NDEs and Materialism

Back in 2012 Salon excerpted a piece from Mario Beauregard's book Brain Wars. The excerpt is a very interesting look at NDEs (Near Death Experiences).

The whole article is fascinating, bearing as it does on the question whether materialism is an adequate explanation of human cognitive experience, but I'll just give a couple of excerpts here.

It opens with the story of Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds who, in 1991,underwent a surgical procedure in which her brain was completely shut down. She was clinically dead:

At this point, Pam’s out-of-body adventure transformed into a near-death experience (NDE): She recalls floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. She saw deceased relatives and friends, including her long-dead grandmother, waiting at the end of this tunnel.

She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving light, and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the light (the breathing of God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as Reynolds’s deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she described as “plunging into a pool of ice.”

NDEs are more common than one might think and they seem to be very cosmopolitan:

Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50 years.

People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception.

Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.

Another very interesting case is that of a woman named Maria whose case was first documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark:

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body.

At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn.

Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe.

From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered.

After considering a number of possible materialist explanations for NDEs Beauregard's article concludes with this: The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest).

Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs [Out of the Body Experience] associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs [Near Death Experiencers] can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality. [Italics mine]

Naturalism and Nihilism

French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to take atheism to its logical conclusion. Many atheists are reluctant to do this because they can't live consistently with their belief that man is all alone in the cosmos.

The thought of our "forlornness," many have concluded, leads to a kind of despair and emptiness and ultimately to nihilism.

Some there are, though, who call upon their fellow non-theists to face up to the gloomy entailments of the belief that nature is all there is. Philosophers Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist's Guide to Reality, and Joel Marks are two who seek to face squarely the logic of their unbelief.

Another example is a commenter at Uncommon Descent who lays out clearly and without sugar-coating what one should also believe if one embraces atheism.

He/she (It's not clear which) writes that if one has a naturalistic worldview one should also be a nihilist:

I’m a nihilist because it shows reality. If there is no higher power, then everything humanity holds dear was constructed by humanity and therefore not real.

There is:

• No objective, absolute, inherent meaning in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent purpose in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent value in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent morality in life or the universe. No good, no evil, no right, no wrong
• No objective, absolute, inherent truth in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent knowledge in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent logic in life or the universe

There's more:

• We are the cobbled together Frankensteins of billions of years of trial and error
• We have no free-will, mind, consciousness, rationality or reason. They are illusions and [the notions of] personhood, identity and humanity are not real.
• The emotions we express are just chemicals in our brain. The very things we seek in life like happiness, peace, contentment, joy are just chemicals reducing us to nothing more than chemical addicts.
• We are no more important than other animals. A dog is a rat is a pig is a boy.
• There is no afterlife. Once we die, we fade from existence and all our memories, experiences, knowledge, etc. goes with it. In time, we are forgotten.
• All the things we do in life are just for survival. Learning, loving, seeking, being positive, eating, relating, having fun are created for the sake of ignoring the real reason we are here and that’s to live as long as we can.
• There is no help coming to save humanity as a species or as individuals. We are all alone and on our own. If you can’t survive, you die.

The reader might wonder why anyone would embrace such a melancholy set of beliefs, but if the only alternative is to accept that there's a God, then nihilism, as depressing, hopeless, and dreary as it may be, will still be more appealing to a lot of people than the divine alternative.

Reflecting on the utter despair that infuses the above assertions, I thought of a character in Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed named Kirilov. Kirilov was an atheist and a nihilist. He says at one point in the story, shortly before taking his own life, "I don't understand how a man can know there is no God and not kill himself on the spot."

Another fellow who realizes that we can't dispense with belief in God and have everything go on as before is an anonymous commenter at CrossExamined.org. The author of the blog, J. Warner Wallace, by way of introducing the commenter's submission, said this:

Several weeks ago, a gentleman (we’ll call him “John”) replied to a blog I posted at CrossExamined.org. As a skeptical non-believer, John wasn’t responding to what I had posted, but to his fellow atheists who had been interacting with Christians in the comment section.

John’s post was controversial but honest. In fact, he clearly delineated the problem of atheistic moral grounding. Here’s what John had to say:

“[To] all my Atheist friends.

Let us stop sugar coating it. I know, it’s hard to come out and be blunt with the friendly Theists who frequent sites like this. However in your efforts to “play nice” and “be civil” you actually do them a great disservice.

We are Atheists. We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself. While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, civility seem to exist, we know they do not.

Our highly evolved brains imagine that these things have a cause or a use, and they have in the past, they’ve allowed life to continue on this planet for a short blip of time.

But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it.

All human achievement and plans for the future are the result of some ancient, evolved brain and accompanying chemical reactions that once served a survival purpose. Ex: I’ll marry and nurture children because my genes demand reproduction, I’ll create because creativity served a survival advantage to my ancient ape ancestors, I’ll build cities and laws because this allowed my ape grandfather time and peace to reproduce and protect his genes.

My only directive is to obey my genes. Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.

We deride the theists for having created myths and holy books. We imagine ourselves superior. But we too imagine there are reasons to obey laws, be polite, protect the weak etc. Rubbish. We are nurturing a new religion, one where we imagine that such conventions have any basis in reality. Have they allowed life to exist? Absolutely. But who cares?

Outside of my greedy little genes' need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Some of my atheist friends have fooled themselves into acting like the general population. They live in suburban homes, drive Toyota Camrys, attend school plays. But underneath they know the truth. They are a bag of DNA whose only purpose is to make more of themselves.

So be nice if you want. Be involved, have polite conversations, be a model citizen. Just be aware that while technically an Atheist, you are an inferior one. You’re just a little bit less evolved, that’s all. When you are ready to join me, let me know, I’ll be reproducing with your wife.

I know it’s not PC to speak so bluntly about the ramifications of our beliefs, but in our discussions with theists we sometimes tip-toe around what we really know to be factual. Maybe it’s time we Atheists were a little more truthful and let the chips fall where they may.

At least that’s what my genes are telling me to say.”

Several readers questioned whether John really was an atheist or just a theist posing as an atheist, so Wallace clarified:

Since posting this comment, I’ve been able to peek at John’s life in a very limited way, and I’ve had a brief interaction with him. He appears to be a creative, responsible, loving husband and father....When John first posted his comment many of the other atheists who post at CrossExamined were infuriated.

Some denied John’s identity as a skeptic and accused him of being a disguised Christian. But in my interaction with John, he told me he was weary of hearing fellow atheists mock their opponents for hypocrisy and ignorance, while pretending they had a definitive answer to the great questions of life. He simply wanted his fellow atheists to be consistent.

As it turns out, though, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.

"John" is, of course, correct. Given atheism (or naturalism) there's nothing morally wrong with doing any of the things he mentions because on atheism there are no objective moral duties, nor can there be.

This outrages some who think such a claim is tantamount to accusing atheists of being wicked or immoral, but this misses the point. A person can be kind, honest, and generous, and presumably many atheists are, but the point is that there's nothing in atheism that would make cruelty, dishonesty, or selfishness wrong. On atheism no one has an objective duty or obligation to be kind rather than cruel.

As "John" suggests above, the only constraint on anyone's desires is what that person can get away with. "John" is acknowledging that a man who has the power to act with impunity is not violating any moral law by torturing children or shooting up a movie theater. In a world with no transcendent moral authority might makes right.

The famous French writer Voltaire expressed it this way. He said, "I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants and even my wife to believe in God, because it means I shall be cheated, robbed, and cuckolded less often." This is the theme I try to amplify in my novel In the Absence of God and also in my soon-to-be released novel Bridging the Abyss (See links at top of page).

Some have asked, essentially, So what? What's the point? The point is that when one adopts a worldview, whether theistic or naturalistic, one must be prepared to also adopt the consequences of that worldview. Otherwise one is acting irrationally.

To be consistent an atheist must either be a complete nihilist, or, like "John," he or she must simply live by his or her own predilections, recognizing that it's a purely subjective choice, and that it's no better nor worse, morally speaking, than any other choice. Moreover, one must forfeit the "right" to make any moral judgments of anyone else's behavior regardless how cruel or revolting that behavior may be.

Moral judgments, after all, imply an objective moral standard and naturalism rules such standards out. The atheist who makes moral judgments of others, who condemns, for example, child abuse, racism, exploitation of the environment, or opposition to gay marriage, is living as if there is an objective standard that's being violated while adopting a worldview that makes that standard impossible.

A Few Thoughts on the Election

For what they're worth here are a few reflections on last Tuesday.

1. People don't vote for a candidate, they vote for a party. As we saw in the Fetterman/Oz debate debates don't matter. No matter how awful the debate performance voters will stand by their candidate.

Mr. Fetterman has been seriously impaired by a stroke, scarcely campaigned, was completely unable to put together a coherent sentence in the his debate with Oz, and sti;ll won a senate seat.

A candidate doesn't even have to be alive for voters to vote for him as long as he's their party's nomineee. A dead man actually won in a race for a Pennsylvania state house seat.

The country is in terrible shape, but people still voted for their team. The quality of candidates doesn't seem to matter so much as the letter they have after their name.

2. The failure of the predicted "red wave" to materialize strengthened President Biden against those in his party who would've tried to ease him out of running in 2024 had the election been a complete debacle. On the other hand, Donald Trump was weakened by the failure of his endorsed candidates to do very well.

Both outcomes work to the advantage of Florida governor Ron DeSantis if he chooses to run for president in 2024.

3. Mr. Biden's glee at having avoided getting clobbered like most presidents do in the mid-terms is understandable, but a little premature. He'll still probably lose the House of Representatives and may still lose the Senate, albeit not by the margins that some were predicting.

If the GOP does wind up taking both House and Senate then Biden's boasting about not losing as badly as other presidents have in the mid-terms will sound like a man in a sword fight who loses an arm and brags that he didn't lose both arms.

4. Crazy speculation of the day: There's one senator who must be harboring very bitter feelings against his leadership and the president for what he perhaps believes to have been a betrayal.

If the senate finally comes down to a 50/50 split, giving VP Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote and the Democrats effective control of the Senate, what sweeter vengeance might this senator exact than to switch parties and give the raspberry to Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden.

I speak, of course, of West Virginia's Joe Manchin. Manchin would have nothing to lose by making the switch to the GOP since he has no future in West Virginia as a Democrat and no future within his own party which pretty much holds him in disdain.

In exchange for Manchin's crucial vote to pass the party’s $740 billion tax and climate spending law, Manchin was evidently under the impression that Mr. Biden would not do anything to hurt West Virginia's coal industry. Yet last week the president said in a speech that he was going to shut down coal plants all across the U.S.

Manchin was angry and doubtless felt betrayed. He probably thinks that he's been played for a sucker, and it certainly does look that way.

I'm not predicting that Manchin will actually bolt the Democrats, but I'd be surprised if the Republican leadership isn't going to try to woo him away from the party that has pretty much humiliated him if it turns out that the GOP needs one more senator for a majority.

It would certainly be karma from Manchin's point of view if the wooing was successful.

When the Brain Shuts Down

An intriguing new study of NDEs (Near Death Experiences) has found that resuscitated patients often report phenomena that seem to count as evidence that there's something more to our cognitive experience than just the material brain.

Here's an excerpt:

One in five people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death, a new study shows.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and elsewhere, the study involved 567 men and women whose hearts stopped beating while hospitalized and who received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and United Kingdom.

Despite immediate treatment, fewer than 10% recovered sufficiently to be discharged from hospital.

Survivors reported having unique lucid experiences, including a perception of separation from the body, observing events without pain or distress, and a meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions and thoughts toward others.

The researchers found these experiences of death to be different from hallucinations, delusions, illusions, dreams or CPR-induced consciousness.

The work also included tests for hidden brain activity. A key finding was the discovery of spikes of brain activity, including so-called gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta waves up to an hour into CPR.

Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception.

Identifying measureable electrical signs of lucid and heightened brain activity, together with similar stories of recalled death experiences, suggests that the human sense of self and consciousness, much like other biological body functions, may not stop completely around the time of death, adds Sam Parnia, the lead study investigator.

"These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink death," says Parnia. As the brain is shutting down, many of its natural braking systems are released.

Known as disinhibition, this provides access to the depths of a person's consciousness, including stored memories, thoughts from early childhood to death, and other aspects of reality. While no one knows the evolutionary purpose of this phenomenon, it clearly reveals "intriguing questions about human consciousness, even at death," says Parnia.

Wesley Smith at Evolution News states that,

...maybe there is no evolutionary explanation. There is certainly no discernible natural-selection benefit. Moreover, what purpose would such a “soft exit” offer? Why would it appear? How would it develop if consciousness is solely generated by the brain and is purely a materialistic phenomenon?

Good questions, but the study also raises the question of whether there might be more involved in our cognitive life besides just our material brain. Perhaps we also possess another substance, an immaterial mind or soul.

NDEs certainly point in that direction.

The Bearded Nut

Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon had some sage advice a few years ago for consumers of news in our hyper-politicized, hyper-partisan media culture.

He wrote:

Events are turning me into a radical skeptic. I no longer believe what I read, unless what I am reading is an empirically verifiable account of the past. I no longer have confidence in polls, because it has become impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

What I have heard from the media and political class over the last several years has been so spectacularly proven wrong by events, again and again, that I sometimes wonder why I continue to read two newspapers a day before spending time following journalists on Twitter. Habit, I guess.

A sense of professional obligation, I suppose. Maybe boredom.

The fact is that almost the entirety of what one reads in the paper or on the web is speculation. The writer isn't telling you what happened, he is offering an interpretation of what happened, or offering a projection of the future.

The best scenario is that these theories are novel, compelling, informed, and based on reporting and research. But that is rarely the case.

More often the interpretations of current events, and prophesies of future ones, are merely the products of groupthink, or dogma, or emotions, or wish-casting, memos to friends written by 27-year-olds who, in the words of [former Obama advisor] Ben Rhodes, "literally know nothing."

There was a time when newspapers printed astrology columns. They no longer need to. The pseudoscience is on the front page.

There's much more of interest in Continetti's column at the link, and I encourage you to read it. For my part, I think he's right, even though I suppose what he says could apply to Viewpoint as much as any other blog. The difference is, I think, that this blog is clearly a platform for opinions, not news, and I don't pretend it's anything else.

In any case, I don't think we should give up on trying to be informed by our media, but we do need to be very critical readers, viewers and listeners. This is especially the case if we get our information from cable news shows and talk radio.

Not every show on either of these venues is overly biased, but both are populated with programming and personalities who are committed advocates of a particular ideology. Even when I think what the people I'm listening to are saying is correct I'm often dismayed by the manner in which they say it.

For just one example, hosts on both left and right on television and radio will make criticisms of their opponents (i.e. Trump or Biden) which could just as well apply to their preferred heroes (i.e. Trump or Biden) whom they wouldn't dream of criticizing. This is not only tendentious, it seriously diminishes their credibility, not to mention that it makes it extremely hard to refrain from turning them off in disgust.

On occasion, hosts on one of these venues will have someone of a contrary viewpoint on their program, but they'll frequently step all over their guests, interrupting and talking over him or her, to prevent them from being heard. Sean Hannity at Fox is a particularly egregious example of the type.

It's probably a good rule of thumb whenever we read or hear some personality make a criticism of someone to ask oneself what evidence is being offered to buttress the criticism, and does the criticism being made apply with equal force to the personality's own political champions.

If the answers to those questions are "not much" and "no" then tune them out. You're not being informed, you're being propagandized.

Continetti closes his piece with a quote from the late author Michael Crichton: "Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It's not sensible to listen to it."

Sadly, as concerns much of the media - and not just cable and talk radio, either - this is good advice.

Clash of the Titans

Tomorrow is one of the most consequential midterm elections in recent memory, and it has a lot of otherwise apolitical folks thinking politics.

The White House is not officially on the ballot tomorrow although it certainly is on the ballot unofficially. Many see tomorrow as a tacit referendum on the Biden presidency.

Donald Trump is gearing up for another run at the Oval Office and has already started taking pot shots at his potential rivals for the Republican nomination, which is unfortunate because such conduct probably hurts him more than it helps.

In any case, National Review's Rich Lowry has an essay up in which he compares the relative merits of Trump and Florida's governor Ron DeSantis.

Lowry makes a compelling case that DeSantis is the better option for Republicans going into the 2024 campaign season. He writes:

There are huge pitfalls to Trump 3.0 that would be easily and nearly completely avoided by nominating and electing DeSantis, or any other Republican alternative. (I don’t take it as an absolute certainty, by the way, that DeSantis will run, or that if he does, it will come down at the end to the Trump–DeSantis contest everyone expects.)

The difference between nominating Trump and DeSantis — the delta in terms of Republican prospects and governing potential — is hard to exaggerate.

Lowry makes several good points, among which are these:

1. A President Trump would be four years of mayhem. "Democrats would certainly find a reason to deny the legitimacy of a President DeSantis, but his cabinet secretaries probably wouldn’t have to have bomb-sniffing dogs checking their cars every morning."

2. Trump at 76 is much more vigorous than Biden, but, if Biden does run again, which I seriously doubt, " a Trump–Biden race will be aged-on-aged violence that will be a great victory, one way or the other, for the American gerontocracy. A DeSantis–Biden race, on the other hand, would set up a simple future-vs.-past contest like Clinton vs. Dole in 1996 or Obama vs. McCain in 2008.

"Although Trump looks as if he could be doing campaign rallies until he’s 90, time comes for us all. There’s no guarantee that Trump won’t start encountering Biden-like aging problems, either during a general election or in a prospective second term. Why risk it, when there are palatable, new-generation alternatives?"

3. Trump would be a serious problem for other Republicans in other races. "If he’s the nominee, every Republican in the country would either have to endorse his delusions about the 2020 election or find a way to dodge them. And Trump would be paying attention. He’d presumably be happy to take shots at anyone in the party not showing sufficient loyalty to 'stop the steal,' no matter how destructive."

4. Trump would have much more difficulty governing than DeSantis. "Trump did a number of truly consequential and creative things policy-wise while in office, but his erratic nature also limited his ability to deliver. A vendetta tour against all his real and perceived enemies would now be layered on top of this.

"Assuming that Mitch McConnell is still the GOP leader in the Senate, do Republicans really want a newly elected president and a Senate majority leader who don’t speak to each other and, worse, a president who has insulted that majority leader in crude and personal terms?"

5. Related to the above, Trump would likely find it very difficult to find top level people willing to work in his administration, knowing that they'd be setting themselves up for harsh personal public insults as soon as they crossed him.

"He has much more of a policy apparatus and government-in-waiting than in 2016, but he’ll still have trouble hiring for top positions, and a miasma of legal controversies will continue to trail him everywhere. Again, why choose that when there are other alternatives who’d start with a clean slate and be able and willing to work with everyone in the party?"

6. Finally, Trump is much more likely than DeSantis to allow his personal character flaws to alienate voters and cause him to lose a race that should be easily winnable (like 2020).

DeSantis has most of Trump's virtues with none of his vices. He's a solid conservative - socially and economically - with apparently no scandal in his background, and he's a fighter, albeit of a different style than Trump.

At this point, he looks like a much better choice for Republicans in 2024, than a man who did most of the things conservatives elected him to do but who did them in a fashion that repelled far too many voters who would've otherwise been inclined to deny Joe Biden their vote in 2020.

Are We Headed for Climate Catastrophe?

An article by Chris Melore emphasizes that some of the most dire predictions concerning our changing climate are probably wrong.

By 2100 the change will probably be neither as catastrophic as some models predict nor as benign as others project.

Here's Melore:

Yes, climate change is very real and poses a serious threat to the health of our planet. However, researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder have a simple message for scientists who focus on the most dire effects of global warming: chill out.

In a letter in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors write that many scientists are focusing way too much on the worst-case scenarios of climate change and environmental shifts all around the globe.

While the team notes that these problems are real, constantly preaching impending doom is counter-productive and overshadows the more likely outcomes of global warming.

These more-likely outcomes fall into the middle of the climate change conversation — not good, but also not extremely bad.

CU Boulder assistant professor Matt Burgess, a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences states that “We shouldn’t overstate or understate our climate future.”

He adds that,

People need to think in terms of gradations, not absolutes. Yes, we need to be aware of the extremes, like climate solutions that get us to net zero before mid century, or on the flipside, global catastrophes.

But it’s what’s in the middle that is more likely. And that deserves more research.

The most extreme scenarios require that,

...all the regions in the world in 2100 would need to have over $100k GDP per capita, with no climate policy the whole century, all-in on coal, despite facing unlivable heat in tropical regions with the warming that that scenario produces. That’s just not realistic.

At the same time, the researchers note that models which come in on the low-end of the climate change spectrum are probably going to be incorrect too. These forecasts predict that temperatures will only rise by less than three degrees by 2100.

“That would be a daunting task to keep us that low—we are almost there now,” Burgess explains.

The new report notes that several experts agree that temperatures will likely rise by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees by 2100. By focusing on these “middle-ground scenarios,” the team says scientists can focus on how that change will impact local communities and humanity as a whole.

This includes the impact of more severe heat waves and the shrinking number of areas seeing snow in the winter.

It'd be good to keep all this in mind when assessing the claims made by our politicians about our climate future, claims that often skew toward the lower extreme (Republicans) or the upper extreme (Democrats).

Off the Rails

In the wake of the attack on Paul Pelosi by an illegal immigrant lunatic in San Francisco a lot of people on the left have been pointing to what they perceive to be violent rhetoric on the right as responsible for this sort of political violence.

With that in mind my jaw dropped the other night when NBC historian Michael Beschloss on MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes went completely bonkers as he predicted the horrors that await if there's an electoral "red tsunami" on Tuesday.

He claimed that Tuesday's election could signal the end of democracy in the United States if the Republicans win. He expressed fear that we could be headed for a brutal authoritarianism, that our freedom to speak and write what we want could be lost and that our children will be arrested and killed - all if the Republicans win the House of Representatives, the Senate and a number of governorship's in Tuesday's mid-term election.

Now, aside from the fact that Beschloss' fear-mongering sounds a lot like Chicken Little running about shouting that the sky is falling, and aside from the fact that it's the left that's the source of almost all attempts to curtail freedom of speech in our society - from suspensions of social media accounts to university cancel culture - consider how Beschloss' febrile prognostications of doom might affect a mentally unbalanced listener prone to violence.

Such a person - think of James Hodgkinson, a left-wing political activist and Bernie Sanders supporter who shot six people in 2017, nearly killing Republican Steve Scalise - might well reason that if Republicans are a threat to our democracy and the lives of our children then killing Republicans is not only justified, it's a moral imperative.

How many Democrats are likely to hold Beschloss accountable for his irresponsible, paranoid rant, especially if there's violence against Republicans in the coming days.

Let's hope we don't have to find out.

Here's the clip of Mr. Beschloss venting his fantasies on Chris Hayes' show (it might take a moment to load):

Consciousness and Atheism

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in a column at The Week, observes that arguments surrounding human consciousness comprise one of the most animated debates in contemporary philosophy.

He goes on to note that one reason why consciousness is so vexing to academic philosophers is that "a great many of them are atheists, and the reality of subjective consciousness frustrates an extremist but widely held version of atheistic metaphysics called eliminative materialism."

He writes:

This form of metaphysics takes the position that the only things that exist are matter and mindless physical processes. But in a world of pure matter, how could you have subjective, conscious beings like us?

To someone schooled in the great historical philosophical traditions — which have been largely dismissed following the adoption of post-modernism in the academy — this debate is immensely frustrating. In fact, much of the ongoing conversation about consciousness is self-evidently absurd.

"The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no non-physical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that," writes philosopher David Chalmers. The New York Times backed him up, calling this a "succinct" summation of the status quo.

Except that it's not.

First of all, there can be no scientific consensus or evidence about non-physical realities, because science is only concerned with physical realities. As for the "philosophical consensus," well, anyone who knows anything about philosophy knows that there has never been such a thing and never will be. And even if there were, it wouldn't mean anything, since philosophy is not a science; in science, an expert consensus does represent the state of the art of knowledge on a particular issue.

In philosophy, it merely represents a fad.

The problem for materialist philosophers is that there's no plausible physical explanation for consciousness. For example, sensations like pain are caused by physical processes in the nervous system and brain, but the sensation itself is not physical. It's not something that can be observed or measured by anyone other than the person experiencing it.

How do atomic particles like electrons zipping along neurons produce the sensation of pain or sound or color? What is the bridge between the physical stimulus and the non-physical sensation? No one knows.

Some materialists claim to solve the problem by asserting that the sensations just are the electrochemical stimuli, but not many philosophers are willing to agree that their experience of pain is nothing more than the firing of specific nerve fibers.

Surely the agonizing sensation of pain is more than just atoms whizzing about. The sensation of sweet is something other than a chemical reaction in the brain. The sound of middle c is something other than the vibrations which elicit it.

The 18th century mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz argued that if an observer were miniaturized so that he could be inserted into a patient's brain he wouldn't see the brain light up red when the patient looked at a red object. We know today that all he'd see would be the flux of molecules coalescing and coming apart, so where does the red come from?

Gobry continues with a look at the work of philosopher Daniel Dennett:

Another argument on consciousness that enjoys a bit of consensus, especially lately, is that consciousness is an illusion. Our brain constructs models of the world around us and then tricks itself into believing that this is an expression of the world.

The foremost proponent of this view is the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

But again, this view is literally nonsense. The concept of an illusion presupposes that there is a subjective consciousness experiencing the illusion.

There's more from Gobry at the link. He's right that Dennett's view seems nonsensical. If consciousness is an illusion then the sensations we have of pain, sound, fragrance, and so on are also illusions. So, too, are our ideas and thoughts.

If this is so, then almost our entire experience of the world is an illusion, including Dennett's idea that consciousness is an illusion.

What's the point, Dennett might be asked, of writing a book full of ideas which, if true, are themselves illusions? Isn't the very act of trying to persuade someone of the truth of one's illusions a rather vain exercise?

This is a good example, unfortunately, of the silliness into which very intelligent people lapse when they're determined to efface any vestige of the "supernatural" from their metaphysics.

The phenomena of consciousness strongly suggest the existence of a non-physical mental substance, and if such a substance exists, then materialism is false. And if materialism is false then an atheistic worldview loses one of its main supports.

That's one reason why atheistic philosophers are so determined to deny the existence of consciousness regardless of the difficulties that that denial poses.

Philosopher J.P. Moreland has written on how odd it is that consciousness poses very serious problems for an atheistic worldview but rather than give up their worldview many atheistic philosophers have given up consciousness.

The Human Embryo

Ever since I was an undergraduate biology major I have been intrigued by the mystery of how a zygote (a fertilized egg) develops from a single cell into a multi-cellular embryo and from there to a complete organism.

The reason this is such a profound mystery is that the initial cell somehow "knows" to divide and the daughter cells somehow "know" to form different kinds of cells which somehow "know" to migrate around the embryo and form different kinds of tissue which somehow "know" to integrate with other kinds of tissues to form organs, and so on.

So, how do cells with no brains "know" how to do all this? Where are the instructions located which choreograph this astonishing process and tell all the parts what to do and how to do it, and how are those instructions communicated?

The information doesn't seem to be found in the genome or the epigenome, so where is it, what is its storage medium, and how is it stored and accessed? What mechanisms control it so that the entire assembly unfolds in a flawless sequence with each step occurring precisely when it must in order to successfully construct an adult organism?

And how, exactly, does the zygote "know" to produce, say, a flower rather than a fish, or a bird, or a human?

These questions are fascinating and they emerge again in an article at Uncommon Descent that quotes geneticist Michael Denton. Referring to an illustration of the development of the fertilzed ovum Denton writes:

The earliest events leading from the first division of the egg cell to the blastula stage in amphibians, reptiles and mammals are illustrated in figure 5.4 (in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis).

Even to the untrained zoologist it is obvious that neither the blastula itself, nor the sequence of events that lead to its formation, is identical in any of the vertebrate classes shown.

The blastula stage is an early step in embryogenesis when the zygote divides several times to produce a ball of cells. When those cells then evaginate and begin to take on the form of the early embryo biologists call that the gastrula stage.

Denton continues:

The differences become even more striking in the next major phase of in embryo formation – gastrulation.

This involves a complex sequence of cell movements whereby the cells of the blastula rearrange themselves, eventually resulting in the transformation of the blastula into the intricate folded form of the early embryo, or gastrula, which consists of three basic germ cell layers: the ectoderm, which gives rise to the skin and the nervous system; the mesoderm, which gives rise to muscle and skeletal tissues; and the endoderm, which gives rise to the lining of the alimentary tract as well as to the liver and pancreas....

In some ways the egg cell, blastula, and gastrula stages in the different vertebrate classes are so dissimilar that, were it not for the close resemblance in the basic body plan of all adult vertebrates, it seems unlikely that they would have been classed as belonging to the same phylum.

There is no question that, because of the great dissimilarity of the early stages of embryogenesis in the different vertebrate classes, organs and structures considered homologous in adult vertebrates cannot be traced back to homologous cells or regions in the earliest stages of embryogenesis. In other words, homologous structures are arrived at by different routes.

Incredibly, different types of animals that are all alleged to have arisen from common ancestors and to be evolutionarily related evidently follow different pathways in building morphological structures such as the arm of a man, the foreleg of a horse, the wing of a bird, and the pectoral fin of a fish.

If they follow different pathways then there must be a different set of assembly instructions for the development of these "homologs," and thus all of the above questions arise again.

There is in the organism from the time it's just a single cell at least until it's fully developed, a massive amount of information that programs its development.

The locus, nature, and modus operandi of this information are unknown, but one thing I think can be inferred: If information of such astonishing sophistication controls the progression of the cell's development, it seems very unlikely that that information is the product of blind, impersonal, random processes.

Complex information such as we find in computer code or architectural blueprints are never the product of random processes like genetic mutation, but are always, insofar as we've ever experienced it, the product of a mind.

Computer programmer shares some of the wonder of all this in the following 9 minute TED Talk:

The Top Issues for Voters

I mentioned in yesterday's post that many analysts expect the Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate after next week's elections.

One reason why they expect this was explained by NBC's chief political analyst and number cruncher, Steve Kornacki.

On Monday, Kornacki pointed out that Republicans have a "massive advantage" going into next week's election. He based his analysis on an October 31st Gallup poll which assessed which issues voters considered most important and which party they thought better able to address those issues.

As can be seen in the following image the GOP led on four of the five issues and on three of them their lead was in the double digits.

According to Gallup the economy topped the list of extremely important issues, with 49% considering the issue “extremely important,” followed by abortion at 42%, crime at 40%, gun policy at 38% and immigration at 37%.

Kornacki concluded that, “...when you look at this issue set, you look at how these voters are breaking along these issues, you see what looks like a significant Republican advantage."

If the vote on Tuesday reflects these priorities there'll be a much different Congress come January 2023 than there was last January.

What the White House Can Expect in January

If, as many observers expect, the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives in a week and their members and leaders are sworn into office in January what might the White House expect?

Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon has some thoughts on the question:

History offers clues. The Republican Congress will fight with the president over spending, immigration, the IRS, aid to Ukraine, and the debt ceiling. And it will open investigations into Biden’s personal and professional life.

Divided government in a polarized America doesn’t simply halt a president’s legislative agenda. It saps energy out of the executive branch by forcing the White House into a defensive crouch.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has experienced a period of divided government. Every president since Reagan has faced withering scrutiny from an opposition Congress, from a special or independent counsel, or from all the above.

Every president since Bill Clinton has fought Congress over spending. Those battles resulted in at least one government shutdown during three of the past four presidencies. (The Democratic Congress during George W. Bush’s final two years didn’t want to close the government, it wanted to cut off funds for the war in Iraq.)

Reagan was almost impeached for the Iran-contra scandal. George H.W. Bush had to contend with independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and with fallout from the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry.

Clinton’s troubles began with Whitewater, moved on to the White House travel office, progressed to sleazy campaign finance, and climaxed in his impeachment for lying about and covering up his affair with a White House intern half his age.

George W. Bush had to deal with another special counsel investigation, as well as a firestorm over his firing of U.S. attorneys. Barack Obama’s administration was investigated for the Fast & Furious program, IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, and the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.

Donald Trump had special counsel Robert Mueller hounding him during his first two years, then Congress impeached him for his unsuccessful attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainians into giving him dirt on Biden. Then Congress impeached him again for the events of January 6, 2021.

Trump has been out of office for almost two years, and Congress is still investigating him.

That’s six presidents and three impeachments. Three and a half, if you count the Iran-contra mess. Fair odds, then, that another impeachment lies ahead.

I'm not sure about this, though. The House may wish to impeach Mr. Biden, but it's not so certain that they'd want the Senate to convict and have him actually thrown out of office.

It's not that they think he's doing such a great job, or that they don't think his scandals and miscellaneous ineptnesses don't warrant his removal, rather they surely must feasr that were he sent permanently back to his beach house in Rehoboth it would leave the country in the hands of Vice-President Kamala Harris - a frying pan/fire scenario.

It seems more likely that the Republicans will focus their fire and impeachments on folks lower down the food chain and there are lots of targets of opportunity:

As soon as Congress changes hands, Republicans will be all over Homeland Security’s response to the border crisis.

They will deluge the White House with document requests. They will examine whether the administration colluded with social media companies to censor politically incorrect views.

They will put Attorney General Merrick Garland in the hot seat for his department’s handling of school board protests and criminalization of political differences.

And, of course, the GOP Congress will pore over the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The media will surely object loudly against "Republican witch hunts" and whatnot, but after four years of hounding Donald Trump based mostly on fabrications, their protestations will have little credibility.

18 Trillion Feet

One of the marvels of our bodies' engineering is the compactification of DNA in each of the three trillion or so nucleated cells each of us possesses. DNA has been called the most efficient information storage device known to man and the following six minute video explains why.

As astonishing as the storage of our genetic code is the video hardly scratches the surface of the multiple layers of complexity involved. There are entire systems of proteins devoted to unraveling the double helix, reading off the code, repairing errors, replicating the code, integrating the epigenome and more.

See here for some additional details.

One of the most amazing examples of this bio-complexity is the ability of DNA to "make sense" at several different levels of structure. To see what I mean, imagine you read a paragraph in a book in which each word is read sequentially. The paragraph will have a meaning.

Now suppose you only read every third word and found that the paragraph still made sense but had a completely different meaning. That's how DNA works. Depending on where along the strand the "reader" begins it codes for different proteins and traits. (See here for a fuller explanation)

This is so baffling that many investigators doubt that there can be any naturalistic explanation and believe it points instead to an intelligent programmer who somehow designed the system.

In any case, watch the video and ask yourself how blind purposeless processes could have produced the ability to achieve this degree of compaction purely by chance.

Five Things Naturalistic Science Can't Explain

In his book Scientism and Secularism, philosopher J.P.Moreland lists and discusses five phenomena that naturalistic science cannot account for or explain but which fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. The five are these:

1. The Origin of the Universe: That the universe had a beginning is the consensus view among cosmologists, but if it had a beginning what could have caused it. If the universe encompasses all of space, time and mass-energy then all of this exists only when the universe comes into being, which means that the universe came into being out of nothing. How? The answer to this question lies outside the purview of science.

2. The Origin of the Laws of Physics: As with the universe in general, the fundamental laws of physics exist only insofar as the universe does. Apart from a universe there are no such laws. An explanation of why just these laws exist and have the properties that they do is not an explanation that science is equipped to provide. Science can only tell us what the laws are and what they entail. It can't tell us why they are.

3. The Fine-Tuning of the Cosmos: As we've written on VP numerous times in the past the fundamental forces, parameters and constants which form the fabric of the universe are calibrated to unimaginably precise values such that an infinitesimally tiny deviation in the settings of any one of several dozen examples would make either the existence of the universe impossible or the existence of any kind of significant life impossible. Possible explanations for this extraordinary state of affairs, such as the multiverse hypothesis, even if they're credible, are metaphysical conjectures which lie outside the realm of science.

4. The Origin of Consciousness: Mental states such as holding a belief, understanding a joke, doubting a proposition, feeling pain, sensing red, and recognizing the meaning of a text are phenomena which defy a scientific explanation. On the scientific view there was nothing but atoms, molecules and chemical compounds for eons of time until one day a completely different phenomenon, consciousness, emerged. How does physical matter produce conscious experience? Science has no plausible answer.

5. The Existence of Objective Moral Laws: Science can tell us what is the case in the natural world, but it cannot tell us what ought to be the case. It can explain why people have subjective moral sentiments, perhaps, but it cannot explain how objective moral duties could arise, where they would've come from, why they're binding upon us, and so on. Indeed, any such explanation, even were one possible on naturalism, would be philosophical, not scientific.

These five phenomena come from Moreland's book, but the summaries of them are mine. Moreland's treatment of each is much more detailed than what I've provided here, and he argues that each of these is more compatible with a theistic ontology than any of them are with naturalism.

I enthusiastically recommend his book to anyone interested in the philosophy of science, the explanatory limits of science, and/or the interface of science and theism.

Christian Nationalism

Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano is running for governor of the state, and one of the allegations leveled against him by his opponents is that he's a "Christian nationalist."

So, is that a bad thing? It depends on what one means by it.

An article at MSN.com reports on a piece in the Washington Post that addresses Christian nationalism and in which the Post tries to clarify what's meant by the term. Christian nationalism, according to the Post is "an ideology that says Christianity is the foundation of the United States and that government should protect that foundation."

If that's what we're to understand by "Christian nationalism" it seems rather innocuous.

A lot of people believe that the foundational principles of the United States, the freedoms included in the first amendment, for example, are rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview, and that the founders, whether or not they were Christians themselves, were heavily influenced by the Christian culture in which they lived.

Indeed, the concept of liberty and justice for all is, historically speaking, a uniquely Christian idea, and the claim that Christianity influenced the founding of this nation is clear to anyone who has read their Tocqueville.

Most people believe, moreover, that government should protect that foundation by protecting the principle of religious liberty.

So, if that's all Mastriano, or any other Christian nationalist, believes then almost anyone who is a Christian in the U.S. would be ab defino a Christian nationalist.

But further along in their column the Post adds a twist that subtly alters the definition:

As part of our research, we examined the percentage of Americans who, over the past 15 years, said they agree or strongly agree with this Christian nationalist statement: “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.”

So now they appear to implicitly define a Christian nationalist as one who wants the federal government to officially declare the U.S. to be a Christian nation.

Here we should be inclined to balk.

It's one thing for a citizen to acknowledge that the U.S. was founded on Christian principles and to expect the government to protect the principles upon which the nation was founded, the principles contained in all of our founding documents. It's quite another for a citizen to hold that the federal government should declare the U.S. to be officially Christian.

It's hard to picture specifically what such a declaration would even mean in practice. Would it entail making Christianity a state religion, a circumstance which our founders explicitly sought, for good reason, to avoid?

As the founders knew from Europe's experience, state religions can be oppressive, and receiving state favoritism often corrupts the religion.

So, however much Christianity influenced our founding it seems unwise at this stage in our history, a stage in which there's far more religious diversity present in our population than was present 250 years ago, to formally declare the U.S. to be officially a Christian nation.

If that's the sort of Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano is, though, he's probably going to alienate a lot of voters who might otherwise be inclined to vote for him.

The Clotting Cascade

A new episode of Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe's Secrets of the Cell has been released and it's fascinating. In this 16 minute episode Behe explains the amazing cascade of events that occur when we get a simple scratch.

Why is it that when we are cut we don't continue to bleed?

Well, of course it's because the blood clots, but how does this clotting happen, and, if purposeless Darwinian processes are what produced living things, how did such an extraordinary system as the clotting cascade ever come about through unguided physical processes with no intervention from an intelligent agent of some kind?

Watch as Behe takes us through a discussion of these questions.

Carnivorous Plants

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't.

But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

Some while ago Evolution News ran an essay that discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain. Here's what they said about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid. The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients.

The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey. The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volken­burgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival.

The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food. The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's a video that shows the Venus Flytrap in action:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture and digest prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

The trap mechanism is exceedingly complex and also completely gratuitous, but the digestion of the prey itself requires extensive modifications and genetic changes, all of which would have been unnecessary for the plants' survival and pretty much useless until they were all in place.

This kind of engineering requires foresight, and foresight, as biochemist Marcos Eberlin notes in his book by that title, is not a trait possessed by blind, impersonal Darwinian processes. It requires a mind.

Systemic Racism

One of the myths of our time is that our culture is shot through with systemic racism. Actual racism has been so difficult to document in the twenty first century that in order to keep alive the dogma that we live in an inveterately racist country, those who profit from the dogma have had to invent "systemic racism."

This is the claim that racism permeates all of our institutions, but is so subtly diabolical that it's very hard to detect. Indeed, the inability to detect it is sometimes considered proof of how insidious it is.

To the extent that the existence of systemic racism is argued for, the argument is usually based on disparities - disparities in prison populations, wealth distribution, education achievement, etc. In order for the disparity argument to work, however, systemic racism has to be the only possible explanation for disparities.

If it's possible that disparities could have other causes besides racism then the systemic racism explanation loses its force for all but those who desperately want it to be true.

Anyway, there's a short video put out by Prager U. that features a woman, a convert from the left, who argues that systemic racism does indeed exist, but it's not what you might think it is.

Check it out.

Your Skeleton

I wonder how many of us think about how amazing our skeletal system is until we injure it. Here's a clever video that shows the articulation of every one of the 206 bones in your body.

Enjoy:

Why the Young Don't Vote

I was listening the other day to the host of a local talk show discussing with some college kids the lack of interest in politics among young people and why the young are so unlikely to vote.

The host thought that youthful apathy was a shame, but I didn't see what the problem was.

Why should young people care about politics? Most people become interested in the process when they start paying taxes, owning property, raising families, and serving in the military.

It's when they become invested in society and start thinking seriously about their future that they begin to see the importance of the ideas which will determine that future. Until then they're much too preoccupied with their studies, sports, and the opposite sex to spend the time it requires to learn about what's going on in the political arena.

The problem, in my opinion, is not that young people don't care about politics. That's normal.

Nor is it a problem that they don't vote. Those who don't keep abreast of the affairs of state are doing the right thing by not voting.

The problem is that our politicians, in an attempt to exploit the ignorance of the young for their own political gain, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971 thereby enfranchising a demographic group which is very unlikely to go to the voting booth with an informed opinion on whom they should vote for.

It does not enhance democracy to have an electorate consisting of large numbers of uninformed voters. It's bad enough that many people over 21 really have no well-thought out idea why they're voting for the person they are, but it makes the problem worse when we add to their number by encouraging 18 year-olds to join them.

While we're on the subject here's a voluntary voter disqualification test. If you can't get at least twelve answers correct perhaps you should consider recusing yourself from voting while you bone up:

1. Which political party is most likely to let you keep most of your paycheck?
2. Which political party is most likely to appoint judges who will rule on matters of law according to what the constitution says?
3. Which political party is most likely to scale back spending on national security?
4. Which political party looks most favorably on abortion even after birth, gender surgery on minors, and the secularization of society?
5. Which political party is most likely to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.?
6. Which political party is most likely to favor measures which will make us a "color-blind" society?
7. Who is the current Secretary of State? Vice-President?
8. Which party currently controls the House of Representatives?
9. Which party currently controls the Senate?
10. Who is the current Speaker of the House? Senate Majority Leader?
11. Who were the last two justices appointed to the Supreme Court?
12. Who is the current Chief Justice of the United States?
13. Which party favors policies which would lower the price of oil and gasoline by increasing the supply?
14. Which party is more likely to try to make it easier for businesses to operate profitably?
15. What was the annual inflation rate for the month of September?

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Answers:

1. Republican
2. Republican
3. Democrat
4. Democrat
5. Republican
6. Republican
7. Anthony Blinken, Kamala Harris
8. Democrat
9. Democrat
10. Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer
11. Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson
12. John Roberts
13. Republican
14. Republican
15. 8.2%

How'd you do?