Superdeterminism and Free Will

Michael Egnor has an interesting piece at Mind Matters based on a video featuring a talk by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. In the video Hossenfelder discusses something called Superdeterminism, the view that everything that happens in the universe is the inevitable consequence of prior causes.

She believes, contrary to many of her colleagues, that this determinism holds everywhere, even at the quantum level.

Many physicists have for the last century argued that quantum events, events involving sub-atomic particles, were indeterministic, that there was no way we could predict them because they essentially had no physical cause. One reason this view of quantum mechanics was popular was because it allowed room at the quantum level for free will.

If Superdeterminism was true, many physicists believed, there'd be no way to hold on to free will and the philosophical consequences of abandoning the notion that we are somehow free to choose are extensive, including the loss of moral obligation, human culpability, and human dignity.

Here's Egnor explaining this:

The conventional view of nature held by materialists, who deny free will, is that all acts of nature, including our human acts and beliefs, are wholly determined by the laws of nature, understood as the laws of physics. We cannot be free, they assert, because all aspects of human nature are matter, and the behavior of matter is wholly determined by physical laws.

There is no “room” for free will.

It’s noteworthy that physicists who have studied determinism in nature (specifically, in quantum mechanics) have for the most part rejected this deterministic view [at the quantum level] and implicitly (if not explicitly) endorsed the reality of free will. There are two reasons for this.

First, experiments that have followed from the research done by Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990) in the 1970s have shown that determinism on a local [or quantum] level is not true. The theory and the experiments are subtle, but suffice to say, detailed and quite rigorous experiments have shown that the outcomes of quantum processes are not determined locally.

That is, there’s nothing “baked in” inanimate matter that determines the outcome of the quantum measurement. Nature is not locally deterministic.

The second reason that physicists have rejected determinism relates to the theory of Superdeterminism. Superdeterminism posits that, while inanimate matter is not locally determined, the entire universe — including the thoughts and actions of the experimenters who are investigating nature — is determined as a whole.

The experiments based on Bell’s theorem have disproven local determinism but they do not disprove Superdeterminism.

The problem with Superdeterminism from the perspective of most physicists is that it seems to invalidate the process of science itself. That is, if the scientists’ own thoughts, ideas, and judgments are just as determined as the behavior of inanimate matter, then science itself has no claim to seek or find the truth.

...If all of nature is an enormous robot, then it makes no sense to claim that tiny parts of the robot are seeking or have found the truth. Because Superdeterminism seems to obviate the very scientific method used to investigate it, physicists have generally rejected Superdeterminism.

Recently, however, several physicists have suggested that Superdeterminism is a quite plausible way of solving the measurement problem in quantum physics so it seems to be having a bit of a resurgence.

Ms. Hossenfelder is one of the latter. She thinks Superdeterminism is true and although she herself doesn't believe that we have free will, she nevertheless doesn't think that Superdeterminism really has anything to do with whether we are or are not free.

Here's her video on the subject:

Egnor agrees with Superdeterminism but also believes we are free to choose. He reconciles Superdeterminism and free will by positing a "block" universe in which past, present and future all exist simultaneously. This idea, as counterintuitive as it may seem, is actually a consequence of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity.

I'm not sure Egnor's argument rescues free will from Superdeterminism, but you can decide for yourself by reading his argument at the link.

Brutal Poll Numbers

The most recent Quinnipiac poll is not good news for team Biden. In fact it's brutal. The President's approval numbers are about the same as President Trump's rating after the January 6th Capitol Hill riot.

According to the poll, which was published January 12th, only 33 percent of Americans approve of President Joe Biden's job performance. The results would be even uglier if Democrats were bracketed out. His approval rating is just 25 percent among independent voters and 28 percent among Hispanics.

Even among Democratic voters, where his support is still fairly strong, his rating has declined from 87 percent in November to just 75 percent today.

On specific issues Mr. Biden's support is no less anemic. He has 34 percent approval on the economy and 35 percent approval on his conduct of foreign policy.

He was elected in part on his promise to "shut down" the Covid pandemic, but despite inheriting vaccines and therapeutics that Mr. Trump did not have until the last months of his presidency, more people have died during Mr. Biden's year in office (430,000) than died before he was inaugurated.

Consequently, only 39 percent of the people surveyed approved of his handling of the pandemic.

Mr. Biden was also elected because voters hoped he'd unite the country, but according to the poll, 49 percent of Americans said he's "doing more to divide the country," compared with just 42 percent who said he's "doing more to unite the country."

The number of people who think he's uniting the country is not likely to be helped by his recent rhetoric in Georgia where he compared those who oppose the Democrats' voting rights bill to segregationists and defenders of slavery. Speaking to those senators who must vote on the bill to impose federal regulations on voting laws of all the states, Mr. Biden asked whose side these senators wanted to be on:

Do you want to be ... on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?

Not only does such a comparison reflect an ignorance of the reasons for opposing the bill, it's politically clutzy. It's certainly not a helpful way to fulfill his promise of uniting the country.

Much can happen between now and 2024, of course, but Mr. Biden is proving himself to be a very unpopular president which is why some in his party are casting about for someone else to run in the next presidential election. But who is there among Democrats who would make an attractive candidate? Might we anticipate the resurrection of a Hillary candidacy in 2024?

Lucky Guess?

In a piece at Evolution News Casey Luskin lists a dozen of the parameters of the universe that must be fine-tuned in order for the universe to be life-permitting:

• Strength of Electromagnetic Force: 1 part in 25
• Strength of Strong Nuclear Force: 1 part in 200
• Mass of Quark: 1 part in 10^21
• Value of Gravitational Constant: 1 part in 10^35
• Value of Cosmological Constant: 1 part in 10^90
• Ratio of the masses of a neutron to the proton: 1 part in 1000
• Ratio of the Weak Nuclear Force to the Strong Nuclear Force: 1 part in 10,000
• Ratio of the Electromagnetic Force to Gravity: 1 part in 10^40
• Cosmic Mass Density at Planck Time: 1 part in 10^60
• Initial Expansion Rate of the Universe: 1 part in 10^17
• Initial Density of the Universe: 1 part in 10^24
• Initial Entropy of the Early Universe: 1 part in 10 to the power of 10^123

Is it just a coincidence that these parameters have precisely the values that allow for the existence of a universe that can sustain life? Unimaginably minute changes in some of these (especially the last) would've resulted in either no universe at all or one in which living things were impossible.

In their book A Fortunate Universe, from which Luskin got many of these values, Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes use this analogy: A bank vault is robbed. The armored door was opened without force; the robbers used the access code which is a twelve digit number. The police arrive on the scene.

One officer says, "Maybe they guessed the code." The second replies, "No way. There are a trillion combinations. The system shows they entered the code correctly on the first attempt. Surely the odds against that are astronomical." The first then says, "But it's still possible, right?"

Yes, it's technically possible but what rational person would think that a lucky guess is the explanation for how the thieves got into the vault?

The obvious conclusion is that the robbers somehow knew the code. No reasonable person would think they guessed it on the very first attempt, or that they would've guessed it no matter how many attempts they made.

The analogy to the fine-tuning of the universe is this: Of all the possible combinations to the vault only one would allow access. Of all the possible values for the twelve parameters Luskin lists, only the values they actually have, or values exceedingly close to the actual values, will allow for a life-permitting universe.

Believing that our universe is nevertheless the accidental, coincidental product of mindless forces is like believing that the robbers accidentally, coincidentally guessed the combination to the vault.

Yet it seems like the alternative is to assume that the universe is the product of an intelligent creator, an alternative repugnant to those who adamantly cling to a naturalistic worldview.

So, are there other plausible options or is an intelligent creator the best explanation for cosmic fine-tuning? Luskin looks at the plausibility of other options in his article which I encourage you to read if this topic interests you.

Wilson's Incoherent Naturalism

The famed entomologist E.O. Wilson passed away last December 26 at the age of 92.

Wilson, whose specialty was ants, was a seminal figure in the development of what's called Sociobiology, the theory that our behavior is fundamentally determined by our genes which have evolved to induce behaviors that make it more likely that our genes will be propagated into the next generation.

E.O. Wilson

Richard Weikart critiqued Wilson's views on human nature, morality and religion in his book The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life some of which is excerpted here. On Wilson's view of free will Weikert writes:

Wilson claims that ultimately every phenomenon in the cosmos can be reduced to physical laws, so the human mind is simply physical brain activity, and humans have no free will.

[He] argues that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is controlled by material processes in the brain that evolved through natural selection.

If Wilson is correct about material processes producing all our thoughts then he's also correct that we have no free will, and if he's correct that we have no free will then he's also correct when he states that morality is just an illusion.

As he states in an article co-authored with philosopher Michael Ruse in 1985, “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate.”

Weikert also describes Wilson's view of the meaning or purpose of human life:

In [his book] Sociobiology he stated that “in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing.” The only significance of an individual organism is to reproduce: “the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.”

In The Meaning of Human Existence (2014) Wilson explains that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose in life. Rather, he asserts, the only meaning we have is that we are the product of mindless evolutionary processes. He states,

We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of species in Earth’s biosphere. Hope and wish for otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace shining down upon us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned us, no second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one.

We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It means we are completely free.

Wilson argues that all organic processes — and here he clearly includes human behavior — are ultimately reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. For Wilson evolution has clearly replaced religion as the source of answers about the purpose and destiny of life.

He asserted, “The great questions — ‘Who are we?’ ‘Where did we come from?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ — can be answered only, if ever, in the light of scientifically based evolutionary thought.”

And here is where the great scientist runs completely off the rails. What does it mean to say that we have no free will but then insist that we are completely free? Weikert states that "Wilson explains that this freedom gives us options that 'empower us to address with more confidence the greatest goal of all time, the unity of the human race.' ”

But if morality is an illusion why should we care about the unity of the human race? On what is this expression of Wilson's moral sensibility based? Why, if the whole raison d'etre of human existence is to promote the survival of one's DNA, should anyone care about anything other than one's own welfare?

And if our death is the end of our existence, if our lives have no real meaning, why should people care about the unity of the human race after they're dead?

Wilson evidently wants to believe at one and the same time that we have no free will, but also that we're completely free; that life has no meaning - that we are nothing more than the result of mindless material processes - but also that the "great questions" are nevertheless somehow important; and that morality is an illusion but also that we should care about our fellow man and strive for the unity of humanity (whatever that means).

If Weikert's excerpts from Wilson's writings are a fair representation of Wilson's thought then it seems obvious that like so many others who embrace naturalistic materialism, Wilson could not avoid philosophical incoherence. He evidently found it impossible to maintain philosophical consistency in his worldview, which causes one to wonder why he persisted in it.

An Immigrant's Perspective

Columnist Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) recently wrote a piece about an immigrant from Jordan named Amjad Masad who came here in 2012 at the age of 24.

In the column, titled Ten Things I Love About America, she outlines Masad's background and writes this:

On Tuesday afternoon Mr. Masad, who became a citizen in 2019, thought about the 10th anniversary of his arrival. He was so grateful for three things: a company, a family, a house. He and his wife and business partner, Haya Odeh, also from Jordan, started talking about America. At 3:56 p.m. ET, he posted a Twitter thread.

Here's what Masad says on his Twitter:

I landed in the United States 10 years ago with nothing but credit card debt. After one startup exit, one big tech job, and one unicorn, I genuinely believe that it wouldn’t have been possible anywhere else in the world. Here are 10 things that I love about this country:

1. Work Ethic. First thing I noticed was that everyone regardless of occupation took pride in doing a bang-up job, even when no one looked. I asked people: ‘why do you pour everything into a job even when it is seemingly thankless?’ And it was like asking fish ‘what is water?’

2. Lack of corruption. In the 10 years in the US, I’ve never been asked for a bribe, and that’s surprising. When you know that you predictably get to keep a sizeable portion of the value you create and that no one will arbitrarily stop you, it makes it easier to be ambitious.

3. Win-win mindset. People don’t try to screw you on deals, they play the long game, and align incentives in such a way that everyone wins. This is especially apparent in Silicon Valley where you can’t underestimate anyone because one day you might be working for them.

4. Rewarding talent. From sports to engineering, America is obsessed with properly rewarding talent. If you’re good, you’ll get recognized. The market for talent is dynamic—if you don’t feel valued today, you can find a better place tomorrow.

5. Open to weirdos. Because you never know where the next tech, sports, or arts innovation will come from, America had to be open to weirdness. Weirdos thrive without being crushed. We employ people with the most interesting backgrounds—dropouts to artists—they’re awesome!

6. Forgiveness. Weird and innovative people have to put themselves out there, and as part of that, they’re going to make mistakes in public. The culture here values authenticity, and if you’re authentic and open about your failures, you’ll get a second and a third chance.

7. Basic infrastructure. Americans take care of their public spaces. Parks are clean, subways and busses run on time, and utilities & services just work. Because life can be livable for a time without income, it was possible for us to quit our jobs and bootstrap our business.

8. Optimism. When you step foot in the US there is a palpable sense of optimism. People believe that tomorrow will be better than today. They don’t know where progress will come from, but that’s why they’re open to differences. When we started up even unbelievers encouraged us.

9. Freedom. Clearly a cliche, but it’s totally true. None of the above works if you’re not free to explore & tinker, to build companies, and to move freely. I still find it amazing that if I respect the law and others, I can do whatever I want without being compelled/restricted.

10. Access to capital. It’s a lot harder to innovate & try to change the world without capital. If you have a good idea & track record, then someone will be willing to bet on you. The respect for entrepreneurship in this country is inspiring. And it makes the whole thing tick.

Noonan adds that she thought this was just beautiful.

So much on the list is what I see. Hardworking: In my town everyone from bicycle deliverymen to masters and mistresses of the universe work themselves like rented mules. And, somehow most moving, that we’re open to weirdos: We always have been; it’s in our DNA; it explains a lot of our politics and culture; it’s good that it continues. “This Is Us.”

At the end Mr. Masad said he was speaking generally, that character limits [on Twitter] don’t invite nuance, that there’s no call to sit back self-satisfied, that everything can be made better.

But he added a warning: “Many of the things that I talked about are under threat, largely from people who don’t know how special they have it. America is worth protecting, and realizing that progress can be made without destroying the things that made it special.”

Masad has received a lot of feedback, he told Noonan who contacted him by phone, most of it overwhelmingly positive and most of "the real positive, heartwarming, excited feedback has been from other immigrants. They add to the list what they appreciate.”

Noonan concludes with this thought:

The past few years, maybe decades, we’ve become an increasingly self-damning people. As a nation we harry ourselves into a state of permanent depression over our failures and flaws and what we imagine, because we keep being told, is the innate wickedness of our system, which keeps justice from happening and life from being good.

Maybe we got carried away. Maybe we have it wrong. Maybe those who are new here and observe us with fresh eyes see more clearly than we do. As long as our immigrants are talking like this, maybe we’ve still got it goin’ on. What a welcome thought.

Thank you, Amjad Masad.

Elections and Insurrections

One nefarious tactic employed by the media to discredit their opponents on the right is to ask them whether they believe Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president. If the person being asked the question answers in the negative but is unable to point to any specific illegality involved in the 2020 election then he or she is portrayed as some kind of kook.

It's a tactic that works splendidly since casual listeners often don't think to ask why this same question is never asked of Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams, neither of whom were willing to grant that they legitimately lost their elections in 2020.

In any case, the question of the legitimacy of Biden's election is a red herring. The problem with the 2020 election is not that anything done was technically illegal, although perhaps some things were, the problem was with how rules were altered and how lies were perpetrated, both to the detriment of Donald Trump.

The rule changes may have all been done legally, the lies themselves may not have been "illegal," but the result certainly cast suspicion on the fairness of the election.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist offers a few thoughts on the reasons for this suspicion:

The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty.

Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting.

Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers, disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

The term "stolen" may not be technically accurate, but given these machinations there's no surprise that many Republican voters believe the election was indeed "rigged."

With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

Time’s article didn’t come out until February 4, 2021, but in the months prior to its publication, Republicans grew increasingly concerned that the rigging it described had, in fact, happened.

Their desire for free and fair elections they could trust, elections that “well-funded cabals of powerful people” weren’t able to rig, resulted in mass protests following the November election. The fact that the election was exceedingly close didn’t help matters.

Media and other left-wing pollsters had put out preposterous suppression polls to help Joe Biden get over the finish line. For example, the Washington Post’s final poll claimed Biden would win the swing state of Wisconsin by 17 points, indicating a nationwide blowout of historic proportions. (He won it by seven-tenths of a percent.)

The actual outcome took weeks to calculate and came down to just 43,000 votes across three states, even closer than Trump’s close victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Nor does it help change Republican voters' minds about the integrity of the election when common sense measures to secure voting integrity are strenuously opposed as "attacks on democracy," when the media is relatively silent on the effect that millions of mail-in ballots had on the fairness of the system or merely shrugs at Mark Zuckerberg's $419 million dollars targeted at getting out the vote for Biden.

Hemingway goes on:

The media and other Democrats have used the January 6 riot at the Capitol as a way to ignore legitimate concerns about what they did to the election system, and as a way to continue the assault on election security.

As part of their political operation, they have used a propaganda technique of redefining efforts to secure the integrity of elections as attacks on democracy.

The 2020 campaign to destroy election security by flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots was run by Marc Elias, a braggadocious Democrat attorney and former general counsel for Hillary Clinton who also ran the Russia collusion hoax that seriously damaged the country. In fact, one of his partners in the scheme was recently indicted by prosecutor John Durham for lying about his role in the hoax.

Elias and his “well-funded cabal of powerful people” are hoping to make permanent or even expand the weakening of election security.

The propaganda press have also downplayed Zuckerberg’s staggering $419 million expenditure, or falsely presented it as non-partisan help to voters. Independent researchers have shown that the funding dollars overwhelming poured into blue counties, and particularly blue counties in swing states.

The money was used to enable the private takeover of government election offices, erasing the bright red line between campaign operations and government administration of elections.

The massive grants were used to run Get Out The Vote operations through these government offices, in a manner that benefited Democrats in overwhelmingly disproportionate ways. The funds were used mostly to register Democrats to vote, encourage Democrats to vote, harvest Democrat ballots, cure defective Democrat ballots, count Democrat ballots, etc.

No right-wing billionaire could have gotten away with even thinking about such an operation, but had he, the media would be all over it. A few hundred thousand dollars in Russian Facebook ads for both Clinton and Trump generated years of hysterical media coverage from the corrupt press.

Yet Zuckerberg funding the private takeover of elections to secure Democrat victories has barely been mentioned — much less obsessed over — by most of corporate media.

Meanwhile, the media has certainly obsessed over the January 6th, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill, insistently labelling it an "insurrection." Yet in the year since, with all of the investigations that have ensued from this shameful and tragic event, not a single person among the 725 people who've been arrested has been charged with any crime connected to "insurrection."

An insurrection that involved no firearms among the insurrectionists and no suppression by the military is not much of an insurrection. It was indeed a riot, however, and the rioters need to be held accountable, but the media is loath to call it a riot, perhaps because they'd then have to explain why the riots that beset our cities in the summer of 2020 were "understandable" but the January 6th riots were not.

All of this - the hyperbolic labelling, the attempt to portray the riots as something much worse than riots - appears to be a cynical, disingenuous ploy to discredit and malign Donald Trump and his supporters as treasonous because they fear that he'll run again in 2024.

Hemingway concludes:

The media and Democrats’ J6 hysteria is meant as a distraction to keep Americans from properly dealing with the very real problems with how the 2020 election was overseen.

The future of the country rests on the ability of both winners and losers to trust our elections, to make it easy to vote, but difficult to cheat, and to have some reasonable level of confidence that voting is conducted privately and without coercion, harvesting, or undue third-party influence.

The media and other Democrats are cartoonishly overhyping the J6 riot to avoid being held accountable for the many ways in which they destroyed election integrity in the months and years leading up to November 2020.

Wise people are not fooled by their distraction attempt.

Let's hope that there are a lot of wise people.

Soft Totalitarianism

In his book Live Not By Lies Rod Dreher makes a plausible case that the U.S. is moving toward a kind of soft totalitarianism in which individual freedoms will be sharply curtailed and in which "deviants" will suffer social punishments like loss of jobs and access to medical care, the inability to shop or travel, etc.

Indeed, this is already happening with people being fired from their jobs for holding incorrect political opinions, declining vaccinations and other recalcitrant acts frowned upon by our elites.

Dreher gives a succinct summation of the theme of his very important book in this short video from Prager U. It's worth checking out:

Why I Am a Christian (Pt. II)

Yesterday I sketched some of the reasons that I remain a theist. Today I'd like to do the same for why I remain a Christian theist. Or, better, following the 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, why I continue to strive to become one. Although there are more than six reasons, here, in brief outline, are six reasons why I embrace Christianity:

1. The beauty of the story. The Christian account of history is a beautiful love story that recounts how, moved by love for mankind, God gave Himself to ransom His beloved and to share eternity with "her" together. It's the greatest love story ever told. If it's not true it should be. We should all want it to be, and I marvel that so many want it not to be true.

2. The beauty of the lives of those who have taken the teaching of Jesus seriously. Cardinal Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict, has said that,“I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth…are the lives of the saints and the beauty that the faith has generated.” When Ratzinger mentions the lives of the saints he's talking about men like Maximilian Kolbe and women like Mother Teresa.

He's talking about the people George Eliot mentions in her novel Middlemarch when she has a character observe that, "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

It is because of 2000 years of anonymous people trying to live as Jesus enjoined us to live that we have hospitals and clinics, orphanages and schools, charitable organizations and so much more. Atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas acknowledges this when he writes that, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

3. The beauty of grace. Author Philip Yancey wrote that he left the Christian faith as a young man because there was so little grace in his very strict church. He eventually came back to the faith because he could find grace nowhere else. It's certainly not found in today's secular progressive PC Cancel Culture where people get reported by interns to their employer's Human Resources department for wishing co-workers a Merry Christmas.

Christianity, properly understood, is a way of life teeming with forgiveness and reconciliation, i.e. grace, among ourselves and between God and us. Grace is enormously attractive, and it's the essence of Christianity.

4. The beauty of the moral core. Christianity (or more accurately, Judeo-Christianity) is based on two "laws": Love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. There's nothing simpler, more elegant or more beautiful. The whole moral teaching of the Bible is summed up in those two rules. To love others is to do justice and to display compassion - for the poor, for those with whom one deals in business, for our co-workers and our neighbors.

5. The fact of the Resurrection of Jesus. Skeptics have tried for centuries to explain it away, but every attempt to provide a naturalistic interpretation of the historical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as found in the New Testament sounds more fantastic than that a miracle actually did occur and that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. The Resurrection of Jesus is the keystone in the arch of Christianity. It is the confirmation that everything Jesus taught about Himself, this life and the next is true.

6. The beauty of the hope of eternal life. Some folks are content to accept physical death as the end of their existence, but this, for me, is difficult to understand. It's difficult to understand why we continue to invest enormous resources in extending human life through medical technology and do so much to extend our own individual lives through healthy living but care so little about life that we're indifferent to the possibility of enjoying it forever.

To have loved family and friends, to have loved life, and not be thrilled with the hope that there's an even richer, more wonderful existence beyond this one, an existence which we might share with those from whom we've been separated by death, an existence in which those who have suffered will be rewarded and those who caused their suffering will be held to account, strikes me quite frankly as perverse.

For these reasons and others, especially the simple but paramount fact that I believe Christianity is true in all its essential aspects, I remain committed to it.

Why I Am a Christian (Pt. I)

In 1927 British philosopher Bertrand Russell gave a talk titled Why I Am Not a Christian in which he laid out the reasons why he was, in fact, not a Christian. The talk was subsequently published as a pamphlet and then a book and has become prescribed reading among secularists throughout the Western world. It's really quite peculiar that it achieved the popularity that it did given the fact that the reasons Russell adduces for his atheism are, for the most part, singularly unconvincing.

In any case, I thought I'd like to compose a Viewpoint post on the topic Why I Am a Christian. To be sure, these aren't the reasons why I became a Christian but rather some of the reasons why I have remained one.

First, though, let me briefly sketch some of the reasons why I remain a theist.

There are two live options in the contemporary Western world, theism and naturalism (atheism). Agnosticism is sometimes considered an option, but agnosticism is simply atheism by another name. Atheists are persons who consciously or willfully lack belief in a God, and, since agnostics lack a belief in God, agnostics are atheists, albeit of a softer variety than those who explicitly deny that God exists.

Between atheism and theism, then, which best explains the facts of our experience of the world and life? For me there's no contest. The best explanation, as I see the world, is that a personal, moral Being exists and has created the cosmos. I hold this opinion because there are numerous facts about the world and human life that seem to me far more plausible or probable on theism than on atheism. Consider the following ten examples:

1. Human rights - Why, on naturalism, should anyone think that humans have rights that others are obligated to respect? Why think that tyranny or the holocaust are evil? Why think that we have a duty to do justice to others? On a naturalistic explanation of human existence the notion of human rights is nothing more than a comforting fiction. Only theism gives us a sound basis for them as Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence where he affirmed that our rights come from our Creator.

2. Human equality - What, on naturalism, provides grounds for thinking that humans are in some sense equal or should be treated as such? We have no reason for cherishing the notion of gender or racial or legal equality on a naturalistic understanding of the origin of our species, but, on theism, we're all equally loved by God who requires us to value and love each other in the same way.

3. Meaning or significance - If the cosmos as a whole has no meaning what meaning can anything in it have? Is the meaning of our lives something we just make up, like children conjuring an invisible friend to salve their loneliness? Human life can only mean anything if humans have a telos or purpose, and that telos can only be given to us by God. Nothing in nature can confer significance or meaning upon human beings.

4. Consciousness - How do matter and energy, mere electrochemical reactions in the brain, give rise to sensory experiences like sweetness, fragrance, pain or color? What are these sensations anyway? Where does the meaning of the sound of a siren or the flashing lights at a railroad crossing come from? What enables these physical events to be invested with a meaning and how does mere matter create their meaning? These phenomena strongly suggest that the material self is not all there is to us, but if we are possessed of immaterial minds it's difficult to see how they could be the product of a physical process like evolution. It seems more plausible to believe that such entities trace their provenience back to an original Mind.

5. Objective morality - Why think that it's wrong to just live for oneself or to adopt an attitude of might makes right? Why think that it's wrong to adopt a survival of the fittest attitude toward the poor? Why believe that it's objectively wrong to be cruel to children and animals? If we believe that these things are wrong, as I do, then we must conclude that there are objective moral rights and wrongs, but that can only be the case if there's an objective moral standard. No such standard exists in the naturalistic worldview. Only theism offers such a standard: the moral character of a perfectly good God.

6. Human free will - How, on naturalism, do we justify the powerful conviction that we have free will? How can mere matter, if that's all we are, be free to override or circumvent the laws of physics? We can't live consistently with the belief that we're not free, but the naturalistic worldview entails that free will is merely an illusion. A worldview with which it's so difficult to live consistently is profoundly at odds with itself.

7. Biological information - Living things are brimming over with information. Everything in an organism - molecular machines, mitosis, metabolism - is governed by information. It seems to me much more probable that libraries of information such as exist in every living cell are the result of an intelligent Mind than that they're the result of mindless, purely random accidents in nature.

8. Cosmic fine-tuning - The universe is comprised of dozens of constants and forces whose strengths are set to exceedingly precise values. Had those strengths deviated from their actual values by unimaginably tiny amounts, in some cases by one part in 10^120, either the universe would not exist or life in it would be impossible. Thus, the existence of a life-sustaining universe is extremely improbable and the existence of no universe or one that's life-prohibiting is astronomically more likely. It seems to me, then, that it's more probable that such precision is the product of intelligent, purposeful engineering than that it's the product of an incomprehensibly improbable fluke.

9. Mathematical structure of nature - The universe is not only explicable in terms of math, it appears to many scientists to actually be mathematics. It seems to me more probable that the mathematical nature of the universe is attributable to a Mind than to sheer dumb serendipity.

10. The origin of the universe - The universe evidently came from nothing, at least nothing that's allowed in a naturalist ontology. How does something come from nothing? How does something begin to exist and remain in existence uncaused? It seems more reasonable to me to think that the universe has a cause that's not part of the aggregation of contingent things that comprise it. Thus, the cause of the universe would be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, very powerful, very intelligent and possess necessary being (since were it contingent it'd be part of the universe).

In sum, theism seems to me to be a much more plausible explanation for the existential facts of life as well as for the nature of the world in which we live.

Whenever I'm beset by doubts about the existence of God I reflect on the above facts and am reminded that it seems far more probable that the world and human experience are the product of a personal intelligence than that they're the product of nothingness plus chance.

But even if there is a God why think that Christianity is true? Why not just hold to a bare theism? Why embellish it with the narratives found in the New Testament gospels? I'll attempt an answer to that question tomorrow.

Spooky Action

The universe is a very strange place, stranger than we can imagine. One of the strangest things about it is something Albert Einstein once referred to as "spooky action at a distance."

In quantum mechanics there's a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. No one knows how it works, no one really understands it, but every time it's been tested it's been shown to exist, and it's absolutely bizarre.

Here's the nutshell version: Two subatomic particles, e.g. electrons, can be produced from the disintegration of another particle. These daughter particles then travel at enormous velocities away from each other, but they somehow remain connected such that if a property of one of them is changed the same property in the other one changes simultaneously even though any signal sent from one to the other would have to travel at infinite speed to affect the other.

This, though, is impossible, so how does the second electron know what's happened to the first? No one knows the answer to this, which is why Einstein, who could never accept the idea of entanglement, called the phenomenon "spooky."

An excellent 15 minute video featuring physicist Brian Greene explains this quantum weirdness:

An article at Nature discusses a recent test that pretty much clinches the theory that somehow particles that are widely separated from each other, even at opposite ends of the universe, are still in some mysterious way connected so that they can communicate instantaneously with each other:

It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world.

The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, could be the final nail in the coffin for models of the atomic world that are more intuitive than standard quantum mechanics, say some physicists. It could also enable quantum engineers to develop a new suite of ultrasecure cryptographic devices.

“From a fundamental point of view, this is truly history-making,” says Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

In quantum mechanics, objects can be in multiple states simultaneously: for example, an atom can be in two places, or spin in opposite directions, at once. Measuring an object forces it to snap into a well-defined state. Furthermore, the properties of different objects can become ‘entangled’, meaning that their states are linked: when a property of one such object is measured, the properties of all its entangled twins become set, too.

This idea galled Einstein because it seemed that this ghostly influence would be transmitted instantaneously between even vastly separated but entangled particles — implying that it could contravene the universal rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

He proposed that quantum particles do have set properties before they are measured, called hidden variables. And even though those variables cannot be accessed, he suggested that they pre-program entangled particles to behave in correlated ways.

The recent experiments cited in the Nature article are said to show that Einstein was wrong and that entanglement exists. The universe is indeed a very strange place.

One possible explanation for the instantaneous "communication" between particles light years apart could be provided by the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley believed that the ultimate reality was not matter but mind. If he was right, and if the universe is as he and others have suggested, a kind of idea in the mind of God, then a change in one particle could be instantly perceived and transmitted to the second particle.

In other words, the laws of physical nature are not the ultimate laws but are based on higher laws grounded in a non-physical mind.

This may sound very bizarre to many, but it's no more bizarre than the quantum phenomena themselves, and those seem undeniable.

Reading the Genetic Code

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

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

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

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

Gauger goes on to explain:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wouldn't these questions be important to think about?

The Case for Black Patriotism

Glenn Loury is an African American Social sciences professor at Brown University who has published an article (paywall) titled The Case for Black Patriotism in the journal First Things.

Loury describes himself as formerly "a man of the left" who has become much more conservative as a result of the harmful and tendentious public racial discourse promoted by the left over the past decade.

The article is a bit long, but I'd like to highlight some of what Loury says. If more people, both black and white, felt as he does we'd be a lot better off as a society and a country. Here are some representative excerpts:

The “America ain’t so great, and never was” posture, popular on campuses and in liberal newsrooms, [e.g. the 1619 Project] is a sophomoric indulgence for blacks in the twenty-first century. Our birthright citizenship in this great republic is an inheritance of immense value. Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness.

Those who make their living by focusing on our differences believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with America. They’re wrong. We should resist their divisive rhetoric. It is easy to overstate the racial problems facing our country, and to understate what we’ve achieved.

My conservative prescription for the problem of persistent racial inequality in the twenty-first century is as follows. First, fortify the mediating institutions—families, churches, civil associations—through which citizens, especially the most vulnerable, develop the competencies to enjoy the fruits of liberty that our constitutional framework can deliver. Second, the state can supplement, but it cannot substitute for, those mediating institutions. There are times when the state needs to step in; but solutions to problems in our communities can and should come from those communities.

Anti-racism activists on the left claim that “white supremacy,” “implicit bias,” and old-fashioned “anti-black racism” are sufficient to account for black disadvantage. Those who make such arguments are daring you to disagree with them. If you do not attribute pathological behavior to systemic injustice, you must be a “racist,” one who thinks that black people are intrinsically inferior.

What are these folks saying when they declare that “mass incarceration” is “racism”—that the high number of blacks in American prisons is evidence of racial antipathy? To respond, “No. It’s mainly a sign of antisocial behavior by criminals who happen to be black,” is to risk “cancellation” as a moral reprobate. This is so even if the speaker is black.

Common sense and much evidence suggest that those in prison are mainly those who have hurt somebody, stolen something, or otherwise violated the basic behavioral norms that make civil society possible. ... Moreover, those who bear the cost of such pathology are almost exclusively other blacks. An ideology that ascribes this violent behavior to a racist conspiracy against black people is simply not credible.

Academic skills are acquired through effort; no one is born with them. So why are some youngsters acquiring them and others not? ....The simple answer, “Racism,” is laughable—as if such disparities had nothing to do with behavior, cultural patterns, what peer groups value, how people spend their time, or what they identify as being critical to their self-respect. Anyone who actually believes such nonsense is a fool.

Another unspeakable truth: We need to put the police killings of black Americans into perspective. There are about a thousand fatal shootings of people by the police in the United States each year .... Roughly three hundred (about one-fourth) of those killed are African Americans, while blacks represent about 13 percent of the American population. Black people are overrepresented among these fatalities, though they still make up far less than a majority. (Twice as many whites as blacks are killed by police in this country every year. You wouldn’t know that from the activists’ rhetoric.)

There were roughly 20,000 homicides in the United States last year; nearly half of them involved black perpetrators. The vast majority of these perpetrators took other blacks as victims. For every black person killed by the police, more than twenty-five others meet their ends because of homicides committed by other blacks. We must hold the police accountable for the way they exercise their power over citizens. But it is very easy to overstate the significance and extent of the abuses, as Black Lives Matter activists have done.

Let me speak plainly: The idea that I, as a black person, dare not leave my house for fear that the police will round me up, gun me down, or bludgeon me to death because of my race is ridiculous.

Police killings are regrettable regardless of the race of the people involved. To emphasize race—an officer’s whiteness, a victim’s blackness—is to presume that the officer acted as he did because the young man was black. This assumption is seldom tested against the facts. Moreover, once we begin to racialize these events, we may not be able to limit the racialization to cases of white police officers killing black citizens. We may find that cases of black criminals killing unarmed white victims are viewed through a racial lens, as well. Since there are a great many such cases, this is a development no thoughtful person should welcome.

An ideology dominated by the terms “white guilt,” “white fragility,” and “white privilege” cannot exist except also to give birth to a “white-pride” backlash, even if the latter is seldom expressed overtly—its expression being politically incorrect.

If I were one of these “white oppressors”—constantly bludgeoned about the evils of colonialism, urged to tear down statues of “dead white men,” commanded to apologize for what my white forebears did to “peoples of color” in years past, ordered to settle my historical indebtedness by means of racial reparations—I might well ask myself: On what foundation does human civilization in the twenty-first century stand? I might enumerate the works of philosophy, mathematics, and science that ushered in the Enlightenment, that allowed modern medicine to exist, that gave us the beginnings of what we know about the origins of the species and the universe. I might tick off the great artistic achievements of European culture: the books, the paintings, the symphonies. And then, were I particularly agitated, I might ask these “people of color,” who think they can bully me into a state of guilt-ridden self-loathing: “Where is ‘your’ civilization?”

The only way to address the legacy of historical racism without setting off a reactionary racial chauvinism is to march, even if fitfully and by degrees, toward a world in which no person’s worth is contingent upon racial inheritance—a world in which racial identity loses significance, as we learn how to “unlearn race,” as Thomas Chatterton Williams puts it. By contrast, those who promote anti-whiteness (as Black Lives Matter activists do) will reap what they sow, in a backlash of pro-whiteness.

The folks who think they can insist on spelling “Black” with a capital “B” while keeping “white” in the lower case are likely in for a rude awakening.

Is this a good country, one affording opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of American citizenship? Or is it a venal, immoral, and rapacious bandit-society of plundering racists, founded in genocide and slavery, propelled by capitalist greed and anti-black antipathy? The evidence overwhelmingly favors the former.

On our shores, we have witnessed since the end of the Civil War the greatest transformation in the status of an enserfed people that is to be found anywhere in world history. Some 46 million strong, we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet. The question, then, is one of narrative. Will we blacks regard the United States as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or will we see our nation for what it has become over the last three centuries: the greatest force for human liberty on the planet?

Emancipation, the freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition—that was a new idea. It was a Western idea, brought to fruition in our own United States of America. It would not have been possible without the philosophical insights and moral commitments cultivated in the Enlightenment—ideas about the essential dignity of human persons and about what legitimates a government’s exercise of power over its people. Slavery was a holocaust, out of which emerged something that advanced the morality and the dignity of humankind: emancipation.

The abolition of slavery and the incorporation of African-descended people into the body politic of the United States of America were monumental, unprecedented achievements for human freedom. Look at what has happened in the last seventy-five years. A huge black middle class has developed. There are black billionaires. The influence of black people on American culture is vast and has global resonance. Black Americans are rich and powerful, comparatively speaking.

[We must reject] the notion that the American Dream doesn’t apply to blacks. It most certainly and emphatically applies. To deny this is to tell our children a lie, a lie that robs black people of agency and self-determination. It is a patronizing lie that betrays a profound lack of faith in the capacities of black Americans to rise to the challenges, face the responsibilities, and bear the burdens of freedom.

Very wise, it seems to me. First Things may allow non-subscribers a few free articles, so try the link to see if you can read the whole thing.

2021 Favorites

Reflecting on the three dozen or so books I've managed to squeeze in over the past year I've decided that those listed below were perhaps my favorites. Some of them were books I'd read previously but wanted to reread, others were books that I picked up after reading a review or which were recommended to me by friends.

Even though I often read books that are recommended to me, I'm reluctant to recommend books (even my own!) to others, and this list isn't intended to be such. I learned long ago that recommending books to others who have different tastes and different background knowledge is a risky business.

It's been my experience that people rarely finish books that they purchased on a suggestion from me, so I've concluded that it's best not to encourage them to spend their time and money.

At any rate, for what it's worth and not in any particular order of significance, here are most of my favorite reads from 2021:

Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self - Carl Trueman: A lucid and arresting explanation of how our contemporary culture has been shaped by the development of the idea of personal autonomy.

The Dying Citizen - Victor Davis Hanson: An informative recounting of recent American political and social history and how the significance of American citizenship has been eroded by progressive policies.

Return of the God Hypothesis - Stephen Meyer: Meyer makes the case for a creator God based on the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, and the enormous difficulties with any purely natural explanation of the origin of life.

Animal Algorithms - Eric Cassell: A fascinating look at the phenomena of animal, particularly insect and arachnid, behavior and the neural mechanisms which control it. The book leaves one with the conviction that belief that such mechanisms evolved solely via natural mechanisms requires a supreme act of blind faith.

Gunning for God - John Lennox (reread): Lennox performs a superb evisceration of the "new atheists," particularly Richard Dawkins.

I'm Not a Racist, But ... - Lawrence Blum: A very interesting analysis of race and racism.

Fault Lines - Voddie Baucham (reread): A strong critique of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality written by an African American pastor dismayed by, among other things, the sheer divisiveness of these contemporary movements.

God and Churchill - Sandys and Henley: The authors argue that Churchill's greatness was due largely to the influence of Christian principles instilled in him in his youth. Sandys is Churchill's great grandson.

Revolution - Peter Ackroyd: An account of English history from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Ackroyd's histories read almost like novels.

The Pioneers - David McCullough: The story of the struggles of the people who settled the Ohio River valley.

Sword and Scimitar - Raymond Ibrahim: A very important recounting of the history of the warfare between Muslims and Christians from the 7th century to the siege of Vienna in 1683 with implications for our contemporary understanding of Muslim attitudes toward Christianity and the West.

Killing Crazy Horse - O'Reilley and Dogard: Interesting stories about the clash between whites and Native Americans in the 19th century west.

What Can We Know? - Louis Pojman (reread): A readable text on epistemology - the study of what and how we can know and its relationship to belief.

The Hidden Spring - Mark Solm: Solm is a South African neuroscientist who explores the sources of human consciousness. Preview: Consciousness, Solm argues, does not arise out of the cortex of the brain.

Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrell: Luttrell's account of his training as a navy SEAL and the tragic Afghanistan mission that cost the lives of over a dozen Americans and which only he survived.

The Stranger - Albert Camus (reread): Camus' famous account of modern existential man, alienated and unmoored.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (reread): Conrad's novella illustrates the depravity, cruelty and greed of "civilized" Europeans in the 19th century. It also can be read as a metaphor for the state of man without God.

I also read some Dickens (Barnaby Rudge and Dombey and Son) this year, but most of my reading in 2021 - excepting the two short novels listed above - was non-fiction which is even more hazardous to recommend to people than fiction.

You can, if interested, read last year's list here.

Whatever your taste in books, I encourage you to try to read at least one book more in 2022 than you did in 2021. Books, like friends and family, enrich our lives.

Atheism and the Nuremberg Trials

In an essay titled On Not Obeying Immoral Orders the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote the following:

In 1946, the Nazi war criminals on trial at Nuremberg all offered the defence that they were merely obeying orders, given by a duly constituted and democratically elected government. Under the doctrine of national sovereignty every government has the right to issue its own laws and order its own affairs. It took a new legal concept, namely a ‘crime against humanity’, to establish the guilt of the architects and administrators of genocide.

Well, this raises a perplexing question, I should think, for those who've adopted a secular outlook on things. How can there be "a crime against humanity" in a world which denies any higher moral authority than the state?

What reason, exactly, can someone who denies the existence of a transcendent moral law-giver provide us for saying that the holocaust was evil? Rabbi Sacks, of course, was a theist and had ample grounds for condemning it, but what of those non-theists who in the wake of WWII were morally outraged by the genocide of the Jews and the Japanese atrocities in Nanking and elsewhere?

Aside from a lot of emotive rhetoric, perhaps, what rational justification can they give for saying that these horrors were immoral or evil?

There is none. They were simply emoting, giving expressions to their feelings, but why were their feelings any more "right" than the feelings of the Nazis?

Objective moral right and wrong require a standard beyond our subjective individual intuitions of right and wrong, and in the absence of God there is no such standard. Those who condemned the Germans at Nuremberg were tacitly adverting to a higher law than the law of the state, even if some of them had no grounds for thinking that any such law existed.

The world did something similar in 1948 when the U.N. passed its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which it pronounced that all humans on the planet were born free and equal and had a right to life, a right not to be enslaved or tortured, etc.

But where did the drafters of this Declaration think such rights come from? If we're all the result of eons of mindless evolution how do we come to have "rights" which everyone else is obligated to respect? And for that matter, where does the obligation to respect those rights come from?

These things are simply comforting, feel-good fictions unless they're mandated by a moral authority who has the right and the power to hold us accountable.

Men can pass laws which entail punishments if those laws are transgressed. They can, if they have the power, impose their will on other men and exact punishment if their will is violated.

But what men can't do, independently of God, is claim that any behavior is wrong in any moral sense. The Soviet communists could pass a law saying that it's illegal to speak out against the state and send transgressors to the Gulag or to the grave, but what they couldn't do, at least not logically, was declare that it was morally wrong to speak out against the state.

It may have been illegal in the antebellum South to harbor runaway slaves, but that certainly didn't make it morally wrong. Legality and morality are two different things. The men on trial at Nuremberg broke no laws of their state and no one who denies a law that supercedes the laws of men can say that they did anything morally wrong.

The non-theist who wants to condemn them has left himself with no grounds to do so, for if objective morality is not rooted in something higher than man, either individual man or collective man, then it does not exist. Morality is merely a matter of arbitrary personal feelings and the power to impose them on others.

A non-theist who believes in human rights and moral evil should either give up those beliefs and live as a moral nihilist or give up his atheism. Otherwise, his moral judgments are incoherent.

Five Short Talks

I've mentioned philosopher of science Stephen Meyer frequently in the past, most recently yesterday. I mention him again today because he has delivered a series of five short but worthwhile talks at Prager U. on why the evidence scientists have uncovered in cosmology and biology over the last couple of decades makes more sense when seen as products of intentional design than as products of blind mechanistic processes.

Meyer is the author of three excellent books on the subject, Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt and Return of the God Hypothesis. Each of these contains enough scientific evidence and cogent argumentation to convince anyone who's not already dead set against it that the universe and living things are not just exorbitantly improbable flukes but are rather the products of intelligent engineering.

The videos are each about five minutes long. Here are the first two in the series:

You can access the rest of the talks in the series at the link.

The James Webb Space Telescope

Philosopher of Science Stephen Meyer, in a short essay at The Federalist, explains some of the significance of the recent launch of NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope.

Among other things, the Webb telescope may add additional confirmation onto the standard model of the origin of the universe that states the universe had a beginning in time, and if it did that's very powerful evidence that the universe had a Creator.

The Webb telescope is a $10 billion, 21-foot device that features a massive umbrella-like sun shield. It also boasts 15 times the range of motion and six times the light-gathering capability of the Hubble Space Telescope—NASA’s next best instrument for peering deep into space and far back in time.

It will operate from an orbit 1.5 million miles from earth.

The Webb instrument, Meyer explains, will be capable of seeing the first starlight from just after the Big Bang — a light, and an event, that tell us about the creation of the universe and, in their own ways, reveal God to the world.

Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have already detected energy, called the Cosmic Background Radiation, left over from what they believe to have been the initial Big Bang, but the Webb telescope could provide further confirmation of that event.

Here's Meyer:

The light that NASA’s new telescope seeks to detect comes, not from those very earliest moments after the beginning, but from the first stars and galaxies that formed an estimated several hundred thousand years later.

Detecting that light will nevertheless provide further confirmation of an expanding universe. Since the new telescope can detect infrared light—invisible light with extremely long wave-lengths—it can establish whether the most distant galaxies exhibit the amount of red shift that astronomers expect given the Big Bang.

As space plasma physicist and long-time NASA contractor Rob Sheldon has explained, “The light coming from these ancient, extremely distant galaxies, should be ‘ultra red-shifted’ into the infra-red range that the Webb telescope is designed to detect.”

This additional evidence of an expanding universe would further deepen the mystery associated with the Big Bang and add weight to a growing science-based “God hypothesis.”

But why does evidence for an initial creation event point to God?

If the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning — as observational astronomy and theoretical physics increasingly suggest — it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of any physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe.

After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy — no physics — would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.

Instead, whatever caused the universe to originate must not have been material and must exist beyond space and time. It must further have been capable of initiating a great change of state, from nothing to everything that exists.

Moreover, though Meyer doesn't mention this, to have created a universe as precisely calibrated and complex as this one the cause of the universe must be unimaginably intelligent and purposeful, two qualities of personal agents. The vast majority of possible universes are universes in which nothing much could exist except for perhaps a few atoms of hydrogen, but our universe is exceedingly complex and, in our little corner, fit for life.

Such considerations have led other scientists — former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Gerald Schroeder and the late Caltech astrophysicist Allan Sandage, for example—to posit an external creator as the best explanation for the origin of the universe as revealed by modern cosmology.

Oddly, the detection of light from extremely old and distant galaxies could also further corroborate the specifically biblical account of the origin of the universe. After all, the first words of the Bible not only affirm a “beginning,” but also that the first light came soon thereafter.

As Tulane University cosmologist Frank Tipler has noted, “Genesis tells us that there was a beginning and that after the beginning, light was the first created thing — exactly what modern astrophysics confirms.” [Nobel Prize winner] Arno Penzias has similarly noted, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses. . . .and the Bible as a whole.”

A passage from the late astronomer Robert Jastrow, himself an agnostic, seems appropriate here. He wrote in his book God and the Astronomers, that,

Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth.

And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact....

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

The "Didn't See it Coming" Presidency

President Biden has had a tough first year in office. During his campaign he declared that any president who was "responsible" for over 220,000 Covid deaths should not remain President of the United States.

Altogether in 2020 there were about 385,000 deaths attributed to Covid. More than 386,000 have been reported in the first year of the Biden presidency, 166,000 deaths more than the number he set as disqualifying Mr. Trump to be president.

Moreover, it must be noted that Mr. Biden has had the advantage of vaccines, therapeutics and a much better understanding by our medical professionals of how to treat the disease. Yet, 166,000 more people have died during his tenure than did during Mr. Trump's last year.

During the campaign he promised the American people that, “I’m not going to shut down the country, I’m not going to shut down the economy, I’m going to shut down the virus!” But of course he hasn't.

Should he be blamed for this? No, it's not his fault or anyone's (except the Chinese) that the virus continues to plague us. What he should be faulted for is hubris and hypocrisy. He made a promise that he had no power to deliver on, blamed Trump for a failure that was not Trump's fault, and refuses to apply the same standard to himself that he set for his predecessor.

An honorable man, having declared Trump "responsible" for 220,000 Covid deaths and thereby unfit for office would apply that same standard to himself and resign or at least apologize, but Mr. Biden will apparently do neither.

Instead, we're subjected to a constant stream of excuses. After only one year in office his presidency has become the "We didn't see it coming" presidency.

As Jim Geraghty writes at NRO, they didn't foresee Omicron spreading so rapidly and weren't prepared with test kits for it. They didn't foresee the Taliban taking over Afghanistan so quickly. They didn't foresee inflation coming or lasting so long. They didn't foresee the supply-chain crisis coming. They didn't foresee the labor shortage coming or the hordes of migrants at the border.

It's hard to imagine how brutal the media would be, how brutal candidate Biden himself would be, if the Trump administration described itself as unable to foresee so many difficulties.

Surely they would declare Mr. Trump and his leadership completely inept, and they'd have good reason to do so.

A Christmas Eve Noel

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

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

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

Three Christmas Symbols

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. Actually, the X is a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin, it has signified the opposite of any attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word is.

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A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

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No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young, and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be quite likely condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (Say the words "Saint Nicholas" quickly with a European accent and you'll understand how we got the name Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

Christmas Magic

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding an incomprehensible idea, the idea of the Incarnation.

The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and we could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, that hope, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with mystery and magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the real source and traditional meaning of the night are irrelevant or that they're something other than what they really are.

People feel they should be joyful at Christmas, but they can't say why. They seem to be trying to manufacture some sort of artificial "Christmas spirit," just like they try to gin up a feeling of near-delirium on New Year's eve.

An analogy: Picture the celebrations of players and fans after winning the Super Bowl or the World Series, but imagine the revelry and rejoicing even though the game hadn't yet been played. It'd certainly seem nonsensical and strange, but this is pretty much what a secular Christmas is like. No "game" has been played, nothing has been won, there's really nothing to celebrate, but the merriment and partying goes on nonetheless. Why?

All the talk of reindeer, ads for cars, beer, and phones, all the insipid "holiday" songs and movies - none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. The "joy" seems phony, empty and forced.

Indeed, Christmas Eve is hollow without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

One of the things that makes Christmas "good news that will cause great joy for all the people," is that the One who came to dwell among us has made it so that we can break out of the prison-house of meaninglessness and hopelessness that enchains us if all there is to life is being born, enjoying a few good meals, suffering and dying.

Christmas represents the possibility that we can throw off the crushing weight of purposelessness, emptiness and despair that plague modern life. It reminds us that our lives can matter for eternity.

Lovely thought, that, and one of the good things about it is that it's never too late for the transformation to begin. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of What Child Is This on their album Lost Christmas Eve.

The line that I find most poignant and hopeful is when an older man, though dying, finds his life transformed by reflecting on the Christmas story and cries out, "To be this old and have your life just begin!"

Here's Rob Evan of TSO performing the song.