Unconscionable Horror

As has been well-publicized, corporations like Nike and the NBA are cozy with Communist China and stars like LeBron James refuse to criticize the Chinese government that is a cash cow for his employers and himself.

Not too long ago our liberal media, which never sees any evil on the left, was deriding anyone who had the temerity to suggest that the Chinese were responsible for the Covid virus and culpable for the deaths of the 3.5 million people who've since died in the worldwide pandemic. It's racist, we've been told, to calumniate the good folks in Beijing.

Well, Elle Reynolds at The Federalist must be a racist because she publicizes the contents of a newly released book written by Sayragul Sautybay and journalist Alexandra Cavelius (The title is: The Chief Witness: Escape From China’s Modern-Day Concentration Camps) and what she writes is not at all flattering to Xi Jinping and his minions.

Sautybay was held in a state-run concentration camp in Xinjiang province where she witnessed the horrors perpetrated against Uyghur Muslims in China.

Despite having been forced to sign a pledge that she would never, on pain of execution, speak of the things she witnessed, after being released from the camp in 2018 she managed to escape China, and has been actively trying ever since to rouse the conscience of the liberal Western media which would much prefer to focus their attentions upon the nefarious Donald Trump and the January 6th riot at the Capitol.

Reynolds comments on Sautybay's book:

According to satellite photos from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the number of camps had reached 380 by September 2020. Sauytbay was forced to work as a teacher at one of them.

The screams coming from the black room [a torture chamber at her camp] “sounded like the raw cries of a dying animal,” she says. “The second you hear them, you know what kind of agony that person is experiencing.”

She recalls seeing chains on the walls in the black room, and chairs with “nails sticking out of the seats” where inmates would be tied down. Torture devices on the walls “looked like they were from the Middle Ages,” including “implements used to pull out fingernails and toenails,” and a spear-like rod “for jabbing into a person’s flesh.”

Electric chairs, “iron chairs with holes in the back so that the arms could be twisted back above the shoulder joint,” and other chairs designed to pin victims down lined one side of the room. “Many of the people they tortured never came back out of that room,” she says. “Others stumbled out, covered in blood.”

Secretive orders mandated that any prisoners who died or were killed “must vanish without a trace,” Sauytbay recalls. “There should be no visible signs of torture on the bodies … Any evidence, proof, or documentation was to be immediately destroyed.”

Fine people, these Chinese communists. Sautybay recalls one of the classes she was forced to teach:

I was barely even listening to myself talk about our self-sacrificing patriarch Xi Jinping, who "passes on the warmth of love with his hands" [while] several of the ‘students’ collapsed unconscious and fell off their plastic chairs.

When prisoners fell unconscious, from anguish or stress, the guards “grabbed the unconscious person by both arms, and dragged them away like a doll, their feet trailing across the floor,” Sauytbay says. “They didn’t just take the unconscious, the sick, and the mad … sometimes it was simply because a prisoner hadn’t understood one of the guard’s orders, issued in Chinese.”

One 84-year-old woman Sauytbay remembers was accused of making an international phone call. Despite her denial, the camp guards punished her by ripping out her fingernails.

Another woman, in her twenties, admitted to texting a greeting to a friend for a Muslim holiday as a teenager. As punishment, the guards gang-raped her, while Sauytbay was forced to watch. “While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting,” she recalled in 2019. “People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again.”

It gets worse:

Inmates who were healthy and young often had their medical files marked by a red X. “It was simply a fact that the Party took organs from prisoners,” Sauytbay says. She began to suspect those inmates were being forcefully used for organ harvesting. Organs from Muslim donors are often preferred by other Muslims because they are “halal.”

“I realised that these young, healthy inmates were disappearing overnight, whisked away by the guards,” Sauytbay adds. “When I checked later, I realised to my horror that all their medical files were marked with a red X.”

She goes on to describe having seen classified documents from Beijing that discuss plans for world domination. Frankly, I don't know why such documents would be in a prison camp or how she would have seen them, but perhaps she explains in the book. At any rate, here's what Reynolds says about Sautybay's claims:

Sauytbay also recalls seeing classified papers from Beijing outlining a plan to overtake Europe by 2055. The first step, alongside the years 2014-2015, was to “assimilate those who are willing in Xinjiang, and eliminate those who are not.”

Step two called for the annexing of “neighboring countries” between 2025 and 2035. China has already started to test its borders. In 2020, the Chinese government built 11 buildings inside the Nepalese district of Humla, and denied Nepal’s claim to the district. In the same year, the CCP passed a “security” law over Hong Kong and used it to charge and imprison pro-democracy legislators and activists.

The third step, to be achieved between 2035 and 2055, was the “occupation of Europe.”

Of course, our elites will scoff, just as they scoffed at the notion that Covid-19 started in a Wuhan lab, and just as they scoffed at Trump for calling it the Wuhan virus. Such aspersions against the Chinese are racist and not to be countenanced. After all, why think the compassionate Chinese leadership would do such things?

As Reynolds concludes:

Western nations cannot afford — morally or practically — to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government’s abuses against its own people, the survivor says. “The current situation has already surpassed ethnic and religious issues,” Sauytbay told Radio Free Asia in 2020. “[It] has risen to a level of humanitarian tragedy.”

You can read more about Sayragul Sauytbay here. Meanwhile, we might reflect a bit on Dostoyevsky's aphorism, repeated several times in his great novel The Brothers Karamazov, "If God is dead then everything is permitted."

Determinism Is Irrational

Earlier this month neuroscientist Michael Egnor posted a piece at Mind Matters in which he made a case against the notion that free will is an illusion and that in fact all of our choices are determined by factors such as our environment or our genes.

Egnor made four brief points:

1. Nature is not deterministic.
2. Neuroscience clearly supports the reality of free will.
3. The claim that “free will isn’t real because we are governed by states of matter” is self-refuting.
4. Everyone believes free will is real.

He gives a brief explanation of each of these at the link. His explanation for #3 is particularly interesting.

Essentially, he points out that if determinism is true then all our thoughts and actions are the product of electro-chemical processes in the brain.

It follows, then, that the claim that determinism is true is ultimately a product of electro-chemical processes, but the claim that determinism is true is a proposition, it can be either true or false. But if it's just an epiphenomenon of brain chemistry how can it be true or false. Molecular interactions have no truth value, they're just states of matter. Thus, the determinist's claim is fundamentally meaningless.

About #4 he writes this:

Free will deniers live their lives as if free will is real — they make moral claims, they believe they can convince other people to change their minds by rational arguments, they acknowledge the concepts of justice and injustice, they give credit or blame for good or bad conduct, etc. The least we can ask of materialists is that they live according to their “beliefs” (which they deny they have — it’s just states of matter after all!).

But if you really don’t believe free will is real, you can’t logically praise or blame anyone. You can’t adhere to any moral standard. If free will isn’t real, them murder has the same moral status as saving a life — it’s all determined by states of matter and we have no choice in what we think or do.

Hitler and Mother Theresa are morally the same — that is, they are not moral creatures at all. We instinctively know that that isn’t true.

It comes down to this: If you have a metaphysical theory and it contradicts science, logic, and everyday experience, then your metaphysics should be abandoned. It’s noteworthy that materialists miss this point: the logical implication of determinism and materialism — the implication that free will doesn’t exist — isn’t evidence against free will, which is undeniable, but evidence against materialism, which is utterly untenable.

If someone is a determinist but they can't live consistently with their determinism they really should give it up. Otherwise, they're being irrational.

The Amazing Enucleation

In an interview at a site called The Successful Student geneticist Michael Denton discusses one of the strangest phenomena in cell biology and a huge problem for Darwinian explanations of the evolution of the cell. The interview is a must read for anyone interested in how discoveries in biology consistently refute the Darwinian paradigm.

Here's just one of the problems he discusses, a problem I confess I had never heard of before reading the interview:

At King’s [College in London] the subject of my PhD thesis was the development of the red [blood] cell and it seemed to me there were aspects of red cell development which posed a severe challenge to the Darwinian framework.

The red cell performs one of the most important physiological functions on earth: the carriage of oxygen to the tissues. And in mammals the nucleus is lost in the final stages of red cell development, which is a unique phenomenon.

The problem that the process of enucleation poses for Darwinism is twofold: first of all, the final exclusion of the nucleus is a dramatically saltational event and quite enigmatic in terms of any sort of gradualistic explanation in terms of a succession of little adaptive Darwinian steps.

Stated bluntly; how does the cell test the adaptive state of ‘not having a nucleus’ gradually? I mean there is no intermediate stable state between having a nucleus and not having a nucleus.

This is perhaps an even greater challenge to Darwinian gradualism than the evolution of the bacterial flagellum because no cell has ever been known to have a nucleus sitting stably on the fence half way in/half way out! So how did this come about by natural selection, which is a gradual process involving the accumulation of small adaptive steps?

The complexity of the process — which is probably a type of asymmetric cell division whereby the cell extrudes the nucleus - is quite staggering, involving a whole lot of complex mechanisms inside of the cell. These force the nucleus, first to the periphery of the cell and then eventually force it out of the cell altogether.

It struck me as a process which was completely inexplicable in terms of Darwinian evolution — a slam-dunk if you want.

And there’s another catch: the ultimate catch perhaps? Is an enucleate red cell adaptive? Because birds, which have a higher metabolic rate than mammals, keep their nucleus. So how come organisms, which have a bigger demand for oxygen than mammals, get to keep their nucleus while we get rid of ours?

And this raises of course an absolutely horrendous problem that in the case of one of the most crucial physiological processes on earth there are critical features that we can’t say definitively are adaptive.... Every single day I was in the lab at King’s I was thinking about this, and had to face the obvious conclusion that the extrusion of the red cell nucleus could not be explained in terms of the Darwinian framework.

And if there was a problem in giving an account of the shape of a red cell, in terms of adaptation, you might as well give up the Darwinian paradigm; you might as well "go home." .... It’s performing the most critical physiological function on the planet, and you’re grappling around trying to give an adaptive explanation for its enucleate state. And the fact that birds get by very, very well (you can certainly argue that birds are every bit as successful as mammals).

So, what’s going on? What gives? And it was contemplating this very curious ‘adaptation’ which was one factor that led me to see that many Darwinian explanations were “just-so" stories.

Denton, whose recent book The Miracle of the Cell describes a host of amazing cellular phenomena, also talks about another fascinating development in biology - the growing realization that everything in the cell affects everything else. Even the shape, or topology, of the cell determines what genes will be expressed and that the regulation of all of the cellular activities is far more complex than any device human beings have ever been able to devise.

It's all very fascinating stuff.

So What Are They?

Everyone has probably heard by now about the Unidentified Flying Objects that have perplexed those who've viewed videos of these encounters taken by military pilots. The Today Show did a segment on it the other day:

Jim Geraghty at National Review offers four possible explanations for these phenomena and rules out the first three. He posits that they are either:

1. secret U.S. government or military technology,
2. secret private sector technology,
3. secret technology from a foreign country, or
4. aliens.

You'll have to go to the link to see why Geraghty rules out the first three possibilities, but I think he should rule out all four.

Andrew Follett, also at NRO, insists, contra much popular opinion, that these are not sightings of aliens and that they each have "an obvious terrestrial explanation." He argues that each of the controversial videos taken of these phenomena can be more plausibly explained by such mundane things as geese, planes, balloons or space debris.

Again, check out the link to see his reasoning. It's not as crazy as it sounds.

I'm certainly not in any position to venture an opinion on the identity of these strange phenomena except to say that I think visitors from some other planet in some other part of the galaxy is by far the least likely explanation for them. I say this because I'm very skeptical that intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe, let alone in our galaxy.

Astronomer Hugh Ross in his book Why the Universe Is the Way it Is states that there are at least 816 parameters which have to be met by any planet for complex, intelligent life to be possible on it. Here are just a few of the 816:

A life-sustaining planet must:

• be located in the habitable zone of a suitable galaxy and must orbit in the habitable zone of a star of the proper age, size and luminosity.
• have a certain mass, period of rotation, plate tectonics, a magnetic field and a stable axis tilt.
• have ample liquid surface water and sufficient amounts of other specific elements and compounds.
• have an atmosphere of the proper chemical composition and transparency, and not too much nor too little oxygen.
• have a moon of the proper size and distance from the earth.

Ross calculates that there's less than 1 chance in 10^1032 that even one planet possessing all 816 criteria would occur anywhere in the universe apart from the intentional agency of a transcendent Creator.

Even if there are a trillion galaxies in the universe, each with a trillion planets, that would only be 10^24 planets. It requires an incredible exertion of blind faith to believe that despite such enormous odds not only does another planet exist somewhere in the universe that can support life, but that despite the additional enormous odds against life actually arising on this hypothetical planet, it nevertheless did.

Moreover, one must believe that despite the additional enormous odds against it, the life on that planet actually reached a level of intelligence that enabled it to develop technology that could defy the known laws of physics and travel across thousands, or even billions, of light years of space to reach earth.

I don't know what those pilots are seeing, and I'm reluctant to say that overcoming the astronomical probability barriers mentioned above is impossible, but in my opinion, unless God put life there, it's all but impossible.

The Evolution of Whales

This animated video depicts a sperm whale hunting prey, including a giant squid, by echolocation.

Until recently the consensus opinion among biologists was that whales evolved from land animals, but recent finds have made this view increasingly untenable. Not only is the window of available time for all the requisite changes to adapt a terrestrial creature to a marine environment very narrow, but the sheer number and scope of the changes strains credulity.

Here are a few of the changes that would need to have occurred within the span of about 3-5 million years:

• Counter-current heat exchanger for intra-abdominal testes
• Ball vertebra
• Tail flukes and musculature
• Blubber for temperature insulation
• Ability to drink sea water (reorganization of kidney tissues)
• Fetus in breech position (for labor underwater)
• Nurse young underwater (modified mammae)
• Forelimbs transformed into flippers
• Reduction of hindlimbs
• Reduction/loss of pelvis and sacral vertebrae
• Reorganization of the musculature for the reproductive organs
• Hydrodynamic properties of the skin
• Special lung surfactants
• Novel muscle systems for the blowhole
• Modification of the teeth
• Modification of the eye for underwater vision
• Emergence and expansion of the mandibular fat pad with complex lipid distribution
• Reorganization of skull bones and musculature
• Modification of the ear bones
• Decoupling of esophagus and trachea
• Synthesis and metabolism of isovaleric acid (toxic to terrestrial mammals)
• Emergence of blowhole musculature and their neurological control

The problem of how all these changes could've come about by random mutations so that a terrestrial species ultimately transitioned to marine whales remains a serious difficulty for any kind of "molecules to man" evolutionary hypothesis, as this article at Evolution News and Views illustrates.

It may have happened that all forms of life on earth descended from a single ancestral form by purely natural processes, but it seems that the more we discover the less evidence there is for it, and the more improbable such a descent is.

Water's Weirdness

There's an interesting article by Alok Jha in The Guardian on the very strange and unique properties of a substance we (unless we're Californians) take for granted - water.

It's hard to overstate how amazing water's properties are and how crucial those properties are to living things. For example, Jha tells us that,

Water is at its most dense at 4C and, at that temperature, will sink to the bottom of a lake or river. Because bodies of water freeze from the top down, fish, plants and other organisms will almost always have somewhere to survive during seasons of bitter cold, and be able to grow in size and number.

If the temperature of the water continues to drop toward 0C (the freezing point) the colder water actually gets less dense and rises to the surface. That's why ice floats. It's less dense than the warmer water it floats in.

In fact, if it didn't float it would sink to the bottom and bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up making it impossible for most forms of life to survive a cold winter.

Jha adds,

This, though, is just the start. Take a glass of water and look at it now. Perhaps the strangest thing about this colorless, odorless liquid is that it is a liquid at all. If water followed the rules, you would see nothing in that glass and our planet would have no oceans at all.

All of the water on Earth should exist as only vapor: part of a thick, muggy atmosphere sitting above an inhospitable, bone-dry surface. A water molecule is made from two very light atoms – hydrogen and oxygen – and, at the ambient conditions on the surface of the Earth, it should be a gas. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), for example, is a gas, even though it is twice the molecular weight of water. Other similar-sized molecules – such as ammonia (NH3) and hydrogen chloride (HCl) – are also gases.

Of course if water were a gas at normal temperatures life as we know it would be impossible. Jha mentions a few other interesting facts about water, but he just touches the surface, as it were. Entire books have been written on the subject, and indeed, Jha himself has written one.

Here's one more fact that Jha didn't mention. Water gains and loses heat more slowly than almost any other substance. This is why the ocean is still cold even on a blistering hot day in June. It takes a long time for water to heat up and a long time for it to cool down.

This is very fortunate for a number of reasons but one is that because there's so much water on the earth's surface and because it changes temperature slowly it tends to stabilize the earth's overall temperature and keep it within a range in which life can thrive.

Water has lots of other properties that make it indispensible for life: Its very low viscosity, its ability to dissolve most other substances, its ability to adhere to surfaces and cohere to itself, its ability to exist in all three states at the same time, and many more unique properties, many of which are essential to living things.

Jha claims that evolution has shaped us to survive in a watery environment.

Perhaps so, although it's hard to imagine a life form that could exist in the absence of water, or perhaps the myriad fortuitous properties of water, so far from accidentally resulting from the mindless chaos of the initial Big Bang, are actually the deliberate result of the scientific genius of a brilliant cosmic Chemist.

This lovely 8 minute video emphasizes the uniqueness of water:

Metamorphosis

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

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model of evolution has no answer.

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

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

Here's another thought for those who believe that our lives don't end when we die. Is it far-fetched to think that in this life we are like caterpillars and that death is really a kind of metamorphosis from which we emerge as a creature in some ways like, but in many ways completely different from, the caterpillar?

Stand for the Truth

In a recent column at The American Conservative Rod Dreher quotes a message from Donald Trump in which he makes several claims about chicanery in the Arizona election. Among other things he asserts that the entire database of Maricopa Co. has been deleted, the boxes that hold the votes show evidence of having been tampered with, ballots are missing, etc.

Dreher then shows a tweet by Maricopa Co. Recorder Steven Richer who states that Trump is lying, and that he, Richer, is looking at the Maricopa database on his computer as he writes that tweet.

Dreher is himself convinced that Trump is lying and writes this about those who will believe him because they were enthusiastic about what he accomplished as president:

Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process. I get sick and tired of people on the Left who refuse to believe things that contradict what they prefer to believe, but it is no better when people on the Right do it.

It is as plain as day what happens when a people accept as true statements they have every reason to know are lies, and accept them because it suits their political preferences. The corruption of the truth is far worse than ordinary corruption, like stealing money. It makes it impossible to know what is real.

What Dreher says about the willingness to believe what we have every reason to know is false is on the mark whether or not Trump is, in fact, lying. He quotes from his book Live Not By Lies:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause:

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth.

Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

Dreher remarks that,

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth.

In pre-totalitarian states, [Hannah] Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Arendt wrote that a people’s eagerness to believe lies that pleased them was a clear sign of a pre-totalitarian society:

The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

Arendt also wrote in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism that "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction...and the distinction between true and false...no longer exist."

Dreher concludes with these thoughts:

Look, I wrote a whole book that describes the left-wing ideological assault on the truth, for the sake of achieving political power. We on the Right are no better than them if we surrender the truth for the sake of power. Donald Trump is not forcing anybody to accept the lie. That is on us.

If you are a member of Congress who would rather affirm something you know to be a lie, or should know is a lie, because you are afraid of losing your job, then you have already lost something far more important than your job.

Once again, I want to see a Republican Party that embodies many of the principles associated with Trump: immigration restriction, anti-globalism, cultural conservatism, and so forth. But none of that matters if we abandon the truth. None of it. That is a price too high for honest men and women to pay.

Truth matters. Not "truth" as in whatever works to promote one's particular political agenda, but objective truth that corresponds to objective reality.

Good people who were paying attention were disgusted by those who spent almost the entire Trump presidency perpetuating the libel that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election (and who have the chutzpah to now affix the stigma of the "Big Lie" to Trump for insisting that the Democrats stole the 2020 election).

But if the only lies that disgust us are those purveyed by those we oppose politically, then we're no different than they are. Dreher's right. If Trump is lying he should be publicly called to account by the GOP. More than that, Republicans need to find a candidate in 2024 who will give us Trump's policies without Trump's character flaws.

If neither Republicans nor Democrats will put truth before party then our nation won't, nor will it deserve to, survive.

Causal Adequacy

Frank Wilczek is a very bright man, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but sometimes very bright people say things that leave one scratching one's head.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column he draws a comparison between the precision found in living cells and the precision required in technology. The former is certainly impressive, as anyone who has read about how living cells work can attest.

He starts off his column with this:

Precision is a powerful tool, but it can be hard to come by. That theme, with variations, is a leitmotif of science, organic life and modern technology. It is sounding again today, at the frontier of quantum computing.

Consider biology. Complex organisms store their essential operating systems—instructions for how to build cells and keep them going—within long DNA molecules. Those basic programs must be read out and translated into chemical events.

Errors in translation can be catastrophic, resulting in defective, dysfunctional proteins or even in cancers.

There's nothing problematic about any of that, but then he concludes this observation with an off-handed comment that's tantamount to waving a magic wand while saying abracadabra:

So biology has evolved an elaborate machinery of repair and proofreading to keep error rates low—around one per billion operations. A series of complicated molecular machines examine the progress and correct mistakes, in a process aptly called proof-reading.

The creation of this machinery is one of evolution’s greatest achievements.

It's uncertain, of course, what he means by "evolution," a protean term that has several shades of meaning, but it appears from the phrase "biology has evolved" that he intends Darwinian evolution - the development of the enormous diversity of living things from a single ancestral cell via purely natural processes like chemistry and chance.

If so, then the sentences I've highlighted in bold-face are an expression of a marvelous degree of blind faith in the power of those processes.

I say blind faith because blind faith is a belief in something despite the lack of any evidence for it. There's simply no evidence that chemistry and chance can generate the information necessary to produce the very complex machinery and systems that Wilczek describes and there are good reasons to believe that they can't.

Such systems require dozens of proteins, all working in a coordinated fashion to achieve a certain end. Yet the odds of just a single functional protein of modest length being produced by the random connections of amino acids in some hypothetical prebiotic environment are something like 1 chance in 10^164. This is so astronomically improbable that it would be a miracle if it happened just once let alone dozens of times.

And that's just what's necessary to produce the proof-reading machinery. An actual cell consists of hundreds of proteins, all choreographed to perform myriad functions. Not only the production of the proteins but also their choreography all require information, and no one knows how random, accidental processes could generate that information, especially in the first cell.

Indeed, what we do know about natural processes is that they are exceedingly more likely to degrade information.

Another Nobel-Prize winner, Francis Crick, reflecting on the enormous difficulty in trying to imagine how chemistry and chance could create the equivalent of a library of information before any life existed said,

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions that would have to be satisfied to get it going.

Crick used the word "almost" because he didn't believe in miracles, but he didn't know what else to call the organization of the first life.

Paul Davies in his book The Fifth Miracle is at pains to avoid using the term "miracle" to describe the origin of biological information, but by the end of the book, after all his attempts to find a plausible, non-miraculous solution to the problem of life's genesis, he's no closer to an answer than he was when he started.

Here's the problem for folks like Wilczek, Crick and Davies: Nature just doesn't create information, but intelligent agents do it all the time. Chemistry and chance by themselves lack causal adequacy as explanations for the origin of the biological information packed into proteins and DNA, but scientists can relatively easily synthesize functional proteins and nucleic acids in the lab.

It seems, then, that the most plausible explanation for the origin of the amazing biological error-correcting systems Wilczek discusses, are, like technological error-correcting systems, the product of intelligent engineering. It's the explanation that relies upon what we know about information and its causes.

As Stephen Meyer writes in his excellent new book The Return of the God Hypothesis, causes known to produce a given effect are judged better explanations than those causes which are not known to produce that effect.

Intelligent minds are the only causes known to be able to generate large amounts of specified information, so why Wilczek so insouciently assumes that the massive amounts of information required by a functioning cell are the product of blind, mindless, accidental processes is certainly puzzling, to say the least.

No Moral Equivalence

Conflict has yet again broken out between Israelis and Palestinians. Hamas has launched over 1500 rockets at Israeli cities, an attack to which Israel has responded with airstrikes against Hamas military targets in Gaza (see here for an account of how the Israelis duped Hamas terrorists), and predictably there are several myths circulating about these events.

Jack Elbaum debunks three of the biggest myths surrounding the violence in a piece at The Federalist.

The three myths Elbaum criticizes are these:

• Israel Is Committing ‘Terrorism’ in Gaza
• Israel Attacked Peaceful Worshippers
• The Conflict Would End if Israel Gave Palestinians a State

You'll have to go to Elbaum's article to read his full response to these, but here's some of what he says about the first:

This claim is not supported by the facts. The only reason that Israel conducted any airstrikes was that the terrorist group in charge of Gaza, Hamas, instigated violence by indiscriminately shooting thousands of missiles into Israel. These rockets were not only aimed at their usual targets in southern Israel, but also civilian centers in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.

These strikes have hit schools, hospitals, and homes in Israel.

While Hamas’s attacks were aimed at civilians, Israel only intends to strike military targets. Israel destroyed a Hamas military intelligence facility, a weapons manufacturing and storage site, terror tunnels used to kidnap and kill Israelis, and dozens of top terrorist leaders.

Anti-Israel activists are quick to point out that many civilians have also been killed in Israel’s airstrikes. This is true, and it is a tragedy. The reason it is happening, however, shows who the real terrorists are.

While Israel invests in state-of-the-art Iron Dome technology to protect its people from rocket attacks, Hamas puts its people in harm’s way by using them as human shields. While Israel conducts its military activity away from civilian centers, Hamas launches rockets, hides senior officials, and manufactures weapons in heavily populated areas where they know collateral damage will take place.

They store rockets in hospitals, schools, and mosques; they shoot rockets off the top of homes.

When Israel responds, they attempt to only hit terrorist targets. They even give notice hours in advance to the people who are in the buildings they are about to strike through phone calls or other means — something that nearly no other army would have the decency to do. But, because Hamas would like their people to remain in harm’s way for photo ops and to stoke Palestinian grievances, innocent lives are tragically taken.

The loss of innocent Palestinian life is a strategic goal of terrorist groups like Hamas.

Those who seek to draw some sort of moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, or worse, make Israel culpable for this current outbreak of violence, are either very ill-informed, very unintelligent or very malevolent. As Kevin Williamson notes at National Review,

Hamas has its advocates and apologists in the United States. So did Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao, etc. — all of them “deadly foes of civilization.”

Are Miracles Impossible?

A common objection to the possibility of miracles is that such prodigies as, for example, a man rising from the dead would entail a series of violations of the laws of nature, specifically the conservation laws, and that, as David Hume put it, it's been the "uniform experience" of mankind that nature's laws suffer no such violations.

Of course, as C.S. Lewis observes in his book Miracles we can only know that nature's laws have never been "violated" if we also know that every report of a miracle is false, but we can only know that every report is false if we also know that miracles are impossible, and we can only know that miracles are impossible if we also know that God doesn't exist. And how can we know such a thing as that?

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains in this 11 minute video why, even if the laws of nature were inviolable - even for God - it's a mistake to think that a miracle violates them. Whether the laws are Newtonian or quantum mechanical the occurrence of a miracle is not ruled out by them:

As noted above, if it's possible that God exists then it's possible that God acts in the world and that miracles occur, and since it's manifestly possible that God exists any report of a miracle must be assessed on the evidence for it and not on the apriori assumption of atheism.

Some Very Bad Arguments

Jeff Schweitzer, a former White House policy advisor and a Ph.D. in marine biology as well as in neurophysiology, must be a very bright guy, which makes a column by him in the Huffington Post all the more remarkable for the sophomoric silliness of its argumentation.

Schweitzer evidently wishes to persuade his readers that the recent discovery of an earth-like planet elsewhere in our galaxy threatens to discredit the Bible and perhaps mark the end of any warrant for belief in God, but the reasons he gives in support of this are unworthy of a man of such achievements.

He immediately gets off on the wrong foot:

[T]here are likely thousands or millions or even billions of such earth-like planets in the universe. The discovery of just one such world is good evidence for many more: after all, we know of 100 billion galaxies each with as many as 300 billion stars (big variation per galaxy). Astronomers estimate that there are about 70 billion trillion stars. Math wizardry is not necessary to conclude we did not by chance find the only other possibly habitable planet among that huge population of stars.

With this discovery, we come ever closer to the idea that life is common in the universe. Perhaps you are not convinced.

Well, no, I'm not convinced. The discovery of a planet roughly the size of the earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a star, is certainly a necessary condition for life to exist on it, but it's nowhere near a sufficient condition. So many other factors are necessary for the planet to sustain life, much less advanced life, that the odds against any planet in the galaxy, or in the hundred billion other galaxies, exhibiting them all are astronomical.

It's very possible that Earth is the only planet which exhibits all the characteristics necessary for advanced life, and to believe otherwise is little more than an act of faith.

Furthermore, to assert, as Schweitzer does, that this discovery brings us ever closer to the idea that life is common in the universe is like saying that the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun brought us ever closer to sending a man to the Andromeda galaxy. Even if our planet is not the only one in the universe that can sustain life it doesn't follow that any other similar planets there may be actually have life on them, and it certainly doesn't follow that life is common in the universe.

Schweitzer seems to think that given a few appropriate conditions the emergence of life is inevitable, but this again is an act of faith.

In any case, these little exaggerations are as nothing compared to what Dr. Schweitzer has in store for us further on:

[L]et me speculate what would happen should we ever find evidence of life beyond earth even if you think such discovery unlikely. I would like here to preempt what will certainly be a re-write of history on the part of the world's major religions.

I predict with great confidence that all will come out and say such a discovery is completely consistent with religious teachings. My goal here is to declare this as nonsense before it happens....

Let us be clear that the Bible is unambiguous about creation: the earth is the center of the universe, only humans were made in the image of god, and all life was created in six days. All life in all the heavens. In six days. So when we discover that life exists or existed elsewhere in our solar system or on a planet orbiting another star in the Milky Way, or in a planetary system in another galaxy, we will see a huge effort to square that circle with amazing twists of logic and contorted justifications.

But do not buy the inevitable historical edits: life on another planet is completely incompatible with religious tradition. Any other conclusion is nothing but ex-post facto rationalization to preserve the myth.

This is so bad, so far wrong, that one is embarrassed for Dr. Schweitzer for having made such public display of his ignorance. He states that:

1. the Bible is unambiguous about creation
2. the Bible teaches that the earth is the center of the universe
3. the Bible teaches that only humans were made in the image of God
4. the Bible teaches that all life was created in six days.

The first three of these claims are patently false, and the last is the subject of intense disagreement among Christian scholars, but even if all four claims were true how are they inconsistent with life existing elsewhere in the cosmos? Nothing in those statements precludes the possibility that life on earth is not unique.

Schweitzer assays to reinforce his asseverations by drawing on the Genesis record, though he misidentifies Genesis 1:26,27 by calling it Genesis 1:1. This is a small error perhaps, but it serves to cast doubt on Schweitzer's understanding of his topic. He writes:

From Genesis 1:1 [sic], we get:

God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of god he created him; male and female he created them.

Nothing in that mentions alien worlds, which of course the ancients knew nothing about. Man was told to rule over the fish on the earth, not on other planets. But god would have known of these alien worlds, so it is curious he did not instruct the authors to include the language.

In other words, 1) if the Genesis account is accurate then we would expect it to give us an accurate account of life on other planets. 2) Since it makes no mention of such life we are left to believe there is none. 3) So, if it should turn out that there is life on other planets we can only conclude that the Bible is wrong.

Set aside the fact that premise 1) is clearly false. Taken as a whole the argument is what is called in elementary logic an argument from silence. It's like arguing that if the Bible were really the true word of God it would mention Antarctica because God would have known about Antarctica. Since the Bible nowhere mentions Antarctica it cannot be the true word of God.

Most people learn to recognize this fallacy by the time they reach puberty, but Dr. Schweitzer, in all his learning, has evidently never come across it before.

Later he gives us another textbook example of the same fallacy when he says:

None of the 66 books of the bible make any reference to life other than that created by god here on earth in that six-day period. If we discover life elsewhere, one must admit that is an oversight. So much so in fact that such a discovery must to all but the most closed minds call into question the entire story of creation, and anything that follows from that story.

How could a convincing story of life's creation leave out life? Even if the story is meant to be allegorical, the omission of life elsewhere makes no sense.

It's only an oversight, of course, if the purpose of the Bible is to provide an exhaustive description of the universe, but that was surely not its purpose. Schweitzer may as well have complained that Genesis doesn't mention quasars, black holes, and the moons around Jupiter and that the omission of these celestial objects makes no sense since surely God would have known about them.

To be sure, if life is discovered elsewhere in the cosmos, it will raise some interesting questions, but it will have no bearing whatsoever on the basic claims of Christian theism.

Let's close with another example, among many that Schweitzer provides, of his philosophical/theological sloppiness. He writes:

There is also a problem with Genesis 1:3: And God said, "Let there be light" and there was light. Well, the earth is only 4.5 billion years old, yet the universe, and all the light generating stars in ancient galaxies, are more than 13 billion years old. So when god said, "Let there be light" there already had been light shining bright for at least 10 billion years.

Dr. Schweitzer here fails to acknowledge that most people believe Gen. 1:3 to be a reference to the initial creation event, the Big Bang. Why assume that it comes ten billion years later?

I don't have all the letters after my name that Dr. Schweitzer has after his, but even so, I'll presume to give him a word of advice. Before venturing out of your field of expertise to make dogmatic pronouncements about what is and is not the case in other disciplines, please read up on what the brightest minds in that other field are saying about the issues you want to raise.

In other words, do some homework. You'll save yourself a lot of embarrassment.

Spring Birds

Long time readers of VP know that I enjoy birds. It's something of a hobby of mine, and the spring migration is a great time to get out and try to get a good look at some of the beautiful bits of feathered fluff passing through on their northward trek.

Here are a few of my favorites from this past week. All of these pics are of males of the species. Females are often more drab, and, in the case of the last two species, they look much different than the males:

The bird above is a Magnolia warbler. It's the bird that inspired a young teen-ager named Roger Tory Peterson to take up birding which led to a lifetime of painting birds and a whole series of nature field guides. Peterson saw the Magnolia warbler in New York's Central park and was immediately hooked on birds.

The Blackburnian warbler is in my mind one of the most striking birds in all of North America. When the sunlight hits the bird's throat it's as if it has been set aflame.

The Cape May warbler nests in boreal forests in the U.S. and Canada and is only found in Cape May, NJ during migration. It was first described by ornithologist Alexander Wilson in Cape May, NJ but not seen there for a hundred years afterward. The Cape May warbler's tongue is unique among warblers. It's tubular, like the hummingbird's tongue, and enables the bird to sip nectar from flowers on its wintering grounds in the Caribbean.

The Prothonotary warbler is famous, those who've read about the "Red Scare" of the early 1950s might recall, for being instrumental in convicting Alger Hiss on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. You can read about it here. The Prothonotary warbler got its name from the bright yellow robes worn by papal clerks, known as prothonotaries, in the Roman Catholic church.

The bird pictured above is an Indigo bunting. Here's an interesting fact about birds that many people have a hard time believing. Birds do not have blue pigment in their feathers. The blue color found in many birds is due to the way their feathers refract sunlight. The Indigo bunting is common in eastern North America but is often overlooked because it's small, and the dazzling blue color only shows up in good light against a proper background.

The Rose-breasted grosbeak is a handsome woodland species that occasionally visits sunflower feeders during migration. The female looks like a large brown sparrow.

Bird migration is one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature and it's occurring this week across much of the United States. Since it happens largely after dark most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring in the skies above them most nights at this time of year.

Even so, millions of birds are traveling each night from their winter haunts in Central and South America to their breeding territories in North America. The migration involves birds of all types, hundreds of different species, navigating their way north to find a mate, establish a territory, breed and return south again in the Fall.

To help give a sense of the movements of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How and why did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales, dragonflies and numerous other creatures, ever evolve in all these different groups through mindless, unguided processes like random mutation and natural selection? Did it evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it? How did that ability evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

Birds truly are a marvel.

The Lies We Must Believe

In his book Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher reminds us of George Orwell's observation in his classic 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that, "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

Dreher adds that,

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language - Newspeak is the Party's word for the jargon it imposes on society - it controls the categories in which people think. "Freedom" is slavery, "truth" is falsehood, and so forth.

I thought of this when I read the latest effort of the left to change the language. Just as we must refer to those who promote abortion as being pro-choice rather than pro-abortion, and refer to those who advocate racism against whites as anti-racists, and refer to those who adopt fascist tactics in our streets as anti-fascists, and call those who practice political and religious intolerance, tolerant, so, too, must we now refer to Mother's Day as "Birthing Person's Day."

It's surreal.

Dreher describes Orwell's word Doublethink as "holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them." This, he says, is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party's ideology:

The citizen is conditioned to believe whatever the state tells them. If the Party insists that 2 + 2 = 5 then despite all your senses telling you that that's false you had to acknowledge that it was true because the Party said so.

Writes Orwell, "Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense."

Hannah Arendt notes in her masterpiece study of Nazism and Stalinist communism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that, "The ideal subjects for totalitarian rule ... [are] people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false...no longer exist."

There seem to be a lot of those kind of folks in contemporary America.

Dreher adds that in America the rising cultural dictatorship is softer and more subtle than in Nineteen Eighty-Four or the twentieth century tyrannies Arendt studies. Under what Dreher calls "soft totalitarianism,"

...the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in Doublethink every day. Men have periods, The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.' Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally...."

Dreher could've added the patent falsehoods, belief in which is de rigueur in much of America today, that the country is systemically, ineradicably and irredeemably racist, that black people have more to fear from white cops than they do from their own neighbors and that racism is uniquely endemic to the white race.

None of these beliefs can be empirically substantiated, they're all to be believed solely because those with "moral authority," the "oppressed" (like Lebron James and Ibram X. Kendi), say so.

As weird as it would've seemed to an American just ten years ago, we appear today to be spiraling toward an Orwellian dystopia in which the basic freedoms we've always cherished, the accomplishments of Western science and literature, and the idea of rewarding merit and excellence must all be done away with. They're all manifestations of white supremacy and systemic racism and need to be rooted out and torn down.

In order to accomplish this we must also dispense with manifestations of white privilege like truth, logic and objective facts. Thus, we are a people beset on every side by lies, distortions and sloppy thinking. Hopefully, the vast bulk of Americans will soon be roused from our complacent slumber, demand truth, reject the lies and scorn the liars, but if not there may be some very hard times ahead.

If you have never done so, I encourage you to read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's been said with only slight exaggeration that the only thing he gets wrong in this prophetic work is the date in the title.

The Sovietization of America

Victor Davis Hanson makes a compelling case in an op-ed at the Telegraph Herald that Americans are heading down the same road as did the citizens of the Soviet Union in the last century.

Hanson lists ten symptoms of what he calls "Sovietism," but before he does, he asks a couple of questions: "What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system? Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?"

Does that sound familiar?

We are ourselves surrounded by lies. Many of our political leaders, much of our media, and many social activists have no respect at all for objective truth. Their standard is a kind of pragmatism in which "truth" is whatever serves to advance their agenda or whatever they strongly feel ought to be the truth. Any assertion which meets these criteria is considered to be justified.

Hanson's ten "symptoms of Sovietism" are accompanied by a brief explanation of how each one manifests itself in our society. Here's a sample:

The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.

Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments. The U.S. Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

CNN recently alleged that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans’ online activity.

The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought.

Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of diversity, equity and inclusion staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan the admissions, hiring, curriculum and administration at universities [for any heterodox actions or speech].

Like good commissars, our diversity czars oversee compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize for and renounce its evil foundations.

The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons for rooting out all potential enemies of the people.

Since when did Americans encourage co-workers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a rival? Why are there now new thought criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism or vaccination racism?

The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom. Instead, they boasted that they were advocates for equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege — and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased.

Our wokists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced re-education sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long-overdue “fundamental transformation.”

So if they destroy people in the name of equity, their nihilism is justified.

You can read the rest of Hanson's indictment of the direction in which we are moving at the link.

In his excellent book, Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher makes much the same case as Hanson. He draws numerous parallels between the oppressive circumstances in which people in the Soviet bloc found themselves in the post WWII era and what's happening in the United States today. Dreher focuses on the inveterate dishonesty of the Soviet regime and cites the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

What did it mean [in the former Soviet empire] to live by lies?

It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm - or at least not to oppose - to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force.

The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.

There are still a multitude of such "refuseniks" in America who refuse to swim with the mendacious cultural currents flowing through our institutions. They merit our support, and hopefully more of us will number ourselves among them.

Scylla or Charybdis

Over the last couple of days, we've considered the question whether it was more rational to be a naturalist or a theist. Today I'd like to share some final thoughts on the topic.

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair.

The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism must be wrong. Why that belief is "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are lots of very good reasons, some we listed on Thursday, for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true.

Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

I wonder, too, if they won't think it incomprehensible that anyone could think that it was more rational to believe naturalism to be true than to believe theism to be true.

Which Is More Rational (Pt. II)

Yesterday we examined the objection to theistic belief that belief in God is irrational. In reply to this objection I suggested that there are a number of things an atheistic materialist has to believe that many people, including atheists, would consider irrational or at least less rational than believing their contraries.

I'd like to finish up those thoughts by noting one other grave problem with what we might call the atheistic argument from irrationality. The atheist who employs this argument against the theist actually winds up shooting himself in the foot. Here's why.

Atheists, or naturalistic materialists (Nat Mats), are philosophically wedded to a Darwinian explanation of the emergence of the human species, but according to the Darwinian view organisms and all their capacities evolve to enable them to survive and reproduce.

It follows, then, that the Nat Mat must acknowledge that human beings have evolved their cognitive faculties, which include reason, to enable them to survive and reproduce. But survival is not the same thing as truth. Our cognitive faculties have not evolved to enable us to discover truth.

Most Naturalists freely admit this. Here are four examples of the dozens that could be cited:

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Physicist Eric Baum.

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman.

"Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Neuroscientist Steven Pinker.

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

You get the idea. If Darwinian evolution is true then we have no basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth because reason didn't evolve to serve that function. The thoughts in our brains are just the movement of electrons along neurons which are, in turn, the result of a mindless, unguided evolutionary process.

If this is so, why should I believe anything those electro-chemical reactions in the brain tell me is true? Indeed, what grounds does a Nat Mat have for even believing that Nat Mat is true?

Naturalistic philosopher John Gray writes, "The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth," and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett agrees, “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.”

How then can our Nat Mat friends claim that it's rational to believe in the evolution of human reason, a faculty not designed to discover truth, but that it's irrational to believe that human reason was designed by an intelligent Mind to enable us to apprehend truth? Clearly, the atheist has put himself in a pickle here.

If the atheist is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties and thus also given us strong reason to doubt the truth of any belief they produce, including the belief that there is no God.

Moreover, since the atheist has no grounds for trusting the deliverances of his reason he a forteriori strips himself of any rational basis for science. If atheism is true then there's no warrant for either science or truth, since both depend upon the ability to trust the faculty of human reason. Atheism saws off the epistemic branch that it sits on.

How, after all, can it be reasonable to hold the belief that we have no basis for trusting reason?

So, which is more rational, holding a belief - atheism - that implicitly denies that our reason is trustworthy and that truth can be known, or holding a belief - theism - that tells us that our reason is trustworthy because it was instilled in us by a rational Creator?

Which Is More Rational?

A criticism often leveled against theistic belief is that it's irrational to believe in an entity (God) that can't be observed. French philosopher Michael Onfray, for example, has written that "Monotheism loathes intelligence." And, "God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence and the critical mind."

Onfray, of course, is an atheistic materialist who, like the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, and others, argues that belief in God is an irrational delusion.

Well, is it? Which is the more rational belief system or worldview, atheism or theism? Is it more rational to believe, for instance, that ...

• the information needed to form the first living thing arose by chance, or to believe that wherever we find it information is always the product of a mind?
• the extraordinarily precise calibration of the parameters, forces constants and initial conditions of the universe necessary to permit life to exist is just an astronomically improbable accident or to believe that this cosmic fine-tuning is the result of intentional engineering?
• the space, time, material universe created itself, or to believe that space, time and matter were caused by something that is itself neither spatial, temporal nor material?
• moral values - belief in human equality, dignity, rights, the belief that it's wrong to harm others - are purely subjective and arbitrary or to believe that they're objectively grounded and independent of whether people agree with them or not?
• every choice, act and thought is the inevitable consequence of prior causes that determine everything we do or to believe that we are in some sense free to choose between alternative futures?
• our conscious experience is just electro-chemical processes in the brain or to believe that the phenomena of human consciousness are the products of an immaterial mind working in concert with our physical body?
• your life is a pointless "tale told by an idiot" or to believe that your life is meaningful because what you do in this life matters forever?

Materialism offers no plausible explanation for the origin of the universe, the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, or the origin of consciousness. To be a consistent materialist one should be a determinist about human choices and a nihilist about life in general and morality in particular.

Perhaps a further question one might ask in addition to those listed above is, is it more rational to adopt a worldview (atheistic materialism) whose entailments are almost impossible to live with consistently or is it more rational to adopt a worldview (theism) whose entailments are consistent with our most basic beliefs about life?

After all, what's irrational is denying that there's a God while living as if there is.

Materialist Superstition

John Zmirak offers an acerbic critique of Woke culture in an essay at The Stream and wonders how we've come to the place where so many highly educated Americans have been reduced "to a Stone Age level of fanatical superstition." His answer is, "In a word, Darwin."

He explains:

[Darwinism] insists that the existence of the universe itself is a meaningless cosmic accident. No purpose or mind lies behind it. Likewise the emergence of life, which Darwinists believe by some secular miracle leapt fully-armored from the mud like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Mere chance somehow engineered not just the baroque complexities of the humblest bacterium, but the vast, elaborate rococo of higher mammals, then primates. Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not their arrival.

But somehow this combination of infinitesimally unlikely genetic mutations, and ruthless natural selection red in tooth and claw produced … human beings with brains perceptive and reliable enough to generate Modern Science.

I'd quibble that it may be more accurate to use the term naturalistic materialism, of which Darwinism is one expression, for what follows, but no matter. Zmirak continues:

Even though this Science tells us that we’re meaningless epiphenomena of random cosmic burps and vicious competition, somehow we also have dignity and rights, including the right to Equity. (Insert stolen premises from the biblical worldview here.) But the science that teaches us about that dignity and those rights - theology - should curl up and die once we’ve taken ... the gold fillings out of its teeth.

The Woke folk will decide what “Equality,” “Equity” and “Justice” mean. And they’ll do so with all the arbitrary, random, irrational whimsy that the universe showed in mutating us into existence. They’ll enforce their capricious verdicts with all the ruthlessness of Natural Selection, throwing their failed competitors onto the fossil heap of history.

True enough. Once a substantial percentage of the educated population comes to believe that life, including human life, is all a big accident, that there's no meaning to any of it, that death is the end of existence, then the only ethics that makes sense is an egoistic form of might makes right.

In a world devoid of purpose there can be nothing that's wrong in any meaningful sense, and thus there's nothing wrong with destroying, either literally or figuratively, people who disagree with them.

So, in the universe of the naturalistic materialist, whatever it takes to make my own existence more pleasant - including using others as means to my ends and imposing my will upon them - whatever I have the power and desire to do, I might as well do.

In this purposeless world, whoever has the loudest voice and the most political heft makes the rules, and it's pointless for the less powerful to object that the rules make no sense or are immoral. Sense and morality depend upon the existence of objective truth about human nature, and in a Godless, Darwinian world there is no objective truth about human nature that binds us or constrains us.

Human nature is malleable. It's whatever humans are able to make it. What rules there are, about morality and about human nature, we make for ourselves.

All of this follows from the embrace of an antitheistic materialism by our cultural elites. Our ivy educated betters scorn what they like to call "religious superstition," but they adopt instead all manner of other superstitions - superstitions about human nature, race, gender and evolution to name just a few.

As G.K. Chesterton famously observed, "When people no longer believe in God they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

Free Will Skepticism

There's an interesting article at The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman on the topic of free will.

Although Burkeman writes the article in such a way as to suggest that he himself is a determinist, or what he calls a "free will skeptic," he admits at the end of the piece that he "personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life."

Nevertheless, almost all of the people he cites in the article are determinists with the opinions of some compatibilists* mixed in, but doesn't mention any arguments from those philosophers who believe we have libertarian free will*.

I've pulled a few passages from Burkeman's article that help to give a sense of it. Let's start with this one:

Nothing could be more self-evident [than that we make free choices]. And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

It's important to note that each of these thinkers is a naturalistic materialist. Their determinism is a derivative of their prior belief that all that exists are matter and the physical laws which govern it. Being committed to that ontology it's not surprising that they would be free will skeptics, since materialism allows no room for any deviation from physical law. As Burkeman says at one point, "Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock?"

If, however, naturalistic materialism is false, if there's more to us than just our material bodies and brains, if we also possess an immaterial mind or soul, then the strength of the argument for determinism is substantially diminished.

Burkeman explains why the free will question is crucially important:

...the stakes could hardly be higher. Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.

Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness.

And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

The consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion:

Saul Smilansky, a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, [but] although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise ....“On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on...it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said.

“For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”

Smilansky is right about the consequences of a deterministic view of human choice. Not only would it do away with the idea that humans deserve reward and punishment, it would also do away with the idea of moral guilt. It would also strip our species of any notion of human dignity, equality or rights:

By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces. “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts,...“it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”

Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.

For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified....Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.”

The preceding paragraph illustrates why so few philosophers believe we can live consistently as determinists. Caruso uses words like "unjustified" and "capricious," but if determinism is true there are no acts which are justified or unjustified, and there certainly is no caprice. Everything happens as the inevitable consequence of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. To complain that an act is unjustified is meaningless and to allege that an act is capricious is to imply that it could have been otherwise than it was, which is nonsense if determinism is true.

Caruso commits the same inconsistency in the next section. Burkeman writes:

Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.

You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat.

But how, assuming the truth of determinism, can we speak of a "right" to do something and an "obligation" to do something else? These words are meaningless if there are no genuine choices. If at every given moment there's only one possible future how can people have a right or an obligation to do other than what they've been determined to do?

Like so many philosophical questions, the question of free will really comes down to the question of God. If one doesn't believe in God then it's indeed difficult to see how we could have free will even though we'd find it impossible to live consistently as a determinist. But if God does exist then it's possible that He has endowed us with an immaterial self (mind or soul) not subject to physical law and out of which not only conscious experience but also genuinely free choices arise.

Put differently, if you believe that there are at least some moments in your life when you're genuinely free to choose between two alternatives, then to be consistent you should be a theist. If you are a naturalistic materialist then free will certainly would seem inexplicable, but if determinism is true why are the implications so disturbing and why can't we live consistently as determinists?

As Burkeman admits, he has to live as though determinism is false:

I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option. In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.

Burkeman has much more to say about "Free will Skepticism" at the link. The article's a bit long, but worth reading in that it does a good job of presenting the determinist challenge to those who believe in libertarian free will.

*Compatibilism is the notion that even though our choices may be determined, it makes sense to say we’re free to choose. Compatibilists think determinism and free will are both true. Libertarian free will is the view that there are some moments in which one can genuinely choose between two or more possible futures.