Truth and Trust

In 2016, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in his final book before his death last November (Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times), the Oxford English Dictionary declared the term post-truth to be its "word of the year."

Oxford's dictionary defines post-truth as an adjective denoting the circumstance that objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Britain's Lord Hall, director-general of the BBC, warned that the world is facing "the biggest assault on truth since the 1930's." Sacks writes that according to a Pew Research Center report,

A majority of Americans now view fake news as a more serious problem than terrorism, illegal immigration, racism or sexism. Almost seven in ten say it undermines confidence in government. Fifty four percent say it damages people's confidence in one another.

In other words, a majority of Americans doesn't believe that their media is telling them the "real" truth about what they report, but where there's no confidence that what we hear is true there'll surely be no trust.

Our society, Sacks argues, has arrived at the point where our skepticism about the possibility of truth is corroding trust, not just in our media but in all our institutions as well as our interpersonal relationships. This is the legacy of our postmodern age.

When "truth" becomes whatever has appeal to the listener, whatever comports with his or her own beliefs, biases, and predilections, when you have your truth and I have mine, then what basis do we have for trusting each other?

How have we come to such a predicament? Entire books have been written on that question, but perhaps the short answer is, to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we have forgotten God.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) foresaw the consequences of man's abandonment of God in the second half of the 19th century. He realized, long before it dawned on many of his fellow atheists, that if God does not exist then there's no objective standard for truth nor for morality.

"There is no truth, " Nietzsche declared, "there are only interpretations."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Because there is no objective truth, there's no reason why anyone should aspire to be truthful, and if there's no God there's no objective moral obligation to be truthful anyway. The moral duty to be truthful is an anachronism, according to Nietzsche, a holdover from the Christian belief that God imposes the duty of truthfulness upon us: In The Gay Science he writes:

Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are not moral? .... we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.

Put differently, in Nietszche's day men had rejected God but they still tried to hold on to belief in truth, especially moral truth. Nietszche saw that you can't do it. You can't have one without the other.

If you want to make moral judgments and discern truth from falsehood then you have to undergird that with a theistic worldview. If you don't want theism, you have to be willing to foresake truth, morality and trust as well.

A world that no longer believes in God will soon enough stop believing in truth, including moral truth, and when truth no longer matters trust will soon die, and when that happens, Rabbi Sacks warns, society will be well on the road to complete disintegration.

Multiple Layers of Information

The theory of naturalistic evolution holds that unguided, unintelligent physical processes like genetic mutation and natural selection have blindly, over vast stretches of time, generated a huge increase in information. Evolution started with simple molecules and has produced the extravagant diversity of complex living things we see all around us, but this theory has a serious conflict with modern genetics.

Biochemist Michael Behe argues in his book Darwin Devolves that much of what is thought to be evolutionary progress is actually devolution from higher levels of information to lower levels. This comes about when genes are broken in one fashion or another, the loss of the broken gene allowing other genes to express themselves differently (See the video series Secrets of the Cell).

This, however, means that for change to have occurred there must have been a greater amount of genetic information at the start than at the culmination which is exactly opposite of what the standard evolutionary model states. Why is it so hard for evolution to proceed in the way normally supposed by the standard theory and which most high school students are taught? Geneticist John Sanford explains:

Most DNA sequences are poly-functional and therefore must also be poly-constrained. This means that DNA sequences have meaning on several different levels (poly-functional) and each level of meaning limits possible future change (poly-constrained).

For example, imagine a sentence that has a very specific message in its normal form but with an equally coherent message when read backwards.

Now let's suppose it also has a third message when reading every other letter and a fourth message when a simple encryption program is used to translate it. Such a message would be poly-functional and poly-constrained.

We know that misspellings in a normal sentence will not normally improve the message, but at least this would be possible.

However, a poly-constrained message is fascinating, in that it cannot be improved. It can only degenerate. Any misspellings which might possibly improve the normal sentence will be disruptive to the other levels of information.

Any change at all will diminish information with absolute certainty....Changing anything seems to potentially change everything!

Thus, almost any change in an organisms DNA would be catastrophic for the organism, but if this is so how did complex organisms with high levels of information encoded in their DNA evolve from simpler organisms with lower levels of information?

The answer we often hear from our Neo-Darwinian friends goes something like this: "It must've happened somehow because we know evolution is true, and we know its true because here we are!"

Well, yes, we might reply, but couldn't there be some other explanation for how we got here? To that query our friends often give an answer something like, "The only other live explanation is that we were created by a supernatural Being, but we know that's false because we know there's no such Creator."

And how do we know there's no such Creator? we might ask. "Because," we're assured, "Darwinian evolution has made such a being unnecessary and irrelevant."

Hmmm. Somewhere in that chain of "reasoning" a circular argument or two seems to be lurking.

Why the Cubans, Mr. President?

I have from time to time made the tongue-in-cheek observation that if the migrants pressing on our southern border could be expected to vote Republican the Democrats would be themselves down there with sleeves rolled up building a barrier to rival the Great Wall of China to keep them out.

Of course, that was just a surmise for which I had no real evidence. Until now. Hot Air's Allahpundit notes that the Biden administration has recently declared that any refugees seeking to enter the United States without proper authorization will be turned away and sent to wait in another country.

He wonders why that policy applies to people arriving by sea but not by land. Why is the Biden administration adopting for Cubans what was essentially Trump's Remain in Mexico policy for migrants seeking to enter the U.S. through the southern border, but not applying it to those migrants arriving through Mexico?

And as others have noted, it's odd (not really) that there's no outrage among Democrats or their media mouthpieces over the "cruelty" of closing our borders to people fleeing the oppression of a communist dictatorship. Yet we were constantly told that Trump's policy of not letting in migrants from across the Rio Grande was "inhumane" and "not our values."

Moreover, isn't it true that many of these potential Cuban refugees would be people of color? Why aren't there protests over the blatant racism of the Biden policy of slamming the door shut so that people of color can't get in? Trump was certainly harangued by cries of racism because he was building a wall that would keep dark-skinned Hispanics out.

So, where is the outrage from Democrats and the majority of the mainstream media? Why are these “cruel” policies toward potential dark-skinned migrants fleeing economic hardship and brutal oppression at the hands of a tyrannical government not being denounced as cruel racism? The silence, Harsanyi says, is almost deafening.

Well, perhaps we need not look too deeply into these questions to find plausible answers. Jazz Shaw, also at Hot Air, notes:

Compared to other Hispanic minority groups, Cubans tend to be more conservative in their politics and are more likely to register as Republicans. Trump overperformed with Cuban-Americans in 2020, a fact that very likely put him over the top in carrying Florida.

So with the Democrats in charge, it seems that the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and the wretched refuse of your teeming shore doesn’t include the Cubans.

Nor anyone else likely to vote Republican, but if this is the reason for pulling up the drawbridge so Cubans can't get in, it's a shameful disgrace. Yet what other reason could there be?

Some have suggested that Mr. Biden doesn't want thousands of people risking the treacherous 90 mile trip across the Caribbean, but the thousand mile trek across Mexico with heat, cartel coyotes and sundry other thugs is scarcely safer.

Others may be closer to the mark when they point out that Democrats don't want an influx of refugees coming from Cuba because it makes that socialist paradise look bad, and so it does and so it should, but if that's the reason for the difference in policies it's just as ignoble as keeping them out for fear that the Cubans will bolster the GOP in Florida.

Perhaps Mr. Biden will favor us with an explanation, but perhaps not. Perhaps even he realizes that nothing he can say would make what should be a humanitarian decision sound like anything other than a cold, heartless political calculation.

Darwin's Racism and Sexism

I mentioned a few days ago that Allison Hopper's essay in Scientific American was so absurd as to be embarrassing to both her and the journal which published it (See Hopper's Whoppers).

Her thesis was, essentially, that it's somehow racist of Darwin skeptics to reject the evolutionary paradigm. She writes, for instance, that she wants to “unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.”

Yet it was the 19th century Darwinians who provided the very scientific justification seized upon by the racists who came along at the end of that century and the first fifty years or so of the 20th century.

In an article at Evolution News Michael Flannery states that,

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s indefatigable “Bulldog,” wrote a shameful essay on May 20, 1865, shortly after the conclusion of the American Civil War. He suggested that the South should be relieved given that it was no longer responsible for the care and “protection” of the now-former slaves.

He declared that no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.” A reform-minded American Darwinist, Charles Loring Brace, concurred.

Richard Weikart, author of the book From Darwin to Hitler, writes that, contrary to Ms Hopper's allegations,

...the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy.

In a 2017 article in his Radix journal, Richard Spencer, a leading figure on the white supremacist Alt-Right argued that “Group differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection” and “racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution.”

This is a commonplace view among white supremacists, as you can easily discover by looking at white supremacist websites and print publications.

...most people today who reject evolution, which includes many people of color, are not racists. On the other hand, most of the leading white supremacists today embrace evolutionary theory with alacrity.

In a piece at Science Princeton anthropologist Augustin Fuentes, who is sympathetic to Darwin, nevertheless points out the harmful opinions he expresses in his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Fuentes writes:

...some of Darwin's other assertions were dismally, and dangerously, wrong. “Descent” is a text from which to learn, but not to venerate....“Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin's day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity.

Darwin portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less than Europeans in capacity and behavior. Peoples of the African continent were consistently referred to as cognitively depauperate, less capable, and of a lower rank than other races.

....yet he still, baselessly, asserted evolutionary differences between races. He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.”

This too is confounding given Darwin's robust stance against slavery.

Well, if I may be permitted a quibble, Fuentes seems to be mistakenly assuming that opposition to slavery necessarily entails that one regards the enslaved as in all respects equal to the rest of humanity, but that's clearly not so.

A number of abolitionists who opposed slavery nevertheless thought that blacks were inferior to whites.

One need not think the "races" are in every sense equal to see that chattel slavery is a moral evil. Nor must one think that everyone is in every sense equal to everyone else in order to believe that everyone should be treated equally under the law.

But that aside, Darwin's chauvinism didn't end at race. It extended also to sex. Fuentes notes that:

In “Descent,” Darwin identified women as less capable than (White) men, often akin to the “lower races.” He described man as more courageous, energetic, inventive, and intelligent, invoking natural and sexual selection as justification...

Fuentes acknowledges and laments the influence Darwin has had ever since on public attitudes about race and gender:

Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements “validated” by their presence in “Descent” as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.

So, should Darwin's statues be taken down?

No, but I don't know how activist wokesters can demand that statues of southern slave owners and Confederate generals be toppled while Darwin, whose views actually provided much of the intellectual rationale for 19th and 20th century racism, remains placidly ensconced in Shrewsbury and at the London Museum of Natural History.

Darwin Statue in Shrewsbury, England

Darwin Statue at London Museum of Natural History

William Galston on CRT

Former Clinton administration official and current Wall Street Journal contributor William Galston has a piece in Wednesday's Journal (subscription required) that highlights a few of the most troubling aspects of Critical Race Theory.

Here are some excerpts from his column. The quotes are from two of the seminal CRT thinkers Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado and their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:

He [Delgado] writes that critical race theory “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

This would seem to mean that CRT opposes the idea that all persons should be treated equally under the law and that the law should not aspire to be neutral in regard to the race of those who come under its purview. By questioning the validity of Enlightenment Rationalism it also apparently questions, or more accurately, rejects, the idea that reason and logic should be employed to settle disagreements and to establish policy.

It builds on critical legal studies and radical feminism, the work of European theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the American radical tradition, including the Black Power and Chicano movements of the 1960s and early ’70s.

Gramsci, of course, was a communist and the Black Power movement was separationist. CRT substitutes race for class in Marxist theory and rejects the ideal of racial integration. Just as Gramsci's Marxism promoted the revolution of the oppressed classes, so, too, does CRT theory require a revolution that would completely overturn the social order. It would essentially seek to make whites the oppressed class.

Citing Delgado and Stefancic Galston proceeds to describe some of the key tenets of critical race theory:

These propositions include the belief that racism is ordinary, “the usual way that society does business,” not aberrational; and that “triumphalist history”—the confidence that the legislation and court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s set the U.S. on the course of irresistible racial progress—neglects social backlash and legal retreat.

Liberal approaches to racism, such as colorblindness and neutral principles of law, can fix only the worst abuses. But if racism is deeply embedded in thought processes and social structures, they say, then only “aggressive, color-conscious efforts” to change the status quo can make a difference.

Or, to quote another theorist Ibram X. Kendi in his book How to Be an Antiracist, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

Presumably, what Kendi means is that the laws must be tilted to advantage blacks even if this disadvantages whites and Asians, and if blacks are being discriminated against today, whites and Asians must be discriminated against tomorrow.

It's not a prescription likely to engender racial harmony.

Here's Galston,

“White privilege”—the unspoken, unseen advantages that whites enjoy—is a key aspect of these social structures. Changing laws without undoing the “racial subordination” inherent in white privilege will not get us very far.

Incrementalism is a bankrupt strategy; “everything must change at once.” The logical conclusion is that to overcome racism, we need a cultural revolution.

The case against affirmative action, we are told, rests on “an implicit assumption of innocence on the part of the white person” this policy displaces. The guilty parties are the beneficiaries of affirmative action who take what does not rightfully belong to them.

But if racism is “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained,” as critical race theorists insist, then “no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” Because all whites benefit from a system of unearned advantage, race-conscious remedies simply rectify that injustice.

This “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained” racism is, however, notoriously difficult to pinpoint. The burden of proof that it exists despite being invisible rests on the person making the claim, and mere racial disparities are not even compelling evidence, let alone proof of systemic racism.

Galston concludes with this:

I have barely scratched the surface of this complex movement in these paragraphs. But one thing is clear: Because the Declaration of Independence — the founding document of the American liberal order — is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation.

Yes, and those who advocate teaching this to our children are advocating teaching our children to despise both their nation and its history, their own "whiteness," and ultimately their own selves.

Little wonder that parents all across the nation are outraged that both the NEA and the AFT have endorsed teaching CRT (see the link) and thousands of teachers have pledged to teach it in defiance of state laws which prohibit it.

The Culture War Is a Long War

Tanner Greer has written a very interesting essay at a site called Scholar's Stage titled Culture Wars Are Long Wars.

Although he doesn't mention philosopher Thomas Kuhn and his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his essay could be seen as an application of Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts in science to the sphere of culture and politics.

Greer begins with this lede:

We are told that conservatives “lost the culture war.” I dissent from this view: American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that.

They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture.

Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation.

No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

Greer believes that politics is downstream from culture, to use the late Andrew Breitbart's phrase, and as such the political fight that Republicans have waged is really the wrong fight. Unless the culture is changed political remediation will only be effective around the margins.

I have to register a minor disagreement at this point. It seems to me that what's needed in the present day is actually a two-pronged attempt to change both the culture and the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics because culture and politics are both influenced and changed by the other.

The law is a teacher, and when laws are changed the people are instructed and the culture is changed. The Civil Rights acts of the fifties and sixties were imposed on a majority population that was largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the plight of black people in America, but the law roused the majority from their slumbers.

Aristotle lends his considerable authority to this view when he writes that,

The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions....Lawgivers make the citizens good by inculcating (good) habits in them...if he does not succeed in doing that his legislation is a failure.

Anyway, Greer continues:

Cultures can be changed; movements can be built. But as these examples all suggest, this is not a quick task. Culture wars are long wars. Instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time—usually two to three generations of time. It is a 35-50 year process....

This is all true although I wish Greer would've explained how a culture - and politics - can be changed apart from a religious awakening.

With regard to religion he offers this insight which is also on the mark:

America’s future is godless not because the God-fearing were convinced of the errors of their faith, but because their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren never adopted their faith to start out with.

Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.

This is Kuhn's paradigm shift. Kuhn writes that scientific theories are rarely overthrown by the generations which initially championed them. What happens instead is that too many discoveries accumulate that the theory can't explain. The younger generation of scientists that doesn't have the professional and emotional investment in the theory that their elders have, become skeptical.

As the older generation retires and dies away their younger successors are freed up to promote a new theoretical paradigm which accounts for most of the anomalies and which ultimately supplants the old theory.

I think this is happening today with intelligent design which will, I think, eventually supplant a clunky, arthritic Neo-Darwinism as the old line Neo-Darwinists shuffle off the stage.

Greer elaborates on the cultural paradigm shift in the following:

....almost all “social” or “value laden” attitudes are established early in life and are then maintained throughout it. The “formative events” of one’s youth truly are formative.

The ideas, attitudes, and social pressures of one’s youth have a similar impact on one’s worldview, even after the conditions that created these pressures have long disappeared.

Cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort. They can, however, build up a system of ideas and institutions which will preserve and refine the ideals they hope their community will adopt in the future.

The real target of these ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren. Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn.

Future generations will be open to values, religious, political and cultural, that the current generation rejects outright.

This will not be apparent at first. Beneath the official comings and goings of the cohorts above, a new consensus forms in the cohorts below. Ideas will fester among the young, but their impact will be hidden by the inability and inexperience of youth.

But the youth do not stay young. Eventually a transition point arrives.

Sometimes, this transition will be marked by a great event the old orthodoxy cannot explain. At other times it is simply a matter of numbers. In either case, the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.

Greer cautions against hoping for a quick change. He's right to do so. Our present cultural circumstances did not develop overnight. They've been some sixty years or more in the making and have still not run their complete course.

Most of us, like the generation of ancient Israelites that fled Egypt, will not live to see the promised land:

.... as culture wars are long wars, there are no quick victories. If you reject the quickly crystalizing orthodoxy of America’s millennials, your short-term options are limited. The millennials are a lost generation; they will persist in their errors to the end of their days.

Theirs is a doomed cohort—and for most of the next two decades, this doomed cohort will be in charge.

But like all orthodoxies, theirs will eventually stumble. Today’s orthodoxy will meet events it cannot explain. Today’s hopes will be the source of tomorrow’s sorrows. When those sorrows arrive, a rising generation will be looking for alternatives.

The job of today’s insurgents is to build a coherent critique of this orthodoxy, a compelling vision of a better way, and a set of networks that can guard the flame until the arrival of that happy day.

This sounds very much like Rod Dreher's prescription in both The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies.

Greer is optimistic that the day will come when the current soft totalitarianism (Dreher's term) collapses. My concern, though, is that it'll only come if there's a revitalization of the Judeo-Christian faith that underpins the values to which he'd like to see us return.

Until we see signs of that revitalization I'm afraid the paradigm shift toward which Greer looks will be postponed indefinitely into the future. Anyway, read his essay. It's very good and there's much more to it than I can write about here.

Intellectual Virtues

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, Critical Race Theory, abortion, transgenderism, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that it's reasonable to hold?

Mill continues:

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred.

All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions.

It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among many of those participating in debates, especially online, on the issues of our day.

Closing the Door to the Divine Foot

One of the most fascinating fields of study in biology is the field of embryology - the study of how a zygote develops into an adult organism. For most animals our knowledge of their ontogenetic development is still incomplete, but a team of scientists has worked out the complete developmental history of a nematode called C. elegans and has won a Nobel Prize for their achievement.

The ontogeny (the development of an organism from fertilized egg to adult) of this tiny worm, so small that you need a microscope to see it, is programmed to follow a specific pathway, but several mysteries surround attempts to determine what it is that controls that ontogeny as well as attempts to elucidate how undirected processes could ever have produced such a control system in living things.

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson discusses some of the problems in this 10 minute video.

Perhaps there's a materialist explanation for embryological development such as we see in C. elegans and even more astonishingly in higher organisms, but if there is itmust be a closely guarded secret.

What we see in this presentation seems to point to a teleology that many scientists insist on ruling out a priori because teleology, the notion that there are ends or purposes in nature, doesn't fit into their naturalistic worldview. After all, if there's a goal or end toward which an embryo strives there must've been an intelligent agent which established it. Goals do not result from naturalistic processes.

Yet I wonder if these scientists aren't missing something by refusing to admit the possibility of teleological explanations into their scientific work.

I've quoted before in this context a passage from William James that I think is particularly apt. James wrote that, "Any rule of thought that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." If the purpose of science is to discover truth why rule out ahead of time certain kinds of explanations just because they're incompatible with a particular metaphysical commitment?

The refusal to permit the hypothesis that a mind may be somehow responsible for what we see in C. elegans reminds me of another quote, this one from the late geneticist Richard Lewontin who just passed away last week at the age of 92. Lewontin once wrote that,

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Scientists used to declare that they were committed to following the evidence wherever it leads, but now that there seems to be much evidence that leads away from naturalism and toward a creative mind as the fundamental explanation for nature and the cosmos, that declaration is apparently no longer operative.

Who's Responsible for the Culture War?

One of the aspects of our modern politics that's particularly galling is the brazen dishonesty of the political class. President Trump's tenuous connection to the truth was well-documented, but those on the left are equally as bad, if not worse.

For more than three years the progressives lied to us about the Russian collusion business. More recently, Democratic spokespersons have, with a straight face, told us that it's not Democrats who want to defund the police, it's Republicans. Truth is often MIA in the culture war.

Speaking of the culture war, another mendacity that the left often foists upon us is that conservatives are the aggressors in the contemporary culture war, and that it's the political right which is responsible for the polarization of our politics and culture. This is so obviously absurd that it'd be funny were it not so serious.

The fact is that the left has for almost a century been seeking to tear down virtually every institution and value that have traditionally glued our diverse society together. The left has relentlessly attacked the family, the church, law enforcement, the military, our educational system, our economic system, our history, our traditional understanding of sexuality - almost everything one can think of - while conservatives have been waging a defensive struggle, trying to preserve what's good against the leftist onslaught.

Nevertheless, as soon as conservatives resist the left's assaults on our institutions and moral values, their opponents accuse them of being the aggressors in the culture war. Conservatives find themselves in the position of a man being repeatedly slapped in the face who puts his hands up to fend off the blows and is thus accused of being provocative, hostile and aggressive.

A good example of this is the left's response to conservative parents who protest against their children's schools for teaching their students that they're racists and ladening them with guilt for being white. The left professes dismay that parents would resist teachers inculcating Critical Race Theory and its racist offshoots in their classrooms, and it's the parents who are called racists for opposing this supposedly "antiracist" indoctrination.

Kevin Drum, himself a progressive, has a helpful set of graphs at his website which show quite clearly that our contemporary polarization is a result, not of conservatives moving further to the right, but of Democrats moving further to the left.

Drum analyzes six issues that divide progressives and conservatives, five of which might be considered cultural and one economic, and finds that on each issue Democrats have moved leftward in far greater numbers than Republicans have moved toward the right. For example, on immigration he notes that:

The Republican view of immigrants has bounced up and down a bit and is now up by maybe five points or so since 2000. The Democratic view has gone up by 35 percentage points.

(Note that by "up" I mean that the percentage share of partisans who hold the conventional partisan opinion has gone up. For Republicans, it means the share of Republicans who endorse the right-wing position has gone up. For Democrats it means the share of Democrats who endorse the left-wing position has gone up.)

In other words, Republicans (which should not be confused with conservatives, but which may serve as a stand-in for the purposes of this illustration) have become slightly more opposed to immigration over the last two decades than they were in 2000 whereas Democrats (liberals and progressives) have become more amenable to immigration by 35 percentage points.

On abortion the numbers are similar:

Among Republicans, the most extreme view on abortion (always illegal) has gone up by about two points since 2000. Among Democrats, the most extreme view (always legal) has gone up by 20 points.

On same sex marriage:

Democratic support for same sex marriage is up 50 points. Republican support is down 39 points (that is, they've moved 39 points away from the conservative position).

Republicans have become much more "liberal" on this issue but nearly as liberal as Democrats have.

On guns:

Among Republicans, the conservative point of view has gone up about 10 points. Among Democrats, the liberal point of view has increased by about 20 points.

On taxes:

The Republican view of taxes has gone down about ten points (probably due to the Bush tax cuts). The Democratic view of taxes has gone up by about 20 points.

Again, Republicans have moved somewhat toward the liberal position on taxes (high tax rates), but Democrats have moved in even greater numbers toward that position.

On religion:

Among Republicans, religiosity hasn't changed at all. Among Democrats, it's gone down by nearly 15 points.

Check out Drum's website to see his actual graphs.

The point that Drum is making is that the polarization we see in our politics and the aggressiveness we see in our cultural conflicts in general is largely a result of more Democrats moving further to the left while conservatives (Republicans) remain for the most part where they've always been. Although in some cases Republicans have moved a bit leftward, there's no case in which Democrats have move toward the right.

White Privilege

According to the taxonomy of racism represented by the pyramid featured in a couple of previous posts, white privilege is a form of "covert racism," but why is that so?

Even if we assume it to be true that whites enjoy a privilege in this country that other races don't, an assumption with which I have problems, why is it racist to be born with a particular kind of privilege?

Many people are born with all sorts of characteristics that privilege them in our society - wealth, intelligence, good looks, physical assets, good parents, etc. so why is being born white singled out as particularly egregious to the point where some whites are claiming on social media that they're ashamed of being white?

Moreover, when one is asked to denote the privileges that accrue to whites by virtue of their whiteness the advantages they list are often trivial - not being followed in a store, not having people cross the street when they see you approaching, not being stopped by police for walking in a neighborhood not one's own, etc.

Parenthetically, I've been stopped by police at least twice and had residents drive by slowly when walking both in my own neighborhood and a neighborhood not my own. And I'm white. On each occasion I simply explained that I was walking for exercise, we had a friendly chat, and that was that.

Almost all of the more serious privileges - like not being denied a loan or an apartment simply on the basis of race, etc. - have been illegal in this country for decades, and it's hard to see how something that's illegal can be a privilege.

The idea that white privilege, if it exists, is a form of racism is hard to understand. Racism is an evil, but it's not evil to be born with privilege. Whether you are black or white, if you are born into an intact family with a father and mother who love you and love each other, you are privileged and will benefit for a lifetime in ways that others will not, but that's not evil.

Whether you are black or white, if you are born into the middle class you will have benefits for the rest of your life that those born into the lower classes do not have, but there's no moral fault in being born into that class.

Whether you are black or white, if you are born into a (relatively) free country like America you are privileged and will benefit for a lifetime in ways that others will not, but you certainly shouldn't feel guilty about it.

But, it will be objected, the particular privilege that's called "white privilege" evolved to the detriment of others and as long as you enjoy the benefits of that oppression, even if the oppression is historical and not current, you share in the guilt.

This objection is hard to credit. It's probably the case that everyone living in almost every country of the world is living in a country that was established through the conquest of other peoples and perpetuated by various other forms of injustice and oppression. There are probably few, if any, countries or peoples of which that is not the case.

So, should every person in the world today feel guilty for enjoying the benefits of what was done by others long before they were born? Should blacks feel guilty for enjoying the benefits of living in a country which severely mistreated Native Americans?

In his book I'm Not a Racist, But ... philosopher Lawrence Blum says that white privilege is not racism, but it's nevertheless a "racial ill."

I disagree. It's only a racial ill if those who enjoy the privilege are insensitive toward those who do not and/or actively seek to exclude those who do not from enjoying the same benefits.

But unlike intellectual and physical gifts, whatever serious privileges whites are alleged to enjoy are not, or should not be, exclusionary. Anyone can aspire to them. That's why millions of immigrants have risked their lives and the lives of their children to come here.

The biggest problem with the notion of white privilege, though, is that it implies that people are to be regarded according to the group to which they belong rather than as individuals. You, yourself, may not be an oppressor, the argument goes, but other members of your race were, and are, therefore you're implicated in their guilt.

But why should you be held responsible for what others who happened to have the same skin color have done? If you're a white Jew are you nevertheless responsible for the Nazis' crimes? If you're a black male are you therefore responsible for the disproportionate number of assaults by blacks on whites?

The attempt to impute guilt to an entire group is a derivative of the Marxism that has influenced so much of contemporary racial thinking. For Marx and his ideological descendants everyone is guilty or innocent based on their socio-economic class.

For our contemporary race theorists, race is simply substituted for class.

But it's just silly to claim that if persons are white they are ipso facto privileged and if persons are black they're not. Surely, Barack Obama, Denzel Washington or Oprah Winfrey are far more privileged in our society in most ways that most people think really matter than are 99% of the whites living in America.

In fact, it doubtless strikes a white single mother struggling to feed three children while keeping her creditors at bay as laughable to be told that she's a racist because she has "white privilege."

It would be a good thing if we retired the idea of "White Privilege" altogether. All it does is breed resentment and division. What we should focus on instead is what makes us the same and not what makes us different.

Hopper's Whoppers

An article by Allison Hopper at Scientific American is, or should be, embarrassing to both the author and her editor. Ms. Hopper's thesis is that what's called Creationism, a view based upon a literal interpretation of the Bible's Genesis account, actually promotes white supremacy.

How does she arrive at such a peculiar conclusion? She complains firstly, that children's books don't show "black-skinned early people who launched human civilization."

This is the first puzzler in her essay, but not the last. Almost every depiction of early hominids I've ever seen shows them to be either exceedingly swarthy or so hirsute as to be racially indecipherable.

She then adds that, "The global scientific community overwhelmingly accepts that all living humans are of African descent....We are all descended genetically, and also culturally, from dark-skinned ancestors."

Even if "the global scientific community" is correct that all humans descended from African ancestors, how does it follow that they were therefore dark-skinned? The fact that Africans throughout recorded history, as far as we know, have had dark skin certainly doesn't necessitate the conclusion that those who inhabited the African savannah in prehistoric times were dark-skinned.

But set that aside. Hopper hasn't yet gotten to the core of her complaint. What she wants to do is, "unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies."

So if you're skeptical of the "just so" stories of modern evolutionists it's because you're a white supremacist wishing to "perpetuate segregation and violence against Black bodies." Does she adduce any evidence for this claim? Yes, she does:

[T]he first wave of legal fights against evolution was supported by the Klan in the 1920s. Ever since then, entrenched racism and the ban on teaching evolution in the schools have gone hand in hand.

This is odd logic: The Klan opposed teaching evolution and the Klan is racist, so opposition to teaching evolution is racist.

It's an interesting instance of guilt by association, I suppose, but very poor reasoning. It's somewhat like arguing that the Pope is opposed to abortion and the Pope is Catholic, so those who oppose abortion are Catholic.

In any case, having warmed up with this pseudo-argument Ms. Hopper then delivers herself of some extraordinary theological exegesis:

At the heart of white evangelical creationism is the mythology of an unbroken white lineage that stretches back to a light-skinned Adam and Eve. In literal interpretations of the Christian Bible, white skin was created in God's image.

This is a head scratcher. I challenge Ms. Hopper or anyone else to show where in the Bible it says anything about the color of Adam and Eve's skin, or God's, for that matter. But Hopper's biggest whopper is this:

Dark skin has a different, more problematic origin. As the biblical story goes, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants' skin. Historically, many congregations in the U.S. pointed to this story of Cain as evidence that Black skin was created as a punishment.

Hopper manages to reinforce in this short passage the already strong suspicion that she never took the trouble to read the relevant passage. The Genesis account is completely silent about the nature of the mark, nor is the mark a punishment. Here's what the Bible says (Genesis 4:13-15, NIV):

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.

It's clear that whatever the "mark of Cain" was it was designed to protect him from those who would kill him. The "mark" was not a curse; the curse was being driven from the presence of God.

If anyone interpreted this passage as being somehow a justification for racism they're only showing themselves to be just as ignorant of the Bible as Ms Hopper.

The irony of this article, though, is that if anything bears responsibility for modern racism it is evolutionary theory and the belief, promoted by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man as well Herbert Spencer, that some races are inferior to, and more primitive than, others.

Darwin believed that Africans were less evolutionarily advanced than white Europeans and that they were inevitably doomed to extinction in the struggle for survival. He wrote in The Descent of Man:

The Western nations of Europe...now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization. The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.

If Ms. Hopper wants to draw our attention to the wellsprings of white supremacy she'd do well to point us to her beloved theory of evolution and its author.

The idea of a struggle for survival in which the most fit would prevail together with the Darwinian notion that some races are inferior to others provided white southerners during the Jim Crow era with all the justification they needed for relegating blacks to second class status.

It has also supplied the Nazis and every racist, bigot and antisemite of the twentieth century with the intellectual ammunition to justify their belief in their own racial and ethnic superiority.

If Ms. Hopper had done just a modicum of research before sending her silly piece off to Scientific American she would've known this and saved herself, and them, no little professional embarrassment.

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?