A Few Thoughts

I'm glad to see that our Democrat friends have finally recognized that riots are bad, the police and the national guard are good, and fences work. What they couldn't see, or wouldn't admit, during last summer's riots is evidently as plain as day to them now. All it took was for them to get "mugged by reality" last week and suddenly the scales fell from their eyes.

Now they're demanding that illegal entry into the nation's Capitol be prosecuted, they've stopped demanding that the police be defunded, they're wondering why the national guard wasn't called in and they're approving the erection of barriers around every capitol building in the nation.

Perhaps they'll even see the dissonance between their newfound views on illegal entry, the importance of law enforcement and the need for barriers to keep people out and their views on illegal immigration, but I shouldn't hope for too much.

Here's a pet peeve of mine: Why do politicians insist on calling people who commit horrific crimes "cowards" when the word is completely inapt? A coward is one who lacks the courage to do or to endure something. In the wake of 9/11 the terrorists who perpetrated that atrocity were often called cowards, but whatever they were, they were not cowardly. Anyone willing to sacrifice one's life for a cause one believes in is hardly a coward.

Likewise, the rioters who stormed the Capitol on the 6th have been called cowards by some of our political leaders, including Mike Pence, but I fail to see how the word applies to what they did. Their behavior certainly doesn't deserve to be called brave, but how was it cowardly? It seems the more appropriate word would be "evil," or "malignant," or, if we really wish to be anachronistic, "wicked."

Unfortunately, a society which can't bring itself to use language any stronger than "not okay," "unacceptable" or "inappropriate" to describe acts that are morally heinous like burning down shops and destroying peoples' livelihoods will shrink from incurring the opprobrium of progressive social media mobs for being judgmental and using more robust descriptors like "evil" or "wicked."

Now that's cowardice.

Trump and the Nonjudgmentalism Problem

The Democrat majority in the House of Representatives has once again chosen to impeach President Donald Trump, this time, in the eyes of many erstwhile Trump supporters, with much more justification than the disgracefully political previous attempt.

Set aside for now the merits of the present case and consider that it's based not only on an explicit judgment of illegality but also on an implicit judgment of moral turpitude. The legal claim is pretty thin since it'll be extremely difficult to prove in the Senate that the president deliberately incited a riot on January 6th, but the moral judgment that his actions were so reckless, irresponsible and morally reprehensible that he cannot be allowed to finish out the last week of his tenure and must be prevented from ever serving in public office again packs a more compelling punch.

There's an interesting irony here, though. Frank Furedi, Professor Emeritus at Kings College, has an article in the January issue of First Things (paywall) in which he traces how Americans have developed an aversion to making moral judgments, associating them with "judgmentalism" and authoritarian personality types.

Furedi explains the genesis of our current "nonjudgmentalism":

Since the early 1920s, Western culture in general and American society in particular have become increasingly hostile to the conscious act of judgment. It was at this point in time that the term nonjudgmentalism was invented, used by progressive educators, social workers, and therapeutic professionals as a core axiom of their work.

By the late 1930s and especially the 1940s, judgmentalism was linked to authoritarian behaviors and deemed the cause of totalitarianism. Judgment, that is, was at the root of conflict and war. Moral truths firmly stated and the acceptance of moral authority were depicted by progressive pedagogues and social scientists as symptoms of a sick personality.

No one wished to be regarded as a "sick personality," of course, so a reluctance grew on the part of everyone in authority - parents, teachers, clergy, politicians - to make judgments about right and wrong. Today only those judgments which conform to accepted political fashion can safely be voiced, and yet here we are passing a moral judgment on the President's behavior:

This devaluation of judgment contributed to the steady unravelling of moral authority in the cultural imagination of the West in the mid-twentieth century. From the interwar period onwards, but especially since the 1940s, moral authority shifted from a necessity many regarded in a positive light to something increasingly ominous.

As one might expect this unravelling of moral authority has had calamitous social consequences:

Without an authoritative moral source, judgment loses cultural currency. Not surprisingly, when confronted with the claim that moral judgments are merely an expression of the personal opinion of a closed-minded individual, many citizens in the mid-twentieth-century West decided to keep their views of what is right and wrong to themselves.

With so many experts challenging the value of moral absolutes, the very idea of obedience to normative authorities became suspect. Social scientists adduced powerful historical reasons for warning against (presumed) moral authorities: The willingness of civilian populations to obey totalitarian leaders leading up to World War II proved to many that obedience was inconsistent with a democratic form of public life.

The desire to avoid appearing judgmental or authoritarian had ludicrous consequences as well:

For young adults, nonjudgmentalism is likewise a worldview, a paradoxical one of absolute relativism. An important study from 2011, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, demonstrated this widespread prevalence of moral indifference among young people.

The majority of subjects interviewed believed that since morality is a matter of individual choice, it was inappropriate to judge others. Those who insisted on doing so were perceived as legitimate targets of condemnation. The prevailing sentiment among these young interviewees was that judging was associated with “condemning, castigating, disparaging, or executing.” One young adult thought people who sought to impose their moral beliefs on others were “sick.”

In other words, judging others is sick, but judging others for the sin of judging others is righteous. Furedi adds this:

Nonjudgmentalism leaves a vacuum in the consciences of human beings, a moral indifference that provides no satisfaction other than the fleeting virtue of showing one’s liberal forbearance, but that was enough for them. They would never think that their enlightened tolerance is a species of moral cowardice.

It's a shame Furedi's article is free only to subscribers because he says much of importance that I can't include here. Instead I'll append a few thoughts:

A moral judgment has to be based on some moral standard, but in a secular society with its adamantine determination to scrub public discourse of all reference to objective moral authorities, i.e. God, either no such standard exists or no such standard is deemed relevant. Yet that doesn't prevent many individuals from being "judgmental" by reproaching the president's actions.

In fact, secular folk, who have no grounds for criticizing the president's behavior beyond an expression of their own subjective disapprobation, make moral judgments all the time. If judgmentalism consists in making groundless moral evaluations of other peoples' conduct then our secular friends are among the most judgmental people in our society for they haven't been shy about expressing their contempt for the president's moral faults over the last four years or more.

Even so, notwithstanding that people do it all the time, denying any transcendent, objective basis for moral judgment while nevertheless voicing moral judgments can only be described as irrational behavior.

Whether Trump should be impeached or not, censured or not, the matter can only be argued on tenuous legal grounds by our secular friends. Having purged our public square of any transcendent moral authority, secularists have left themselves no resources with which to make a moral argument for impeachment, or for anything else, for that matter. Moral arguments depend on judgments of right and wrong, and not only does the secular citizen have nothing upon which to base such judgments other than their own tastes and preferences, but by their own lights declaring someone to be morally corrupt exposes them to the charge of "judgmentalism" and being "sick."

Of course, few of them realize the logically untenable position they put themselves in by pronouncing their moral deprecations of Trump, and so, thinking they're putting their virtue on display for all to see, they actually make themselves appear intellectually shallow and foolish.

Our Divided Land

In the course of an email conversation about all that's happened in our nation in recent months a friend mentioned to me that he's in a quandary as to how we "can ever bring unity to our exceedingly divided land." I wish that by way of response I could've offered a more hopeful way forward, but I fear that the fissures which separate us are going to be with us for a long time. They took generations to develop and will not be reversed by the election of any one man or party.

The way I see it the left has for over a century sought to undermine every institution, cherished belief and custom they could - the family, education, religion, the free market system, our history and the first two amendments in the Bill of Rights to name just a few of the most important. The result has been a rent in our social fabric that appears irreparable.

In the past, our political and social disagreements were conducted within the bounds of a shared set of assumptions, a shared worldview, but for millions of Americans today that common ground no longer exists. Rather than standing on opposite sides of a room across which we could walk toward each other, we find ourselves standing on disparate islands separated by a sea of philosophical differences so deep as to be impassable.

When we try to communicate at all we're like radio operators transmitting and receiving on different frequencies and just talking past each other. Too often our only communication is one side simply shouting slogans and insults at the other. Not sharing any common philosophical ground we find ourselves speaking different socio-cultural languages and have often given up even trying to understand the other.

What I mean by shared philosophical ground can be illustrated by an example that I've discussed many times on Viewpoint. In order to be able to communicate with others at any but a superficial level we have to have a shared view of truth, but we don't. Some of us believe that there is objective truth which we can discover through the use of our reason. Others believe there's no such thing. Truth for them is simply whatever one feels strongly about, it's constructed by the individual or the group to which the individual belongs based on subjective desires, experiences and prejudices.

One way this plays out in our culture can be seen in the transgender phenomenon. Some people believe that an individual's biological sex is an objective determinant of their gender whereas others hold that the individual's gender is whatever they strongly feel themselves to be. For the former group, there's an objective truth about gender fixed in their biology and independent of the psychological inclinations the individual may possess. For the latter group one's gender is subjectively determined. It could be said that for them their psychology trumps their biology.

Differences in one's view of truth actually derive from an even more foundational belief, a belief from which all other worldview conflicts derive. This is the belief about God. Those who believe that truth is objective generally hold to a theistic worldview. They believe that truth exists independently of what we feel or perceive because a transcendent God has established it.

Those who reject the notion of objective truth generally hold to a naturalistic worldview. There is no God, they maintain, therefore there's no telos for mankind, no essence, no fixed human nature, no purpose, no meaning, no free will, no such thing as human dignity or an objective standard of right and wrong. Man is whatever he or his environment make him to be.

Everything ultimately rests, then, on the question of the existence and nature of God. It's the most important, most basic question in life. If there is no God then there's no objective moral truth, there can be no agreement on what justice is or upon what makes any act right or wrong to do, and if there's no objective standard of truth, then every disagreement can only be settled by means of a power struggle, each group striving to impose their will on others through the exercise of raw judicial or political coercion.

The gulf between the two worldviews, between theism and naturalism and the ramifications and implications of each, is as wide as an ocean, and that, in my opinion, is why coming together won't happen any time soon.

Impeachable Offenses

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online recounts a conversation between radio host Hugh Hewitt and Republican Senator Ben Sasse concerning the events of last Wednesday:

Sasse: He wanted there to be chaos, and I’m sure you’ve also had conversations with other senior White House officials, as I have.
Hewitt: I have.
Sasse: As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.
Hewitt: That said . . .
Sasse: That was happening. He was delighted.

Geraghty then goes on to quote from a Washington Post article in which an unnamed advisor reveals that the President,

...was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV. If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.

The WaPo article continues:

. . . But the president himself was busy enjoying the spectacle. Trump watched with interest, buoyed to see that his supporters were fighting so hard on his behalf, one close adviser said.

. . . Meanwhile, in the West Wing, a small group of aides — including Ivanka Trump, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Meadows — was imploring Trump to speak out against the violence. Meadows’s staff had prompted him to go see the president, with one aide telling the chief of staff before he entered the Oval Office, “They are going to kill people.”

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., the group finally persuaded Trump to send a tweet: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” he wrote. “They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

But the Twitter missive was insufficient, and the president had not wanted to include the final instruction to “stay peaceful,” according to one person familiar with the discussions.

The WaPo is hardly a Trump-friendly paper so maybe we should take their reporting with a touch of skepticism, but if they are accurately recounting what happened it presents a very damaging picture of the president's behavior. Geraghty adds this:

The article paints an appalling portrait of the president’s refusal to act as the crisis worsened. But once again, we’re dependent upon sources in the White House who won’t give their names.

The consequences of these statements are gargantuan; they’re describing a president refusing to protect Congress or his own vice president. If there was ever a time to go on the record, this is it.

Maybe the White House staffers closest to the Oval Office on Wednesday would be clearer and more specific if they were testifying under oath.

If all that Geraghty says here is true, it's hard to see how Mr. Trump avoids impeachment, but whether it's true or not will only be ascertained, as Geraghty says, by putting these aides under oath.

Earlier in the same column Geraghty quoted NRO contributor Andrew McCarthy as saying that if the Democrats really want to impeach Trump they're going about it all wrong by charging him with inciting insurrection.

If what the Democrats truly want is bipartisan consensus in the service of national security, rather than political combat, the articles of impeachment they plan to file should charge the president with (a) subversion of the Constitution’s electoral process, particularly the Twelfth Amendment counting of the sovereign states’ electoral votes; (b) recklessly encouraging a raucous political demonstration that foreseeably devolved into a violent storming of the seat of our government; and (c) depraved indifference to the welfare of the vice president, Congress, security personnel, and other Americans who were in and around the Capitol on January 6.

That would be an accurate description of impeachable offenses. It would not disintegrate into legal wrangling over incitement, insurrection, and causation.

I'm not sure the Democrats believe that it's all that urgent to get Trump out of office. Rep. Jim Clyburn said they might hold off until after Biden's been in office for three months before sending articles of impeachment to the Senate. If Trump really is a clear and present danger to the nation, as numerous Democrats and some Republicans have claimed, why would they delay the business of removing him?

Slandering the Capitol Police

There's a theme developing among the progressive left that the police treated the rioters at the Capitol last Wednesday more gently than they would've treated them had they been black. There's absolutely no evidence that this is so, but it's being asserted apodictically as if there could not possibly be any doubt.

David Brooks makes this claim in a New York Times op-ed:

The rampage reminded us that if Black people had done this, the hallways would be red with their blood.

President-elect Joe Biden said much the same:

If it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting they would have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol.

So did his Vice-president elect Kamala Harris:

We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer.

The claim that the Capitol police were much more passive than they would've been had the protestors been black not only lacks any substantiation, it accomplishes nothing but boost racial discord and drive the wedge between the races even deeper.

Even more, it's an awful slander on the men and women who serve at the Capitol because it imputes to them a racism that's wholly undemonstrated.

A National Review Online article by Tobias Hoonhout is critical of a Washington Post article for pounding that theme.

Hoonhout writes that,

Multiple Washington Post articles published in the days following the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill ignored key details in an effort to cast the day’s events as the inevitable consequence of racially disparate policing.

One such article — titled “Kid glove treatment of pro-Trump mob contrasts with strong-arm police tactics against Black Lives Matter, activists say” — was published Wednesday evening, just hours after the chaos subsided. It quotes a number of Black Lives Matter activists who misrepresent the day’s events to suggest that the police went easy on the pro-Trump rioters because they were predominantly white.

The four reporters whose bylines are listed on the article didn’t bother to fact-check any of the false claims.

The implication in the WaPo article as well as the Biden, Harris and Brooks statements, of course, is that the Capitol police are a bunch of racists.

As Hoonhout points out, though, the WaPo article fails to mention that a white female Trump supporter was shot in the neck and died and that the reason the National Guard was not in evidence was because D.C.'s mayor Muriel Bowser, a black woman, had requested only a small contingent of guardsmen, primarily to control traffic and monitor metro stations.

The WaPo article declares that the vandalism and violence of the rioters had no obvious consequence, but there was one dead woman and at least 82 arrests by Thursday night, facts which belie the WaPo's reporting, as does the fact that, in addition to deadly force, the police also used tear gas and flash bang grenades in an attempt to defend the Capitol from the mob.

It should also be pointed out that the Capitol police are not trained in riot control and were not wearing riot gear.

Hoonhout quotes a BLM spokesperson who's not going to let a few measly facts get in the way of his narrative:

DeRay Mckesson, described in the Post as “a leading voice of the Black Lives Matter movement” told the paper that “Black and Brown people have been shot and arrested for far less.”

“Black people would not have even gotten into the building. They would have started shooting at them the minute they started to rush at the police,” he said.

How Mckesson, Biden, Harris or Brooks know any of this none of them tell us, but their lack of any warrant for their inflammatory claims doesn't diminish their certainty. They just know it's true because they know that the Capitol police, many of whom are black themselves, are eager for the chance to shoot black rioters.

It's as incredible as it is disgusting that Biden, et al. would so shamelessly slander the men and women of the Capitol police force while the corpses of their fellow officers were yet warm simply to score political points.

The left, it seems, has no desire to promote racial harmony. Rather they have a deep ideological and political interest in generating as much friction between blacks and whites as they can.

The actor Morgan Freeman was once interviewed by Mike Wallace and gave what I think to be the best advice on how we should handle race in this country. Wallace asked Freeman, "How are we going to get rid of it (racism)?" To which Freeman responded, "Stop talking about it, I'm going to stop calling you a white man, and you're going to stop calling me a black man. I'll know you as Mike Wallace, and you will know me as Morgan Freeman."

Such simple advice. Why don't more people heed it?

The Darkness Closes In

Ben Domenech offers a number of pertinent remarks about last Wednesday's ruckus on Capitol Hill in a fine essay at The Federalist.

Some of his most interesting comments, perhaps, are in his concluding paragraphs where he notes that those who control our news and social media will use the riot as an excuse to amp up their condemnation of conservatives, at least those who themselves don't condemn Trump, and to accelerate the process of suppressing, or even eliminating, the free exchange of ideas in this country.

Here's Domenech:

What will happen next is obvious: A total crushing, anti-free speech effort that treats Trump-supporting groups like Branch Davidians. An effort to restore the fundamentally unserious neocons as the voice of reason in the room. A hardening of the bounds of the People’s House to keep people away from politicians. A use of any levers of government power — including audits, regulation, and lawfare — to harass conservatives now categorized as seditionists and terrorists by the incoming president who falsely claims to want to unite the country. And above all, a doubling down on all the policies and efforts put in place to crush exactly the type of people who showed up at the Capitol yesterday in a foolish, desperate attempt to make themselves heard.

The crushing of free speech is absolutely necessary for the left because they're aware, if only subliminally, that conservative ideas have a powerful appeal to rational folks. Progressives sense that their own ideas can only compete on an emotional level and simply couldn't withstand the criticism they'd be subjected to in a free and open public square.

This is one reason for the postmodern disparagement of Reason itself and for the ascendence of fact-free emotivism in our public discourse. It's one reason why so many conservative speakers, people like Jordan Peterson, for example, are disinvited from speaking on college campuses or shouted down and threatened with physical harm if they do show up. The progressive leadership at these schools fears that the audience would find these speakers too persuasive if they were permitted to expose students to their ideas.

Likewise, Facebook and Twitter will continue to deplatform conservatives. Many newspapers and tv newsrooms will continue in their role as propagandists for the left. Apple may follow though on its threat to drop Parler from its app store, applicants for teaching positions will be asked their opinions of sundry social issues and quietly passed over for the job if their answers don't pass progressive litmus tests.

It's ironic that progressives who see themselves as the champions of justice for the oppressed are themselves busily engaged in creating another unjustly oppressed class and happily serving as the oppressors. The people who see themselves as children of light are actually ushering in the darkness.

Domenech adds this:

The rioters failed in their effort and ensured their marginalization. But marginalization doesn’t mean evaporation. They’re still here. They’re still Americans. And they’re not going away.

They may not be going away, but every effort will be made to make them seem irrelevant, insignificant and malign and to suppress their voices lest people who hear them begin to think that they make a lot of sense.

Protein Shapes

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of metabolic processes occurring in each of the trillions of cells in your body at this very moment. Each of those processes requires the work of a team of specialized proteins, and each of those proteins must have a particular shape in order to perform its assigned task.


Examples of Protein Shapes

 If a particular protein fails to achieve the proper shape when it's formed the fitness of the cell will suffer, and thereby hangs an interesting problem. Given that the universe of possible configurations that a protein could adopt is vastly greater than the number of seconds since the earth formed, how is it that natural selection was able to "discover" all of the highly specific shapes of each of the myriad proteins necessary for even the simplest cell to function?

Biologists tell us that the shape of a protein is a function of the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein, much like beads make up a necklace, but how, out of all the possible sequences there are, did just the right sequence arise, not just once but hundreds of times in the first cell?

Cornelius Hunter offers an interesting discussion on the problem at Darwin's God. He writes:

But [the protein] works just fine only because a very special amino acid sequence was specified. That amino acid sequence is just as astronomically rare as the three dimensional structure that the unfolded protein was able to find. So from where did this amino acid sequence come?

The string of amino acids that make up a protein comes from the cell’s translating machine called the ribosome. The ribosome takes as input a string of nucleotides and produces as output a string of amino acids. The translation is done according to the genetic code.

And from where did the string of nucleotides come? It came from the DNA. A massive protein copying machine slides along an opened section of DNA and copies a gene.

And from where did the DNA gene come? According to evolution it evolved, but it is here that we find another entropy barrier. Just as the folding protein is confronted with an astronomical number of possible structures, so too the DNA gene is confronted with its own nightmare of choices.

This is one of the main reasons why explaining the origin of life is such an intractable problem. DNA is a code. It's information. Where did this information come from. Could it have been produced by chance and blind forces, or did it require intention and intelligence?

We've never experienced information such as a code being produced apart from a mind, and yet despite the complete lack of empirical warrant the naturalist takes an enormous leap of faith and chooses to believe, without any evidence, that not only is it possible to have produced a code by chance, but that it actually happened in the origin of living things.

Then the naturalist, having committed himself to the belief that unthinking nature is capable of such miracles - the equivalent of believing that a computer program could be produced by a random symbol generator - criticizes those who are skeptical of such wonders as being superstitious and unscientific for thinking that the existence of information points to the existence of an intelligent mind.

It's actually rather amusing.

Reaping What We Sow

Wednesday's riots at the Capitol were tragic, disgraceful and worthy of all the condemnation and criticism they've received from Republicans, both those who support and those who are critics of Mr. Trump.

I say Republicans because among our political class it's only Republicans who have the moral standing to condemn what happened on Wednesday. This may sound absurd to some, but almost all Republicans who have been outspoken in their criticism of the mob that vandalized the Capitol building were also outspoken in their criticism of the mobs which vandalized and looted our cities and injured and, in some cases, murdered people last summer.

During that long stretch of chaos and turmoil, however, most Democrats were either silent or even excused the violence.

Tristan Justice at The Federalist lists 28 examples of Democrat politicians or progressives in the media excusing or even applauding last summer's riots in which thirty people died and untold millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed.

Justice writes:

Not one prominent conservative pundit or politician with any significant platform was reported to have tried endorsing the mob of Trump supporters infiltrating the U.S. Capitol. To the contrary, conservatives spent months vilifying Democratic leaders for not doing enough in their own states and cities to crack down on the militant mobs of leftists taking streets under siege, normalizing the kind of political violence on track to appear routine in the nightmare 2020 decade.

He goes on to list his examples which I've condensed here. I urge readers to go to the original, though, because Justice provides video and tweets which document each of the examples he cites:

Vice-President elect Kamala Harris urged her followers to donate toward paying Minneapolis rioters’ bail. Justice doesn't mention this quote from Ms Harris but he might have:

They’re [last summer's riots] not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

That's our new Vice-President.

CNN's Chris Cuomo justified the violence in our cities' streets by demanding to be shown "where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”

Multiple reporters, including MSNBC's Ali Velshi, excused last summer's violence by assuring us that the protests were "mostly peaceful." The same could be said, of course, about the protest march in D.C. on Wednesday, but that doesn't excuse or diminish the violence that did occur.

Democrats went through their entire online convention without condemning any of the violence that staggered the nation in the months preceding their event.

During a CBS interview Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the New York Times' 1619 Project, explicitly rejected the idea that destroying property fits the definition of “violence.” The interviewer agreed that she was making "a great point."

CNN news anchor Don Lemon celebrated the George Floyd riots as a 21st-century version of the Boston Tea Party. “And let’s not forget if anyone is judging this, I’m not judging this,” Lemon said as CNN cameras rolled with footage of riots in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. “This is how this country was started.”

CNN’s Chris Cillizza complained that Trump was wrong to describe the looting, burning and beatings in our cities last summer as "Riots."

Huffington Post released a video instructing viewers as to "How Riots Built America." The video drew parallels between the 2020 riots against police with periods of unrest throughout American history.

NBC News evidently instructed staff last summer to avoid the term "Riot."

When anarchists were taking control of downtown Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkin advised people not to be "afraid of Democracy."

When a mob tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore last June House Speaker Nancy Pelosi merely shrugged and replied, "People will do what they do." Perhaps she repeated that profundity when she saw pics of Trump supporters lolling about her office with their feet up on her desk.

Rolling Stone magazine re-published an article in May urging readers to "Rethink Property Destruction." The article promoted the idea that the devastation and property destruction caused by riots as "frequently effective."

Other publications offered similar justifications for rioting:

GQ Magazine averred that "Violent Protests Work." Slate argued that riots are a "Proportionate Response." Mother Jones declared in June that "Riots Aren't Irrational." Time magazine insisted that using the term "Riot" was "Loaded." Vox said last summer that riots are "scary but productive" and yesterday wrote that the Capitol riots were "devastating.' Jacobin magazine opined that looting is justified only to promote social justice.

Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez informed us early last December that the whole point of protesting "is to make people uncomfortable." She also claimed that marginalized people have no choice but to riot. She was talking about poor people, but her assertion would apply, I suppose, to any form of perceived marginalization, including the belief one is being marginalized by an unfair electoral process.

Writer Vicky Osterweil published a book late last summer titled, “In Defense Of Looting,” and earned a feature on National Public Radio (NPR) for the work.

Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill went on NPR complaining that dismissing protestors as rioters “dehumanizes” them and impedes political progress.

As I said, you really should go to the OP and watch the videos and read the tweets, but meanwhile, given their silence or support, both tacit and explicit, when people with whom they sympathized committed crimes even worse than were committed by Trump supporters on Wednesday, they have no moral credibility, at least with me, when they criticize and condemn the mob that overran the Capitol building.

If political rioting is unjustified and criminal when Trump supporters do it, and it is, then it's equally unjustified and criminal when BLM and Antifa do it. Yet, mayors in some of our cities have refused to prosecute those who destroyed peoples' property and livelihoods and no one in the liberal media or in positions of Democratic party leadership has expressed outrage over this.

Indeed, the fact that so many rioters were released without charges last summer doubtless fueled some of the frustration of those who showed up in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate and quite plausibly led some of them to believe they could yield to the temptation to vandalize and assault police without fear of prosecution. The lack of censure of Antifa and BLM from the left has no doubt also led some to ape the left's behavior, believing that if they want to compete with and defeat the left they must play by the left's rules.

This is tragic for the nation, but we reap what we sow. What we excused and rationalized yesterday will come back to plague us today. It's almost a law of human nature.

A Shakespearean Ending

For almost four years President Trump accomplished more good for the country and the world, in my opinion, than any other president in my lifetime. Few other human beings could've withstood the withering criticism from the media, the constant vitriol from the left, the years of allegations of phony scandals, congressional investigations and impeachment and still managed to amass the achievements he did.

Despite unprecedented adversity, he gave us a robust economy, record employment among minorities, peace in the Middle East, a record number of exceptional judges and Supreme Court justices, development of a Covid vaccine at what has been near-miraculous speed, and much more, but he seems almost determined in these last few weeks to undo what could have been an outstanding legacy of accomplishment.

I was open to the argument that the election was stolen and was willing to wait for the evidence to be made public. Whatever testimony there was to that effect, however, (for example, that of the truck driver who claimed to have transported thousands of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania on election night) as well as every promise of imminent revelations of Democrat chicanery, seemed to vanish like morning mist.

If there was anything substantive to such allegations it certainly hasn't been widely publicized and demonstrated. Instead, those who promised them, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Lin Wood, for three examples, ended up looking foolish, dishonest or insane.

Neither the president nor his spokespersons have gone beyond mere assertions of wrong-doing and actually laid out the case for malfeasance. Perhaps insiders know more, but those of us looking on from outside are asking why we're not being given the overwhelming proof we've been promised.

To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, President Trump refuses to go gently into that dark night, but has chosen to rage, rage at the dying of the light. He claims he's been cheated and has sought redress in the courts as is his right, but none of the almost sixty lawsuits filed on his behalf, many heard by conservative judges, have resulted in a win for the president. Perhaps some of the judges are corrupt political hacks, but can they all be corrupt hacks?

The confusing message sent to voters in Georgia, first suggesting they shouldn't vote in the senate runoff and then saying they should, and his completely unnecessary squabble with the state's Republican governor and attorney general on the eve of a crucially important election, may well have contributed to the Democrats' winning control of the Senate and implementing the most radical agenda this country has ever seen.

Nor did it help that just prior to the runoff Mr. Trump drove a wedge into the Republican caucus by proposing a $2000 payout to every American. Such largesse was seen by many Republicans as irresponsible, and it forced the Georgia senatorial candidates into a dilemma. Either support it and be seen as recklessly pandering for votes, or defy the president, forfeit his support and alienate many Georgia voters.

Now with the Democrats in control of both the White House and both houses of Congress, much that Mr. Trump has accomplished will be undone and his legacy diminished. The burden of responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs will fall to some extent on his own shoulders, though he's not likely to accept that burden.

The attempt by some in Congress yesterday to forestall the inevitable by refusing to certify the verdict of the states seemed like a call for Congress to usurp the authority of the states to control their own electoral process, and it would've set a very dangerous precedent. It doesn't seem like a tactic that Constitutional conservatives should be adopting, and it's only going to make a deeply fractured Republican party more likely.

At the same time, thousands of apparent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, and some of their number resorted to vandalism and violence, bringing disgrace upon the movement they say they embrace and besmirching further the president's last days in office.

It's been alleged that the violent perpetrators were really leftist antifa infiltrators wanting to make Trump supporters look bad. Perhaps. Here's a suggestion: Arrest them all, charge them with whatever they can be charged with and then sort out who's who, just like they should've done in Portland, Seattle and a dozen other cities last summer. Indeed, had the mayors and governors in the cities and states beset with last summer's mayhem taken a strong stand against it yesterday's hooligans would've been less likely to think they could riot with impunity.

It's a shame that the Trump presidency is ending this way. It's a denouement that Shakespeare might've written, full of chaos, confusion and death. I imagine that a lot of people who were hoping the president would run again in 2024 are now having second thoughts.

Is the Eye Poorly Designed?

One frequently employed argument against the theory of intelligent design is that if living things are indeed the product of intelligent agency the designing agent must not be all that competent since some biological structures appear to be quite poorly designed.

The argument goes back at least to David Hume (d. 1776) in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and modern skeptics point to the human eye as an almost paradigmatic illustration of Hume's claim. The light sensitive cells in the eye's retina, it has long been thought, are facing the wrong way. This would seem inexplicable if the eye were engineered by an omniscient, omnipotent designer.

Yet, as research on the eye continues it looks more and more as though the skeptics have been wrong. These light receptors in the retina appear, in fact, to be optimally designed and oriented for the role they play in vision.

Here's a short video which makes this point quite well:

The optimality of the eye's design, coupled with the fact that complex eyes have been around since the Cambrian era and seem to have no fossilized ancestral predecessors, leads to the conclusion that this very complex structure arose with relative suddenness in the history of life and apparently de novo.

That's pretty hard to explain on any naturalistic theory of origins.

Our Contemporary Moral Crisis

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?” The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here.

Toner writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.” The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution.

We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

We have always flouted moral standards but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, but that's where large segments of our culture are headed in these postmodern times.

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime. The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter. The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.”

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The Reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

• If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.
• If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.
• A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.
• Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever we wish.

Unless there is a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there is no such thing as a moral obligation.

As the great Russian novelist Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

The price we pay in a secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas means by the following:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner continues:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power.”

You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality is not good.

Holding Two Mutually Contradictory Beliefs

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent poses an interesting thought experiment:

Suppose there were a group of people who insisted that there is absolutely no objective standard for morality and that all moral norms are based on subjective preferences that are foisted on us by material evolutionary forces.

And suppose there were a group of people who are so serenely confident of their own moral rectitude and the indisputable goodness of their policy prescriptions (which policy prescriptions are driven by their moral viewpoint) that they are determined to force the entire nation to conform to those prescriptions.

Now suppose that these groups are one and the same. It would be mind blowing if such a group actually existed would it not?

Yes, it would, but they do. Here’s a second scenario:

Suppose there were a group of people who insisted that all political structures are, without exception, based on power dynamics in which the strong impose their preferences on the weak, and all supposed logical justifications for any particular political structure are merely smokescreens employed to further one’s agenda in the power game.

And suppose there were a group of people who advanced logical justifications for a political structure based on arguments grounded in words like “justice” and “equality.”

Now suppose, once again, that these groups are one and the same. Again, it would be mind blowing if such a group actually existed would it not?

One need not suppose at all. Neither scenario is hypothetical. The group in question in both scenarios exists and it has a name: materialist progressives.

The logical contradictions progressives are able to juxtapose in their minds never cease to amaze. Their entire worldview is irrational. Is it any wonder that they attack rationality itself (“It’s an arbitrary ethnocentric, patriarchal social construct!!”) as part of their program?

When a secular materialist condemns racism, unwelcome sexual overtures, "homophobia," "transphobia," Islamophobes, climate deniers or anything at all on moral grounds they're exhibiting precisely the behavior Arrington highlights. Lacking any metaphysical support for making moral judgments they're nevertheless adamantine in their own moral certainties.

By denying or rendering irrelevant any transcendent foundation or source of moral obligation the secularist reduces all moral claims to expressions of personal taste. Not all progressives who make moral judgments are secular, of course, but those who are are behaving irrationally. They're contradicting their secular, materialistic worldview every time they condemn behavior on moral grounds.

A commenter responding to Arrington's post remarks:

Oh dear. I remember a conversation with a science teacher friend where I had to implore her: Stop thinking of progressives as if they had a logical basis for their beliefs. They don’t. It’s the secret of their success that they don’t.

Like a wolf pack bearing down on prey, they don’t need logic when they have force. I fear Americans are in for a bad time if they don’t know that. It appears that they don’t know what will happen.

Indeed. One thing folks need to understand about the spasms of moral outrage on our streets and campuses is that they're not really about morality at all. Moral language is merely a tactic, a weapon.

What these protests and demonstrations are are power plays - attempts by the wolves to use moral ideas to persuade the unwary prey still living within an objective moral framework, grounded in a transcendent moral authority, of the righteousness of the wolves' cause so that the prey will surrender to their demands.

Secular wolves, if they have a modicum of philosophical sophistication, don't believe in objective morality. They believe only in power.

If You Must Talk About Race

Rodney Stevens is a life-coach and writer who had a column titled "If You Must talk About Race, Be Gracious" published recently in the Wall Street Journal. In the column, he says this:

I grew up black in the 1960s in a small South Carolina town. Trust me, today’s America is nothing like it was then. And even under segregation, the marginalization was not total. My father was a plumber, my mother a school librarian. We were treated kindly. The local shopkeepers wanted our business, but they also wanted to avoid trouble from the few who believed wholeheartedly in racial segregation.

The segregation wasn’t uniform. One doctor had a separate waiting room; the other didn’t. Ditto for the town’s two dentists. Once the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed separate facilities, things opened up very quickly.

Many of the authors, commentators and journalists who spend all their energy thinking and talking about race today fail to acknowledge how much has improved with regard to race in this country. There are countless successful black Americans today—doctors and lawyers, entrepreneurs and academics, journalists and artists, compassionate politicians and famous Hollywood actors.

I'm going to return to this last sentence in a bit, but first Stevens is confident that the numbers of these successful black Americans will keep growing as long as we keep in mind certain facts. He goes on to list and explain six of those facts that'd be helpful for anyone, black or white, to remember when participating in a discussion of race in America:

First, every life matters. Mine is not one cell more or less valuable than anyone else’s. That this idea has to be debated or defended is lunacy.

Second, racism still exists, but it is no longer systemic. Those who claim that racism is everywhere today are delusional. Third, we tend to think too highly of our individuality. My color, weight, sex and sexual orientation are four of the least interesting things about me.

Fourth, policemen have to be held accountable for their actions, as is being done more and more.

Fifth, do what law enforcement officers ask you to do. Obviously that won’t solve every problem because policemen are humans, not angels. But that’s part of life. Simply doing what the people in blue ask you to do would drastically reduce needless confrontations, injuries and deaths.

Sixth, if you must talk about race, be gracious and respectful. Discussions about it shouldn’t be antagonistic—one’s race isn’t a choice, after all—but for some reason many popular figures insist on making the subject as unpleasant as possible.

It's excellent advice and also an excellent suggestion for a New Year's resolution.

An example of the "countless successful black Americans today—doctors and lawyers, entrepreneurs and academics, journalists and artists, compassionate politicians and famous Hollywood actors" that Stevens mentions is Brown University professor Glenn Loury who claims in a tweet that the “anti-racism” activists are bluffing us.

In a two minute interview he dares say about the relative lag in progress of black Americans what it seems few are willing to say in public.

According to Loury there's "an equilibrium of tacit agreements" under which crucial issues like black on black crime, the status of the black family, underperformance of black students are minimized or ignored while insisting that "white privilege" and "systemic racism" explain everything that ails the black community.

He's right about the reluctance of both whites and blacks to talk about these dysfunctions. At one time this reluctance was perhaps justified by the concern that emphasizing these problems would contribute to black feelings of inferiority and fuel racist prejudices, but shifting the onus onto whites and an illusory "systemic racism" - a phenomenon that we're assured exists everywhere in society and which is so deeply embedded and insidious that no one can actually see it - not only fails to address the real problems but strips blacks of their dignity as masters of their own lives.

The bluff, according to Loury, is based on the belief by the race hustlers like Ibram X. Kendi that nobody will break these agreements, hold black Americans accountable for their successes and failures and treat them as responsible agents. There's more money to be made by these "anti-racism activists" by churning out books and lectures that make whites feel guilty about being white, for working hard and being successful, and by convincing whites that, whether they're aware of it or not, they and their whole white culture are permeated with racism.

Here's Loury:

Here I explain my idea of the "bluffing equilibrium" that stifles public discussion in America about persistent racial inequality. For more of the same, follow us at https://t.co/Wy8KpOFZx9 pic.twitter.com/x4a9DuccwE

— Glenn Loury (@GlennLoury) December 29, 2020

Some of This Year's Books

2020 was not "a very good year" what with the social unrest in our cities, the increasing political and social distrust and polarization among Americans, and, of course, the pandemic and all the suffering it has wrought.

Nevertheless, the year did allow time for the reading of good books. The Roman orator and politician Cicero once said that "if you have a garden and a library you have everything you need." Well, maybe you wouldn't have quite everything, but you'd certainly have two essentials.

The 16th century reformer Erasmus acknowledged his addiction to reading by confessing that, "When I get a little money I buy books. If I have any left over I buy food and clothes."

The contemporary social critic P.J. O'Rourke advised that you should "always read stuff that would make you look good if you died in the middle of it."

My own reading this year past included some excellent books as well as some clunkers. Following the suggestion of C.S. Lewis that before you read a new book you should reread an old one, many of the good works to which I treated myself were rereads of books I'd read years ago.

I've been remiss the last couple of years in posting my annual reading list and didn't want to miss again so here are my favorite reads this year with a sentence or two of comment. Links are to other VP posts about the book:

Novels:
American Dirt (Jeanne Cummings) - Cummings received a lot of criticism for being a white North American woman writing a book about the experience of Hispanic migrants. The criticism is absurd, motivated perhaps by jealousy on the part of critics envious of the book's success, a success which is quite deserved.

Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) - A story about a feral girl growing up in a marsh. Having spent time myself in that habitat I couldn't understand how Owens could tell this story without once mentioning how intolerable the mosquitoes, ticks and biting flies would have made life for anyone trying to live the life Owens describes.

The Plague (Albert Camus, Reread) - I was motivated by the current pandemic to reread this classic story of a doctor who labors heroically but vainly against a deadly plague. There are some similarities to our present circumstance.

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - A prize-winning but salacious tale that has almost nothing at all to do with cholera but is instead about a man's life-long unrequited love for a woman. R-rated.

The Sun Also Rises (Ernst Hemingway) - A somewhat autobiographical story set in Spain describing the meaninglessness of lives filled with ennui and alcohol of the "lost" post-WWI generation. Mutatis mutandis it could've been written today.

The Eustace Diamonds (Anthony Trollope) - An elegantly written Victorian novel about a very difficult woman and her struggle to keep diamonds she claims to have been bequeathed her by her deceased husband.

The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens) - Not one of Dickens' best, but still pretty good. The curiosity shop has almost nothing to do with the story which is actually about the perils of a precocious young girl named Nell.

Hard Times (Charles Dickens) - Both an expose of the misery of life in industrial England and a parody of the extreme rationality and scientism of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham.

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, Reread) - A rambling account of the descent into despair and mental illness of a faithless wife. Some regard it as the greatest novel ever written.

Animal Farm (George Orwell, Reread) - Orwell's famous allegory of a leftist revolution and its brutal consequences. Thus it ever is with such revolutions.

The Possessed (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Reread) - A novel based on the idea, made more explicit in his Brothers Karamazov, that for men without God there are no moral rules. One criticism of the novel is that Dostoyevsky takes a seeming eternity to finish introducing his characters and get on with the story.

The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor (Reread) - O'Connor's stories are satirical tragicomedies whose theme is often the fall of the proud and haughty. Her use of the language of the South is masterful. My favorite of these stories is The Displaced Person.

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, Reread) - A book whose fame is surely based not at all on the quality of the actual story but rather entirely upon Huxley's prevision of modern man as compliant putty in the hands of a dictatorial state which employs technology and pleasure to manipulate its citizens.

History:
Dominion (Tom Holland) - An account of the development of the Western world and its dependence, whether acknowledged or not, upon Christian moral assumptions with which, even in a secular age, it continues to be saturated.

The French Revolution and Napoleon (Charles Downer Hazen, Reread) - A readable account of the events surrounding 1789 and the subsequent rise and fall of one of the most execrable men in European history, at least prior to the 20th century.

Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers (Brian Kilmeade) - In this book and the next Kilmeade sketches out the details of famous events which most of us never learned in school but maybe should have. Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans (Brian Kilmeade)

The Last Assassin (Peter Stothard) - A sometimes confusing but otherwise interesting account of the pursuit and execution of the assassins of Julius Caesar.

The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz) - Milosz describes the psychology and coping strategies of people living behind the Iron Curtain of communism in Eastern Europe in the post-WWII era.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Pt.III (Hannah Arendt) - An exhaustive description of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism written in 1951. The breadth of Arendt's scholarship is remarkable.

Biography:
Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love (Tom Tarrants) - Tarrants was a genuine white supremacist (not the ersatz variety sometimes presented to us by our media) who, as a young man in the 1960s, attempted murder, saw his friends killed by police and was himself severely wounded in a gun battle with the police. His whole life was changed through a Christian conversion that he underwent while in prison. It's an amazing story of redemption.

A Severe Mercy (Sheldon Vanauken) - Vanauken recounts his and his wife's conversion to Christian faith, their relationship with Oxford don C.S. Lewis and her subsequent death.

God's Funeral (A.N. Wilson, Reread) - An interesting recounting of biographical vignette's from the lives of a variety of 19th century British atheists and agnostics. Wilson wrote the book while he was himself an agnostic, but he later became a Christian.

Science:
The Miracle of the Cell (Michael Denton) - Readers without a background in biology will find some of this book difficult, but even so, Denton does a marvelous job of illustrating how living cells, all the way down to their constituent atoms, show astonishing evidence of having been intricately designed for the purpose of making life possible.

Signature in the Cell (Stephen Meyer, Reread) - This book deserves to become a classic on the problems inherent in any naturalistic account of the origin of life. It requires some knowledge of cell biology, but given that knowledge, Meyer's book is a powerful critique of naturalistic materialism.

The 5th Miracle (Paul Davies, Reread) - In this book and the next agnostic Paul Davies discusses the origin of life, seeking to avoid the hypothesis of intentional design. Other than to note that science can't permit such an explanation, he fails.

The Demon in the Machine (Paul Davies and also here) God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse (Hutchings and Wilkinson) - An interesting look at the multiverse and its inadequacies as a scientific hypothesis.

The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook (Barnes and Lewis) - The authors lay out the obstacles that must be overcome by anyone wishing to promote an alternative to Big Bang cosmology and other ancillary consensus theories held by contemporary cosmologists.

Theology/Philosophy:
The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis, Reread) - Lewis' imaginative tale of what heaven and hell are like. According to the story they're not what many people think.

Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis, Reread) - Lewis describes how modernity has dehumanized man, creating "men without chests."

Are We Bodies or Souls (Richard Swinburne) - Oxford philosopher Swinburne offers an improved version of Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul.

Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (Tim Keller) - An excellent resource to help sustain those in the midst of grief and suffering.

The Prodigal God (Tim Keller) - Keller offers an interesting look at the parable of the prodigal son and focusses our attention not only on the grace and love of the father but also on the bitter reaction of the older brother.

The War that Never Was (Kenneth Kemp) - The alleged war between science and religion is an ahistorical myth. Actual conflict between scientific theories and religious belief has been rare throughout Western history.

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Habermas and Licona) - There are four or five historical facts about the resurrection of Jesus upon which all or most scholars agree, even those who reject the historicity of the resurrection. The best explanation of those facts, however, is that Jesus actually did die and return to life.

Cultural Commentary:
Live Not by Lies (Rod Dreher) - Dreher's thesis is that America is entering an era of "soft totalitarianism" in which instances of people being "cancelled" for holding politically or socially unacceptable views will continue to increase to the point where anyone publicly expressing such opinions will suffer severe social and economic penalties. These penalties will be imposed not so much by the state but by private sector employers and social media with state sanction. As Dreher notes, this slide into tyranny is already well underway.

What if Life Exists on Other Planets?

Suppose scientists discovered intelligent life on a planet in a distant solar system, or perhaps on several such planets. What would be the implications of such a discovery for the validity of one's belief either that God, or a being very much like God, exists or one's belief that no such being exists?

For a long time metaphysical naturalists - those who believe that nature is all there is, there's no supernature - believed that the discovery of intelligent life on other planets would suggest that such life could and would arise anywhere the conditions for it are right and that the existence of living things on earth is thus not extraordinary. It would, in other words, seriously weaken the argument that the origin of life, especially intelligent life, is so improbable that it must be the product of a divine intelligence.

Physicist Paul Davies, an agnostic, believed this himself until he set out to write a book on the origin of life (The 5th Miracle). In the book Davies lists three possible explanations for life's origin, what biologists call abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-living matter).

The biggest problem for which any explanation has to account is the origin of complex, specified information such as we find in the DNA/RNA molecular architecture that forms the genetic code. According to Davies there are three possibilities: Either physical laws generate this specified complexity, or there are unknown biological laws that make it inevitable, or it was a genuine miracle.

Davies invokes science as justification for not considering the miraculous, but he also rejects the first possibility. He writes:

The heart of my objection is this: The laws of physics that operate between atoms and molecules are, almost by definition, simple and general. We would not expect them alone to lead inexorably to something both highly complex and highly specific....A law of nature...will not create biological information, or, indeed, any information at all. Ordinary laws....can shuffle information, but they can't create it.

This leaves him with the possibility of a kind of biological determinism which results from a heretofore undiscovered complexity law or information law that drives matter toward the goal of producing life:

Whereas the laws of physics merely shuffle information around, a complexity law might actually create information....I believe it is only under the action of an informational law that the information channel, or software control, associated with the genetic code could have come into existence.

From the standpoint of naturalism, however, such a law has at least two unacceptable implications. The first is that it flies in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy which claims that naturalistic processes are meaningless, purposeless and directionless. A law of information that exhibits foresight, purpose, meaning and direction and that pushes atoms and molecules toward the goal of increasing complexity would be the undoing of this claim.

The second is that if there is such a law and if the universe is actually suffused with purpose, meaning and foresight that would be compelling evidence for the existence of a super-natural mind, an intelligent architect of the cosmos.

If, though, scientists one day discover that life really is abundant in the universe then that would mean that the existence of such an information law and thus the existence of an intelligent supernatural agent are very likely. In fact, there's no significant difference between life resulting from a kind of biological determinism established by God and a supernatural miracle of instantaneous creation. They're both miraculous. The only real difference is the matter of how long the process took.

In the beginning of the last chapter Davies quotes one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, Freeman Dyson, who wrote in 1979 that, "The more I study the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." The evidence to which Dyson refers has multiplied in the four decades since 1979 many times over.

Davies concludes his last chapter with this:

The search for life elsewhere [in the universe] is thus the testing ground for two diametrically opposed worldviews. On one side is orthodox science, with its nihilistic philosophy of the pointless universe, of impersonal laws oblivious of ends, a cosmos in which life and mind, science and art, hope and fear are but fluky incidental embellishments on a tapestry of irreversible cosmic corruption....

There is an alternative view, undeniably romantic but perhaps true nonetheless, the vision of a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe, governed by ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve toward life and consciousness. A universe in which the emergence of thinking beings is a fundamental and integral part of the overall scheme of things. A universe in which we are not alone.

What Davies leaves to the reader to ask is where would such laws, laws that direct mindless matter to create consciousness, come from? Of the three possible explanations for the origin of life - physical law, biological determinism and miracle - the first is a non-starter and the other two both lead to the conclusion that there's an intelligence at work behind the universe.

Naturalists can't be happy with this state of affairs.

Newt's Refusal

An op-ed by Newt Gingrich in The Washington Times last Monday titled "Why I Will Not Accept Joe Biden As President," has elicited a lot of reaction from conservatives. Many responses were sympathetic and some were not. I find myself largely in agreement with what Mr. Gingrich writes and share much the same feelings about the last four years that he describes.

Where I demur is in the headline's refusal (Gingrich probably didn't select the headline) to accept Mr. Biden as president. It was after all the liberal leftists who four years ago loudly declared that Donald Trump was "not their president." That struck me then as both fatuous and small-minded. Trump was in fact the president of all Americans and unless they were prepared to renounce their citizenship, which they evidently were not, their cavils sounded absurd and insincere.

I like to think that conservatives are better, wiser and more serious than that. I like to think that despite how those on the other side behave, and despite what they say about those of us who disagree with them, we won't succumb to the temptation, strong though it may be, to act like them and to hate like they do.

Anyway, after some introductory thoughts Gingrich explains his reaction to the election results:

As I thought about it, I realized my anger and fear were not narrowly focused on votes. My unwillingness to relax and accept the election grew out of a level of outrage and alienation unlike anything I had experienced in more than 60 years of involvement in public affairs.

The challenge is that I — and other conservatives — are not disagreeing with the left within a commonly understood world. We live in alternative worlds.

The left’s world is mostly the established world of the forces who have been dominant for most of my life.

My world is the populist rebellion which believes we are being destroyed, our liberties are being cancelled and our religions are under assault. (Note the new Human Rights Campaign to decertify any religious school which does not accept secular sexual values — and that many Democrat governors have kept casinos open while closing churches though the COVID-19 pandemic.) We also believe other Democrat-led COVID-19 policies have enriched the wealthy while crushing middle class small business owners (some 160,000 restaurants may close).

The former Speaker of the House then recounts some of the past bad behavior exhibited by many of the President's foes:

In 2016, I supported an outsider candidate, who was rough around the edges and in the Andrew Jackson school of controversial assaults on the old order. When my candidate won, it was blamed on the Russians. We now know (four years later) Hillary Clinton’s own team financed the total lie that fueled this attack.

Members of the FBI twice engaged in criminal acts to help it along — once in avoiding prosecution of someone who had deleted 33,000 emails and had a subordinate use a hammer to physically destroy hard drives, and a second time by lying to FISA judges to destroy Gen. Michael Flynn and spy on then-candidate Donald Trump and his team. The national liberal media aided and abetted every step of the way. All this was purely an attempt to cripple the new president and lead to the appointment of a special counsel — who ultimately produced nothing.

Now, people in my world are told it is time to stop resisting and cooperate with the new president. But we remember that the Democrats wanted to cooperate with Mr. Trump so much that they began talking about his impeachment before he even took office. The Washington Post ran a story on Democrat impeachment plots the day of the inauguration.

In fact, nearly 70 Democratic lawmakers boycotted his inauguration. A massive left-wing demonstration was staged in Washington the day after, where Madonna announced she dreamed of blowing up the White House to widespread applause. These same forces want me to cooperate with their new president. I find myself adopting the Nancy Pelosi model of constant resistance. Nothing I have seen from Mr. Biden since the election offers me any hope that he will reach out to the more than 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump.

But Gingrich is just getting started. When the conversation is about the bad behavior of many of the President's opponents there's much more than can be fit into a single op-ed. Nevertheless, Newt makes a stab at it:

When Twitter and Facebook censored the oldest and fourth largest newspaper (founded by Alexander Hamilton) because it accurately reported news that could hurt Mr. Biden’s chances — where were The New York Times and The Washington Post?

The truth of the Hunter Biden story is now becoming impossible to avoid or conceal. The family of the Democrat nominee for president received at least $5 million from an entity controlled by our greatest adversary. It was a blatant payoff, and most Americans who voted for Mr. Biden never heard of it — or were told before the election it was Russian disinformation. Once they did hear of it, 17% said they would have switched their votes, according to a poll by the Media Research Center. That’s the entire election. The censorship worked exactly as intended.

Typically, newspapers and media outlets band together when press freedom is threatened by censorship. Where was the sanctimonious “democracy dies in darkness?” Tragically, The Washington Post is now part of the darkness.

When Twitter censors four of five Rush Limbaugh tweets in one day, I fear for the country.

When these monolithic Internet giants censor the president of the United States, I fear for the country.

When I see that elite billionaires like Mark Zuckerburg are able to spend $400 million to hire city governments to maximize turnout in specifically Democratic districts — without any regard to election spending laws or good governance standards — I fear for the country.

When I read that Apple has a firm rule of never irritating China — and I watch the NBA kowtow to Beijing, I fear for our country.

When I watch story after story about election fraud being spiked — without even the appearance of journalistic due diligence or curiosity — I know something is sick.

So for Gingrich the problem isn't just the election. That's simply the last brick in the wall of alienation between Americans who believe that everyone should play by the rules and those who believe that whatever it takes to win is fair play as long as it works:

The election process itself was the final straw in creating the crisis of confidence which is accelerating and deepening for many millions of Americans.

Aside from a constant stream of allegations of outright fraud, there are some specific outrages — any one of which was likely enough to swing the entire election.

Officials in virtually every swing state broke their states’ own laws to send out millions of ballots or ballot applications to every registered voter. It was all clearly documented in the Texas lawsuit, which was declined by the U.S. Supreme Court based on Texas’ procedural standing — not the merits of the case. That’s the election.

In addition, it’s clear that virtually every swing state essentially suspended normal requirements for verifying absentee ballots. Rejection rates were an order of magnitude lower than in a normal year. In Georgia, rejection rates dropped from 6.5% in 2016 to 0.2% in 2020. In Pennsylvania, it went from 1% in 2016 to .003% in 2020. Nevada fell from 1.6% to .75%. There is no plausible explanation other than that they were counting a huge number of ballots — disproportionately for Mr. Biden — that normally would not have passed muster. That’s the election.

The entire elite liberal media lied about the timeline of the COVID-19 vaccine. They blamed President Trump for the global pandemic even as he did literally everything top scientists instructed. In multiple debates, the moderators outright stated that he was lying about the U.S. having a vaccine before the end of the year (note Vice President Mike Pence received it this week). If Americans had known the pandemic was almost over, that too was likely the difference in the election.

The unanimously never-Trump debate commission spiked the second debate at a critical time in order to hurt President Trump. If there had been one more debate like the final one, it likely would have been pivotal.

Any one of those things alone is enough for Trump supporters to think we have been robbed by a ruthless establishment — which is likely to only get more corrupt and aggressive if it gets away with these blatant acts.

Gingrich then brings his indictment of Trump's opponents to a close with this:

For more than four years, the entire establishment mobilized against the elected president of the United States as though they were an immune system trying to kill a virus. Now, they are telling us we are undermining democracy.

Given this environment, I have no interest in legitimizing the father of a son who Chinese Communist Party members boast about buying. Nor do I have any interest in pretending that the current result is legitimate or honorable. It is simply the final stroke of a four-year establishment-media power grab. It has been perpetrated by people who have broken the law, cheated the country of information, and smeared those of us who believe in America over China, history over revisionism, and the liberal ideal of free expression over cancel culture.

I write this in genuine sorrow, because I think we are headed toward a serious, bitter struggle in America. This extraordinary, coordinated four-year power grab threatens the fabric of our country and the freedom of every American.

Everything he says in this seems true, but how should those who agree with him channel their anger and resentment? Speaking for myself, I want to resist the answer some have proffered that the best, most needed response is to act like them.

I hope that's not true.

How DNA Is Read

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each. Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information. It's an incredibly ingenious solution to the problem of packing maximum information into the shortest possible code, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence, and the only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be.

But why decide that? What reason can be adduced to rationally justify such a decision? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is, it seems, that they have a strong psychological or emotional preference that no such being exist and they allow that preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Wouldn't these questions be important to think about?

The 2020 Election Mess

National Review's National Affairs editor John Fund has written a helpful explanation of why so many people believe the 2020 election was riven with fraud and why the courts failed to support efforts to gain redress.

Part of the article that stands out is Fund's summary of the irregularities that were alleged in Georgia. He writes this:

The Trump lawsuits may have had merit. In Georgia alone, Trump lawyers alleged, in addition to mail-in signature problems, there were:

• 92 mail-in ballots cast before voters requested them
• 217 voters whose mail-in ballots were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day”
• 395 out-of-state voters
• 1,043 people who claimed to live at post-office boxes
• 2,560 ineligible felons
• 10,315 dead people
• 66,247 voters under the age of 18
• 305,701 voters who requested absentee ballots after the deadline

In Georgia, Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Assuming these figures are correct, the frustration and anger many Trump supporters feel is understandable. Fund goes on to state that,

In the future, reforms must be made to ensure that the public believes in the integrity of the election. Many don’t believe that the 2020 election was fair. A Quinnipiac poll released on December 9 found that 38 percent of Americans believe that the election was marred by widespread fraud. That included 35 percent of independents and 77 percent of Republicans.

Needed reforms include requirements for a government photo ID to vote by mail (people could send a photocopy or smartphone image), as in Kansas and Alabama currently.

States should use Department of Homeland Security records to check the citizenship of registered voters.

Absentee ballots should go only to voters who request them — there should be no automatic mailing of such ballots to all registered voters, because those lists are filled with people who have moved or died or are ineligible.

The computer software used in voting machines must be shared with election officials and available to the public in court cases.

It should be added that making mail-in voting available also made it inevitable that perhaps millions of people would cast a ballot who would never have bothered to show up at a poll on November 3rd. It also made it extremely easy for party activists to "assist" tens of thousands of people to fill out their ballots.

That Republicans allowed this to happen without much objection prior to the election is incomprehensible. In Pennsylvania, for example, it was the Republican legislature, which, in 2019, joined 33 other states and the District of Columbia in actually passing legislation that enabled "no-excuse mail-in voting." Subsequently, roughly 2.2 million of Pennsylvania's seven million voters chose to submit a ballot that way.

Since Democrats formed the majority of that number and since Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes - stunningly scoring about 7800 votes more in the city of Philadelphia than Barack Obama did in 2008 - it's very likely that mail-in voting was directly responsible for Mr. Biden's victory in Pennsylvania.

Fund concludes his column with this paragraph:

Abuses, incompetence, and, yes, alleged fraud made the 2020 election suspect. Too bad Trump exaggerated his claims, failed to address some of the election’s ticking time bombs in court before the election, and took on lawyers unsuited to the task. Those errors, plus the fact that the media and courts often didn’t do their jobs, doomed his effort.

If these abuses aren't corrected by 2024, if opportunities for fraud continue to be permitted to infect the system, the American people will lose all confidence in our electoral process, and loss of confidence, the belief that the election isn't fairly conducted, will almost certainly lead to increased polarization, civil disobedience and turmoil.

A Christmas Eve Noel

I thought it fitting on Christmas eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God: