The Fury of the Fatherless

The riots of last spring and summer were unlike anything in the history of our nation. There have been violent riots before, of course, but the organized and sustained vandalism and violence we witnessed last summer is unprecedented.

Mary Eberstadt, in an article at First Things titled The Fury of the Fatherless, claims that the apparently unlimited supply of mayhem-makers requires an explanation, and she offers one, but first she discounts the explanation that's most frequently invoked, that the riots were a reaction against racism.

The fact that rioters who were often white screamed at and spat at black police officers and, in at least one case, even killed a black security guard suggests that the rioters weren't motivated by any sense of sympathy for blacks. Nor, she asserts, do the actual statistics of police violence against blacks support the conclusion that police brutality is the cause.

For Eberstadt the critical factor responsible for the hatred and rage exhibited on our cities' streets this year is due to something more subtle but more insoluble. She writes:

So, here’s a new theory: The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.

The riots are, at least in part, a visible consequence of the largely invisible crisis of Western paternity. We know this to be true, in more ways than one.

Six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. And this the United States has done, for two generations now. Almost one in four children today grows up without a father in the home. For African Americans, it is some 65 percent of children.

Some people, mainly on the left, think there’s nothing to see here. They’re wrong. The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in fatherless homes. Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes.

Eberstadt goes on to argue that fatherlessness leads to a search for father substitutes which is one reason why the homicide rates among blacks are so high. Black homicide is largely a gang problem and gangs are largely a missing father problem. The gang and the gang leader are often father substitutes.

She has more to say about this that's interesting, but her point is that many of those attracted to BLM and Antifa are young people who grew up fatherless and the resentments and bitterness this causes is manifested in the violence we watched on our television screens last summer and probably would have watched again had Biden lost the election.

Moreover, the loss of an earthly father plays a role in the rejection of a heavenly Father. Each generation for the last sixty years has been less inclined to believe that there exists a transcendent, ideal Father. Their experience with earthly fathers has soured them on the notion of a heavenly Father. They can't trust the disappointing earthly version to be there for them, and are thus similarly distrustful of, and disinterested in, the heavenly version.

A further consequence of the lack of a decent father in so many lives is that many of those who've been abandoned by their fathers feel no allegiance or loyalty to their country. Loyalty starts in the family and children of dysfunctional families, or families that have been rent asunder by divorce or other forms of fatherlessness (except when the father was killed or died of natural causes in which case he's often memorialized and revered) have a much harder time developing a sense of loyalty to an abstraction like a nation.

Eberstadt's essay is rather long, but it can be summed up in this sentence: The anger and fury vented by our young in our cities last summer, as well as the increasing secularization among the young that we see reflected in survey after survey, is largely the culmination of our culture's six decades-long minimization of the importance of fathers in the lives of their children.

I think she's right.

The Scientistic Worldview

In Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality the author unabashedly promotes a scientistic view of knowledge. "Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it describes a view based on "scientism" which is the view that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not something we should even believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism."

Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, truths about justice, rights, beauty, and morality, for example, but Rosenberg thinks it's neither good science nor good epistemology to hold beliefs about these things.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor morally "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unrelentingly dark world and even this little glimmer is beset with problems.

Here's one: If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved behaviors that are not "nice." If we're the product of evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and nothing which is wrong to do.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to bravely and honestly face up to these consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in both of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of the page) that the consequences outlined in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism. The atheist who lives as if none of these consequences exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief or a worldview that entails conclusions one cannot live with, however, stands in serious need of reexamination.

Bidenisms

President Trump was roundly mocked by the liberal press for his awkward way of phrasing things. Sometimes the criticism was justified, sometimes it wasn't. Now Mr. Biden appears as though he'll surpass his predecessor in cringeworthiness although in his case our delinquent media will surely choose not to take notice.

Indeed, he's not even in the White House yet and already he's providing plenty of ammo for late night comics, at least those intrepid enough to risk the opprobrium that attaches to making merry at the expense of a liberal Democrat.

Here's an example. Last week Mr. Biden delivered himself of this mathematical head-scratcher:

Christmas is going to be a lot harder. I don’t want to scare anybody here, but understand the facts — we’re likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January. You hear me?

Frightening stuff, to be sure, but on what data was this claim based? Jim Geraghty at NRO took the trouble to do the math:

I am all for taking the virus seriously, but there is such a thing as fearmongering, and precision counts in public statements about a topic as serious as this. The United States suffered about 3,000 deaths from the coronavirus yesterday. There are 27 days left in this awful year. If we lose 3,000 people per day for 27 days, we will see 81,000 deaths. That will be terrible, but that will not be “another 250,000 by January.”

If we are generous and assume Biden meant the end of January, another 3,000 deaths for another 31 days would be 174,000 deaths — still well short of the 250,000 that Biden predicted.

Imagine the hooting from the media if Mr. Trump had said something so ridiculous. As it happened, the talking heads at MSNBC and CNN must've all been on coffee break at the moment Mr. Biden chose to put his mathematical proficiency on display.

Throughout the campaign, candidate Biden promised in so many words that he'd get us out of the pandemic. His administration would do things better. He'd listen to the experts. He'd follow the science. So now that he seems to have been elected what will he do to relieve us of our covid-induced misery? Well, he's going to ask us to wear masks for a hundred days.

That's it? Wear masks? After consulting with all of his experts about what to do about the pandemic and after all his promises to fix the problem the most he offers us is a reiteration of the same advice we've been getting from every fifth grader for the past nine months?

Then there was the bizarre promise to resign from office if he and his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, ever had a serious disagreement:

When we disagree, so far it’s been just like when Barack and I did. It’s in private. She’ll say, "I think we should do A, B, C, or D," and I’ll say, "I like A, don’t like B and C." Like I told Barack, if I reach something where there’s a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I’ll develop some disease and say I have to resign.

This was stunning. Why would the president resign if he had a disagreement with the vice-president? Was this some sort of slip of the tongue in which Mr. Biden inadvertently admitted that he's just a figurehead and Kamala Harris is really the power behind the throne? Was it a Freudian admission that the plan all along has been for him to resign so that the far-lefty Ms. Harris could seize the reins of power?

Some say he was joking. Maybe he was, but it doesn't sound like a joke and nobody, including Mr. Biden, was laughing. Watch the video and decide for yourself:

At the rate the president-elect is churning out these Bidenisms the electorate will be chortling so heartily by the end of his first term, if he's still around four years hence, that he'll be re-elected in a landslide just for the entertainment value.

Credit Where It's Due

There's good news afoot regarding the Covid pandemic. Even as cases are spiking and hospitals are once again seeing a surge in the very sick it looks as if a vaccine will begin to be available by the end of this month and most who want it will be able to be vaccinated by spring.

The development of this vaccine in less than a year since the outbreak of the virus is nearly miraculous. Indeed, last spring many thought it would take several years to develop a vaccine, get it approved by the FDA and distributed to the population.

What would've happened to small businesses, already ravaged by lockdowns and reduced customer traffic, if they had to go through all that again for the next several years? Indeed, they are going through it in California.

What would've happened to families already on the edge, emotionally, psychologically and financially, if they had to endure the loss of income and freedom of movement for several more years?

What would've happened to the educational development of our children had they been forced to spend another couple of years on pedagogically inadequate zoom lessons?

To what do we owe this near-miracle?

Surely President Trump and Vice-President Pence deserve a lot of credit, though they won't get it, for their role in establishing Operation Warp Speed, as does the head of that operation, Moncef Slaoui, whose expertise, Dan Henninger notes in a column at the Wall Street Journal, grew out of three decades of work with GlaxoSmithKline.

Henninger goes on to note that,

[T]hey created a public-private partnership that actually worked, in large part by busting through the bureaucratic sludge that normally slows anything.

But though these men deserve our gratitude and admiration the real heroes of the story are the hundreds, or even thousands, of scientists and technicians who labored tirelessly in a pharmaceutical version of the Manhattan Project to bring us a vaccine that will, if all goes well, save hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. and millions of lives worldwide.

As Henninger notes, these people deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but they won't get it. The Nobel prizes have become too politicized, and Big Pharma, like Trump, has become so demonized that such recognition of our debt to them by the Nobel committee is unimaginable.

The truth remains, nevertheless, that as hated as they are by the left, many of those haters will owe their health and even their lives to Donald Trump, Mike Pence and the pharmaceutical companies whose brilliant employees gave us the gift of a drug that may allow us all to return to some facsimile of normalcy over the next few months.

In conclusion Henninger says this:

The intellectual, technical and organizational firepower of thousands of men and women employed by pharma is what made these savior vaccines happen in 10 months rather than years. They won’t ask for anyone’s gratitude, but they deserve it.

Yes, they do.

A Christmas Gift Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during (a non-covid) football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, and it is, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our sixteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (see the link at the top of the page) on your Christmas shopping list.

Russia's Miseries

We don't hear much about Russia these days except from those who still stew in the fantasy that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, but these are not happy times in Russia.

Part of the reason for the Russian Bear's current unhappiness are the sanctions imposed on Russia by the Trump administration, the same administration led by the same man who was supposed to be "Putin's lap dog," the same man who was alleged by the more delirious media talking heads to be in cahoots with Russia to sell out the United States.

But there are other reasons for Russia's distress, too. Strategy Page elaborates:

The Russian economy has taken a beating because of low oil prices and Western economic sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. The Russian advance in Ukraine has been stalled since 2015, after Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine had been seized.

The stalemate in Ukraine has crippled the Russian military since Ukrainian industry was a key supplier of military components.

Russia estimates that the loss of access to Western technology and Ukrainian components cost their military over $25 billion so far. That was the cost of replacing or doing without new components that used Western or Ukrainian tech. Locally made replacements were usually not as effective as what the Ukrainians were providing until 2014....

The most severe shortages occur in key areas. Prominent examples include IBCMs, air-to-air missiles, aviation and engines for warships.

Then there are the Ukrainian made guidance systems used in Russian air-to-air missiles. This includes the infrared (heat seeking) guidance systems for short-range R-73 and medium-range R-27T. These missiles are the main armament for MiG-29, Su-27, Su-30 and Su-35 fighters.

But their military woes are only part of Russia's miseries:

By 2017 Russia was also facing problems with population decline, corruption, an increasingly inefficient police state and an exodus of its best educated and most entrepreneurial citizens. Russia was no longer a great power and, as much as Russians would talk about regaining their superpower economic status, that is not going to happen.

To put it into perspective, consider how smaller (especially in terms of population) countries like Australia managed to pass Russia in GDP. Russia still has six times as many people as Australia but Australia has far less corruption and a much more efficient government and economy. The Australian population is growing and its GDP in 2016 was the same as that of Russia at $1.3 trillion. The Australian GDP was growing at least twice as fast Russia’s.

International economists at the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund) see Russian GDP continuing to fall as long as low oil prices and sanctions remain as they are. In 2013 Russian GDP per capita (person) was $16,000 compared to $7,000 for China. By 2020 both nations will have about the same GDP per capita of about $12,000. These trends are expected to continue for the next few years and Chinese GDP per capita will continue to grow faster than Russia’s.

The Russian people, especially the poor, have suffered awfully for centuries, the worst of which was the twentieth during which century the people groaned under the boot of a draconian totalitarian socialism. Although there's much more private ownership in Russia today freedom is still limited, which is why many of the "best educated and most entrepreneurial citizens" who can go elsewhere to make a life, do it.

It's a shame because the Russian people are often brilliant, their literary output alone is magnificent, and the country is richly endowed with resources. So why can't they manage to achieve something more than a third world economy?

Perhaps part of the reason is that under the old Soviet system so many of the best and the brightest were liquidated and those who survived developed a kind of slave mentality which inhibits economic progress and which may take many generations to overcome.

Do Bad Decisions Cause Poverty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Is Bigotry Wrong?

Insistent demands to end racism and bias against women and LBGTQ individuals are rife in our culture, but rarely, it seems, does anyone ask why these bigotries are wrong. on those occassions when it is asked it's sometimes replied that any form of discrimination is morally wrong, but what, exactly, is meant by this is unclear.

Here's what I'm getting at: Let's assume we've all adopted a secular perspective in which either there is no moral authority that transcends human society or, if there is, that that authority should be permitted no role in our secular affairs. Given this assumption what does it mean to say that racism, misogyny and discrimination against LGBTQ folks are wrong? If there's no moral authority how can "wrong" mean anything more than "something some people don't like"? And if that's all we mean then what reason is there for all the outrage? Why not just accept that different people hold different values and let it go at that?

After all, something can be wrong in any meaningful moral sense only if there's an objective moral authority who promulgates an objective moral law and holds people accountable for living according to that law. If no such authority exists, or if any such authority is excluded from our public lives, then racism is little more than a behavior some people practice and some people don't like.

An example of the former is the famous 19th century British evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Huxley was the man who coined the term "agnostic" to describe his own attitude toward God and was also a firm believer in the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest.

His evolutionary convictions led him to believe that some races were superior to others, and he argued that emancipation of the slaves in the U.S. had doomed blacks who would now have to fend for themselves, a task for which he believed them poorly suited.

Huxley stated that, "no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.”

Huxley's racism was little different than that of his hero Charles Darwin. Writing to the Rev. Charles Kingsley in 1862, Darwin stated,

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.

Almost twenty years later he offered similar sentiments in a letter to Irish philosopher and political economist William Graham:

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

People today would be aghast were they to hear preeminent thinkers voice such bigotry, but the question we should ask is why do we consider views like those of Huxley and Darwin to be morally offensive?

One might answer that they're offensive because they're hurtful, but that answer assumes that it is objectively wrong to hurt others. But why is it? Is it wrong to hurt others because we wouldn't want someone to hurt us? It's of course true that we wouldn't want others to hurt us, but how does that make it wrong for us to hurt others? If we had the power to hurt others with impunity, in what sense would it be wrong to do so?

The secularist has no convincing answers to these questions. He or she has to assume that there is no relevant objective moral authority, that objective morality therefore doesn't exist and that all of our moral judgments are simply expressions of our own personal, subjective preferences, like one's preference for Ford trucks rather than Chevys.

If the secularist wishes to maintain that moral judgments are objectively meaningful then he's piggy-backing on a theistic worldview while all the while insisting that that worldview is either utterly false or irrelevant to morality.

In other words, the moral secularist must behave irrationally in order to assert that racism is wrong. On his own secular assumptions he has no grounds for claiming that anyone or anything is objectively wrong. All he can say is that he doesn't like it.

But how does a Judeo-Christian view of the world provide grounds for affirming that racism and other bigotries are morally wrong? It does so because according to that view all men are created by God in His image and are loved by Him. We are all equal in the sight of God, and God, the creator of the universe, demands that we treat each other with compassion and justice. Moreover, He will hold us ultimately accountable for whether we actually do or do not treat others this way.

To harm others is morally wrong because it violates the objective will, nature and law of God who is the ultimate source of moral knowledge and the ultimate standard of right and wrong.

Only if this is true can racism, sexism and bigotry of any kind be objectively wrong. Only if this is true does our belief that human beings have rights and dignity make sense. If it's not true then Huxley and Darwin were probably right, and we should cease our pretensions of believing in moral right and wrong and the equality and dignity of men and just do whatever serves our own interests and desires.

Of course the decision to follow that road leads to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust.

How the Media Swayed the Election

Joe Biden's ostensible victory on November 3rd has been attributed by many of Donald Trump's supporters to electoral hanky-panky of one sort or another, some of it illegal, some of it legal but unethical.

An example of the latter is presented in a story by Jordan Davidson at The Federalist in which he cites a study that finds media suppression of certain news stories kept many Biden voters in the dark, voters who claim that had they known of these stories they would've voted for Trump.

Since the number of Biden voters who claim they would've voted for Trump if they'd known information that the media was suppressing totaled some 17% of those who supported the Democrat candidate, it's clear that, in a counterfactual world, one where the media, were honest and objective, Trump would've won.

Here are some of the key points in Davidson's column:

The survey results report that 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket if they had known about at least one of the eight news stories that were suppressed by big tech and mainstream media outlets.

The survey, conducted online by The Polling Company, ... asked 1,750 Biden voters living in seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) if they were aware of certain issues surrounding Biden, his family, and some of the Trump administration’s successes.

Some of these topics include former Biden staffer Tara Reade and her sexual assault allegations against Biden, the Hunter Biden scandal, VP Nominee Kamala Harris’s extreme liberal voting record in the Senate, the U.S.’s economic jump in the third quarter, millions of jobs added, America’s energy independence, Operation Warp Speed successes, and Trump’s facilitation of multiple peace deals in the Middle East.

Over a quarter of Biden voters said they didn’t know Sen. Harris had the most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2019, and nearly half of all Biden voters polled, 49 percent, said they were unaware of the U.S.’s remarkable economic recovery in the third quarter, doubling the previous record.

One in six Biden voters polled, 17 percent, said they would have changed their vote had they been aware of these stories. The report also found that without even voting for Trump and simply refusing to vote for Biden, “these voters would have handed all six of these states, and a second term, to the president if the news media had properly informed them about the two candidates.”

In Pennsylvania and Georgia, 15 percent of Biden’s voters would have refrained from casting a vote for him. In Michigan, it was 14 percent. In Arizona, it was 21 percent. In Wisconsin, it was 13 percent. And in Nevada, it was 18 percent.

The significant numbers, the report states, “would have moved every one of the swing states into Trump’s column, some by a huge margin.”

This would've given Trump an electoral college win of 311 to 227.

This is a condign indictment of the mainstream and social media, but although it is true that the media have behaved reprehensibly throughout Trump's four years in office, and although it may also be true that had these voters known about these stories the outcome of the election would've been different, I nevertheless have one reservation about this report.

I think it may be a bit of an overreach to conclude that had the media been more honest and professional in their reporting these voters would've known about these stories. The fact is that no matter how much the media discussed these facts it's possible that many voters would still have been oblivious to them because many people simply aren't interested in political news and don't tune in to it.

So, yes, voter ignorance very likely played a role in the outcome of the election and the media certainly played a role in keeping the voters ignorant, but whether an honest media would've been able to educate enough of those who don't take the trouble to be educated to have changed the election results is hard to ascertain.

Even so, when Donald Trump declares that large segments of the liberal media are "the enemy of the people" he has a point. Any organization entrusted by the people to disseminate information but which fails to uphold that trust is doing the country a grave disservice, even if what they do is technically legal.

Davidson has more details at the link.

Liberals and Leftists

Now that it appears likely that Joe Biden and the Democrats will inherit the White House it might be useful to keep in mind the distinctions between "liberals" and "leftists" or, as the latter are often called, "progressives."

President-elect Biden, who was once fairly moderate, has in recent years moved leftward and gained a reputation for being rather liberal/left. His party, however, is dominated by radical leftists who also exert an outsized influence in academia as well as news, entertainment and social media.

Given the dominance of leftist progressivism in the Democratic party and, indeed, in the culture as a whole, it'll be interesting to see how far Mr. Biden allows himself to be pulled toward their positions.

This five minute Prager U. video gives a succinct explanation of what those positions are and highlights the main differences between leftists and liberals:

One thing about these distinctions that should be kept in mind: Many people are liberal on some issues and leftist on others, so there's lots of ideological gray among folks on the left side of the ideological spectrum, just as there is among those on the right.

He's a Magic Man

J.B. Shurk at The Federalist notes that it's most peculiar that the media is not talking more about Joe Biden's absolutely astonishing political accomplishment in winning the recent election.

The word "incredible" seems an inadequate description of Biden's victory. Despite never having accomplished much during his 47 year career in politics, despite scarcely campaigning for the presidency, despite showing signs of cognitive impairment, despite generating scarcely any excitement, Mr. Biden nevertheless received the most votes in American history, 15 million more than Barack Obama.

But there's much more to Mr. Biden's astounding feat. As Shurk points out, the Democrats were clobbered in the down-ballot races, but still gave Mr. Biden a victory at the top of the ticket, defeating an incumbent who actually gained 10 million more votes than he won in 2016 - the first time in history an incumbent actually gained votes and still lost.

He goes on to observe that,

Amazingly, Biden beat the guy who lifted all other Republicans to victory. Now that’s historic! In 2020, The Cook Political Report and The New York Times rated 27 House seats as toss-ups going into Election Day. Right now, Republicans appear to have won all 27.

Democrats failed to flip a single state house chamber, while Republicans flipped both the House and Senate in New Hampshire and expanded their dominance of state legislatures across the country.

Now that's a breathtaking display of political prowess from a man who sometimes forgot where he was and which office he was running for. But that's not all. For the first time in history a candidate for president won despite losing both Florida and Ohio. He also won despite losing big in almost all of the "bellwether" counties in the country. Shurk writes:

Of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years, President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington.

Whereas the former VP picked up Clallam by about three points, President Trump’s margin of victory in the other 18 counties averaged over 16 points. In a larger list of 58 bellwether counties that have correctly picked the president since 2000, Trump won 51 of them by an average of 15 points, while the other seven went to Biden by around four points.

Here's another staggering aspect to Mr. Biden's masterful performance:

Polling guru Richard Baris of Big Data Poll...noted a statistical oddity from 2020’s election returns: “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Washington Post election analyst Robert Barnes...added that in those “big cities in swing states run by Democrats...the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.” In the states that mattered most, so many mail-in ballots poured in for Biden from the cities that he put up record-breaking numbers and overturned state totals that looked like comfortable leads for President Trump.

Who says miracles don't happen? Biden's wonder-working power rivals even that of Jesus who famously raised the dead and fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

As Mr. Shurk concludes, "Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out."

It is indeed interesting, but perhaps the lack of curiosity on the part of the anti-Trump media can be attributed to their unspoken incredulity that Biden is really the political magician he'd have to have been to honestly pull this off. Prudence dictates that an attainment so implausible, so apparently miraculous, when accomplished by the man one desperately hopes will win, is best left unquestioned.

It's bad form, after all, to ask the magician how he managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

How Thanksgiving Became Official

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. However, on September 28th, 1863 a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861 he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, though, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation only to become permanently an American custom and institution."

Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, the actual proclamation was written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to raise money to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads quite as if it could have been written today, particularly the penultimate paragraph.

I hope we all give thanks tomorrow for our many blessings, remembering especially as we express our gratitude to God and to each other those who suffer and grieve and that our thanksgivings make tomorrow a wonderful and meaningful day.

Gratefulness

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans will observe on Thursday is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) Thursday will be a day filled with gratitude, love, joy and, I must add, proper caution in these plague-ridden times.

If Naturalism Is True and Evolution Is True Then We Have No Reason to Trust Our Reason

In Part III of our series last week titled Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation, I wrote that,

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist has no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

For these thoughts I'm indebted to philosopher Alvin Plantinga who, in his book Where the Conflict really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Atheist philosopher Patricia Churchland.

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. Atheist philosopher John Gray

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive. Atheist biologist Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them in his book On Miracles:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E. This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out.

The naturalist has a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false. On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

To loosely cite Craig again:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. V)

Today's post concludes our series on theism as an inference to the best explanation for numerous facts about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.

I'd like to finish up with these four existential traits of human beings:

15. Our desire for justice
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self
18. Our desire to survive our own death

Human persons long for justice, but it's a longing for which there's no fulfillment if death is the end of our existence. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives filled with terrible fear, pain and grief and then they die.

Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering come to the end of their lives peacefully and content after many years of pleasure. In a world without God everybody comes to the same end, everyone vanishes, and there's no reward or punishment, just nothingness. In the world of the atheist, it doesn't matter ultimately whether you're Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, and there's no hope that justice will ever be done.

Only if there's a transcendent moral authority, like God, who has the power to hold us accountable for how we treat others is justice in any ultimate sense possible.

Humans also crave meaning to our existence. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but in the absence of God death nullifies everything and renders it all nugatory. There's no fixed purpose or value to anything we do. Everything we strive for is destined to perish either after we die or eventually in a solar explosion that will incinerate the earth, after which there'll be not a trace that humans ever existed. What will all of our efforts and achievements matter then?

All our struggles are like the furious running of a gerbil in his treadmill. Our lives are just a footprint in the sand at the edge of a space-time surf. When all is washed away and the cosmos is left as though we were never here, the greatest acts of heroism, charity, and scientific discovery will mean absolutely nothing.

If the atheist is correct, if our existence is simply a temporary fluke of nature, a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to think that anything we do actually matters at all in any permanent sense. If, on the other hand, we have been created by God we may assume that He had some purpose for making us. We may not know what that purpose is, but we have a basis for hoping that there is one. Indeed, if there is a God then we have reason to hope that what we do is not ephemeral, it's eternal, and that each life has an everlasting meaning.

Another point: In a Godless world the concept of soul becomes problematic and with it the notion of a self other than the physical body. Since our body is constantly changing, however, we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I," only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who I really am.

As T.S. Eliot put it in The Cocktail Party, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger." Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests, however, that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet, unless there is a God physical flux is all there is.

If there is a God, then it's possible that our self, our identity, persists through time because He constantly holds us, our individual essence, in being in His mind. So, while in one sense we're constantly morphing into someone different, in another sense we remain the same person we've always been.

Finally, human beings want desperately to live and yet we know we're going to die. In a Godless universe, the fate of each of us is annihilation. There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever "see" them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, they must acknowledge that their bravery serves to mask an inner despair. Many still harbor a profound wish that their loved ones still exist and that they'll someday be reunited with them.

But if death is the end of our existence our life truly is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," a Shakespeare put it in MacBeth. If death is the end then human existence is completely absurd. But, of course, death is the end if the materialist is right.

Only if God exists is there a realistic basis for hope of something beyond this life. Only if God exists can we have a reasonable hope that our longing for life will be fulfilled.

So, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we possess those yearnings because they point us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God.

In other words, the existence of God is, I believe, the best explanation for the human condition. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair toward which her worldview pushes her. She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists actually repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.

I've sought in this series of posts to briefly suggest why the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of their satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God.

If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice.

We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the nature of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled.

How, then, do we come to have these yearnings? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the skeptic should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence.

Nevertheless, I've never known or read one who held such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to wishing, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke. Nagel writes in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me at least, to understand.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. IV)

The theme of the last three posts has been that if we employ the principle of inference to the best explanation to the question of the existence of God it's reasonable to conclude that the best explanation for a host of facts about the world and human existence is that there is an intelligent mind, a God, that accounts for them.

In today's post I'd like to briefly examine six facts of human existence and explain why I think theism accounts for them more seamlessly than does naturalism. The six facts are these:

9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
10. Our sense of moral obligation
11. Our sense of guilt
12. Our belief in human dignity
13. Our belief in human worth
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights

Since these are facts about the human condition they comprise what might be called an existential case for the existence of God:

Consider the first of these. It's part of the human psyche to desire answers to life's most profound questions. As human beings we want answers to the deepest, most perplexing questions raised by our existence, but in the world as the atheist sees it there are no answers, there's no assurance about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die.

We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Why do we want from life what we cannot have? - but in a Godless universe there's no reply, only silence. The cosmos is indifferent to our desire for answers. We are alone, forlorn, as Sartre put it, and our quest for answers is absurd.

If there are no answers to these questions it's a puzzle as to why we would've evolved in such a way as to feel such an urgency for answers to them. If, on the other hand, God exists then it's possible that each of those questions has an answer, and if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire their answers makes sense. We may not know what the answer is, but we have a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there is a reason why they gnaw at us.

The atheist must counsel acquiescence to the disconnect between our deep need and the impossibility of fulfilling that need. The theist is in a position to counsel hope.

Another aspect of the human condition is that we are burdened with a deep sense that we are obligated to act morally. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base them. In a purely material world morality is nothing more than whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right in any objective sense. There simply is no objective moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what non-theists deny. Consider these two quotes from some well-known atheists:

"In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. The way our biology forces its codes is by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject." Philosopher Michael Ruse.

"Life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins.

For the atheist moral judgments can be little more than expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state.

Whatever those who possess power do is neither right or wrong, even if they commit torture or genocide, it just is.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is nothing whatsoever which obligates us to act in one way rather than another. What could possibly obligate me, in a moral sense, to act in the interest of others rather than in what I perceive to be my own interest? Given naturalism, there is nothing which obligates us to care for the poor, nothing which makes kindness better than cruelty, nothing to tell us why the holocaust was morally wrong.

Given atheism, morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, our conviction that it does exist is simply self-deception. If God exists, however, then, and only then, does our intuition that objective moral value and obligation also exist make sense.

Related to the preceding point, we experience feelings of guilt, and have a sense that guilt is not just an illusion, but without an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there can be no real guilt. Human beings are no more guilty in a moral sense than is a cat which has caught and tortured a bird. The feeling of guilt is merely an evolutionary epiphenomenon which arose to fit us for life in the stone age and which, like our tonsils, we no longer need. Indeed, it's a vestige of our past that we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

On the other hand, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good Creator of the universe, then our sense that we are actually guilty has an explanation. We feel guilt because we have transgressed the moral law instituted by the Creator before whom we stand and to whom we must give an account.

It is this Creator who imposes upon us moral obligation. Take away God and there's no moral law, there's no moral duty, there's no transgression, and no guilt. As the great 19th century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it, "If God is dead everything is permitted."

An additional fact about our existence is that we profess a belief in human dignity but modern atheism tells us that we are little more than machines made of flesh - sacks of blood, bone and excrement. There is no soul; there's nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We are more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout.

In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit the rest of us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he might profit from so doing. The universe reminds us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

If, however, we are made in the image of God and personally and specifically loved by Him then we have a basis for believing that we are more than a machine. We have a ground for human dignity that is simply unavailable on the assumption of naturalistic atheism.

Related to the previous point is the further truth that most of us have a belief in human worth, but if all we are is an ephemeral pattern of atoms, a flesh and bone mechanism, then in what does our worth as human beings consist? We have value only insofar as others, particularly those who wield power, arbitrarily choose to value us.

If atheism is true there is no inherent value in being human. Only if theism is true and we are valued by the Creator of the universe can human beings have any objective worth at all. There is no other non-arbitrary ground for it.

Similarly, we have a belief that human beings have certain fundamental rights. Unfortunately, if there is no God there's nothing at all upon which to base those rights save our own prejudices and predilections. As Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, we have the right to life and liberty only because we are children of the Creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us and in whose eyes we are precious.

If there is no Creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules, mere words on paper, which some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked.

When atheists talk about human rights someone might ask them where those rights come from. Who confers them? Who guarantees them? If it is not God then it must be the state, but if so, our rights are not inalienable. If the state decides what rights we shall have then the state can determine that we have no rights at all.

The fact is that if atheism is true human rights are no more substantial or real than the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

More tomorrow.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. III)

Continuing the case for theism as the best explanation for the evidence available to us, let's consider the next four examples of that evidence:

5. The fact of human consciousness
6. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
7. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
8. Our sense that we have free will

One quality of the world that sits better on the assumption of theism than atheism, particularly atheistic materialism, is the existence of human consciousness.

How does it happen, for instance, that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or pain or the taste of sweet)? How do electrochemical reactions in our neurons produce a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, expectation, or frustration, boredom, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book)? How does it want, worry, or have intentions?

How do the chemicals that make up the matter of the brain happen to make that matter aware of itself and its surroundings? How does matter come to hold beliefs or understand what it believes? How does pure matter impose a meaning on a text that one reads or a lecture to which one listens?

These are vexing questions for a materialist view of the world. It may be that if we put the proper chemicals in a flask under the appropriate conditions the flask would become conscious or feel pain, but we have no idea how it could do so, and the belief that it could is simply an article of materialist faith.

In other words, on the assumption that human beings are solely material beings consciousness is inexplicable. After all, a robot could function pretty well without experiencing any conscious phenomena at all, so why did consciousness evolve in humans?

The existence of consciousness suggests that material substance is not the only constituent of reality, which may be one reason why some materialists (called eliminative materialists) pretty much deny the existence of consciousness.

If there is, in addition to the material substance in our world, also mental substance, how could such a thing have arisen in a purely physical/material universe? The hypothesis that there is an intelligent Creator of the universe who is itself pure mind presents us with an explanation where naturalism must just shrug its shoulders.

Related to the matter of consciousness is the question of beauty, or more precisely, why it is that gazing at, or listening to, something beautiful should fill us with delight, or even rapture. It's possible, I suppose, to formulate some convoluted ad hoc hypothesis in terms of purposeless physical forces acting over billions of years on dozens of fortuitous mutations to produce response mechanisms to certain stimuli in our neuronal architecture. But why?

Why should a sunset fill us with wonder and a mountain range fill us with awe? Why and how would blind, unintentional processes produce such responses? What urgency would such seemingly gratuitous responses have in the struggle for survival that the whole panoply of mutations and selective pressures would be brought to bear to cultivate them?

A simpler explanation for such phenomena, perhaps, is that our encounters with beauty, like our encounters with good, are intimations of God. Beauty is one means by which God reveals Himself to us in the world. Our encounters with beauty are glimpses He gives us of Himself, and the delight we feel in them is a prelude to heaven.

Another aspect of the world that is better explained in terms of a theistic rather than an atheistic or naturalistic worldview is our sense that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes is not likely itself to be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, can be trusted to be rational or true, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and the reliability of scientific investigation, like "truth," is chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist is in the awkward position of having no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it.

We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any such justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

The next characteristic of human beings that makes more sense given the existence of God than given the truth of atheism is our sense that we are free to make genuine choices and that the future is open. In the absence of God our sense that we are free to choose and are responsible for those choices is problematic.

In a Godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to physical laws. There is no free will, there is only an inexorable determinism. At any given moment there is only one possible future, and our belief that we can freely create a future is pure sophistry and illusion.

Thus an atheist who faults me for writing this post is acting inconsistently with his own assumptions. If there is no God I am compelled to write and express these ideas by causes beyond my control and for which I am not responsible. Indeed, if there is no God, it's hard to see how anyone could ultimately be responsible for anything they do.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post introduced the concept of inference to the best explanation and seventeen facts about the world and the existential human condition, the best explanation for which, I argue, is God, or something very much like God. Today we'll consider the first four of those facts:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact that life's origin is inexplicable on naturalism
   
4. The fact of biological information
   

The first of these facts is our conviction that the universe must have had a cause and didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that its existence depends upon something beyond itself. It's possible, perhaps, that it somehow created itself, but that seems counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator Itself requires an explanation. As philosopher Del Ratzsch points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider an analogy to the discovery on Mars of a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium .

Most people would think that the cube was produced by some kind of intelligent beings, aliens, and would regard the cube as virtual proof that such beings existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of alien beings, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation of the cube, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the mysterious structure.

Such a reply would certainly sound odd.

The inability to say anything much about who the aliens were or where they came from doesn't count at all against the theory that intelligent agents were responsible for the cube, nor does it mean that the alien theory is no better than the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube is surely an inference to the best explanation.

The second fact about the world that is easier to explain on the theistic rather than the atheistic hypothesis is that the parameters, forces and constants which govern the cosmos are exquisitely fine-tuned. Here is one example of the dozens which could serve:

If the initial density of matter in the universe had deviated by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th power (a value referred to by scientists as the "density parameter"), the universe would have either fallen back on itself or expanded too quickly for stars to form. This is an unimaginably fine tolerance.

Imagine a stack of dimes stretching across 10 to the 30th universes like our own. Let the dimes represent calibrations on a gauge displaying every possible value for the density parameter. Imagine, too, that a needle points to the dime representing the critical value. If the initial density of our cosmos deviated from that critical value by a single dime our universe, if it formed at all, would not be suitable for life.

Or imagine a console featuring dials and gauges for each of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of constants, parameters, and other cosmic contingencies which define the structure of our world. Imagine that each dial face shows trillions upon trillions of possible values. Each of those dials has to be calibrated to precisely the value to which it is actually set in our world in order for a universe to exist and/or for life to thrive.

Of course, it could be an astonishing coincidence that all the dials are set with such mind-boggling precision. Or it could be that there are a near infinite number of universes having all possible values and that ours just happens to be one that is perfectly calibrated for life. But not only is this an extraordinarily unparsimonious hypothesis, it also elicits the question of what it is that's generating these universes and what evidence we have that they even exist.

It's much simpler to bow to Ockham and assume that there is just one universe and that its structure manifests a level of engineering of breath-taking precision, a conclusion perfectly compatible with the idea that there's an intelligent agent behind it all. "It's crazy," as philosopher Richard Swinburne says, "to postulate a trillion universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job."

One further point: Scientists assume as they study the universe that it is rational, that it lends itself to rational inquiry, but if so, then an entirely non-rational explanation for it seems less likely than an explanation which incorporates rational causes.

The third fact is that it has proven exceedingly difficult to explain how the first living unit, a cell able to metabolize, reproduce, eliminate waste, manufacture proteins, etc., could have ever arisen solely by chance. The odds against a chance origin of life, with no input from an intelligent agent, are so improbable as to make belief that it happened a matter of extraordinary blind faith.

It's somewhat like insisting that a very complex, fully functional and self-replicating computer could have arisen by the action of sun, wind, rain and lightning swirling through a junkyard for a couple million years.

A fourth fact about the world from which we might infer that there is an intelligent agent involved somehow in its development is the existence of biological information. The biosphere is information-rich, a fact which raises the question where this information came from and how it ever came about.

The naturalist's answer is that the information, such as we find in DNA and cellular processes, resulted from blind mechanistic forces acting purposelessly and randomly over eons of time. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, of course, but if we're going to limit ourselves to the lessons of experience we must acknowledge that information whose provenience we can ascertain is always the product of an intelligent mind.

Random processes can produce highly improbable patterns (like the particular pattern of craters on the moon) and they can produce very specific recognizable patterns (like the repetition of a single letter typed by a monkey), but what we've never observed a random, non-teleological process do is generate both (such as we find in a computer program). Yet that is precisely what we have in the genetic code.

The genetic code and the complex of proteins and transcription molecules necessary to decipher that code, must've arisen prior to the ability to replicate and thus prior to the action of any selection mechanism, in other words, by sheer chance. Believing it happened is somewhat analogous to believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could leave in its wake a fully assembled and functional jet airplane.

There may someday be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information, but until that day arrives the obvious existence of that information suggests an intelligent agent lurks somewhere in its history.

More tomorrow.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. I)

Among the indictments of religious believers registered by skeptics such as the coterie of anti-theists lead by Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. is that belief in God is at best irrational and at worst pernicious. Theism, the believer is condescendingly assured, is all blind faith and no evidence, but should a theist try to pin down his antagonist and ask him exactly what he means by "evidence," it often turns out that the word is employed as a synonym for "proof."

Well, perhaps there's no proof that there is a personal God, but that's hardly a reason not to believe that one exists. After all, we can prove very little of what we believe about the world, yet we don't hold our beliefs less firmly for that.

The skeptic's claim that there's no evidence for God and that theistic belief is thus irrational is, ironically, the reverse of the truth. It is actually, in my view, more rational to believe that a personal transcendent creator of the universe exists than to disbelieve it. Moreover, if what I argue below is correct, the logical consequences of atheism turn out to be psychically and politically toxic.

Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests more comfortably on the side of the believer. This is because almost every relevant fact about the world, and every existential characteristic of the human condition, makes more sense when viewed in the light of the hypothesis of theism than it does on the assumption of atheism.

Put differently, the conclusion of theism is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation.

I don't mean to suggest that there are no facts about the world that militate against the existence of God - there are, of course. The existence of suffering is the most troubling example. Nor do I mean to suggest that atheism can offer no account at all of the facts of human existence that I discuss in what follows. Perhaps it can. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism the facts are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism.

If that is the case, it follows that it's more reasonable to believe that the best explanation for them is the existence of a personal God.

Here are eighteen facts about the world and human experience that I will argue, over the course of the next several days, are easier to explain on the assumption that traditional Judeo-Christian theism is true than on the assumption that metaphysical naturalism (atheism) is true:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact that life's origin is inexplicable on naturalism
   
4. The fact of biological information
   
5. The fact of human consciousness
   
6. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
   
7. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
   
8. Our sense that we have free will
   
9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
   
10. Our sense of moral obligation
    
11. Our sense of guilt
    
12. Our belief in human dignity
    
13. Our belief in human worth
    
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights
    
15. Our desire for justice
    
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
    
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self
    
18. Our desire to survive our own death
    

Nine Questions about Black Holes

Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes answers nine questions submitted to him by a young student about black holes. If you've ever wondered about any of these questions, or even if you haven't, you'll want to watch the video Barnes has put together on this. Here are the questions:

1. How do scientists know there is a supermassive black hole in the centre of every galaxy?
2. Many sites say scientists don’t know how supermassive black holes are formed. Are there any theories?
3. Why does a star explode into a supernova when it runs out of energy?
4. If it has run out of energy, where does the energy for the explosion come from?
5. Why do extremely dense objects have so much gravity?
6. Does a black hole really ‘blow out’ matter sometimes and why?
7. When a black hole consumes more matter does its gravity increase?
8. Can black holes die?
9. Is it possible for a black hole to have an ‘other side’ and if so what could it be?

And here are Barnes' answers to these questions: