Copts and one Ghanian, and their captors, members of ISIS, had pressured them to renounce their faith and convert to Islam, but they steadfastly and courageously refused.

Their faithfulness to Jesus Christ, even at the cost of their lives, is an inspiration to everyone who reads about it.

Ibrahim's article goes on to explain that this persecution of Christians by Muslims is not something that began the day before yesterday. It has been going on for 1200 years or more. Ibrahim recounts an episode that occured in the 9th century as an illustration of this jihad against Christianity:

In 838, Caliph al-Mu‘tasim—at the head of eighty thousand slave-soldiers—burst into Amorium, one of the Eastern Roman Empire’s largest and most important cities. They burned and razed it to the ground and slaughtered countless; everywhere there were “bodies heaped up in piles,” recalled a chronicler.

The invaders locked those who sought sanctuary inside their churches and set the buildings aflame; trapped Christians could be heard crying kyrie eleison — “Lord have mercy!” in Greek — while being roasted alive.

Hysterical “women covered their children, like chickens, so as not to be separated from them, either by sword or slavery.”

About half of the city’s seventy thousand citizens were slaughtered, the rest hauled off in chains. There was such a surplus of human booty that when the caliph came across four thousand male prisoners he ordered them executed on the spot.

Because there “were so many women’s convents and monasteries” in this populous Christian city, “over a thousand virgins were led into captivity, not counting those that had been slaughtered. They were given to the Moorish and Turkish slaves, so as to assuage their lust,” laments the chronicler.

When the young emperor, Theophilus (r. 829–842), heard about the sack of Amorium—his hometown, chosen by the caliph for that very reason, to make the sting hurt all the more—he fell ill and died three years later, aged 28, reportedly from sorrow.

Meanwhile, the Muslim poet Abu Tammam (805‐845) celebrated the caliph’s triumph, since “You have left the fortunes of the sons of Islam in the ascendant, and the polytheists [Christians] and the abode of polytheism in decline.”

Among the many captives carted off to Iraq were forty-two notables, mostly from the military and clerical classes. Due to their prestigious status and in order to make them trophies of Islam, they were repeatedly pressured to convert:

During the seven years of their imprisonment, their captors tried in vain to persuade them to renounce Christianity and accept Islam. The captives stubbornly resisted all their seductive offers and bravely held out against terrible threats. After many torments that failed to break the spirit of the Christian soldiers, they condemned them to death, hoping to shake the determination of the saints before executing them. The martyrs remained steadfast…

One, Theodore, a Christian cleric who fought in defense of Amorium, was goaded as follows: “We know that you forsook the priestly office, became a soldier and shed blood [of Muslims] in battle. You can have no hope in Christ, whom you abandoned voluntarily, so accept Mohammed.”

Theodore replied: “You do not speak truthfully when you say that I abandoned Christ. Moreover, I left the priesthood because of my own unworthiness. Therefore, I must shed my blood for the sake of Christ, so that He might forgive the sins that I have committed against Him.”

In the end, none would recant; and so, on March 6, 845, after seven years of torture and temptation failed to make them submit to Muhammad, all 42 Christians were — like their 21 spiritual descendants, the Egyptian/Ghanaian martyrs—also marched to a body of water, the Euphrates River, ritually beheaded, and their bodies dumped into the river.

Here's a famous screen shot of the 21 young Christians just before they were butchered.

They've become well-known and books have been written about them and their ordeal (see below), as well there should be, but thousands of others are courageously suffering similar fates every year in Muslim controlled areas in Africa and the Middle East, and they're suffering in anonymity.

We should never cease to remember them even if we don't know their names.

How Scientism Refutes Itself

Philosopher J.P.Moreland has written a fine book titled Scientism and Secularism (2018) from which some of what follows has been borrowed. Scientism is not to be confused with science, but scientists, particularly naturalist or materialist scientists, are often proponents of scientism. Scientism is actually a philosophical view which holds, paradoxically, that science is the only reliable means of apprehending truth.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously declared in a book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design (2010) that "philosophy is dead" and that all the answers to life's important questions, at least those that can be known, are to be answered henceforth by science.

Hawking is here giving expression to his scientism, the view that all the important questions can either be answered by science or not answered at all, and that the methodologies of science are the only valid path to truth and knowledge. All other ways of knowing must give way to the supreme authority of science, especially the natural, or "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry.

Scientism is a common view, but not only does it have some serious liabilities, the notion that science supersedes philosophy is surely false.

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

1. It's self-refuting.
2. It's false that science is the only sure way of knowing truth.
3. It's false that philosophy is dead. If it were then science would be impossible.

Scientism is self-refuting because the claim that only what is testable by the methods of science can be trusted to be true is itself not a scientific claim but a philosophical assertion. It's not a claim that can be tested through the methods of science. Thus, the foundational claim of scientism itself must be false.

Nor can science be the only way of knowing since there are many other things we can know with at least the same level of certainty as we know any of the deliverances of science.

For example, which do you know with stronger certitude, that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter or that torturing children for fun is evil? The latter is not a scientific claim at all, it's a metaphysical claim, yet most of us are far more sure of its truth than we are of the truth of the claim about atoms.

There are other examples of things we know that do not lend themselves at all to scientific demonstration. For example, I can know: that I took a walk on my last birthday, that I hold certain beliefs about science and philosophy, that I have an itch in my foot, that sunsets are beautiful, that justice is good; and I can know the basic laws of math and logic, e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I know that if a proposition (P) entails another proposition (Q) then if P is true so must Q be true.

Not only do we all know such things, we know them with far more certainty than we know the truth of the claims of scientists about, say, global warming, atomic theory or Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, science depends for its very existence upon a series of assumptions, none of which are themselves scientific. All of them are philosophical, so if philosophy is dead where does that leave science?

Here are some examples: The law of cause and effect (Every effect has a cause), the law of sufficient reason (everything that exists has a sufficient explanation for its existence), the principle of uniformity (The laws that prevail in our neighborhood of the universe prevail everywhere in the universe), the belief that explanations which exhibit elegance and simplicity are superior to those which don't, the belief that the world is objectively real and intelligible, the belief that our senses are reliable and that our reason is trustworthy. All of these are philosophical assumptions that cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true.

Scientism is a bid by some materialists to assert epistemological hegemony over our intellectual lives and especially over the disciplines of philosophy and theology. However, just as similar attempts in the 20th century, such as positivism and verificationism, fell victim to self-referential incoherence, so, too, does scientism.

The claim that science is uniquely authoritative and that we should all recognize and bow to its supremacy is quite simply false.

True Heroes

One silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic is that everyday we're seeing real heroes, not the spurious Hollywood heroes on our movie screens, but men and women risking, and sometimes losing, their lives to save the lives of others. They are genuinely wonderful people.

What motivates them to do it? An individual's motivation arises from many sources, of course, but what are the deep-rooted tacit assumptions that impel a man or a woman to do what medical professionals are doing today as they seek to mitigate the misery of so many sufferers around the world?

I can't prove it, but I believe that the impetus that drives these men and women all across the globe can be traced back to a passage in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 35-40 where Jesus instructs His followers as to how He wants them to treat the sick, the weak and the poor:

[For] I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me. Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? And when did we see You a stranger and invite you in, or naked, and clothe You? And when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' And the King [Jesus] will answer and say to them, 'Truly, I say to you, to the extent that you did it to ... even the least of these, you did it to Me.'

This was a revolutionary way to see one's responsibility to other people in antiquity. Other than among some Jews, there really was nothing like it in any ancient society. The idea that anyone had a moral obligation to the “least of these” was a uniquely Christian idea rooted in the teaching of Jesus Christ.

The desire to meet this obligation toward "the least of these" provided the motivation for hospitals, orphanages, almshouses, child labor laws, state welfare, charitable organizations, human rights, etc., all of which eventually emerged first in the Christian West.

In the Graeco-Roman world, by contrast, the poor and weak were often treated with contempt. It was a brutal existence in which human life was very cheap, and the life of the weak and defenseless cheaper still.

In a world which has no concept of the Judeo-Christian God it makes sense to see life this way. This is why nations which officially adopt atheism - communist and fascist - are often murderous and cruel. In the absence of God men are just ciphers, animals to be herded, manipulated and exploited in whatever way benefits those who have power over them.

The 19th century atheist Friedrich Nietzsche saw this clearly. He admired the Roman pagans for their cruelty and their love of greatness and power. He wrote that,

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle .... Without cruelty there is no festival.

and this:

Those who are cruel enjoy the highest gratification of the feeling of power.

Nietzsche disdained Christian morality, calling it "slave morality." He admired what he called "master morality" which differed from slave morality in that master morality values power and pride whereas slave morality values qualities such as empathy, kindness, and sympathy.

Nietzsche correctly recognized that no secular philosophy offers its adherents any warrant for empathy, kindness and sympathy, especially when directed toward the weak and the poor.

Most secular people, for instance, accept the evolutionary account of man's origin, but evolution is all about survival of the fittest, not the survival of the weak and sickly. Darwin himself was troubled by the recognition that caring for the weak was not in the best interest of the human species. It enhanced neither fitness nor survival.

Secular folk might choose to care for the unfortunate, to be sure, but doing so is simply a matter of personal preference. There’s no duty to do so, no obligation. If they were to treat the sick, weak and poor cruelly there’s nothing in their worldview to tell them that they’re doing anything wrong.

If they do think it’s wrong they’re actually piggy-backing on Christian assumptions about human worth. Nothing in the atheistic worldview obligates one to care for the sick, and nothing in atheism condemns one's refusal to care for them.

Christians care for the weak, the poor and the oppressed because, they believe, every person carries the image of Christ. To care for the sick is to care for Christ.

According to historian Tom Holland writing in his best-selling book Dominion, when a plague broke out in Rome in 165-180 A.D., possibly smallpox, many fled the city leaving the sick to fend for themselves. The Romans were astonished that many Christians stayed behind to nurse those who suffered, some also contracting the disease.

The amazing thing to the Romans was that the Christians were complete strangers to those they cared for.

A century later another pestilence spread from Africa throughout the Mediterranean world. On Easter Sunday in 260 AD, Bishop Dionysius of Corinth praised the efforts of the Christians, many of whom had died while caring for others during the outbreak. He said:

Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves, and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains.

The Roman Emperor Julian, a 4th century ruler who despised Christianity and who yearned to restore the ancient pagan rites in Rome, was bewildered by the devotion to the poor manifested by the Christians:

How apparent to everyone it is, and how shameful, that our own people lack support from us, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their own poor, but ours as well.

Julian perhaps had in mind people like Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, two wealthy, well-educated brothers in the 4th century who dedicated their lives to helping the poor.

Basil become bishop of Caesarea in what is today eastern Turkey, and, in the midst of an awful famine in 369, built what was essentially the first hospital. It was actually a small city, and the poor were welcomed and treated by Basil himself who gave refuge and care, even to lepers, greeting them with a kiss.

No matter how disgusting and abject the sufferers were, Basil said, Christ was in them.

His brother Gregory became bishop of Nyssa, also in present-day Turkey, and became one of the strongest opponents of slavery in the ancient world.

Among the ancients it was an accepted and common practice to simply abandon unwanted babies by the roadside, leave them on garbage piles, or to dump them down drains. Some people would rescue the infants to raise them as slaves. Females were often raised to be sold to brothels.

The practice was taken for granted, except in Jewish enclaves, until the emergence of Christianity.

One of the most influential adversaries of the practice was the elder sister of Basil and Gregory, a woman named Macrina, who would rescue the abandoned girls and take them home to raise as her own daughters.

The standard toward the sick, the poor, the slave and the defenseless reinforced by Basil, Gregory and Macrina was incomprehensible to their pagan contemporaries, but it was how Christians acted because they saw every person as bearing the image of Christ.

As Christianity gradually spread throughout the West, the Christian attitude toward the sick and poor spread as well. Even those like the atheist surgeon Dr. Rieux, the hero of Albert Camus' novel The Plague, who in the story strives at great personal cost to himself to help Algerians victimized by an outbreak of bubonic plague, are living off the capital of a Christian understanding of the human person. Nothing in Rieux's atheism provided any ground for his devotion to the dying.

Those who today are giving so much, risking so much, to help the victims of Covid-19 are following in the train of centuries of Christians who were themselves animated by Christ's words in Matthew 25. Even if some of today's healers consider themselves secular or atheistic, even if they are personally hostile to Christianity, they have still, perhaps without realizing it, adopted for themselves an attitude toward the distressed and sick which is Christianity's gift to the world.

But whether or not they realize where their roots lie these men and women are indeed true heroes.

Biden and Kavanaugh

In late summer of 2018 Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused by a woman named Christine Blasey Ford of having jumped on top of her when he was in his late teens. The media talked about nothing else. Kavanaugh was presumed guilty by virtually the entire left-wing media because, as people like Joe Biden were saying, a woman who brings such charges against a man should always be believed.

Kavanaugh's career hung by a very tenuous thread, and his reputation was in tatters.

Now comes word that the same Joe Biden who sternly reproached anyone who would doubt a woman's allegation of sexual assault is himself being accused of an even worse assault than was Kavanaugh.

Caution: The following excerpt may strike some readers as gratuitously crude. Please don't read it if you think you might be offended.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has been accused of sexual assaulting a former staffer in 1993 in his Senate office. Tara Reade, who worked in Biden’s office in 1993, accused Biden of touching her, kissing her and penetrating her with his fingers without consent.

Reade made her claims in an interview with Katie Halper, a writer and podcast host, released Wednesday.

“We were alone, and it was the strangest thing. There was no, like, exchange really, he just had me up against the wall,” Reade said.

“His hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And then, he went, he went down my skirt and then up inside it, and he penetrated me with his fingers… and um… He was kissing me at the same time and he was saying something to me,” she also told Halper.

“He got finished doing what he was doing and I, how I was pulled back and he said, ‘Come on man, I heard you liked me.’ And that phrase stayed with me because I kept thinking what I might have said. And I can’t remember exactly if he said ‘I thought’ or if ‘I heard.’ It’s like he implied that I had done this.”

Reade said that she told her mother and brother about the assault. She also told a friend, who she says advised her not to come forward and face a public firestorm. Her mother, who has since passed, told her to report the incident, but her brother also discouraged her from doing so.

The Daily Caller reached out to Biden’s campaign about the allegation Wednesday and has received no response.

There's more to this story at the link.

It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Will now the same media forces who were mobilized to destroy Brett Kavanaugh mobilize once again to destroy Joe Biden, or was the outrage directed at Kavanaugh really an empty pose undertaken purely for political purposes? Will the media try to bury Ms Reade's allegations under a mountain of Covid-19 reporting or will they strive to be consistent and fair and pursue the charges against Mr. Biden with the same ferocity as they pursued the charges made against Mr. Kavanaugh?

We'll know the answers to those questions soon enough, but if I had to guess I'd say that the media will do everything they can to find something else to talk about. To date few news sources have even mentioned this latest scandal:

The reaction to this allegation has largely been muted in major media outlets. As of Friday afternoon, searches of the New York Times, CNN.com, the Los Angeles Times and many other outlets show no articles on the allegations. Additionally, a keyword search of cable news channels turns up no results on major networks like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News or CNBC.

There are some similarities between the Ford and the Reade allegations, but the latter seem much more credible inasmuch as this is not the first time that evidence has come forward of Mr. Biden's general creepiness. See here, here and here.

It'll also be interesting to see the response of those who said they could never vote for Mr. Trump because of his well-documented past treatment of women. Will they now insist that they would never vote for Joe Biden for the same reason? We'll see.

The following video provides more background to this sordid story: