The Star Spangled Banner

A friend forwarded this short video to me, and I thought it'd be good to share it. It explains when and how the custom of playing the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events began.

It's an interesting piece of American history and only takes a few minutes to watch:

I wonder how long it'll be before the wokesters label the Star Spangled Banner a symbol of oppression and white supremacy and get it dropped from our athletic contests. The Dallas Mavericks toyed with the idea last year, but the NBA insisted that the National Anthem be played before all games when the fans return to the arenas, so the Mavericks yielded.

Even so, the wokesters are nothing if not relentless, and with all the controversy surrounding player conduct during the Anthem, especially in the NFL and NBA, the leagues might at some point just decide it's no longer worth the trouble.

Close-up Magic

This guy is absolutely amazing.

He's a French magician named Yann Frisch, and his performance with cups and balls was a sensation a decade ago and still is today. The act is named "Baltass," and it'll leave you stunned. See if you can figure out how he does what he does:

Frisch was named Champion of France in close-up magic in 2011 and was crowned European champion in 2012. Later that year he became World Champion, and has toured all over the world.

He certainly is a remarkable talent.

Darwin's Racism

Well, since the left is in a "canceling" mood, and everyone who exhibits the slightest taint of white supremacy is being condemned to exile if they're still alive and tossed down the memory hole if they're not, I'm wondering how long it will be until the book burners come for the most revered prophet in the secular pantheon.

I speak of one of the most prominent racists of the 19th century, Charles Darwin.

Darwin's follow-up to The Origin of Species, his Descent of Man, is littered with racist and sexist sentiments which are far more unsavory than anything one would find in Dr. Seuss. Here's just one example of dozens that could be cited:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked will no doubt be exterminated.

The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Oof. This is very awkward. Darwin's Descent of Man should obviously be burned, his statue at the London Museum of Natural History pulled down and his tomb at Westminster Abbey dug up and his bones thrown into the Thames, but on the other hand, if Darwin is discredited what happens to the chief pillar of contemporary materialistic atheism, Neo-Darwinian evolution?

How can a good materialist cling fervently to a theory associated with such a wretched bigot as the quiet professor from Down? Indeed, how can his theories be allowed to be propounded in our classrooms and featured on PBS specials? It's past time, is it not, for all good men, women and the other 50 or so genders to get on their Twitter accounts and demand that the name of Darwin be expunged from every nook and cranny of our culture.

It's certainly time to demand that the execrable Darwin Day be abolished. It's unconscionable that we have a day in which we celebrate a racist. It's as bad as having a Nathan Bedford Forrest Day.

So when will the bells toll for Mr. Darwin? When will he be thrust into outer darkness and his books banished from ebay? Or are these just idle questions?

To anyone who thinks the quote above is not enough to establish Mr. Darwin's guilt there are two things to say: First, you must be a racist yourself or else you wouldn't raise such an objection, and second lots more examples of his pernicious views on race and sex can be found on Denise O'Leary's post at Uncommon Descent.

So, let the bonfires begin!

Okay, I'm kidding, at least a little, but on a more sober note it would be good to watch this 9 minute video. The similarities between what's said and shown on the video and what's happening in our country today are uncanny. Watching it brought to mind the words of philosopher George Sanatyana who declared that "Those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it."

Please watch the whole thing. We need to be reminded of the lessons of history and to take seriously what the people interviewed in the clip are telling us.

Our Least Trusted Professionals

In a column titled The Media's Miserable Record on Getting it Right National Review's Jim Geraghty includes this tidbit:

The Civil Unrest and Presidential Election Study (CUPES), completed last month, asked 980 adults two questions.

The first was, “If you had to guess, how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?” Options ranged from “about 10” to “more than 10,000.” The second question was “If you had to guess, in 2019 what percentage of people killed by police were black?” Respondents could choose any number from 0 to 100.

So, how do you think these questions were answered?

According to the Washington Post database, regarded by Nature magazine as the “most complete database” of its kind, 13 unarmed black men were fatally shot by police in 2019. According to a second database called “Mapping Police Violence,” compiled by data scientists and activists, 27 unarmed black men were killed by police (by any means) in 2019.

The CUPES survey found that “over half (53.5 percent) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were killed,” and 26.6 percent of those identifying as “liberal” believed it was “about 1,000.” Fourteen percent of those identifying as “very liberal” believed “about 10,000” unarmed black men were killed, and almost 8 percent of those identifying as “very liberal” believed that more than 10,000 black men were killed by police in 2019.

There's a chart at the CUPES link which illustrates the data very clearly.

The disparity between liberals and conservatives in terms of how familiar they are with the actual data is remarkable. Of those who consider themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" about 46% thought there were about ten unarmed black men killed by police in 2019 and about 37% of this cohort thought the number was about 100, whereas only 16% of "very liberal" and 22% of "liberal" respondents thought the number of unarmed black men killed by police was about ten.

Why are liberals so much more poorly informed than conservatives? I'll return to that question in a moment, but let's let Geraghty finish:

The study noted that, according to peer-reviewed research, 26.7 percent of the victims of police-shooting fatalities between 2015 and 2020, were black. Another source, BBC News’s “Reality Check Team,” reported that in 2019 specifically, 23.4 percent of the victims of police-shooting fatalities were black.

The second question found similar results. “Those who reported being ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ were particularly inaccurate” in their guesses of what percentage of people killed by police were black, “estimating the proportion to be 56 percent and 60 percent, respectively.”

If you walked around believing that 1,000 or 10,000 or even more unarmed black men were killed by police each year, with minimal if any consequences, you would probably distrust the police and want to see them abolished or defunded or, at minimum, torn down and rebuilt from the ground up with a completely different culture.

Well, I think if you believed what liberals believed there'd be a civil war raging in this country. It's little wonder race relations are in such a mess. How can there be so much ignorance in a country that has so much information at its fingertips? And why are liberals so much more poorly informed than conservatives?

Here's a theory: The progressive media whose job it is to disabuse the masses of false ideas and educate them as to the truth has done a miserable job of both. Journalists have doubtless by now surpassed lawyers and used car salesmen as the most untrustworthy and untrusted professionals in our culture, and it's largely because so many of them on the left have opted to be cheerleaders instead of referees.

If our media were doing their job, they'd be incessantly stressing the truth of these statistics until people on the left realized how wildly wrong their assumptions are, but so far from being an agent for truth and justice, the media seems intent on dousing the flames of racial conflict by spraying them with gasoline.

Perhaps it's too strong to suggest that they "intend" to be inflammatory, but I think it's accurate to say that if provoking racial animosities was indeed their goal, hiding the truth about these stats would certainly be one of their preferred tactics.

PC Logic

It seems like every day brings new examples of the politically correct beclowning themselves. Here's just the latest:

Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced Tuesday they are no longer reproducing six Dr. Seuss classics (“And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer”) because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

President Joe Biden also refused to acknowledge Dr. Seuss in his remarks on Read Across America Day, a departure from a White House tradition even former President Barack Obama upheld.

After the banning, owners of the six books began listing copies for up to tens of thousands of dollars on online retailers like eBay and Amazon. Arkansas native Carol Carson was trying to sell a copy of “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street” on eBay until her listing was taken down on Thursday.

A screenshot Carson shared with the Examiner shows a message from eBay explaining her book was delisted because “it didn’t follow our Offensive material policy. Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t allowed.”

It will come as news to generations of Dr. Seuss's readers that as children they were reading books that promoted hatred, violence and discrimination, but the PC sleuths at Dr. Seuss Enterprises and ebay would be pleased to enlighten them.

For the PC crowd there's no molehill so small and insignificant that it can't be transformed into a mountain.

The stupidity of ebay's decision is even more apparent when one looks at what else they're evidently okay with. A cursory scan of a few book titles shows that one can still buy the antisemitic diatribes of Louis Farrakhan, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Adolf Hitler's even more infamous Mein Kampf.

You can’t make this stuff up. @eBay is blocking my listing of @DrSeuss’s “The Cat’s Quizzer” & citing it as offensive material. Yet anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan’s books are okay? #cancelcancelculture pic.twitter.com/9Au62lagcW

— Clare Ath (@clare_ath) March 4, 2021

What exactly is @eBay’s policy on “hate and discrimination”? Dr Seuss is apparently out, but Mein Kampf still fetches a pretty penny! pic.twitter.com/Y6pN1cH9UI

— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) March 4, 2021

The thought police at ebay deem books that "promote or glorify hatred, violence or discrimination" to be completely unacceptable unless they promote or glorify hatred, violence or discrimination against Jews. Then ebay is happy to list them.

Dr. Seuss is intolerable, Adolf Hitler is okay. Is this what passes for logic and commonsense in contemporary liberaldom?

Cancel Culture and Moral Preening

We are living at a very strange time, a time when our culture seems to be under assault by howling mobs of self-righteous, empty-headed progressive puritans who insist on figuratively - at least for now - burning at the stake anyone, or any words or images, no matter how innocuous or innocent, that in any way, no matter how infinitesimally minute, transgress the sacred orthodoxies of the left.

Anyone who deviates from the "right-think" of the left on race, gender, climate change, or Donald Trump, imperils his or her livelihood, reputation and/or the success of any professional output (books, movies, etc.) they may have produced.

No one knows when they will be next to find the kindling being piled at their feet or their books thrown into the bonfire. Our "cancel culture" is reminiscent of the experience of millions of victims of the Soviet state under Joseph Stalin who were condemned to death or imprisonment on the most ludicrous charges, and as in the "courtroom" scene in the movie The Dark Knight Rises there was never any chance of proving one's innocence or escaping punishment:

There's little point in trying to reason with those in the grip of the current social bloodlust, but on the off-chance that someone who needs to read this actually will, I'd like to suggest a few simple rules people might follow when they're confronted with words or deeds they deem offensive. Before they launch a campaign of invective, hate and personal destruction against the putative malefactor they should:

First, ask whether what's being said is somehow untrue. If so, they should then criticize it for being false, but also be prepared to explain why it is false.

Second, if what's being said is not untrue then ask whether it's gratuitously hurtful to someone. If so, then criticize it for being needlessly hurtful, but also be prepared to explain why and to whom it is needlessly hurtful and to support this judgment with evidence.

Third, if a statement is neither untrue nor gratuitously hurtful it might still be something some people don't wish to hear or see or have others hear or see. It might be in bad taste or it might flout political or social decorum, but then the offended party should explain precisely how it does so and why it's wrong for the offender to have breached these particular standards.

Moreover, one should be prepared to explain why giving some groups offense is taboo but offending others is not. For example, suppose someone tweets that he's going to meet with a Catholic priest and expresses concern about being molested, and then adds, "Just kidding, I'm not a young boy."

How many of those who exclaim their outrage and disgust at someone who unintentionally or trivially offends a racial or LGBTQ group would be chortling at the audacious, biting wit of the tweeter who insults the Roman Catholic priesthood? Why is it unconscionable to offend one group but almost praiseworthy to offend the other?

To simply scream about how awful a person is who would flout the progressive catechism and how anyone who does should be fired or otherwise "canceled" for having done so - without presenting a good reason for thinking that what was done was either false or hurtful - is irrational, shallow, juvenile and cruel.

It's the sort of behavior we find in frenzied, unthinking mobs. It's the stage upon which people unwilling to do the heavy labor of erecting a cogent argument can nevertheless put their own moral purity on display for others to see and admire. It's nothing more than moral preening and narcissistic self-flattery at the expense of others.

It is, to be sure, a form of oppression.

How Christianity Has Messed Up Science

One of the enduring myths in secular circles is that religious belief has always been in conflict with scientific advance. Historians have repeatedly debunked this myth, but it nevertheless lives on in the minds of those who want it to be true.

The satirical Babylon Bee pokes a little fun at these folks by listing seven ways "Christianity completely ruined science for everybody." They begin by claiming that, "Christianity messes up everything, especially science. Everyone knows that if it weren't for Christianity, the scientists would have solved all our problems and we'd have flying cars by now."

They then proceed to list their seven ways Christianity has been a liability to progress. You'll have to go to the link to see all seven, but here are three:

• Christianity contributes to the harmful overpopulation of Mother Earth by yucky humans: We know people are the biggest threat to the earth, but Christians keep wanting to protect them, even the unborn ones. They also have a lot of babies and perpetuate the human race. Ignorant!
• The scientific method was created by a devout Christian, which burdens scientists with restrictive fundamentalist rules: The scientific method limits our science. We're tired of fundamentalist Christians always imposing strict rules. Live a little, for goodness sake!
• Christianity gives people a transcendent meaning and purpose outside themselves, which is totally lame and anti-science: Science would be so much cooler if we could explore ideas like eugenics and DNA tampering and creating a race of robots to enslave humanity without worrying about morals and objective truth. What would go wrong?

The others are funny, too.

Carl Sagan's Inadvertent Justification of Belief in God

It's not uncommon to hear religious believers criticized for holding beliefs they can't empirically demonstrate to be true, or at least probable. The critic assumes that if no scientific evidence can be adduced in support of the belief then it's mere superstition.

This was in fact a popular view among skeptical philosophers from about 1870 to about 1980, and is still trotted out and dusted off every so often. It's called evidentialism, and philosopher Alvin Plantinga has a great deal of fun dismantling it in his book titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Indeed, since Plantinga's book came out philosophers are much more shy about using this argument against religious believers, but others unfamiliar with the philosophical literature are not so reticent.

Plantinga asks,inter alia, why our beliefs should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Why should beliefs not be counted innocent until proven guilty?

He wonders, too, why a person of sound mind, convinced in her heart that God exists, and who has never been confronted with an antitheistic argument that she found compelling, should be required nevertheless to suspend her belief until she has acquired overwhelming evidence that her belief is true.

Suppose, for instance, that you were accused of a crime. There's substantial evidence against you and little that you can offer to offset it. Even so, you're convinced you're innocent. You know you're innocent. You can't explain the contrary evidence, but it doesn't matter. You just know you didn't commit the crime. Should you, despite this assurance, acknowledge anyway that you're guilty because you can't present an argument to explain why you're certain of your innocence?

Many people believe in God on the basis of a totally subjective experience that they can't document or prove but which leaves them with an assurance that they could not deny even were they so inclined. The experience of former atheist Kirstin Powers, a liberal journalist, provides us with a good example. She writes:

Then one night in 2006, on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, "Here I am." It felt so real. I didn't know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn't shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

You can read her full account of her experience at the link.

There's a scene in the movie Contact, which was based on a book by atheistic astronomer Carl Sagan, in which the character played by Jodie Foster, a scientist named Ellie Arroway, is part of an experiment in which she's transported to the center of the galaxy. However, upon her return she's unable to offer any evidence that she actually left earth. None of the data collected by her colleagues from her transporter confirm that the experiment worked. Yet she's convinced that she actually experienced all that she claims to have experienced.

Is she justified in holding that belief? If her belief is the product of properly functioning cognitive faculties belonging to an accomplished scientist not given to imaginative flights of hysteria, is what she says in the following exchange with an interrogator discredited by her inability to present empirical evidence?

Michael Kritz: "Wait a minute, let me get this straight. You admit that you have absolutely no physical evidence to back up your story."

Ellie Arroway: "Yes."

Michael Kitz: "You admit that you very well may have hallucinated this whole thing."

Ellie Arroway: "Yes."

Michael Kitz: "You admit that if you were in our position, you would respond with exactly the same degree of incredulity and skepticism!"

Ellie Arroway: "Yes!"

Michael Kitz: [standing, angrily] "Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony, and concede that this "journey to the center of the galaxy," in fact, never took place!"

Ellie Arroway: "Because I can't. I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish... I... could share that... I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish."

Ellie Arroway, in Sagan's telling of the tale, had what amounts to a religious experience. Sagan clearly wants us to believe that her experience was veridical and that she's warranted in believing her experience was veridical despite the lack of proof, or even of any objective evidence.

But if that's so, why are Christians faulted, by people just like Sagan, for believing in God on the basis of a subjective assurance similar to that possessed by Arroway?

Indeed, far more people have had an experience like Kirstin Powers had than have had an experience like Ellie Arroway. If Arroway is justified in believing that she actually encountered a different world why would people like Powers not be similarly justified?

Just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

Humanism and Nihilism

Philosopher William Lane Craig once wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, of all places, in which he succinctly explained a crucial problem with naturalism, particularly the naturalism of those who call themselves secular humanists.

Humanism is essentially the view that we should act so as to promote the well-being of the human race. There are Christian humanists (indeed, all Christians should be humanists in this sense), and there are secular humanists who are atheistic or naturalistic. This variety of humanism denies any supernatural warrant for their humanism.

They believe that we should care about humanity simply because it's the right thing to do which is rather silly since it's based on an obvious circularity: we should care about others because caring about others is what we should do.

In his op-ed Craig argues that the secular humanist is in a real bind. Not only does he have to show that theism is wrong, he also has to show that nihilism is wrong. Here's part of his column, which, unfortunately, is no longer available online:

• The theist maintains that objective moral values are grounded in God.
• The humanist maintains that objective moral values are grounded in human beings.
• The nihilist maintains that moral values are ungrounded and therefore ultimately subjective and illusory.

The humanist is thus engaged in a struggle on two fronts: on the one side against the theists and on the other side against the nihilists. This is important because it underlines the fact that humanism is not a default position.

That is to say, even if the theist were wrong, that would not mean that the humanist is right. For if God does not exist, maybe it is the nihilist who is right. The humanist needs to defeat both the theist and the nihilist. In particular, he must show that in the absence of God, nihilism would not be true.

In fact, the inescapable conclusion of atheism is that moral nihilism is true. In chapter 5 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, atheistic philosopher Alex Rosenberg describes the downside of the moral nihilism which he himself espouses:

In a world where physics fixes all the facts, it’s hard to see how there could be room for moral facts. In a universe headed for its own heat death, there is no cosmic value to human life, your own or anyone else’s. Why bother to be good?....

First, nihilism can’t condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or those who fomented the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one. If there is no such thing as “morally forbidden,” then what Mohamed Atta did on September 11, 2001, was not morally forbidden. Of course, it was not permitted either. But still, don’t we want to have grounds to condemn these monsters? Nihilism seems to cut that ground out from under us.

Second, if we admit to being nihilists, then people won’t trust us. We won’t be left alone when there is loose change around. We won’t be relied on to be sure small children stay out of trouble.

Third, and worst of all, if nihilism gets any traction, society will be destroyed. We will find ourselves back in Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature, where “the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Surely, we don’t want to be nihilists if we can possibly avoid it. (Or at least, we don’t want the other people around us to be nihilists.)....

Yet, in the absence of God, Rosenberg admits, there's really no way to escape the conclusion that nihilism is the most plausible option:

To avoid these outcomes, people have been searching for scientifically respectable justification of morality for least a century and a half. The trouble is that over the same 150 years or so, the reasons for nihilism have continued to mount.

Both the failure to find an ethics that everyone can agree on and the scientific explanation of the origin and persistence of moral norms have made nihilism more and more plausible while remaining just as unappetizing.

He's surely correct that if God doesn't exist then there's nothing upon which to base objective moral values.

Regrettably, this is either unrecognized by most atheists or it's too unpalatable for them to swallow. Unwilling to admit that philosopher Richard Rorty was right when he stated that "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?'" and unwilling to accept the existence of a transcendent moral authority as the necessary ground of all moral obligation, they remain irrationally suspended in moral mid-air.

They try to live as if there are objective moral obligations incumbent upon us all while simultaneously denying that objective moral obligations exist. They live as if there is a God while simultaneously denying that God exists.

And then they scoff at theism for being irrational.

Leftists, Liberals and Conservatives

Dennis Prager offers 32 questions which serve to distinguish progressives or leftists from liberals and conservatives. He believes that liberals and conservatives are far closer ideologically than are liberals and leftists.

I don't know if he'd agree, but I think the word leftist in today's political parlance is pretty much synonomous with progressive.

By way of introduction, Prager writes this:

Virtually every value liberals have held for a century is now held by conservatives and scorned by leftists. Therefore, America, in serious jeopardy of being lost, will be saved when people convince the liberals in their life that the left, not the conservative, is their enemy.

This process begins by establishing whether a friend or relative is a liberal or a leftist. If it turns out that he or she is a liberal, it is worth engaging in respectful dialogue on the issues of the day. If the friend or relative is a leftist, you can probably only talk about innocuous subjects such as the weather (though not about global warming) or sports (though not about players taking a knee during the national anthem).

If you talk about the great issues of the day with a left-wing friend or relative, that could be the last time you talk to each other. He or she is likely to unfriend you not only on social media but also in life. Leftists generally do not dialogue; they dismiss.

That's certainly true. Leftists (progressives) are rarely open to dialogue or debate. Either you agree with them or you're the enemy and must be ignored or silenced. This is, in fact, a characteristic of people who sense that they cannot offer persuasive reasons for their convictions which they hold for purely emotional or psychological reasons. Logic and objective facts matter little to the leftist unless perchance these somehow support their beliefs.

Prager breaks his questions down into four categories of Race, America, Men and Women and Speech. Here's a sampling from each category:

Race:

• The University of California has declared this statement racist: “There is only one race — the human race.” Do you agree with the University of California, or do you agree with the statement?
• Is the goal of being “colorblind” — doing one’s best to ignore a person’s color and concentrating only on the person’s character and personality — a noble goal or a racist one?
• Do you agree that all white Americans are racist?
• Is it possible for a black person to be a racist?

America:

• Has the United States, overall, made the world a better place?
• Would America be better, worse or the same as now if all Americans dropped their religion and became secular?
• Could a good person have voted for Donald Trump in 2020?
• Should America have full control over its borders to prevent illegal immigration?

Men and Women:

• Should it be legal for a teenage girl to have her breasts surgically removed because she identifies as a male — or should there be a minimum age of 18 or 21?
• Should biological males who identify as females be allowed to compete against biological females in sports?
• Do you agree with the practice of inviting a drag queen into public libraries and elementary school classrooms to conduct a “Drag Queen Story Hour”?

Speech:

• If you believe hate speech should be banned, who do you believe should determine what is hate speech?

You can read the rest of Prager's very incisive questions at the link. He concludes with this:

You might want to send these questions to the people in your life whose views are to the left of your own. At best, you (and they) will realize that you have more in common than either of you previously thought. At the very least, their answers will bring you both clarity. And at worst, they will explain why there is a rift between you — and why you might want to restrict communication to weather, sports, recipes and warm memories.

Believing What You Know Ain't true

The title of the post comes from Mark Twain who offered it as his tongue-in-cheek definition of "faith." I thought of it as I read an old Opinionator column at the New York Times by philosopher William Irwin who discusses an idea promoted by another philosopher, Richard Joyce, called "fictionalism."

Joyce champions the strange notion that belief in God, free will, and objective morality are useful fictions that we believe even though we know they're not true. Joyce thinks that believing what one "knows" not to be true is, in these cases at least, a good thing.

The impression I had while reading this essay was of a philosopher twisting himself into an intellectual pretzel in order to accommodate a naturalistic worldview that appears more awkward and indefensible with every passing year.

In the following excerpt Irwin describes Joyce's argument:

The philosopher Michael Ruse has argued that “morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.” If that’s true, why have our genes played such a trick on us? One possible answer can be found in the work of another philosopher Richard Joyce, who has argued that this “illusion” — the belief in objective morality — evolved to provide a bulwark against weakness of the human will. So a claim like “stealing is morally wrong” is not true, because such beliefs have an evolutionary basis but no metaphysical basis.

But let’s assume we want to avoid the consequences of weakness of will that would cause us to act imprudently. In that case, Joyce makes an ingenious proposal: moral fictionalism.

Following a fictionalist account of morality, would mean that we would accept moral statements like “stealing is wrong” while not believing they are true. As a result, we would act as if it were true that “stealing is wrong,” but when pushed to give our answer to the theoretical, philosophical question of whether “stealing is wrong,” we would say no.

The appeal of moral fictionalism is clear. It is supposed to help us overcome weakness of will and even take away the anxiety of choice, making decisions easier.

This is a kind of philosophical make-believe, an attempt to live "as-if" there were objective moral duties because it's very hard to live without them. Even so, if one didn't believe stealing is wrong why act as if it is? What's the point of trying to conform to what you "know" isn't true? Irwin wonders about this, too:

There is, though, a practical objection to moral fictionalism. Once we become aware that moral judgments have no objective basis in metaphysical reality, how can they function effectively? We are likely to recall that morality is a fiction whenever we are in a situation in which we would prefer not to follow what morality dictates. If I am a moral fictionalist who really wants to steal your pen, the only thing that will stop me is prudence, not a fictional moral belief.

It is not clear that this practical objection can be overcome, but even if it could, moral fictionalism would still be disingenuous, encouraging us to turn a blind eye to what we really believe. It may not be the most pernicious kind of self-deception, but it is self-deception nonetheless, a fact that will bother anyone who places value on truth.

But if a philosopher is willing to consign God, freedom, and morality to the realm of fiction, why place a value on truth? Why not go all the way and just say that all "truth" is also just fiction? The fictionalist can only shrug her shoulders by way of an answer to this question.

Irwin goes on to describe how Joyce defends his moral fictionalist account and how he applies it to God and free will. I encourage you to check out the article at the link.

One of the tests of the soundness of one's view of the world is whether or not it's actually possible to live consistently with it. If a worldview entails that one must live as if fictions are true or as if truth is fiction perhaps there's something wrong with the worldview.

Joyce has evidently adopted a worldview that requires him to embrace "fictions" like the existence of God, free will, and morality even though he believes these things don't really exist. He holds to a naturalistic worldview, in other words, with which he can't really live. Indeed, he finds himself living as if his worldview, his atheism, is false.

That's a good sign that it probably is.

Child Brides and Moral Confusion

I finally got around over the last several weeks to watching the Netflix series Designated Survivor. I very much enjoyed season one despite the persistent liberal preachiness and the obeisance toward political correctness. There was lots of drama, action, and interesting plot twists, the obligatory sex was minimal and relatively understated, and there was no egregiously offensive language. You could almost call it family friendly.

However, at some point during season two all that began to change, and by season three the action had waned, PC preachiness had morphed into irritating, self-righteous hectoring, the producers evidently felt it their artistic duty to display both male and female buttocks, to show us two men concubitio, and to insert an abundance of insultingly foul language into the script. It may have gotten even worse before the season ended, but I couldn't watch any more, so I don't know.

I don't know why the people responsible for the series thought those changes were important to make, maybe they thought their viewers were a bunch of imbeciles who needed to hear an f-bomb dropped three or four times an hour in order to be induced to watch the show. Whatever, the degeneration of the show into tasteless sleaze was very disappointing.

But be that as it may, complaining about another instance of our culture's slide into the sewer isn't what I intended this post to be about. Rather, I want to focus on one of the early episodes in season three (episode two) that offered a good illustration of our society's moral confusion.

In the episode, a member of the (presumably) Saudi royal family, in the company of a girl of about thirteen, does a photo-op with the president in the White House. The girl turns out to be the man's wife, and everyone is aghast. They all express their indignation as they pillory the Saudi for marrying a mere child. The practice is resolutely adjudged by everyone in the show to be abominable, but then it turns out that child brides are legal in many states in our own country under certain conditions, so the cast's moral outrage is redirected toward getting domestic legislation passed that would prohibit this abhorrent practice.

So why did all this strike me as confused, especially since I certainly agree that the practice of coercing a girl into marriage when she's too young to make an informed decision is loathsome? Two reasons:

The first is that the same sort of liberal progressives as those depicted on Designated Survivor in high moral dudgeon over the practice of parents offering their child daughters to older men are telling us today that there's really nothing wrong with parents having their underage children put on puberty blockers and even, in some cases, having irrevocable sex transition surgery.

The president's nominee for Undersecretary of Health refused at a senate hearing to even answer the question as to whether this practice was acceptable. Indeed, our local paper ran a frontpage headline declaring that to even raise the question was itself "transphobic," i.e. hateful.

So, why is it wrong for adults to exploit a child by marrying her off to an older man, but it's not wrong for adults to exploit a child by trying to change the child's biological sex? What's the significant difference? Why should it not be illegal for parents to change forever the bodies of their children, but it is illegal for those same children to smoke e-cigarettes or drink a beer?

The second reason for the moral confusion on display in this episode of Designated Survivor is that for the last fifty years or so progressives like those who produce shows like Designated Survivor have been preaching that morality is all relative to the time and culture in which people live, and that to disagree with this is to reveal oneself to be an intellectual dolt or a religious fanatic.

We've been taught that it's wrong to judge others, to be intolerant of other cultures, to impose one's values on others, that all cultures are equally valid, and so on, but now we're being told by the self-righteous folks at Designated Survivor that all that is suddenly no longer operative.

The progressive relativism, at least as it's portrayed on my television, has evidently morphed into moral absolutism, harshly intolerant of the Muslim fondness for child brides and horrified that sub-cultures in our own country consider marrying underage girls acceptable.

What happened to their sophisticated moral relativism? What brought about this sudden transformation? Have our social betters had a Damascus Road experience in which the scales have fallen from their eyes and they of a sudden realize that there really are objective, non-relative moral truths after all?

Nah.

It'd be nice if that were the case, but in order to embrace objective moral truths they would, if they were at all consistent, have to also recognize the existence of some transcendent standard of moral goodness, a personal being capable of holding us accountable for our moral choices. The only such standard that exemplifies these qualities is the Judeo-Christian God, and I doubt very much if any of the cultural lights at Designated Survivor have really opted to abandon their secularism for theism.

Faith in general, and Christianity in particular, are, in the estimation of our entertainment elites, weird. They're fodder to be misrepresented, distorted, ridiculed and misunderstood. They're hardly something to be lauded and embraced.

No, it's more likely that the folks who wrote and produced Designated Survivor are simply oblivious to their moral inconsistency. Their judgments aren't based on any rational principle so much as they're based upon an attitude, a feeling or a social fashion. They just feel strongly, perhaps because their social set feels likewise, that coercing a child to marry someone twice her age is just wrong and therefore merits all the condemnation they can fit into the script.

They're unaware of how silly - or, less charitably - how hypocritical it is to deplore "judgmentalism" in others while simultaneously manifesting it themselves.

Nevertheless, watching the moral confusion unintentionally depicted by almost everyone in the cast of the show, made for amusing, if irritating, viewing. At least for a while.

On the Meaning of Life

One of the themes in my book In the Absence of God (See the link at the top of this page) is that if naturalism is true, i.e. if there's no super-nature, nothing beyond this space-time universe, then life is ultimately meaningless. As Shakespeare put it, "Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

To admit this is to poise oneself on "the knife edge of despair" in Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg's words, so it's not unusual for naturalists or atheists (the two words are close enough in meaning as to be considered synonyms) to push back.

One typical rejoinder to the claim that life in the absence of God is meaningless was stated by an atheist named Luke who wrote the following to Christian philosopher William Lane Craig:

I believe that purpose to life is not, nor should be cosmologically significant nor intrinsic but something we create and choose for ourselves. Hence, meaning comes from endeavors which could involve pursuing passions, raising a family, or helping others – pursuits which give your life purpose and make it feel as if it is worth living but have a finite and limited impact in any ultimate sense.

You may argue that if we are going to perish, why does it matter, it will not make any difference if I choose a or b. To illustrate why I disagree with this attitude, let’s consider two scenarios:

1. I have just finished my meal at a buffet restaurant and see a chocolate cake on a stand. Me choosing to eat the cake would be inconsequential in any ultimate sense. But the cake is sweet and delicious, eating it makes the moment temporarily more enjoyable, which is good enough. Eating the cake is a worthwhile experience despite the fact that it will run out and will not have any further impact on my life.

2. I am attending a classical concert and know that the music will end, and the event will become a vague memory. But while I am seated in the audience, I enjoy the music which is so powerful, elegant, and enlightening. In this sense, attending the concert was worth it – it was good while it lasted.

So, on naturalism, we will die and perish, the sun will swallow the earth, the universe will cease to exist. But I think it does matter that we were alive.

During the flicker of time while we were here, life was gratifying, engaging, and beautiful. So, under my conception of meaning, life is meaningful under naturalism, the fact that things to come to an end is not and should not be a cause for fear and despair, but rather something I have blissfully accepted. Instead, we should have gratitude that it happened.

Luke's letter reminded me of biologist Theodosious Dobzhansky's bleak asseveration that "The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life."

At the conclusion of his substantive response to Luke's argument Craig writes, "Let me close with a question for you to think about, Luke: you say that we should be grateful that the universe happened. Grateful to whom?"

Good question.

But Craig's response aside, my own answer to Luke would be this:

For something's existence to be meaningful it must have a purpose, that is, an end or telos or reasons for its existence. Reasons, however, presuppose a mind in which those reasons reside.

If there is no mind behind the reality in which we live, if the universe is a result of a mindless series of purposeless events, and if humanity is likewise the result of a mindless series of accidental evolutionary coincidences, then there's no reason for humanity's existence and thus no meaning to it. And, if the universe's existence has no meaning, and if life in general has no meaning, and if mankind's existence in particular has no meaning it's very hard to see how an individual life could somehow, in the midst of all that meaninglessness, nevertheless have a meaning, no matter how much chocolate cake we eat.

Certainly, while we exist some of us can enjoy life's pleasures, but is pleasure the purpose or reason for our existence? Is enjoyment the whole point of our lives? If so, then the lives of most people who've ever lived have had a very attenuated meaning at best because for most people throughout human history to live is to suffer.

And if pleasure is not the reason for our existence, then pleasure can't be what gives life meaning. It only helps to make life endurable.

So, if we are the accidental product of mindless processes that blindly and purposelessly brought us into being then there's no reason for our existing, no end or purpose for which we are made. We're just dust in the wind and all that we do and enjoy ultimately comes to nothing.

As filmmaker Woody Allen once said, "You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing, but it doesn't [amount] to anything."

If naturalism is true then the claim of another filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, is as apt as it is succinct: “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”

On the other hand, if naturalism is false and we're actually the product of an act of intentional creation - if a Mind brought us into being - then we can assume that this Mind had a reason for doing so. We can assume that we have a purpose, an end toward which we are to strive, and that our lives are therefore meaningful.

Even if we don't know the reason for which we were created we can at least assume there is one, and if we were purposely created then our existence is not just a meaningless random accident.

It's a wonderful prospect, but for some perplexing reason naturalists prefer to believe the melancholy view that they're headed for oblivion, that nothing really matters and that all we do is ultimately for naught, rather than embrace the possibility that they were created by a God who loves them and that their lives really do matter. Forever.

Basing Morality on Human Flourishing

Philosopher Sam Harris is often identified as a "New Atheist," one of a number of prominent thinkers who have undertaken to discredit religion in all its manifestations.

Harris gave a TED Talk in 2010 which he based on his book The Moral Landscape and in which he sought to rebut the common view that science, being the study of that which can be observed and measured, really has nothing to say about the aesthetic life - the realm of values, including moral values. In his TED Talk Harris says this:

So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.

Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue.

Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

In other words, Harris claims that right and wrong are about what promotes the flourishing of human beings and that science can speak to this question. There are, however, at least three things wrong with using human flourishing as a criterion for ethics:

1. On what grounds do we privilege conscious creatures over other animals, human beings over chickens? What works against human flourishing (e.g. mass slaughters) might be a boon to the flourishing of animals, particularly carrion-eaters. On atheism, then, what grounds are there for the specieist promotion of human flourishing over that of the flourishing of other animals in general and other mammals in particular?

2. Whose idea of flourishing should we promote? A member of ISIS who thinks the human race would be better off if everyone were either forcibly converted to Islam or killed has a distinctly different idea of fluorishing than, say, Sam Harris. Whose conception of human flourishing should we privilege, and how do we decide that?

3. On what grounds does an atheist conclude that I should be concerned with the flourishing of others as opposed to simply being concerned with my own flourishing? If I can prosper at the expense of others why would that be wrong? Why is it wrong for me to live large by exploiting the earth's resources and leaving future generations yet unborn to fend for themselves?

Perhaps Harris can answer these questions, but I have serious doubts. Atheism simply does not supply the philosophical resources necessary to support a belief in objective moral obligation.

If atheism is true morality devolves to subjectivism, i.e. the view that what's right is whatever I feel is right or whatever I feel I should do, and subjectivism offers no rational justification for stopping short of a "might-makes-right" view of ethics.

On atheism, whoever has the power to make the rules gets to make them, whatever they are, and there's nothing wrong with that.

My Woke Friends Are Right

Like you, probably, I have some woke acquaintances who like to remind me that the United States is racist both personally and structurally and who are incredulous that I'm skeptical of their claim.

After all, "everybody knows" that there are lots of racists out there, that, indeed, just being white makes one a racist and that, in any case, our institutions work to the disadvantage of minority groups, especially blacks, even if the people who work in those institutions don't intend to disadvantage anyone.

Unfortunately, though, the only evidence adduced to support these claims is some disparity or other which could as well be explained by a dozen other factors, but for my woke friends racism is the only factor they'll consider.

Anyway, I think I'm coming around to their point of view.

I did a post the other day in which I concluded that the minimum wage, which disproportionately harms minority workers, especially young black males, is ipso facto systemically racist, and today I read an article in the Wall Street Journal by William McGurn in which he offers a compelling argument that policies adopted by educational institutions dominated by progressives are clearly harming racial minorities.

McGurn writes,

The North Thurston Public Schools in Lacey, Wash., made headlines in November when their “equity report” classified Asian-Americans along with whites instead of as “students of color.” Apparently the Asian-Americans were doing too well academically to be students of color. After what the district said was “an overwhelming public response,” it admitted its “category choices” had “racist implications” and dropped the equity report from its website.

To normal Americans, it makes no sense. How are Asian-Americans not “people of color”? But give the North Thurston folks credit for following progressive logic to its conclusion. Modern progressive theory more or less divides the nation between the oppressors, defined as whites, and the oppressed, defined as everyone else. In this framework, achieving success puts you on the side of the oppressors and thus makes you white or “white-adjacent”—even if your family came from China or India.

Evidently the progressives who obsess over the fine points of racial distinctions fail to see that by defining achievement as white they provide a handy rationalization for the failures of those who don’t achieve. If I'm not white I can't succeed in this world so it's no wonder that I don't succeed. It's not my fault.

McGurn goes on to point out how this prejudice against Asians is a rerun of some of the most inglorious episodes in American history:

Bigoted laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or actions such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II were once thought among the worst stains on American history left by anti-Asian racism. But these days the characterization of Asian-Americans as the “model minority” triggers the woke.

“Asian-Americans are caught in a bind—condemn the system of white supremacy and privilege along with other people of color or be ‘banished’ from the victim group as white-adjacent,” says Wenyuan Wu, executive director of Californians for Equal Rights. “The end goal here is to pit people against each other as if our hyphenated identities are bigger than our common destiny as Americans.”

The director is correct, of course. It has always been the goal of the left to divide this nation into factions in perpetual tension with each other. An America at peace and harmony is not the sort of soil in which one can easily grow a socialist revolution.

Asian-American achievement, McGurn asserts, is "an embarrassment to progressives because it undermines the claim that structural racism dooms nonwhite citizens to the margins of the American dream. So Asian-American achievement must either be dismissed as somehow white, or sacrificed at the altar of equity."

A good example of how progressives address their dilemma is found in the reaction to a report which found that public schools in America’s most progressive cities have been failing their black and Latino children for decades.

The solution in New York City under the aegis of progressive Mayor Bill deBlasio is to punish those who are succeeding:

In January America’s self-styled progressive in chief announced that New York will abolish the entrance exam for the city’s gifted-and-talented programs for young students. If you can’t fix the schools that are broken, you cut down to size the schools that are working.

In 2019 Mr. de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group reported that though Asians are only 17% of New York’s kindergarten population, they account for 42% of the gifted-and-talented seats.

Plainly the mayor’s “success” requires reducing the number of Asian-Americans no matter how qualified they are. The mayor has also tried to abolish the entrance exam for the city’s high-performing high schools, where Asian-American students again are “overrepresented.”

This not only manifests systemic racism on the part of the educational institutions which are failing blacks and Hispanics, but it also demonstrates personal racism on the part of the mayor. After all, would he take such measures if the numbers for Asian students and black students were reversed?

McGurn goes on to give other examples of how progressive policies and institutions are punishing Asians, ostensibly for being successful, and it's worth taking the time to read his entire piece.

As he says, Asian-Americans are an embarrassment to progressives because their success gives the lie to the trope that America is inveterately racist against people of color. The irony is that in their embarrassment Progressives actually adopt the racist policies against Asians that they imagine are being employed by others against blacks. Their policies are also terribly harmful to blacks because they inculcate the ridiculous idea that academic success is a sign of white supremacy which puts it out of reach for all but the most exceptional black students who, it’s alleged, betray their race by “acting white.”

McGurn closes with this:

In the past, anti-Asian bigotry took the form of direct assaults. These reflected claims that Asian-Americans were inferior, incapable of assimilating or stealing jobs. But today many Asian-Americans are learning that the progressive form of discrimination may be the most insidious of all.

“What do progressives say to a Chinese-American or Indian-American when she realizes their ideology means her children will be held to higher standards to get into college simply because of their race?” asks Wai Wah Chin, charter president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York.

“Should she really have to tell her children they must just accept that because of their race they will have to work harder to get the same opportunities as others—and accept this new racism as the price of a woke America?”

So yes, I’m coming to see that my woke friends are right, after all. There is indeed a lot of systemic racism in our progressive institutions and among our progressive friends. Unfortunately, they’re too blinded by their own self-righteousness to see it.

Climate Predictions

Good scientific theories are subject to the outcome of predictions which means that good theories are risky because if the predictions turn out to be false the theory and its proponents are likely to be relegated to professional oblivion. If a theory is not discarded even though it repeatedly fails to pass the prediction test then practically speaking it's unfalsifiable. If no observation is allowed to count against the theory then its validity as a piece of science is suspect.

This all came to mind reading an article on President Biden's special climate envoy John Kerry's recent prediction that we have nine years left to avert climate catastrophe. From the article:

Earth will be plagued by consistently catastrophic climate patterns starting in 2030 unless human inhabitants of the planet begin making drastic changes — and right away.

"The scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left," Kerry told CBS "This Morning" in an exclusive interview aired on Friday.

The former secretary of state was brought on to discuss the historic winter freeze blasting southern states like Texas as well as the Biden administration's official reentrance into the Paris climate accord, an international agreement aimed at lowering global carbon emissions. President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris accord in 2017, citing the fact that it was disproportionately harmful to American business.

During the interview, Kerry argued the situation is so dire that the initial pledges agreed to when the deal was signed in 2015 won't cut it anymore.

"Even if we did everything that we said we were going to do when we signed up in Paris we would see a rise in the Earth's temperature to somewhere around 3.7 degrees or more, which is catastrophic," he explained, imploring that new, more ambitious pledges needed to be made.

"There is no room for B.S. anymore. There's no faking it on this one," he said.

Kerry argued that chaotic weather events such as the winter freeze that has resulted in dozens of deaths in Texas could become the new normal if aggressive steps aren't taken. The freezing temperatures are "directly related to the warming," he noted, "even though your instinct is to say, wait a minute, this is the new Ice Age .. it's not. It is coming from the global warming and it threatens all the normal weather patterns."

This is an odd statement for the climate envoy to make since cold spells in Texas are not unique. There have been several in the last century and the worst was 122 years ago in 1899. Was that one caused by global warming, too? The reason this current blast has been so destructive is that Texas is far more developed today than it was then and far more reliant on technology that's vulnerable to cold and ice to deliver their energy.

But never mind that. Mr. Kerry has given us a prediction that can be tested, and if 2030 rolls around and we haven't seen the calamitous weather he predicts, we may conclude that his failed prediction, though based upon a legitimate scientific hypothesis, is prima facie evidence that the hypothesis is either false or in some way in need of modification.

Of course, there may be reasons why a theory fails to fulfill the predictions based upon it that have nothing to do with the quality of the theory itself. There may be instrument or researcher error, or maybe the prediction was sloppily framed, etc., so one or two failures do not merit trashing the theory, but repeated failures should certainly cast doubt on its reliability.

How many predictions does a theory have to fail, how many unfulfilled promissory notes does the public have to accept, before concluding that either the theory is false or its proponents won't let it be falsified because they keep finding reasons to excuse its failures?

After all, this is not the first time environmental alarmists have issued such dire prognostications. In his 1968 book Population Bomb Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich prophesied that there'd be a world-wide population catastrophe by the 1990s resulting in global famine, war and disease. It never happened.

Likewise, we were told in the 1970s that we were soon reaching "peak energy" and would quickly run out of fossil fuels like oil and coal. It never happened.

More relevant to the matter of climate change, in 2006 former Vice President Al Gore declared that unless "drastic measures" were taken to reduce greenhouse gasses, in just 10 years the world would reach a "point of no return." Yet in 2016 no one believed that we had passed the point of no return. If we did pass the "point of no return" in 2016 there'd certainly be no point in insisting today that we re-enter the Paris Climate Accords or in Mr. Kerry insisting that we have to do something by 2030.

Speaking of doing something, Mr. Kerry would have more credibility if he didn't give the appearance of thinking that he need not actually do anything himself, just that other people must. He's still flying around the globe in a private jet that emits up to 40 times as much carbon per passenger mile as a commercial flight, and although private jet emissions are a tiny fraction of total emissions, the people who make these flights have personal carbon footprints that are hundreds, or even thousands, of times the average as a consequence.

One might think that if Mr. Kerry was sincere in stating that we're on the brink of doomsday unless we all pull together to reverse the trend that he'd set a better example for the rest of us by putting his private jet in mothballs and flying commercial.

But of course flying commercial means he'd have to rub elbows with commoners and what elitist would deign to do that?

Journalistic Credibility

Why do contemporary journalists have so little credibility with so much of the public? Barton Swaim at the Wall Street Journal gives us a clue. He writes:

That Mr. Trump should've won the presidency [in 2016] largely by denouncing the media should have suggested to leading journalists and media executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong. Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their worst instincts.

Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump's unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true.

The repeal of "net neutrality," an Obama-era regulation on internet service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it didn't). The administration built "cages" in which to cram children of illegal border crossers (it didn't). The president praised neo-Nazis as "very fine people" (he didn't). His postmaster general was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie).

In retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans believed Mr. Trump's fictitious claims about the election.

Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.

Swaim could've included all of the untruths that filled our newspapers and airwaves surrounding, inter alia, the Russian collusion hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Trump's alleged "authoritarianism," and his pandemic response. Little wonder allegations of "Fake News" emanating from the White House had such resonance with folks who believed, perhaps naively, that the media have an ethical obligation to present the truth and let the people decide for themselves how they should respond to it.

On the contrary, much of our media and its fellow-travelers on the left saw it as their duty to employ whatever means were necessary, no matter how dishonest, to damage and destroy a Republican president and his administration.

Rather than charitably giving the president the benefit of the doubt they put the worst possible construction on whatever he said or did to make him look as malign and as incompetent as possible. Rather than hold him to the same standard to which they held Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, they condemned in Trump what they ignored in his Democratic predecessors. Rather than tout his many successes along with criticisms of his failures, we heard from many precincts of the media only about his shortcomings and faults.

Any other president, for instance, who brokered the Abraham Accords, the first public normalization of relations between an Arab country and Israel since that of Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, would surely be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama was given the prize simply for talking about peace, but Trump's actual achievement, an amazing historical feat that eluded every president for the past 30 years, hardly rates a mention in our press.

Folks who got their news solely from CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times could be forgiven for thinking that the four years of Trump were an unmitigated disaster for the country. The truth is the Trump administration actually accomplished much more good than did any president in recent memory, but we rarely heard about it because it didn't fit the media narrative.

Mr. Biden talks about "bringing us back together," but it's an absurd aspiration as long as over half the country doesn't, and can't, trust the media to fairly and honestly report the truth.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

• The Covid vaccine was developed in almost miraculous time by the private pharmaceutical sector, but the government at the federal, state and local level is struggling to get the vaccine distributed. Millions of Americans over 70 are still waiting for their first shot.
  
  Why is it so hard? Doubtless it's because government does very little very well. Maybe the feds and states should've contracted with Amazon to deliver the vaccine.


• Can we please declare an informal moratorium on the phrase "getting shots into arms"? The phrase is beginning to suffer from extreme overuse by commentators who either wish to sound hip or lack sufficient imagination to come up with alternatives.


• This is the passage that gave rise to the expression that there's a God-shaped hole in every human heart that only God can fill. It's from Blaise Pascal's (1623-1662) Pensées:

  What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

  Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, theologian and philosopher. He discovered what became known as Pascal's Principle in physics, did important work on conic sections, laid the ground work for the mathematics of probability, invented a digital calculator, the syringe and the hydraulic press, wrote one of the most famous works in Christian theology (Pensées) and developed an argument justifying belief in God that came to be called Pascal's Wager.
  
  Quite a life packed into only 39 years.


• As I get older this story becomes a lot more like my everyday experience:
  
  An elderly couple had dinner at another couple's house, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen.
  
  The two gentlemen were talking, and one said, 'Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great I would recommend it very highly.'
  
  The other man said, 'What's the name of the restaurant?'
  
  The first man thought and thought and finally said, 'What’s the name of that flower you give to someone you love? You know, the one that's red and has thorns.'
  
  'Do you mean a rose?'
  
  'Yes, that's the one,' replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, 'Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?'

Karl Popper and the Falsification Criterion

Charlotte Sleigh at Aeon has an interesting piece on philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994), at least it's interesting until it becomes clear that Ms. Sleigh has no time for Popper's greatest contribution to his discipline.

Popper, in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935), offered a solution to what's called the demarcation problem. This is the problem of distinguishing between what constitutes valid science and what Popper calls pseudo-science. His solution is called the falsification criterion.

What he means by this is that to be considered a legitimate scientific theory there must be some conceivable set of observations which, if they were made, would show the theory to be false. In other words, a theory to be scientific must be subject to testing and disproof.

Of course, this doesn't mean that to be considered scientific a theory must be shown to be false. That would be an absurdity. Rather it means that in principle there has to be some way to test it, some test which it could conceivably fail. Scientific tests usually consist of predictions based on the theory. To the extent that a theory succeeds in satisfying the predictions, the theory is confirmed and strengthened although it never reaches the status of final truth or proof since it's always possible that some future observation will not conform to a prediction.

For example, suppose it's your hypothesis that all objects will fall to earth at the same rate regardless of their mass as long as air resistance is discounted. You test your hypothesis by simultaneously dropping two balls of different masses from a height, as Galileo is said to have done, and you discover that no matter how many times you do this the two balls hit the ground at the same time.

Your hypothesis has been confirmed, but had one of them, perhaps the more massive one, hit the ground first it would've indicated that the more massive ball fell faster and your hypothesis would've been falsified. Since we can imagine a result that would've falsified our hypothesis if that result had occurred our hypothesis is a legitimate scientific hypothesis.

Popper pointed out that it's the essence of science that it deals in theories (i.e. well-confirmed hypotheses) that are subject to being falsified. If a theory is impervious to falsification, if no realistic result could ever serve to show it to be wrong, if it's compatible with every possible observation, then it's not testable and therefore not a scientific theory. That doesn't mean that the theory is wrong, it just means that it's not a scientific theory. It could be a metaphysical hypothesis or pseudo-science, but it's not a theory that scientists should entertain in their capacity as scientists.

Popper's falsification criterion was widely believed to have been a great insight into the nature of scientific practice, but in recent decades, as Ms. Sleigh tells us, there's been grumbling. We might wonder, for instance, why a theory cannot be considered scientific if it can be verified but not falsified.

Suppose your theory is that there's life elsewhere in the universe. Your theory could be shown to be true if extra-terrestrial life were discovered, but it's hard to imagine any observation that could falsify the theory. After all, in order for the theory to be shown to be wrong every cubic centimeter of the universe would need to be inspected be sure that there's no life anywhere, yet despite the fact that the theory can't be falsified it seems as if it should be scientific because it can be verified if living things were to turn up somehow.

The difficulty can be resolved by simply recasting the theory. Rather than posit that there is life elsewhere in the universe we could posit that there's no life elsewhere in the universe. Now, the discovery of life on some distant planet, if such a discovery were made, would falsify the theory so the reformulated version passes Popper's test for a legitimate scientific theory.

Popper, in other words, argues that what scientists do, or should do, is seek to show their theories to be wrong, not to show them to be right.

One reason why Popper is falling into disfavor among some scientists, though, is that his falsification criterion would eliminate from the realm of science certain theories that some scientists have spent their entire careers investigating and writing about. String theory, the multiverse hypothesis, some aspects of Darwinian evolution and the origin of life, anthropogenic climate change and many hypotheses in psychology and social science such as critical race theory, have all been criticized as unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

Yet the people who work in these fields argue that the inability to test their theories shouldn't diminish their status as scientific projects. For them science is whatever it is that scientists are doing.

Popper has also been waved aside by those who wish to blur the boundaries between science and economics, politics and even philosophy and theology. Scientists who wish to use their prestige to speak authoritatively on matters outside their field don't like being reminded that they're outside their field.

One interesting consequence of the rejection of Popper's solution to the demarcation problem is that if falsification is not essential to the practice of science then hypotheses like intelligent design and special creationism cannot be dismissed as unscientific. Even the theological claim that God exists be placed outside the purview of science.

Indeed, if testability/falsifiability are no longer essential to the scientific enterprise it's hard to see how anything could be excluded from the scientific purview.

Here's a 9 minute video that explains Popper's falsification criterion:

Free to Choose

One of the perennial questions of philosophy is the question of free will. Are we in some sense really free to make genuine choices - the choice whether to tell the truth or lie, the choice whether to go to class or sleep in, the choice whether to have eggs or pancakes, or both, for breakfast, etc.? Or are all these apparent decisions actually illusory consequences of influences exerted upon us throughout our lifetime by our genes or by our environment?

The answer we give to this question is crucially important. It matters for reasons mentioned in this six minute video on the topic as well as for others that the video doesn't mention.

One thing you should bear in mind as you watch. If you believe that you're free to choose, if you believe that there are at least some junctures in your life at which there are more than one possible futures, then you're at least tacitly committed to some version of theism. Between theism and naturalism (the belief that physical nature is all there is) only theism has room for a belief in free will.

On naturalism there's simply no way to justify that belief. The video explains why: