Are Minds a Different Substance from Brains?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor recently debated naturalistic philosopher David Papineau on the mind/body problem. Egnor, a Catholic theist, believes that the mind and the body (i.e. the brain) are two distinct substances and that mind cannot be reduced to material stuff like the brain or it's functions.

Papineau is an atheist who believes that mind and brain are essentially the same thing, that what we call mind can be explained in terms of physical laws and processes.

A summary of Round One of the debate in which Egnor goes first can be read at Mind Matters. Egnor begins by explaining how his work in neuroscience is what led him to abandon atheism and become a Catholic in his mid-forties.

He adds that, "I had felt through much of my career that physics, biochemistry, biology, and particularly neuroscience, just didn’t make a lot of sense in a materialist paradigm."

He notes that he,

kept seeing patients who had largely missing brains or had brains split in half (for medical reasons, to treat otherwise intractable epilepsy) who lived normal lives. Whatever the mind is, it did not appear to be wholly dependent on the brain. And I learned a fair amount of neuroscience, but I found that I seemed to know less and less about the mind the more neuroscience I learned.

I’ve been doing neurosurgery now for the better part of 40 years, I’ve done 7,000 brain operations, and I’ve become convinced that there’s much more to the mind than the brain alone explains.

He then gives three reasons why he rejects the idea that the mind cannot be explained just in terms of the brain:

The first is that human mental states are characterized, in many instances, by the capacity for reason, by the ability to make logical inferences, to make logical connections, and a difficulty that materialism faces is that, while all of our logical reasoning entails logical connections between ideas, there are no logical connections between brain states.

Brain states are connected by physical laws, not by laws of logic, and that at least the identity theory brand of materialism, I think fails in this regard, because that is something about the mind, that is the ability to make logical connections, that is not present in the brain. The brain has no logic. The brain just has physics.

In other words, the brain performs electrochemical reactions along neurons, but electrochemical reactions do not employ logic. The provenience of logic is inexplicable in terms of material substance and the laws of physics.

The second reason why I think we can’t explain the mind entirely on the basis of brain states is the existence of qualia, what David Chalmers says is the Hard Problem of consciousness. I can see no reason to infer that any brain state would create first-person experience.

Brain states are third-person ontologies, so I don’t think qualia can be explained in a materialist perspective.

To grasp more firmly what Egnor is getting at imagine that you look at grass and see the color green. Where and what is the sensation of green? It's not in the grass but in your brain, but there's a problem.

The sensation is the product of a chain of chemical reactions that begin in your retina and are converted to an electrical signal transmitted along the optic nerve to your brain, but neither the light from the grass nor the chemical reactions it produces in the retina nor the electrical impulse that goes to the brain are "green."

Nor does the color green appear anywhere in your brain when you see the grass. So where is the green? What are we sensing when we experience the sensation of green? It doesn't seem explicable just in terms of anything in the brain. The same is true for pain, pleasure and all the phenomena of our sense experience.

And the third reason why I don’t think mind states can be explained materialistically is the phenomenon of intentionality.... the hallmark of mental states is that they’re always about something. They’re always pointed at something. There’s a goal to them.

And physical things never have any intrinsic about-ness. They’re simply collections of matter. So the salient characteristic of a mental state is that it’s about something. It has meaning. And you might say the salient character of a physical thing is that it’s never about anything, never has any meaning.

In physical terms the words you're reading are just chemical dots on a screen. They have no meaning in themselves, but they gain meaning when someone sees them. If all that's involved in this are meaningless physical patterns being apprehended by a material nervous system that consists of electrochemical reactions, where does the meaning come from?

This really is a perplexing question. Unfortunately, Papineau's response is to simply assert that there's really no problem here and the subsequent debate gets bogged down, as these kinds of debates often do, on an ancillary question.

Even so, Egnor's opening statement presents a powerful challenge to materialist philosophies of mind. You can watch his entire opening statement as well as the rest of the debate here:

An Atheist's Moral Confusion

A few years back Buzzfeed ran an article recounting accusations of alleged sexual improprieties toward women by celebrity atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss has been active over the last dozen years or so promoting atheism in books and debates with theistic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. Whether Krauss is actually guilty of behaving boorishly or not I can't say, but I was interested in some of the readers' remarks in the article's combox, particularly one from an atheist named Jim MacIver who wrote this:

This [Krauss' alleged conduct] is disgusting. It is the sort of behavior I expect from god-worshippers but not Atheists. We are supposed to be the ones who lead for truth and justice, logic and reason. Harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do but especially if an Athieist [sic] does it.

The religioniists [sic] will use this against us. This hurts us as a movement. This will hurt all Atheists, everywhere. Even more important, it hurts women who are victimized by men they thought they could trust.

You may think that Mr. MacIver sounds a bit like a teenager here, but a link accompanying his comment takes you to his Facebook page, and it turns out that he really is an adult. Given what he has said above, another claim he makes on his page sounds weirdly paradoxical:

I have no morality myself. Morality is arbitrary rules made up by old men to control the sex lives of human beings, particularly women. I have ethics, which tells you whats [sic] right.

Set aside his inapt distinction between morality and ethics, and set aside, too, the fact that on atheism, truth, justice and reason are all highly problematic notions. What I wonder about is how a man who claims to have no morals can say that "harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do".

I also wonder why it's especially indecent if the behavior is perpetrated by someone (i.e. an atheist like Krauss) whose worldview offers no basis for objective moral, or ethical, values and no reason to think that there's any ultimate accountability for anything one does in life.

On atheism, as Mr. MacIver acknowledges, there's no morally right or wrong conduct. The only criterion for assessing whether one should do something that one desires to do, if one is an atheist, is whether one can get away with it.

If someone's behavior hurts or otherwise victimizes women, why, given atheism, should Mr. MacIver be upset about that? All he's doing is emoting, expressing his subjective dislike for behavior that he finds personally unpleasant, but Mr. MacIver's personal repugnance hardly makes it wrong for others to do.

To make a moral judgment of another person's conduct the atheist must piggy-back on a theistic worldview and hope that no one notices that he's deriving his moral sustenance from a source that he in fact believes has no actual validity.

Whenever an atheist makes the sort of judgments Mr. MacIver does he's engaging in a kind of moral parasitism, drawing nourishment from the host of theism because his own metaphysical assumptions lack the resources to support those judgments.

This is dreadfully inconsistent, although it occurs with surprising frequency among atheists despite it's obvious irrationality.

If Mr. MacIver truly believes that sexual misconduct toward women is objectively wrong, and if he truly prizes reason and logic he might want to reassess his atheism. He might also reflect on these words from a fellow atheist, a philosopher named Joel Marks, whose understanding of the implications of his atheism manifests a bit more clarity than does Mr. MacIver's:

This philosopher (Joel Marks) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t...

The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality...

I experienced my shocking epiphany that [Christian theists] are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God...

nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no morality. (Excerpted from Marks' An Amoral Manifesto).

If Marks is correct, and it's hard to argue against his conclusion given his premise that God doesn't exist, then it's very difficult to see how anyone could say that Lawrence Krauss, if he really did that of which he's accused, was acting in any way inconsistently with his atheism.

Nor can one say, Mr. MacIver's moral hand-wringing notwithstanding, how what he is accused of doing is in any way objectively "wrong."

China's Barbarism

Last Friday I posted a piece on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the CCP in which I mentioned the brutal history of the party.

What I mentioned in that post was really just the tip of the communist iceberg. A pair of articles at The Epoch Times gives us more of the grisly details of the communists' barbarism.

The first article highlights the CCP's long hostility toward religious belief.

During the decade long Cultural Revolution, for instance,

Priests and nuns were forced to kneel down in front of a large bonfire, watching helplessly as the flames devoured their sacred instruments and burned their skin.

In another Chinese city, students wearing red armbands hit Catholics with sharp wooden sticks, throwing one priest into a fire pit after he collapsed in pain. They beat one nun to death after she refused to stomp on a statue of the Virgin Mary.

One Catholic priest was buried alive in Beijing after declining to give up his faith.

Since then successive Party leaders have launched campaign after campaign to crush and control people of faith in China, be they Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs, or the Falun Gong meditation discipline:

One year after the CCP took power in 1949, Chinese troops marched into Tibet and forced upon the Tibetans a 17-point agreement to legitimize the CCP’s rule. Yet despite rosy promises of Tibetan autonomy on paper, Beijing turned the region into a surveillance state and installed labor camps.

The Dalai Lama, the region’s spiritual leader, went into exile in India in 1959 after the regime brutally crushed an uprising, killing tens of thousands of Tibetans. In the 20 years following, about 1.2 million Tibetans have died under the regime’s repressive policies.... More than 150 have resorted to setting themselves on fire in a desperate act of defiance.

A recent example is that of a Tibetan herder named Lhamo, a 36-year-old mother of three, who was detained in June 2020 for sending money to her family in India. The family members who saw her two months later found her “badly bruised and unable to speak,” according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

She died days later at a local hospital and was immediately cremated.

Of course it's not only Tibetan Buddhists who suffer under the boot of Communist oppression:

The CCP’s suppression of Catholic and Protestant churches has also intensified under current leader Xi Jinping’s watch.

Chinese authorities have removed thousands of crosses from churches, arrested pastors, ordered the removal of Christian images, and aggressively pursued a “sinicization” policy by establishing “patriotic churches,” in which pictures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are replaced with portraits of Xi or Mao.

The Chinese regime is also reinterpreting and retranslating the Bible to promote “Chinese-style Christianity,” with one Chinese ethics textbook twisting a story from the Bible to have Jesus stone a woman to death while claiming himself a sinner.

In 2017, at least four cities and one province restricted Christmas celebrations, banning displays of Christmas decorations, themed performances, and promotional activities. Communist officials in one university banned activities related to Western religious holidays in the name of helping the younger generation “build cultural confidence.”

One Christian this January received a hefty fine of 160,000 yuan ($24,733) for celebrating the holiday.

Underground churches have proliferated as a result of the regime’s oppression. In response, Chinese officials have detained church members and handed lengthy prison sentences to pastors.

Wang Yi, a pastor in central China’s Chengdu who founded one of the country’s largest unregistered Christian churches, was sentenced to nine years in prison in December 2019 for “illegal business operations” and “inciting to subvert state power,” a charge the regime frequently uses to silence dissidents.

In April, Radio Free Asia reported that Beijing was running secret brainwashing facilities, which usually involve torture, in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province to force Christians to give up their faith.

Last Friday's post mentioned the genocide of the Uyghurs in western China where they face forced labor, torture, sexual abuse, political indoctrination, forced abortion, and forced sterilization, but perhaps equally as bad is what the Chinese are doing to the Falun Gong.

Millions of Falun Gong adherents have been held in prisons, labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, and other detention facilities in China. Hundreds of thousands have been tortured in those venues in a bid to force practitioners to give up their belief.

An untold number have died under China’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, with their organs cut out to be sold on the transplant market.

An eye witness the Times calls "Bob" describes how the organ transplant operation works in the second of The Epoch Times articles:

Over the first five months of 2021, 599 Falun Gong practitioners are documented to have been sentenced for their faith; one of them, 81 years old, received nine years, according to data from Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that monitors the persecution of the faith group.

More than 15,000 were documented to have experienced harassment or arrests last year.

The prisoners determined to be suitable to have their organs extracted...would get injected with a drug said to relieve their pain. Its actual goal, though, was to prevent blood to coagulate after brain death and damage the organs, Bob said.

Those slated for organ harvesting were typically young, healthy men, usually in their 20s and 30s without a history of major illness, according to Bob.

At the execution site, prisoners were arranged in a line to be shot in the back of the head.

Many of the victims were Falun Gong. The article then describes how the bodies were removed to a van and cut open to harvest the organs for transplantation into the bodies of foreigners who paid well for the procedure:

George Zheng, a former Chinese medical intern, recalled assisting in an organ removal operation in the 1990s alongside two nurses and three military doctors, in a mountainous area near an army prison close to Dalian, a city in northeastern China.

The patient, a young man, was unresponsive but his body was still warm. The doctors had removed two kidneys from the man and then instructed Zheng to extract his eyes.

“At that moment, his eyelids moved and he looked at me,” he told The Epoch Times in 2015. “There was sheer terror in his eyes … My mind went blank and my whole body began to shake.”

The memories of those two eyes haunted Zheng for years.

The Chinese claim that they no longer harvest organs, but there's apparently a lot of evidence they still do. In any case, they also claimed they weren't responsible for the Wuhan virus which has killed millions of people worldwide, so their denials aren't worth much.

But even if it's true that they're no longer killing people in order to harvest their organs they're still a tyrannical and brutal regime.

To quote the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once again, "If God is dead then everything is permitted," and Vladimir Lenin said that, "Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order..."

The communists, whether under Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao or whomever, insist that God is dead and that therefore there are no moral constraints on what they do.

Everything is permitted. It's all moral.

Happy Birthday America (Whatever's Left of You)

A Cut Flower Civilization

There's an interesting essay at Mercatornet by Jonathon Van Maren in which he observes that a number of atheist writers are lamenting the loss of Christian faith in our culture and lamenting, too, some of them, that faith seems to elude them.

Here, for example, is the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson:

“I was brought up an atheist—I didn’t become one,” he said. “I regard atheism as the religious faith I happened to be brought up in.

It is, of course, as much a faith as Christianity or Islam—and I have the Calvinist brand, because my parents left the Church of Scotland. I was brought up, essentially, in a Calvinist ethical framework but with no God.

This had its benefits—I was encouraged to think in a very critical way about religion and also about science, but I’ve come to see as a historian that you can’t base a society on that. Indeed, atheism, particularly in its militant forms, is really a very dangerous metaphysical framework for a society.”

“I know I can’t achieve religious faith,” he went on, “but I do think we should go to church. We don’t have, I don’t think, an evolved ethical system. I don’t buy the idea that evolution alone gets us to be moral.

It can modify behaviour, but there’s just too much evidence that in the raw, when the constraints of civilisation fall away, we behave in the most savage way to one another. I’m a big believer that with the inherited wisdom of a two-millennia old religion, we’ve got a pretty good framework to work with.”

Van Maran comments that "For one of the most prominent historians in the world—himself an agnostic—to say that we should go to church is rather startling, but Ferguson’s sentiments also appear to be part of a growing trend."

Ferguson certainly isn't alone:

The late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton began attending church himself despite struggling with belief, regularly playing the organ at All Saints’ in Garsdon. His secular friends say his faith remained cultural; other friends were not so sure.

What we do know is that he thought Christianity was in many ways the soul of Western civilisation, and that the uniquely Christian concept of forgiveness was utterly indispensable to its survival.

Scruton’s friend Douglas Murray, the conservative writer who was raised in the Church before leaving it as an adult, has occasionally referred to himself as a “Christian atheist.”

In a recent discussion with theologian N.T. Wright, he described himself as “an uncomfortable agnostic who recognises the virtues and the values the Christian faith has brought,” and noted that he is actually irritated by the way the Church of England is fleeing from its inheritance, “giving up its jewels” such as “the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer” in exchange for progressive pieties.

“My fear is that the Church is not doing what so many of us on the outside want it to do, which is preaching its gospel, asserting its truths and its claims,” he said. “When one sees it falling into all the latest tropes one thinks well, that’s another thing gone, just like absolutely everything else in the era. I’m a disappointed non-adherent.”

Murray believes that Christianity is essential because secularists have been thus far totally incapable of creating an ethic of equality that matches the concept that all human beings are created in the image of God.

In a column in The Spectator, he noted that post-Christian society has three options. The first is to abandon the idea that all human life is precious. “Another is to work furiously to nail down an atheist version of the sanctity of the individual.”

And if that doesn’t work? “Then there is only one other place to go. Which is back to faith, whether we like it or not.”

On a recent podcast, he was more blunt: “The sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive [the disappearance of] Judeo-Christian civilisation.”

Van Maran goes on to describe the musings of social scientist Charles Murray, an agnostic, historian Tom Holland, author of the 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, and psychologist Jordan Peterson, all of whom seem nostalgic for a faith they either abandoned or never had.

Most people who have left the faith, I've always suspected, simply didn't want it to be true.

There are some, of course, who've had unpleasant interactions with the church, others who are repelled from faith by an intimate experience with grief and suffering, and still others who believe that Christianity is somehow intellectually disreputable, but for many I think their refusal to believe is based on a desire not to have to conform their lives to what they see as a stringent sexual morality.

Here's a question to pose to an atheist acquaintance: If you were confronted with overwhelming evidence of the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus and/or the existence of a personal God would you consider it an occasion for rejoicing or would it make you depressed?

The person may not have sufficient insight into his or her own motives to answer truthfully, but if they do their answer might reveal much about the wellspring of their unbelief.

The writer Christopher Hitchens once said that he would be very depressed if he discovered that Christianity were true, and Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously admitted that he didn't want theism to be true. I don't think these men are unusual in this regard.

Van Maren alludes to this attitude when he writes that,

Not so long ago, the atheists who retreated to their Darwinian towers and bricked themselves up to fire arrows at the faithful wanted to be there. Their intellectual silos were a refuge from faith because they didn’t want Christianity to be true.

They hated it and thought we’d be better off without it.

Now it seems a lot of intellectuals have come to the realization that their naturalistic worldview offers no support for any of the things they cherish. Neither human rights, human dignity, human equality, objective morality, nor free will, to mention just a few examples, can be defended as anything other than arbitrary preferences if naturalism is true.

Naturalism is a worldview that offers a humanity thirsting for living water a cupful of dust. A civilization built on the aforementioned principles cannot survive without the faith from which those principles arise, anymore than a tree severed from its roots will continue to thrive.

Thankfully, a lot of bright people are, if belatedly, coming to realize this. Van Maren concludes with this thought:

The survival of Christianity is essential for the survival of the West. The bad news is that this realisation comes when the day is far spent.

The Good News is simpler. “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each of them Christianity has died,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man. “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

Read the rest of the article at the link. It's quite good.

The Persecution of Jimmy Lai

The Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th anniversary yesterday, and they had much to celebrate. Since the civil war in 1949 in which the communists under Mao Zedong gained control of the mainland they've managed to slaughter millions of their countrymen. Only the Soviet communists can claim to have accomplished as much.

They achieved this feat through policies like The Great Leap Forward which resulted in mass famine, The Cultural Revolution which cost the lives of anyone who even looked sympathetic to the West, and the slaughters of dissidents such as occurred in 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

The terror still continues to this day for minority groups like the Muslim Uyghurs who survive, if they survive at all, in mass incarceration camps, for Christians who live in constant fear of arrest and dispossession of their property, and for those who exhibit the audacity to tell the world what's actually happening in China.

Among the latter are the doctors at Wuhan who went public early on in the pandemic and promptly disappeared and dissidents in Hong Kong which the Chinese, reneging on their promise to keep Hong Kong autonomous, have censored and persecuted.

One example of these dissidents is a man named Jimmy Lai, a self-made billionaire who is putting everything at risk for his belief in God and the freedom of his fellow Chinese.

Christopher Bedford, senior editor at The Federalist, gives us insight into Lai's story:

Lai’s path to success in Hong Kong began on the floor of a garment factory. He rose quickly, eventually joining management. He saved his money, invested in the stock market, and used the profits to buy a factory and start making clothing for middle-class consumers.

After the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where peaceful pro-democracy protesters were trapped, shrouded in darkness, and run over and gunned down by tanks, Lai sacrificed his stake in his mainland business by printing and selling pro-democracy shirts and starting a tabloid magazine that covered scandal and corruption in the party.

Undeterred by his loss, and still a very wealthy man, Lai channeled his time and fortune toward fighting their evil, enduring arrest, persecution, fire bombings, car attacks, and intimidation for it.

Last week he was arrested again, and his and his company’s finances seized under the auspices of China’s new “national security law.”

What leads a man to sacrifice everything - family, wealth and well-being - in order to stand in protest athwart an evil system? For Jimmy Lai it's his Christian faith:

Stories of his self-made riches and pro-democracy bravery dot corporate media, but unless you dig into the columns of those who’d met him, or read Christian news sources, you might miss what actually drives and fortifies him in the face of a vast and relentless enemy. You’d miss why a serial entrepreneur who has spent his life building and creating is willing to give it all up, and you’d miss the truth behind why.

“The Communists,” he told Economic Strategy Institute President Clyde Berkowitz, “think they can buy and or intimidate everyone off, create their own reality, and write their own history. Effectively, they assume the role of God. They are kind of a religion or an anti-religion.”

‘They have initiation into the party as a kind of baptism. They have self-criticism as a kind of confession of sins, re-education as a kind of penance, and elevation to hero of the party as a kind of sainthood. And, of course, at least Mao [Zedong] has a kind of everlasting life as a photo smiling down on Tiananmen Square and as an embalmed corpse in a casket in the square.’

‘But the party and its members do not have souls. In fact, they are dead men walking, because the truth is not in them.’

“Life,” he told the Catholic Napa Institute in an October interview, “is more than just bread; life has a greater meaning.” “If you believe in the Lord,” Lai told the Napa Institute, “if you believe that all suffering has a reason, and the Lord is suffering with me, it will definitely define the person I am becoming so I am at peace with it.”

“I am what I am. I am what I believe. I cannot change it. And if I can’t change it, I have to accept my fate with praise.”

So because Jimmy Lai refuses to bend the knee to the false god of the communists, he languishes today in prison. Meanwhile, American leftists admire the communist regime and American university and corporate executives prostrate themselves before Beijing's ruling class so that they can reap the economic benefits of China's vast market.

Bedford writes:

How many American leaders, how many corporate businessmen, do just that [what Lai has done]? How many executives at Disney and Nike, the NBA and Blizzard Entertainment, in Apple and Hollywood do just that? Maybe no other alive.

Instead, how many of them bow before a thieving, lying, murderous godless slave state in exchange for access to growing markets? How many colleges and universities bow to that state’s every wish and every spy in exchange for paying full tuition into their already bloated coffers? How much do they make? ....

In Western universities and board rooms, souls are cheap. But Lai’s is not. “What separates Jimmy Lai,” a friend in corporate consulting wrote me, “from many of this era’s modern-day princes is that he deeply cares about something beyond his own money, power and status.”

There's something deeply, morally disgusting about the contrast between Lai and our corporate and university elites. It's one thing to acknowledge that few of us, perhaps, would have the courage to make the kind of sacrifice that Jimmy Lai is making, it's entirely another to seek to profit by kissing the feet of people that murder both the body and the spirit of millions of their countrymen and who tyrannize people like Jimmy Lai.

There's more to Bedford's column on Lai at the link.

Michael Ruse on Purpose

Michael Ruse is a philosopher at Florida State University and a prolific author of books and papers on philosophy and biology. In almost all of his books he declares himself to be a Darwinian and an atheist. In one of his most recent offerings, a work titled On Purpose, he talks about how there can be purpose and meaning in a Darwinian world without God.

Along the way he offers his thoughts on several related questions such as the existence of minds, freedom of the will and objective morality.

The book is a little odd in that, being about purpose, it offers little in terms of substantive conclusions about the topic.

The author seems to realize, for example, that his atheistic Darwinian worldview is incompatible with conscious experience, since there's no good scientific explanation for how consciousness or sentience could've arisen from brute matter or how it could be explained in terms of chemical reactions in the brain. So, after some back and forth he concludes by simply waving the problem away, saying that we should take consciousness as a given and "leave the discussion at that."

He comes to a similar conclusion concerning free will. He seems to want to hold on to freedom (it's never quite clear where he stands on some of these questions), but freedom doesn't sit comfortably with his mechanistic view of the world. He bobs and weaves for a bit employing an "on the one hand, but then on the other" discourse, the upshot of which is that people have reasons for what they do so we should just "leave it at that."

Well, that's a suggestion guaranteed to satisfy no one. Are our reasons freely chosen or are they determined by prior reasons? When we act upon our reasons are we free to have acted otherwise or are our reasons determinative?

If we always act upon our strongest reasons how do we know which reasons are our strongest other than by the fact that those are the ones we acted upon? But if Ruse is saying that we always act upon the reasons that we act upon that's hardly helpful, and if we're just going to "leave it at that" what's the point of writing about the problem in the first place?

He wants to discredit religious answers to the questions of meaning and purpose, but in so doing he swats down a battalion of straw men about religious belief and invokes the Euthyphro Dilemma which has been thoroughly rebutted by philosophers for at least fifty years (see here, here and here).

He also poses nonsensical questions like "What if religion is false?" Religious propositions can be true or false, but it makes no sense to ask what if religions are false. It's like asking what if Science is false.

In his final chapter Ruse traipses uncertainly around the question of morality and how it can be grounded on an evolutionary view of things. He answers that it can't:

I argue that once you have given a Darwinian explanation of moral beliefs, you see that there is no foundation. Morality is a set of subjective beliefs, not a reflection of objective, human-independent reality.

He goes on to quote himself from an earlier work, "Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators."

I've argued on many occasions here on VP and in my books that, given Darwinian evolution and atheism, what Ruse says here is exactly right. There's no objective moral right and wrong, only our subjective preferences. But then Ruse tries to smuggle in moral values anyway:

An evolutionarily based morality will have a distinctive form. It would see an obligation to all in need, but would argue that we have a special obligation to some - our children and other relatives particularly.

This is nonsense. Presumably Ruse is basing this on the sociobiological fact that we share more genes in common with our children than with others, but if so, it's a textbook case of trying to derive a moral value from a biological fact. What's the logical connection between being genetically close to someone and having a moral obligation to them?

I assume Ruse would say that the nexus is the proposition that we have a moral obligation to those to whom we're genetically close, but what's the evolutionary justification for that proposition? There is none.

And what basis does Ruse have for claiming that we have an obligation to "all in need"? Why would we? The only reason we have obligations to our fellow man is because the God who created us all and to Whom we must give an account insists that we do.

Ruse, who was raised a Quaker until he was twenty years old, at which time he became an atheist, is nevertheless still living off the moral capital of his Quaker upbringing. The atheistic Darwinism he has since adopted offers no sanction for making moral judgments of any kind.

The FSU professor seems to sense that his argument is unconvincing. He insists, without any support, that something like rape is just wrong and that's the end of the matter: " 'Rape is wrong' means rape is wrong - it's morally prohibited - even if the whole world thinks it's okay."

Well, if the whole world thinks it's okay then by whom is rape morally prohibited? These are the sort of tangles an atheist gets himself tied up in when he tries to affirm objective moral values while denying the existence of an objective moral authority.

Ruse adds this: "Because we think morality is binding on us, we do not cheat - at least, if we do cheat we know that it is wrong." But what does this even mean? What does it mean to say that something is wrong if it violates no objective principle and there's no accountability?

Is it wrong to drive as fast as you please if there's no speed limit and no law enforcement? Cheating is only wrong if there's an objective moral authority who holds us accountable, but on Ruse's worldview there's nothing to restrain our behavior beyond our desire to find approval in the opinions of others.

In the end Ruse seems to give up trying to make the case for a morality based on atheism plus blind, accidental chance (Darwinism) and concludes by saying, "You know what I mean. Let's leave it at that."

Which causes one to wonder, what was the purpose for writing a book on purpose in the first place?

Convolutions of Identity Politics

The intellectual contortions and convolutions of Identity Politics make one's head spin. Here's an example:

Yesterday's post mentioned the concept of "cultural appropriation," surely one of the oddest racial grievances on the current menu of social complaints, since it's so obviously self-defeating for those who invoke it. A post at The American Conservative by Rod Dreher caused me to reflect a bit more on the implications of cultural appropriation for the contemporary phenomenon of transgenderism.

Dreher writes about a man who decided to have surgery to make himself look Korean like his favorite celebrity:

Oli London, a mentally disturbed young Englishman who has a bizarre obsession with the K-pop star Park Jimin, has had many plastic surgeries in an attempt to look like his idol. Now he has finished his surgeries (he says), and believes he looks Korean. Thus, he has announced that he is “transracial” — he is no longer an Englishman, but a Korean. A non-binary Korean.

London claims in the video (at the link) that he's actually had 18 surgeries to make his physical appearance comport with his psychological self-identity. It's very sad, but he poses a pertinent question to his social media critics, one that leads to a chain of further questions. He asks, if people can be transsexual why can't they also be transracial, or trans anything, for that matter?

Good question. What's the significant difference? But here's the problem for our Identity Politics friends who might say that there's no difference and that no one should object to either. According to some of them it's "cultural appropriation" for white persons to, for example, wear their hair in dreadlocks, and cultural appropriation is labelled a form of racism according to the pyramid (about 2/3 of the way down the right side) in yesterday's post.

But if it's "cultural appropriation," and thus racist, for a white person to make himself look black, why is it any less an act of cultural appropriation, and thus racist, to make himself look Korean?

Moreover, as London asks, if it's okay, as it certainly is nowadays, for a man to try to make himself into a woman why is it not okay for a white Brit to try to make himself into an Asian? If it's okay to be transsexual, which is an extreme form of sexual appropriation, why is it wrong to be transracial?

Are some forms of appropriation okay and others not? Is it unacceptably racist for a white woman to adopt the black distinctive of hoop earrings, but totally acceptable to pass herself off as a complete black woman as did Rachel Dolezal a few years back? Why would the former be offensive but the latter not?

And if a white person trying to pass as black does constitute cultural appropriation and is therefore racist, why doesn't a man making himself into a woman constitute sexual appropriation and therefore be sexist? Why isn't the entire trans community being repudiated as a bunch of sexists?

No wonder those who adopt the pyramid reject appeals to logic and rational thinking. There certainly isn't much logical consistency in the concept of cultural appropriation nor Identity Politics in general.

Your Racism Is Unavoidable and Ineradicable

Are you a white supremacist? According to something called the white supremacy pyramid employed by some "anti-racist" speakers you really can't help but be. Note that the pyramid is divided into examples of "Overt White Supremacy" and "Covert White Supremacy."

According to "anti-racists" white supremacy, whether overt or covert, is an expression of racism so if any of the views or opinions anywhere on this pyramid describe you, you are a racist white supremacist.

No one would disagree, of course, with those attitudes depicted as overt white supremacy. They're all harmful and most of them are evil and deserve condemnation. The problem for the anti-racist crowd is that they're so rare that if they were the only manifestations of racism in this country it'd have to be acknowledged that America had pretty much resolved its racial problem.

To avoid thinking that the problem has been largely resolved, to keep racial animus alive and perpetuate the idea that white America still owes black America, the anti-racists espy covert racism almost everywhere. This, we're assured, is the real racism that saturates American life and with which black people have to deal every day.

Here's the pyramid:

It's hard to know exactly what some of these things mean, but in any case notice that,

• if you try to look past a person's race (colorblindness) and treat everyone as a human being and child of God, you're a racist. By this measure embracing Martin Luther King's dream of a day when his children would be judged by their character and not their skin color is racist, and so was King for dreaming it.
• if you believe that our culture was derived primarily from the intellectual resources we inherited from Europe and that this inheritance has made this country the freest, most prosperous country in history and that this heritage should be taught to our children, you're a racist.
• if you were, or are, a Trump supporter who believes that America has wandered away from the institutions and values - like strong two-parent families, Judeo-Christian morality, the belief that hard work tends to be rewarded - that make a nation strong and resilient, you're a racist.
• if you believe that all lives are equally valuable in the eyes of God, you're a racist. But if you believe that God values some lives, based on race, more highly than others then you're also a racist.
• if you believe that many blacks need white help (paternalism) either through transfer payments, donations, affirmative action, or other kinds of support in order to help them become self-reliant, you're a racist. But if you believe blacks shouldn't be given this kind of support you're also a racist.
• if you adopt for yourself aspects of what might be called "black culture" (cultural appropriation) you're a racist. This only works one way, though, since virtually everything that blacks use, enjoy and benefit from throughout their lives is a product of white "European" culture. Of course, if you were to refuse to adopt or appreciate something because its a product of black culture, that, too, would be racist.
• if you believe that we should control our borders and regulate who immigrates into the country, you're a racist.
• if you believe you're not a racist then you are a racist, and if you believe you are a racist then, of course, you are a racist.
• if you believe that black people can be as racist as anyone else then you're a racist. If, on the other hand, you believe that black people cannot be racist then you believe they're morally superior to every other race and that's also racist.

In other words, no matter how hard you may try to expunge your soul of the ugly stain of racism, if you're white it's ineradicable and the purging project is hopeless. But if that's the case where does it lead?

If whites cannot help but be racist might not a lot of them conclude that if no matter what they do they're going to be hectored about their white privilege, their white supremacy and their intrinsic moral failure, they may as well stop trying to treat everyone equally and just stick to people like themselves, racially balkanize, resegregate, and let each race take care of their own?

Resegregation might make the anti-racist crowd happy for a while, but it certainly wouldn't work out to the well-being of the vast majority of blacks who've benefited from having integrated into white society.

I guess to think that, though, is paternalism, and that, according to the pyramid, is also racist.

On Faith and the Multiverse

UC San Diego astrophysicist Brian Keating has an interesting if a bit fast-moving seven and a half minute video up on YouTube that compares belief in the multiverse to religious belief. The video explains the use of the concept of falsifiability in scientific theorizing and is very helpful, except for an error he appears to make in his introductory remarks.

Keating adopts for the sake of discussion the stereotype of belief in God as a belief based on the lack of evidence, which of course is indeed the stereotype but which is wildly mistaken. But he then seems to suggest that evidence for God and faith in God are somehow inversely related to each other as though faith in God's existence decreases as evidence for God's existence increases.

This assumes the Dawkinsian definition of faith, i.e. "belief without evidence," but that definition is quite wrong. It's actually the definition of "blind" faith, but that's not what's meant when thoughtful people talk about faith in God.

Faith is not belief without evidence but rather belief without proof, which is, of course, not the same thing. Indeed, the more evidence one has for any proposition the stronger one's faith in the truth of that proposition generally is, even if one can't prove that it's true.

For example, the more evidence you have that your surgeon has in the past successfully performed operations similar to the one you're planning to have, the more faith you have that he will satisfactorily perform the surgery on you. The more evidence you have that an airline pilot has proven proficient in the past the stronger is your faith that he'll fly you successfully to your destination today.

So far from being somehow contrary to faith, evidence actually strengthens faith. The more evidence there is that God exists, and there's actually a great deal, the more robust one's trust in Him and commitment to Him tends to be. And trust and commitment are two essential components of what people mean when they talk about faith in God.

We might express this as a series of entailments where each entailment in the series is "packed into" the one before it:

Faith in God ---> Belief despite the lack of proof that God exists ---> Love for, and trust in, God ---> Commitment to live the kind of life God desires ---> Treating others with compassion and justice.

Thus, when someone says they have faith that God exists they're actually saying, or should be saying, everything that's entailed by that proposition.

Anyway, here's Keating on the multiverse, evidence, faith and falsifiability:

A Guide to CRT

News reports from around the country have revealed a great deal of discontent among parents with their local school board members who've introduced Critical Race Theory into their children's curricula. MSNBC's Joy Reid complained recently that conservatives, and presumably these parents, who criticize CRT don't really know what it is.

She and others of her ideological persuasion would have us believe that CRT is just a benign attempt to educate students about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. It is, of course, much more than that.

CRT, its own advocates have written, seeks to radically revolutionize America in the name of ending "oppression." It rejects the values of the earlier Civil Rights movement. The idea, for example, that people can, or should strive to be, "color-blind" is rejected. Race is paramount. To not consider race in any interaction is an instance of "white supremacy."

CRT also repudiates racial integration because, proponents argue, it leads to "cultural genocide" as the minority group is absorbed into, and assimilated by, the dominant (white) group.

It rejects classical liberalism and the notion of equality, substituting instead an emphasis on "equity," i.e. the idea that if there are disparities between races in any metric such as mortality rates, life expectancies, incarceration rates, disciplinary actions in schools, etc. they are necessarily the consequence of racism. No other explanation is allowed.

CRT rejects logical reasoning, objectivity, standpoint neutrality and fairness in discussions about race as "white values" and the attempt to adopt these values by People of Color (POC) is to adopt whiteness and to betray one's own race by tacitly affirming the superiority of white values to the values of the oppressed class.

It furthermore rejects the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the principle of blind justice. These ideals, too, are "white."

Its emphasis is on the subjective "lived experience" of POC. Their stories are self-validating. To question them is to engage in an act of white supremacy or racism. The idea that truth is objective is rejected. Knowledge is experiential.

Science and reason are tainted by "whiteness." Statistics are meaningless if they conflict with what a member of the "oppressed class" feels deep in her soul to be true.

It also teaches that whites, and only whites, are inherently racist, nor can they expunge the stain. All they can do is submit to the moral superiority of the oppressed, do some kind of penance and plead for forgiveness, which, if it is granted at all, is only tentative.

Moreover, according to CRT the structures of our society are irremediably saturated with racism and must be torn down. What will replace them, they don't know or say, but, like the Jacobins in 1789 and the Bolsheviks in 1917, it's enough at this point to destroy the old order. The new non-racist order will somehow arise of itself.

Anyone who benefits from this "structural racism" is ipso facto a racist and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist. "Whiteness" refers to anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society regardless of the beneficiary's skin tone. If you're black, but you integrate into the white status quo then you're white regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

But don't take my word for any of this. Instead, watch this video produced by a very bright young man who did his homework and dug into the original sources. His name is Ryan Chapman, and he presents the main points of CRT in a dispassionate, objective fashion that CRT proponents would doubtless dismiss because, after all, Chapman is a white person seeking to be objective, neutral and fair.

Even so, the video is quite good and is a very helpful explication of what the major figures in CRT are themselves saying about it. Maybe Joy Reid should watch it:

Explaining the Origin of the Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without this tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known paper from 1996:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell.

Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes.

Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function....

By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents.

In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves the perhaps unintentional purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this pathway and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (though some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature had no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow conserved and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it takes a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input than to believe that it arose through the agency of a biochemical genius.

On Race and Racism (Pt. II)

Yesterday, we looked at some of philosopher Lawrence Blum's analysis of racism. I'd like today to use some of the ideas he presents as a springboard for further reflection.

Blum states that racism falls into three types or categories:

• Personal racism: Racist acts, beliefs and/or attitudes on the part of individual persons.
• Social racism: Racist beliefs, attitudes and/or stereotypes widely shared within a given population and expressed in social modes such as religion, popular entertainment, advertisements and other media.
• Institutional racism: Racial inferiorizing or antipathy perpetrated by specific social institutions such as schools, corporations, hospitals, banks or the criminal justice system.

Because it's so difficult to find clear-cut examples of personal or social racism in contemporary culture some race theorists have resorted to arguing that the real problem today is not so much individual racism but rather a systemic racism that indelibly stains the structures and institutions of society.

There are, however, at least two problems with this assertion:

First, the evidence that's cited in support of the claim that our institutions are systemically racist usually consists in perceived disparities in how people of different races are treated, but disparities are a very problematic litmus test for detecting racism since they can result from a host of causes that have nothing to do with racism.

To illustrate why disparity is not in itself a good indicator of institutional racism let me cite a couple of examples of how disparities might be thought to show individual racism:

A high school English teacher may find in grading essays that black students are disproportionately less likely to use standard grammar in their writing.

If she penalizes their papers for this short-coming and black students are consequently not well-represented among the better achieving students in the class, is the teacher's act racist? Should she not hold all her students to the same standard? If she allows black students leeway on their use of substandard English that she would not grant to white students, would not that be racist?

Or, suppose it's found that a school punishes black students for misbehavior more severely than it does white students who commit similar offenses. The disparity in treatment seems to be prima facie evidence of racism, but there are many factors that go into the school's disciplinary decisions beyond just the immediate offense.

When students are confronted by school authorities for their misdeeds some lie, some yell obscenities and threats at the teacher or administrator, some violently resist being removed from the classroom.

The punishment the school administers often takes into account all of these exacerbating factors as well as such matters as the student's prior record of conduct. To ignore these factors while claiming that the disparity in discipline between whites and blacks who committed the same basic offense reveals racism on the part of the school authorities is simplistic, misleading and unhelpful.

Actual genuine disparate treatment on the basis of race is, in any case, illegal. A landlord who seeks ways to avoid renting to blacks, for instance, is culpable before the law and can be prosecuted.

The second problem with the notion of systemic, institutional racism is that institutions can't in themselves be racist, only people can. There's no such thing as "racism without racists." If racism does pervade some institution like banks, realty agencies or churches, it's because the individuals who developed the policies and practices of the institution and who currently carry them out were and are themselves racist.

In other words, institutional or "systemic" racism is merely the outward manifestation of the individual racism of the people employed by the institution.

To seek to perpetuate the notion of a racist America, despite finding so few individual racists, by locating the evil in the structures of society is to make a category mistake. It is to impute to an impersonal entity, an institution, a moral sin of which only persons can be guilty.

Here's another point to consider about the use of the word racism:

People tend to think that anyone who does or says something racially insensitive is a racist. This is an example of what Blum calls "conceptual inflation." Someone who flies the Confederate flag may have no racist motives but be unaware of the significance the flag has for others.

A person is no more a racist because something they said or did was born of ignorance or insensitivity than a person is cruel because they said something hurtful without realizing that it was hurtful.

When considering whether to label something as racist we should bear in mind that motive matters. If there's no intent on the part of one person to inferiorize or express antipathy toward another on the basis of the other's race then it's wrong to call that person a racist, even if their words or deeds were thoughtless or inconsiderate. Being racially insensitive or unaware is not the same thing as being racist.

There's much more in Blum's book that's of interest on this topic, but I want to close with a question posed by the authors of the textbook in which Blum's extract appears. Blum repeatedly asserts that racism is a moral evil worthy of our revulsion and opprobrium, so here's the question the authors of the text ask us to ponder: "How would you explain to someone from Mars why racism is wrong?"

Is racism wrong because it harms people? What about racist beliefs a person holds upon which she never acts and thus never result in harm? Are they not still wrong nonetheless? Why?

And why is it wrong to harm someone anyway? Why was it wrong for the Spaniards to torture and slaughter indigenous people in Central America in the 16th century or for plantation owners in the West indies to work African slaves in the hot sun until they dropped dead from exhaustion and disease? If they had the power to do these things, if they were never called to account for doing them, if they died content in their old age after decades of having caused others to suffer, what makes their acts wrong?

The theist who believes we are all made in the image of a God who loves us and commands us to love and respect each other and who will ultimately hold us accountable for how we treat others has an answer to these questions.

The secular man who believes there is no God or that God is irrelevant has no persuasive answer. For him the only answer to the question "why is racism wrong?" is that, well, it just is, and that answer doesn't, or shouldn't, convince any thinking person.

On Race and Racism (Pt. I)

We're often told that we need to have a serious "conversation about race" in this country, but unfortunately there are complications attendant upon any such conversation.

One is that for all the current talk about race, many scientists believe it to be an artificial category or social construct. They've concluded that there are, actually, no distinct racial types.

For example, University of California professor Tanya Golash-Boza writes that the notion of race has no basis in biology. To be sure, there are obvious physical differences between Kenyans, Swedes and Chinese, but it doesn't follow that the world can be divided into discrete racial groups. There's actually a continuous series of incremental gradations between these groups, and this fact makes it difficult to tell where to draw the line between one group and another.

Even the genetic differences between Kenyans and Swedes are not as great as the genetic variation just among Kenyans. Thus, the claim that race is a social, rather than a biological, construction.

As much as I'd like to accept this myself, preferring as I do to think of humanity as a single "kind" created in the image of God, I'm not sure the gradual gradation argument holds up. It's like arguing that because the color red shades imperceptibly to orange and then to yellow and so on to violet across the spectrum making it hard to know where to draw the line between the various colors, that therefore red, violet and the others are really not distinct hues.

It's also difficult, for that matter, to know where to draw the line between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, but it doesn't follow that there's no significant difference between these stages of life.

And biologists have difficulty knowing where to draw the line between life and non-life, but surely there's a difference.

With regard to race, perhaps it's more reasonable to say that humanity is all one biological species manifesting a spectrum of characteristics that tend to cluster around what we might call discrete racial types than to say that because it's hard to draw the line between one racial group and another that therefore there's no basis for distinguishing between them.

In other words, as much as many of us, myself included, would like to get beyond thinking of people in terms of race, the concept of race is admittedly useful even if it's not grounded in any significant biological distinctions.

A second complication in our discussions about race is the promiscuous use of the word racism.

The word is tossed around rather freely, but its users rarely do us the favor of defining what they mean by it. Perhaps there's a reason for that. It's very difficult to give a clear definition that does the work that many who wield the term want it to do.

In their textbook Philosophy the Quest for Truth Louis Pojman and Lewis Vaughn write this:

Racism begins with the belief that races exist and can be differentiated by significant moral, intellectual or cultural characteristics. This supposition ...however, is not itself racism.

According to philosopher and race scholar Lawrence Blum, what transforms the assumption about race into racism is the addition of the belief that 1) some races are inferior to others in important respects or 2) some races deserve disdain, hatred, or hostility.

Blum labels these two factors inferiorization and antipathy.

Pojman and Vaughn go on to state, "But if inferiorization and antipathy are the heart of racism, then many actions, attitudes, institutions, and people that are being called racist don't deserve the label."

Indeed, as helpful as Blum's criteria are, the inferiorization criterion raises the question of what constitute "important respects." Clearly, moral and intellectual differences would qualify, but why not physical differences? What grounds do we have for saying that a race of pygmies is not inferior to a race of giants?

Does it not depend upon the context in which physical differences are relevant? And if the context matters is it not fair to say that whites and Asians in the U.S. are physically inferior to blacks in ways that suit people for athletic activities like basketball, football and Olympic sprinting?

What grounds do we have for saying that those forms of inferiority are irrelevant, and if they're not irrelevant is it racist to recognize that kind of racial inferiority? And if physical differences are relevant then anyone who's aware of the dominance of blacks in some American professional sports would be a racist according to Blum's inferiorization criterion, because they believe that whites and Asians are physically inferior to blacks in ways that are clearly significant in American culture.

Blum is no doubt correct that racism often does involve inferiorization, but a belief that, generally speaking, one race is superior to another in some relevant respect doesn't necessarily entail that the person holding the belief is racist. If it did, then everyone - black, white and yellow - who acknowledges the physical superiority of blacks on the basketball court or on the track would be a racist, which would render the term useless.

For his inferiorization criterion to be helpful Blum needs to specify what forms of inferiority are relevant in assessing racism, and which aren't, without simply making arbitrary judgments.

Blum's second criterion, antipathy based on race, is perhaps less problematic. He writes that racial antipathy "encompasses racial bigotry, hostility, and hatred" toward a racial group, based on a "faulty and inflexible generalization" about that group.

This, though, presents an irony since much of the race-based bigotry, hostility and hatred we see in our current culture is found in the black population and according to the shibboleths of the day, black people cannot be racist. Nevertheless, pace those who would absolve blacks of the stain of racism, there's no good reason to think that blacks, or any other group, are somehow exempt from this particular human sin or that whites are uniquely afflicted by it.

Surely, when a black theologian prays that God will help her to hate white people she's indulging in racism. When a black murderer tells police he wanted to kill white men surely that's racism. When black speakers tell their audiences that "all white people are racists" that's surely an expression of racial bigotry that rises to the level of racism.

Blum points out that inferiorizing and racial antipathy are distinct. Not everyone who inferiorizes other races has antipathy toward them. They "may have a paternalistic concern and feelings of kindness for persons they regard as their inferiors...."

This is the kind of racism often found among liberals who seem to believe that blacks are helpless unless assisted by white benefactors. it's racism, but it's hardly the virulent sort of racism we normally think of when we hear the word.

"Conversely," he writes, "not every race hater regards the target of her hatred as inferior." In the United States, for example, at least some of the current hostility toward Asians and Jews is driven by resentment spawned by a belief, perhaps subliminal, that the hater is actually in some way inferior to those he hates.

Nevertheless, despite some caveats, Blum's analysis is helpful overall. Inferiorization is often, though not always, a sign of racism, and racial antipathy almost always is.

We'll look at more of Blum's analysis tomorrow.

Two Fighters Named Clay

I've written in the past that despite my opposition to the Antifa and BLM types tearing down statues that mark our historical and cultural heritage there are some statutes that I think should be pulled down. I wrote about one of them here.

I also think there are some people who may not be honored with a statue but should be. One of these is a man whose name, despite being unwisely spurned by a world-famous athlete, will sound familiar to almost any American reader of mature years.

The name is Cassius Clay, and Michael Medved gives us a portrait of this very colorful and courageous abolitionist in a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:

Born in 1810, Clay defied his slave-owning and influential Kentucky family when he became an abolitionist during his student days at Yale. A speech by William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery advocate for emancipation, struck him “as water to a thirsty wayfarer.” Returning home after graduation in 1832, he won four terms in the state Legislature despite his unpopular antislavery views.

Clay’s second cousin (and occasional political sponsor) was the state’s most celebrated citizen: Henry Clay, the House speaker and longtime senator.

Clay didn't just argue for abolition and then flee the wrath of his fellow Kentuckians. He was a fighter:

While other antislavery agitators fled the South to escape intimidation and violence, Clay used his inherited wealth to set up an uncompromising abolitionist newspaper in Lexington, named True American. After fighting off a mob of 60 who tried to smash his printing presses, Clay installed two cannons to protect his premises.

He also funded Berea College, a Christian institution that became the first college in the South to welcome black students and women.

Though Clay might have continued in the role of philanthropist and humanitarian, his combative nature pushed him toward provocation and confrontation. Henry Clay’s biographers David and Jeanne Heidler wrote of Cassius: “A venomous pen was his first weapon of choice, a bowie knife his second, and because he was so effective with the one, he found it wise to have the other handy.”

After a heated public debate in 1843, a hired killer assaulted him and aimed a shot directly to his chest. While struggling to remove the bowie knife from the leather scabbard he carried on his belt, Clay unintentionally pulled up the sheath over his stomach. The would-be assassin’s bullet struck the scabbard and lodged itself into the silver blade, before Cash used the knife to slice off his assailant’s nose and an ear.

Six years later, the pro-slavery Turner Brothers—six of them—attacked Clay with cudgels and knives during a public meeting at Foxtown, stabbing him repeatedly in the back before Thomas Turner, the group’s leader, pulled out his revolver. The trigger jammed three times, giving Clay the chance to gut another brother, Cyrus, with his knife, a fatal blow that dispersed his attackers.

                                                      Cassius Marcellus Clay

It's astonishing that this man who risked his life in the anti-slavery cause is not more widely known. Medved tells us more about his military service and personal life and then concludes with this:

[The] “Lion of White Hall” remained active and embattled into extreme old age. To deal with ever-present threats on his life, in his 80s he added two pistols to the bowie knife as part of his personal armament. When he died at 92, his survivors listed the cause of death as “general exhaustion.”

To honor the memory of the famous and fearless abolitionist, one Herman Heaton Clay, whose ancestors had been enslaved by the Clay family, named his own son Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. The young man became world-famous 22 years later with an astonishing, underdog boxing victory against heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.

Shortly thereafter the young fighter jettisoned the name of the old fighter who had inspired his father, and chose to call himself Muhammad Ali, an affirmation of his newfound Muslim faith.

Without any acknowledgment of the daring, dangerous commitment to emancipation that characterized the life of his namesake, the new champ disparaged Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. as “a slave name.” He said: “I didn’t choose it and I don’t want it. . . . Why would I keep my white slave master’s name visible and my black ancestors invisible, unknown, unhonored?”

Surely Ali didn't know the kind of man his father named him for. I like to think that had he known who Cassius Clay was he'd have been proud to bear the name. As it is, Clay the abolitionist is himself almost invisible, unknown and unhonored.

Self-Defense Is Terrorism

After the 11 day war between Hamas and Israel last month Egypt has been trying to negotiate a long-term truce, but the talks are stalled because Hamas refuses to allow reconstruction aid sent to Gaza to be monitored. Hamas wants to use the aid to rebuild the bunkers and tunnels that Israel destroyed, but the donor countries want it to go to housing and other civilian infrastructure for the Gazan Palestinians.

Strategy Page notes:

During the May bombing campaign it became obvious that Hamas military construction efforts in Gaza since 2014 were made possible by diverting most of the reconstruction aid to building new tunnels, bunkers and other military fortifications. That meant the materials donated for rebuilding housing and infrastructure had no impact on the sorry state of housing and infrastructure in Gaza.

This is one of the reasons Gazans blame (quietly, among themselves) Hamas more than Israel for the current damage and support the construction supervision demands of Israel and Egypt.

Hamas continues to insist its primary purpose is to destroy Israel and rebuilding tunnels and bunkers is part of that. Egypt is losing patience with Hamas but wants to maintain its ability to mediate deals with Hamas.

This is in spite of Hamas openly allying itself with Iran, an archenemy of Egypt and openly calling for the replacement of the current Egyptian government with one more accommodating to the needs of Islamic terrorists and Iran.

Despite the stated aims of Hamas, or maybe because of them, lots of people on the left in the U.S. are openly hostile toward the Israelis for defending themselves. The left, folks like Ilhan Omar and other members of "The Squad," is affronted that Israel refuses to acquiesce in its own destruction.

Six days after hostilities began, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Israel an apartheid state, capping off a week of bold statements from progressives including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Betty McCollum, who reintroduced a bill restricting Israel’s use of military aid in April.

House progressives and Senator Bernie Sanders also offered resolutions opposing the sale of $735 million in American weapons to Israel.

Omar tweeted on Monday that: "Israeli air strikes killing civilians in Gaza is an act of terrorism. Palestinians deserve protection. Unlike Israel, missile defense programs, such as Iron Dome, don’t exist to protect Palestinian civilians. It’s unconscionable to not condemn these attacks on the week of Eid."

Evidently, in Omar's muddled thinking, self-defense constitutes terrorism and should be condemned. The article at Strategy Page also had this:

[During the 11-day war with Hamas in Gaza] the Hamas surprise rocket attacks were much less effective than during the 51-day war in 2014. Although Hamas fired over three times as many rockets in 2021 Israeli casualties and losses were much less than in 2014. Hamas losses were higher, especially in terms of tunnels and bunkers located and destroyed, often only after Hamas gunmen or leaders were detected taking shelter in them.

Over the last decade Israel has developed software that performs much more effectively at analyzing aerial digital photos along with data obtained from more abundant and powerful electronic sensors. The use of digital photos made it possible to use software systems to look for threats and even their patterns of operation.

These new technologies made Israeli target detection and target attacks much faster and effective than in the past. The 2021 war demonstrated new Israeli fire control and civil-defense systems as well as new anti-aircraft and missile systems. There were new ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) systems that were only mentioned in passing, without any details.

One sympathizes with the Palestinian people who groan under the brutal oppression of Hamas and suffer as a result of the security measures Israel is forced to take because of the ceaseless machinations of its implacable enemy in Gaza. Nevertheless, to fault Israel for trying to eliminate those who are trying to kill them and their children is ludicrous.

Fathers

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said many things in that book that needed to be said, especially after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then.

Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Tomorrow is Father's Day in the U.S. so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others.

Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men.

It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Meanwhile, Dennis Prager offers some excellent insights of his own in this short video:

Is the World an Illusion?

King’s College philosopher of physics Alexander Franklin wishes to stress that “everyday reality is not an illusion. There really is a world outside our minds." Perhaps so, but there's a more interesting question, I think, concerning the world of which he speaks. More on that in a moment.

Here's an excerpt from a piece at Mind Matters on Professor Franklin's argument:

Popular science often tells us that we are radically deceived by the commonplace appearance of everyday objects and that colour and solidity are illusions. For instance, the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington distinguished in 1928 between two tables: the familiar table and the scientific table, while the former is solid and coloured, the scientific table “is nearly all empty space”.

Eddington then makes the striking claim that “modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there”.

Franklin’s essay in response is a plea for Emergentism (the reality we experience emerges from more basic principles), as opposed to what he calls “Illusionism,” the popular belief that it is all an illusion. Along the way, he offers a useful interpretation of the empty space “table,” in terms of quantum physics (the behavior of elementary particles).

Franklin argues that, according to quantum mechanics, an electron in orbit around an atomic nucleus actually occupies the entire orbit, more like the surface of a hollow ball than like a solitary planet orbiting the sun. Thus, there really is no empty space in the orbit and therefore the table's solidity is not an illusion.

This is a bit misleading, though. The atom is in fact mostly empty space. Even if the electrons can be thought of as existing everywhere in their orbits at once, there's a relatively enormous amount of space between orbits. If, for instance, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom were made the size of a bb and placed on second base in a major league stadium, it's lone electron would be orbiting out around the upper deck.

If our hydrogen atom, represented by the bb on second base, was bonded to another hydrogen atom, the nucleus of the second atom, or bb, would be out in the parking lot somewhere. That's a lot of empty space.

Nevertheless, the more interesting question, at least for me, is not whether the solidity of Eddington's table is an illusion but rather how much of what we experience when we observe the table is objectively there in the table and how much of what we observe is actually a creation of our minds.

For example, suppose the table is painted green. We'd say that the table is green, but, of course, the table itself is not any color at all. The sensation of green is in our brains or minds. The paint merely reflects light energy of a certain wavelength to our eye and our visual sense in concert with our brain/mind translates that energy into a sensation of green.

The same is true of the sensations we have of sound, taste, warmth, smell, etc. The stimuli which give rise to these sensations may be generated by objects, but the sensations they produce are in us.

In other words, were there were no perceivers, no one to observe the world, there would be no color, flavor, sound, warmth or odor - just colorless, tasteless, odorless, soundless matter and energy flying about. Just as there'd be no pain if no one felt it, there'd be no color or sound if no one saw or heard it.

This being so, we might ask what is the world in itself really like apart from our perception of it? How much of what we call reality do our senses/brains/minds actually create and how much is objectively independent of our perceptions?

We might also wonder how much of our understanding of the world is a function of our size? Suppose the table appears smooth to us. Would it appear smooth to a bacterium? The table appears solid to us, but pace professor Franklin, it certainly doesn't appear solid to a neutrino, tens of thousands of which pass through every square inch of everything on earth (including us) every second.

Here's another question: How much different would the world appear to us if we had six or seven senses? A man born blind has no concept of light or color. How much different would this world appear to him were he suddenly able to see? Likewise, what experiences would the world present to us if we had the additional senses with which to experience them?

We go through life thinking that the world is just the way we perceive it to be, but why should we think such a thing? The world may be far stranger, far different, than our five senses can discern.