Bombshell?

We've heard this sort of "bombshell" claim before, most recently when Trump's lawyers "guaranteed" that they had "proof" that the 2020 election was stolen.

Before that it was Trump's political enemies who all but swore that there was "proof" that Trump "colluded" with Russia to fix the 2016 election, so it's probably best not to expect too much from this "bombshell" set to explode tomorrow.

And yet....

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the Chair of the House Oversight Committee, is preparing to drop a major bombshell about Joe Biden.

In fact, he’s so convinced that this evidence is consequential that he’s also spoken to the Department of Justice, advising them not to indict Hunter Biden until the Committee’s forthcoming announcement.

According to Comer, committee members have been meticulously studying bank records and consulting with former associates and whistleblowers, and this bombshell evidence will be released on Wednesday.

“My message to the Department of Justice is very loud and clear. Do not indict Hunter Biden before Wednesday,” Comer told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures.

“When you have the opportunity to see the evidence that the House Oversight Committee will produce with respect to the web of LLCs, with respect to the number of adversarial countries that this family influence peddled in, and this is not just about the president’s son.

This is about the entire Biden family, including the President of the United States. So we believe there are a whole lot of tips that the IRS and the DOJ don’t know about because we don’t believe they’ve done a whole lot of digging in this, and we have,” he said.

“By all accounts from the media reports that we’re getting, what they’re looking at charging Hunter Biden on is a slap on the wrist. It’s a drop in the bucket,” he continued.

“So Wednesday will be a very big day for the American people in getting the facts presented to them so that they can know the truth, and then the Department of Justice can finally do what they should have done years ago.”

Well, maybe, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Trump's Pros and Cons (A Partial List)

Primary election season is right around the corner and as things now stand, there won't be much of a contest for the nomination for President in the Democratic Party. As long as President Biden insists that he's running, the nomination will almost certainly be his for the taking.

In the Republican Party Donald Trump is the clear front-runner, but that could change if and when Florida governor Ron DeSantis enters the race.

For the present, though, here's a brief summary of Mr. Trump's pros and cons.

Ruth Wisse quotes from Victor Davis Hanson's book The Case for Trump which covers Mr. Trump's first two years in the White House, but those two years saw a flurry of accomplishments. She writes:

“massive deregulation, stepped up energy production, tax cuts, increased border enforcement,” as well as near-record-low minority unemployment, a strong stock market and low inflation rates. In foreign affairs, the Abraham Accords are enough to secure Trump’s reputation.

Of domestic successes I [Ms. Wisse] would single out the influence of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in trying to keep schools open during the pandemic, promoting charter schools, and shutting down the government’s assault on due process in sexual-misconduct proceedings.

To these could be added his appointment of federal judges and Supreme Court Justices whose rulings are based on the Constitution rather than ideological whim.

Moreover, his Vice-president and most of his cabinet secretaries during the second half of his tenure look like giants compared to those who have succeeded them in the Biden administration.

Finally, the amazingly rapid development of a covid vaccine during Trump's last year in office as well as his strength in standing against an establishment that subjected him to constant libels and legal harassment throughout his presidency were extraordinary.

On the other hand, Jim Geraghty at National Review gives us the other side of Mr. Trump: He writes that the former president is,

a man who is facing rape charges in a civil trial; dined with white nationalists; lamented that Jewish leaders “lack loyalty”; called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”; used racial slurs to publicly berate his own former secretary of Transportation;

demanded that his own Secretary of State stop denouncing the Chinese and emphasized how much Xi Jinping was helping the U.S. with Covid-19; insisted that all of Florida’s growth and success in recent years is because of “SUNSHINE AND OCEAN,” and has nothing to do with the decisions by its state government;

repeats the most inaccurate and unhinged left-wing critiques of DeSantis; rewrites history on the pandemic and shutdowns;

and just recently said, under oath, while discussing his infamous “grab them by the p****” comments, that, “Historically that’s true with stars. If you look over the last million years, that’s largely true, unfortunately — or fortunately.”

It's a sordid litany, to say the least.

Conservative Republicans are faced with a difficult choice in next year's primaries. Do they vote for policies, most of which they loved under Trump, or do they vote for character, most of which they loathed under Trump?

Unfortunately, if the 2024 race is between Trump and Biden, voters will be confronted, as in 2016, with a choice between two very deeply flawed human beings, so perhaps the odious characters of each will cancel the other out.

The Mathematical Argument

One of the arguments for the existence of a Cosmic Designer that has emerged over the past few decades is what's called the mathematical argument.

That the universe should be at bottom describable in terms of mathematics and that human beings (some of them) should be able to understand the math involved is astonishing.

After all, what generates math if not a mind and why should our feeble minds be able to comprehend the math that underlies the universe and everything in it from the largest galaxy cluster to subatomic particles.

This short video gives a sense of how remarkable this is:

The naturalist skirts the conclusion by asserting that the applicability of mathematics to the universe is just a "happy coincidence." To be a naturalist one must, it seems, believe in an awful lot of happy coincidences.

The War in Ukraine

Strategy Page offers an update on the war in Ukraine. If you're Vladimir Putin the picture isn't encouraging:

Most recent Russian losses occurred in Donetsk province where Russian attacks on Bakhmut (for eight months) and Vuhledar (five months) have cost Russia 30,000 dead, hundreds of combat vehicles and several hundred thousand 152mm artillery shells. Most of the fighting and losses were in Bakhmut. Ukrainian losses were far less at about 5,000 dead.

These heavy Russian losses and little territorial gain have further demoralized Russian troops so a growing number are refusing to go to Ukraine or fight if they do end up there.

In past wars, soldiers who refused to fight could be killed by their officers to encourage the others. That doesn’t work anymore because the Russian troops are armed and see themselves trapped between two groups (Ukrainians and Russian officers) trying to kill them.

Few veteran, pre-invasion Russian troops are in Ukraine. Most have been killed, disabled by wounds or quit the military. The “quit” option was recently outlawed and is applied to men “mobilized”, rather than conscripted, in the last year to serve a set term (six months or longer) in Ukraine.

Mobilization notices are sent via the Internet and failure to comply is a criminal offense. This encouraged so many young Russians to get out of the country that Russian officials claim the economy is doing so well that there is a labor shortage.

Russian media is banned from reporting the heavy losses but Ukraine is not, and the interviews with Ukrainian troops or Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine are available to many Russians via the Internet or video recordings.

To make matters worse, Ukrainian forces have prepared for another major offensive, which apparently has already started. This offensive is much larger than the one in mid-2022 that cleared the Russian out of Kharkiv, where Ukraine had four brigades attacking. The current one involves nine brigades and is in the southeast.

These brigades are in much better shape than any of the Russian units they will face. Russia has no comparable forces and is using a lot of smaller units that have suffered losses and not had any time to rebuild and train.

Most Russian troops have been recently mobilized and have less training and equipment. Morale is low and most men do not want to be in Ukraine. In contrast, the Ukrainian troops are better prepared and confident that they will prevail.

Ukrainian tactics avoid attacks on heavily defended urban areas and instead surround Russian forces and cut their access to resupply or reinforcements. The reality is that Russia has fewer troops in Ukraine and these have far fewer tanks and other combat vehicles.

The Ukrainian troops are better trained, armed, led and motivated than their Russian adversaries....Ukraine is on the offensive against demoralized Russian troops.

Previous to this Russia was desperate for some kind of victory in Ukraine and this led to the Battle for Bakhmut, a town in Donetsk province. Using frontal assaults, often without artillery or armor support, against entrenched Ukrainian defenders, the Russians suffered horrific losses.

Most of the Russian dead were untrained and poorly led recent recruits. Many of these are convicts, promised a pardon if they agree to fight in Ukraine for six months.

This has changed the Russian goals in Ukraine. A year ago, it was to conquer all of Ukraine, now it is to hang onto the remaining Ukrainian territory they occupy and perhaps grab some more if an opportunity presents itself.

Russian losses mnay be even worse than the Strategy Page column indicates. a recent intelligence analysis reported that in the last five months Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties.

It would be no surprise if, when Ukraine begins its spring counter-offensive, a lot of the Russian troops just surrender or flee. They don't want to fight and they want even less to be killed, why would they offer significant resistance to a highly motivated and well-armed Ukrainian force?

A True Saint

He was born Raymond Kolbe in Poland in 1894. In 1910 he became a Franciscan and took the name Maximilian, eventually managing a friary outside of Warsaw which housed 762 Franciscans.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he committed his friary to sheltering thousands of Polish and Jewish refugees. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them.

In May 1941 the friary was closed down and Maximilian and four companions were taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, where they worked with the other prisoners.

On June 15, 1941, he managed to write a letter to his mother:

Dear Mama, At the end of the month of May I was transferred to the camp of Auschwitz. Everything is well in my regard. Be tranquil about me and about my health, because the good God is everywhere and provides for everything with love. It would be well that you do not write to me until you will have received other news from me, because I do not know how long I will stay here. Cordial greetings and kisses, affectionately. Raymond.

One day an SS officer found some of the heaviest planks he could lay hold of and personally loaded them on the Franciscan's back, ordering him to run. When he collapsed, the SS officer kicked him in the stomach and face and had his men give him fifty lashes.

When the priest lost consciousness the Nazis threw him in the mud and left him for dead. But his companions managed to smuggle him to the camp infirmary - and he recovered.

Prisoners at Auschwitz were slowly and systematically starved, and their pitiful rations were barely enough to sustain a child: one cup of imitation coffee in the morning, and weak soup and half a loaf of bread after work. When food was brought, everyone struggled to get his place and be sure of a portion.

Father Maximilian Kolbe however, stood aside in spite of the ravages of starvation, and frequently there would be none left for him. At other times he shared his meager ration of soup or bread with others. At night he moved from bunk to bunk, saying: "I am a Catholic priest. Can I do anything for you?"

A prisoner later recalled how he and several others often crawled across the floor at night to be near the bed of Father Kolbe, to make their confessions and ask for consolation. Father Kolbe pleaded with his fellow prisoners to forgive their persecutors and to overcome evil with good.

When he was beaten by the guards, he never cried out. Instead, he prayed for his tormentors.

A Protestant doctor who treated the patients in Kolbe's block later recalled how Father Kolbe waited until all the others had been treated before asking for help. He constantly sacrificed himself for the others.

One doctor, Rudolph Diem, later recalled: "I can say with certainty that during my four years in Auschwitz, I never saw such a sublime example of the love of God and one's neighbor."

All this was extraordinary but what happened next was astonishing:

In order to discourage escapes, Auschwitz had a rule that if a man escaped, ten men would be killed in retaliation. In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped.

The other men of the bunker were lined up.

"The fugitive has not been found!" the commandant Karl Fritsch screamed. "You will all pay for this. Ten of you will be locked in the starvation bunker without food or water until they die." The prisoners trembled in terror. A few days in this bunker without food and water, and a man's intestines dried up and his brain turned to fire.

The ten were selected, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He couldn't help a cry of anguish. "My poor wife!" he sobbed. "My poor children! What will they do?"

When he uttered this cry of dismay, Maximilian stepped silently forward, took off his cap, and stood before the commandant and said, "I am a Catholic priest. Let me take his place. I am old. He has a wife and children."

Astounded, the icy-faced Nazi commandant asked, "What does this Polish pig want?"

Father Kolbe pointed with his hand to the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek and repeated "I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children."

Observers believed in horror that the commandant would be angered and would refuse the request, or would order the death of both men. The commandant remained silent for a moment. Amazingly, he acceded to the request. Franciszek Gajowniczek was returned to the ranks, and the priest took his place.

Gajowniczek later recalled:

I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp.

It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.

Father Kolbe was thrown down the stairs into a bunker along with the other victims and simply left there to starve. Hunger and thirst soon gnawed at the men. Some drank their own urine, others licked moisture on the dank walls.

Maximilian Kolbe encouraged the others with prayers, psalms, and meditations on the Passion of Christ.

After two weeks, only four were alive. The cell was needed for more victims, and the camp executioner, a common criminal called Bock, came in and injected a lethal dose of carbolic acid into the left arm of each of the four dying men.

Kolbe was the only one still fully conscious and with a prayer on his lips, the last prisoner raised his arm for the executioner. His wait was over.

A personal testimony about the way Maximilian Kolbe met death is given by Bruno Borgowiec, one of the few Poles who were assigned to render service to the starvation bunker. He told it to his parish priest before he died in 1947:

The ten condemned to death went through terrible days. From the underground cell in which they were shut up there continually arose the echo of prayers and canticles. The man in-charge of emptying the buckets of urine found them always empty. Thirst drove the prisoners to drink the contents.

Since they had grown very weak, prayers were now only whispered. At every inspection, when almost all the others were now lying on the floor, Father Kolbe was seen kneeling or standing in the centre as he looked cheerfully in the face of the SS men.

Father Kolbe never asked for anything and did not complain, rather he encouraged the others, saying that the fugitive might be found and then they would all be freed. One of the SS guards remarked: this priest is really a great man. We have never seen anyone like him.

Two weeks passed in this way. Meanwhile one after another they died, until only Father Kolbe was left. This the authorities felt was too long. The cell was needed for new victims. So one day they brought in the head of the sick-quarters, a German named Bock, who gave Father Kolbe an injection of carbolic acid in the vein of his left arm.

Father Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this I left under the pretext of work to be done. Immediately after the SS men had left I returned to the cell, where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.

The date of his execution was 14 August, 1941 at the age of forty-seven years.

Ironically, the escaped prisoner was later found drowned in a camp latrine, so the terrible reprisals had been exercised without cause.

Father Kolbe's body was removed to the crematorium, and without dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow.

The cell where Father Kolbe died is now a shrine. Maximilian Kolbe was beatified as Confessor by Paul VI in 1970, and canonized as Martyr by Pope John Paul II in 1981.

Franciszek Gajowniczek died on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in Poland, 95 years old - and 53 years after Kolbe had saved him. But he was never to forget the ragged monk.

After his release from Auschwitz, Gajowniczek made his way back to his hometown, with the dream of seeing his family again. He found his wife but his two sons had been killed during the war.

Every year on August 14 he went back to Auschwitz. He spent the next five decades paying homage to Father Kolbe, honoring the man who died on his behalf.

It's an amazing story about an exceptional man. To give one's life for a loved one is poignant. To give one's life for a stranger is more than human, it's divine.

What's Wrong With Our Young People?

The Spring 2023 Harvard Youth Poll surveyed 2,069 young Americans between 18- and 29-years old last March. Harvard's Public Opinion Project has provided the most comprehensive look at the political opinions and voting trends held by young Americans, and this year's survey is worrisome, especially for parents of young adults who identify with the Democrat party.

The Washington Free Beacon offers a summary of the findings.

The poll asked respondents how often they had experienced a certain emotion or problem over the past two weeks, and here's how young Democrats reported feeling "at least several days" over that period:

• 61 percent reported feeling "nervous, anxious, or on edge"
• 57 percent said they had "trouble relaxing"
• 55 percent said they felt "unsafe"
• 52 percent reported feeling "down, depressed, or hopeless"
• 49 percent said they felt "little interest or pleasure in doing things"
• 47 percent said they experienced "loneliness"
• 46 percent reported "feeling afraid as if something awful might happen"
• 27 percent said they had entertained "thoughts that [they] would be better off dead" or "thoughts of hurting [themselves] in some way"

According to the Free Beacon's summary the numbers were significantly smaller among young Republicans.The Free Beacon continues:

Despite feeling nervous and unsafe all the time, nearly 4 in 10 young Democrats said they support "defunding police departments" in their communities.

Nearly one in three said police officers make them feel "less safe."

Other noteworthy findings include the following:

• 32 percent said they regularly use TikTok for "news and current events related content," compared with 21 percent of young Republicans.
• 25 percent said they disagree with the statement "I would rather live in America than any other place," compared with 10 percent of young Republicans; just 49 percent of Democrats agree with the statement, compared with 71 percent of GOP respondents.
• 11 percent said they are neither employed nor enrolled as students, compared with 6 percent of young Republicans.
• Just 72 percent of young Democrats identified as "heterosexual or straight," compared with 89 percent of young Republican.
• 22 percent of young Democrats identified as gay (2 percent), lesbian (4 percent), bisexual (10 percent), or "other" (6 percent), compared with 7 percent of young Republicans.

I don't know why these numbers are so much higher among Democrat than Republican youth although one possibility is that young people already disposed to the attitudes and feelings canvassed by this poll may feel more comfortable in the Democrat party and thus gravitate to it.

However, why that party should make young people with these anxieties and emotional dysfunctions feel at home is a question that I'll leave to the reader to speculate upon.

Explaining Away Fine-Tuning

A BBC article from a year ago raises the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix and in the course of discussing the pros and cons of the hypothesis gives an interesting insight into why philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals, like Elon Musk, are entertaining this speculation:

The idea that we live in a simulation has some high-profile advocates.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

However, there is a second, more popular, scenario that seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely so how can the existence of such a finely-tuned universe as ours be explained? There are two (naturalistic) options. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low (about one chance in 650,000) but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago.

I'm reminded of the closing lines of atheist astronomer Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended badly:

“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.”

Two Interesting Facts about Minimum Wage

People often insist that we need to raise the minimum wage, that no one can live on such a pittance as the minimum wage affords. The impression that we sometimes have is that a vast swath of Americans are slaving away and scraping by on $7.50 an hour, but evidently that's not true.

Economist Michael Munger, cited in a brief piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall), writes that he asks his students a couple of questions about the minimum wage. The first one is this:

What percentage of workers in the U.S. work at the minimum wage?

His students usually give him answers between 20 percent and 40 percent, but the correct answer is fewer than 2 percent.

And, although Munger didn't mention it, many of the fewer than 2 percent are kids working for pocket money. In other words, the belief that millions of American are trying to support a family while stuck in dead-end minimum wage jobs is a myth.

The second question was this:

If you have a job in the U.S., at the minimum wage, where does that put you in the world income distribution?

Munger says that the answer he gets from his students is usually around 20 percent, but the correct answer is 85%. He adds:

It quickly gets real, real quiet in the auditorium. All through high school the kids have earnestly been told that poverty should be defined in relative terms, and that the US system is cruel to the poor.

The fact that a minimum wage job puts you in the top fifth of the world income distribution . . . and that 98 percent of [working] Americans make more than the minimum wage, creates enormous cognitive dissonance.

There are probably a lot of things young people learn from our news and social media that really aren't true at all. This is one reason it's wise to be skeptical of what we read and hear from the media until we've had solid confirmation from reliable sources.

A Genuine Miracle?

The last few posts have touched on the topic of the inevitability of genuine miracles occurring if there truly exists a multiverse and the difficulty of ruling them out if our world is just one of a vast ensemble of worlds.

I thought it'd be fitting to add an actual contemporary example of what certainly seems to be a miraculous event that's so amazing a major motion picture has been made about it.

The account of the event appeared in a piece by Josh Shepherd at The Federalist, part of which reads as follows:

On January 19, 2015, 14-year-old John Smith was trapped underwater for 15 minutes. First responders pulled him from the icy waters of Lake Sainte Louise in St. Charles, a northwestern suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a month later: “He wasn’t breathing, and paramedics and doctors performed CPR on him for 43 minutes without regaining a pulse.” Yet, after his mother prayed for him, doctors at St. Joseph Hospital West say Smith inexplicably regained consciousness.

“They never expected the heart monitor to respond,” says Joyce Smith [John's mother] in an interview. “The first doctor who treated John wrote in his medical records: Patient dead. Mother prayed. Patient came back to life.”

Even when John reacquired a pulse, doctors anticipated that since his brain had been deprived of oxygen for so long he'd remain in a vegetative state, but the boy has fully recovered and returned to his basketball team. It's truly a remarkable story, and Shepherd provides much more detail in his article than I've given here.

The movie, titled Breakthrough, and the team behind the film maintains that all the facts have been medically verified, and the story on-screen reflects accounts from multiple sources.

People today are often skeptical of reports of miracles, as they should be, given the number of fraudulent stories that have circulated over the years, but no one should be so skeptical as to rule out the possibility that something for which there's no room in a naturalistic worldview has in fact happened in this instance, and if one believes there's a multiverse, it would seem, one simply can't rule out that such events can and do occur.

This is the multiverse conundrum. If there is no multiverse then the fine-tuning of our universe for life points inexorably to the existence of a supernatural mind, and if one reverts to the multiverse to explain away cosmic fine-tuning she abandons any grounds for skepticism that miracles happen. And if miracles happen the case for that supernatural mind gets much stronger.

Whether you're skeptical or not read the article at the link and see what you think.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. III)

As a followup to our previous two posts here's another example of how embracing the multiverse leads to several unintended and uncomfortable consequences for the naturalist.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll, an atheist, has been quoted as arguing that the multiverse hypothesis, though it does not meet the standard criteria of a good scientific theory (i.e. it's not falsifiable or testable), nevertheless should be accepted as legitimate science.

He writes:

Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth.

The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on [philosopher Karl Popper], have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they’re not falsifiable.

The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.

This reminds me of a passage from William James who asserted that, "any rule of thought which would prevent me from discovering a truth, were that truth really there, is an irrational rule."

Carroll wants to apply James' maxim to science in the belief that it's not reasonable to restrict science only to conjectures about entities whose existence can be tested.

Thus, the multiverse hypothesis should be considered legitimate science even if it's not testable because it's an entity that's either real or it's not, and "refusing to contemplate [it's] possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though [it] might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."

Very well, but then why wouldn't this same standard also apply to the hypothesis that the world is the creation of God? Wouldn't the same standard also apply to Intelligent Design which is banned from public school science classrooms because it allegedly can't be tested and is therefore not regarded as a genuine scientific theory?

Carroll wants to make the multiverse a viable scientific option because it gives him a means to evade the compelling theistic implications of cosmic fine-tuning, but in order to include the multiverse hypothesis in the field of legitimate scientific inquiry he has to open up the domain of science to include conjectures about the existence and activity of a God, which is the very thing he's striving to avoid.

It seems that the harder naturalists try to circumvent God the less able they are to do it.

Tomorrow I'll return to the topic of miracles with a description of a contemporary episode that, assuming it's not a hoax, surely counts as a genuine miracle. Indeed, it would require an even greater miracle for it to be a hoax.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took a look at Vincent Torley's analysis of the multiverse in which Torley argued that if there is a multiverse then miracles must not only be possible but certain to occur in some world in the infinite ensemble of worlds.

The naturalist who embraces the multiverse has a another problem in addition to the problem with miracles. Darwinian evolution is predicated on uniformitarianism, the belief that the laws of physics never change, but if there's a multiverse, of which we are a part, then uniformitarianism becomes highly improbable.

Torley writes:

[S]ince the argument for Darwinian evolution is based on the assumption that the laws and parameters of Nature do not vary, it follows that if we live in a multiverse, then our own universe is infinitely more likely to be one in which the miracles of the Bible occurred than a uniformitarian one in which life evolved in a Darwinian fashion.

... there will still be a number of possible universes in the multiverse in which life pops into existence in the manner described in Genesis 1 and where living things just happen to exhibit the striking traits predicted by Darwinism, whereas there is (by definition) only ONE way for a given set of laws and parameters NOT to vary: namely, by remaining the same at every point in space and time.

The problem [for the naturalist] is that the uniformitarian requirement that the laws and parameters of Nature are the same at every point in space and time – which is rather like hitting bull’s eyes again and again and again, for billions of years – is inherently so very unlikely, when compared to “singularism” (the hypothesis that the laws of Nature undergo slight, short-lived or local fluctuations)...

Thus in a multiverse scenario, uniformitarianism becomes the albatross around the neck of Darwinism: no matter how many of Darwin’s predictions scientists manage to confirm, the sheer unlikelihood of the hypothesis that we live in a universe whose laws never vary renders Darwinism too unlikely a theory to warrant scientific consideration.

What a pickle. If reality is populated by an infinity of universes, all with different combinations of laws and constants, then it's astronomically more likely that any given universe would be one in which the laws of physics happen to vary from time to time. If that's so, then the objection to miracles, which is based on the constancy of the laws of nature, pretty much disappears.

In other words, it's much more likely that we're living in a universe in which the laws of nature are not uniform than that we're living in one in which they are.

But if so, not only are apparent miracles more plausible but Darwinian evolution, which is based on the principle that the laws of nature are invariant, becomes much less plausible.

The naturalist, confronted with powerful evidence for a cosmic designer based on cosmic fine-tuning, invokes the multiverse as an escape hatch. In an infinite ensemble of worlds, he argues, there just has to be one with all the properties of our universe, no matter how improbable such a universe may be, and we just happen to find ourselves in it.

However, if there's a multiverse then it's highly improbable that the laws in our universe would be invariant since universes in which the laws changed from time to time would be far more abundant. And since it's much more likely that our universe is a universe in which the laws are not always the same than that it's one in which the laws are always the same, Darwinian evolution, which is based on the uniformity of the laws, becomes much less likely and miracles, which seem to be exceptions to the laws, become much more likely.

The naturalist seems to be mired in an intellectual quagmire and it's not at all clear how he can extricate himself from it. If he holds on to the multiverse he must diminish his confidence in Darwinism and acknowledge the likelihood that miracles occur. If he chooses to hold on to Darwinism his confidence in the multiverse must diminish and thus the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God becomes much more compelling.

More on the naturalist's difficulties tomorrow.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. I)

Naturalism is the view that physical nature is all there is. It holds that there's no non-physical reality and no supernatural entities. Naturalists often embrace the idea of the existence of a multiverse in which infinite universes, all with different laws and parameters, exist something like bubbles in a bubble bath. Our universe is just one such bubble.

There's scarcely any empirical evidence for the multiverse, however, and it's popularity among naturalists seems to stem largely from its utility as a response to the powerful argument for a cosmic Designer based on the incredible improbability that a universe like ours, with astonishingly precise values of the parameters that form the fabric of the universe and make life possible, would exist at all as a result of chance.

If, however, there's an infinite array of different universes with different laws and parameters, then even astronomically improbable universes are certain to be among that infinite manifold. Thus, as amazingly improbable as a life-sustaining world is, one pretty much had to exist, given the existence of the multiverse and we just happen to be in it, or at least that's the argument.

Nevertheless, as philosopher Vincent Torley points out in a lengthy treatment of the multiverse at Uncommon Descent there's a perplexing difficulty for the naturalist who clings to the multiverse in order to avoid falling into theism. If the multiverse exists then not only does the improbable become certain, but so, too, does anything that is possible to occur under some set of physical laws. This would, of course, include miracles.

Miracles are, after all, exceedingly improbable events given the laws which appear to govern our world, but they're not logically impossible. It's possible that the laws of some universe are structured in such a way that allows for miracles on very rare occasions. Such a world must exist somewhere in the multiverse and perhaps we just happen to be in it.

The irony is that the naturalist rejects the miraculous because he rejects belief in the existence of God, but in order to sustain his non-belief in God he relies on a hypothesis, the multiverse, that makes miracles virtually certain to occur somewhere in the vast ensemble of worlds that comprises the multiverse.

Naturalism sees our universe as invariant. That is, the laws of physics hold everywhere and always. They're inviolable. Thus, miracles, for the naturalist, are physically impossible, but as Torley points out, in a multiverse where all physical possibilities are instantiated there should be universes in which the laws of physics fluctuate episodically, thereby permitting anomalous events like miracles, and these universes should be far more common than uniformitarian worlds in which the laws are invariant.

Here's Torley:

[B]ecause multiverses allow laws to vary bizarrely on rare and singular occasions, and because not all such variations are fatal to life, we can conclude that a life-permitting universe is far more likely than not to experience anomalous events (which some might call miracles), and that a life-permitting universe in which Biblical miracles occur is still more likely than one in which the laws and physical parameters of Nature are always uniform.

Thus [the] belief that we live in in a universe where Biblical miracles occurred will still be more rational than the modern scientific belief that we live in a universe whose laws are space and time-invariant, because [these] universes are more common in the multiverse than law-invariant universes.

We'll have more to say about the difficulty that embracing the multiverse hypothesis poses for a naturalistic worldview tomorrow.

Critical Theory

The general outline of this post was adapted from an article by Adam MacLeod in the March issue of Touchstone (subscription required):

All Critical Theory is based on a Marxist analysis of oppressors and oppressed, whether it's Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Studies, Intersectionality, Queer Theory, whatever. They're all predicated on the assumption that the object of their criticism is an oppressive and unjust system which needs to be torn down.

Critical Theory holds that traditional categories of objective right and wrong are arbitrary "discursive regimes" established by the powerful in order to suppress and oppress the less powerful. Recourse to objective standards by the dominant group is used to justify ignoring the subjective experience of marginalized groups.

These theories, whatever their particular point of emphasis may be, all share a few beliefs in common:

They deny that we can know objective reality. Most people believe that if a proposition corresponds to reality it's therefore true, but since critical theorists insist we can't know reality it follows that we can't know truth.

For the critical theorist reality is simply the way a culture has evolved to think about things. It's constructed by the dominant factions within a culture, the cultural elite, and is used by them to enhance their dominance over other groups.

The concept of the imago Dei, being made in the image of God and deriving our rights from God, is denied by critical theorists who often hold to an atheistic worldview. They deny that there's anything objectively true about human nature or anything especially authoritative about human reason. Having no confidence in reason or truth, everything becomes a matter of subjective preference, and all that's left to adjudicate disputes is power, either political power or physical coercion.

Justice, too, becomes subjectivized. What is justice for me is injustice for others. Oddly, not even critical theorists can really believe this since it entails that my demand that you give me justice is nothing more than a demand that you give me my way. Chants such as "No justice, no peace" are vacuous if there's no objective justice.

All critical theories declare that the foundational ideals, principles and institutions of America are illicit discursive regimes, i.e. arbitrary constructs which employ particular linguistic themes in the service of the acquisition or expression of power. A simple example is the use of male pronouns when the gender of the person being referred to is uncertain. Such usage is a means for consolidating patriarchal supremacy in the culture.

Discursive regimes, critical theorists tell us, are constructed not to describe reality but to exercise control over others. By making maleness the linguistic default, women are being subtly controlled.

For the critical theorist there's no fixed human nature thus gender is fluid. One's gender is whatever the individual decides it will be. To quote the 20th century existentialist Simone De Beauvoir "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" via the decisions she makes in the course of her life.

The critical theorist is not open to persuasion or argument because such efforts depend upon accepting the authority of reason, which the critical theorist refuses to do. Mentioning that critical theory is contradictory or illogical is pointless since logic is an "illegitimate discursive regime" embraced by powerful white men to suppress people of color.

Objecting to critical race theory on the grounds that it promotes racism and injustice gets one nowhere since the objection is interpreted as another power play by the dominant class to keep the marginalized from achieving equity.

Observing that critical theories are themselves illegitimate discursive regimes employed by one group to attain economic, intellectual and/or political hegemony over another, gets one nowhere because such facts are based upon a logical analysis and are irrelevant to the subjective "reality" established by the critical theorist.

For one who still believes that reason and logic are God-given tools to help us in our quest for objective truth, critical theories will be seen as a jumbled collection of incoherent assertions. Only someone who has abandoned reason, abandoned objective truth and objective reality, and who insists upon the notion that their beliefs are subjectively validated - that all that matters are their own personal feelings and experience - can find much merit in critical theory.

What Is a "Just War"?

I thought it it might be useful this week to rerun a post from about a year ago in which I wrote about the war in Ukraine in terms of what philosophers and theologians call Just War theory.

From the time of Augustine (c.400 A.D.) many Christian philosophers and theologians have thought about the question of the demands and restrictions the Gospel imposes on the use of force.

One result of that thinking has been a list of criteria that must be satisfied in any situation in which force, particularly military force, is contemplated. This is called jus ad bellum (justice in going to war).

These criteria generally include the following:

1. Just cause. Examples of a just cause for the use of force include: Defense against an unjust invader; Protection of family, home, or other innocent victims from direct harm; Recovery of goods unjustly taken; Protection of constitutional rights and liberties from government encroachment; Defense of allies who have been unjustly attacked, etc.

2. Just intent. The purpose of the war must be to establish peace or to protect the innocent. Hatred, economic gain, or the exercise of power are all illicit reasons for using force against another.

3. Legitimate authority. The war must be declared/waged by a legitimate government authority. A war declared by a terrorist organization like ISIS is by definition unjust.

4. Reasonable prospect of success. Deliberately protracted wars or wars initiated with no reasonable hope of success are unjust.

5. Last resort. When it's clear that no measure short of the application of force will avail, or that an attack upon one's nation is imminent, war is justified provided the other criteria are met. This requirement is problematic in that it's always possible to imagine yet another set of peace talks, etc. that could be embarked upon and which would delay war indefinitely.

Thus, governments have to exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether they have actually exhausted all practical options and have been left with no realistic alternative to war.

Just War theory also requires that wars not only be warranted by these stringent criteria (jus ad bellum) but that when fought they be conducted according to certain guidelines (jus in bello: justice in war). The two chief criteria of jus in bello are:

1. Discrimination. Civilians should never be deliberately targeted. This follows from the Christian imperative to be compassionate and merciful. It entails that prisoners not be mistreated and that property and livelihoods not be unduly or unnecessarily damaged.

2. Proportionality. The means employed must be no more brutal or violent than what is necessary to secure victory. It would be unjust to slaughter defeated and retreating enemy soldiers if they no longer pose a threat. It would be a disproportionate response, and therefore unjust, to respond to a cross-border raid with nuclear weapons.

As is no doubt obvious, the heat and stress of war and incipient war may create a lot of gray areas for those seeking to hold to the criteria of Just War, and there's often much room for differences in interpretation. Nevertheless, those who wish to wage war justly will strive to hew as closely to these principles as the exigencies of war permit.

Even so, I think it's clear to anyone who's been following the war in Ukraine that Russia is waging an unjust war. They fail the jus ad bellum test, particularly criteria #1,2 and 5, and they also fail the first criterion of the jus in bello test. The response of the Ukrainians is compatible with criteria #1,2,3, and 5 of the jus ad bellum test and #1 of the jus in bello test.

None of the other criteria really apply to their struggle.

The Russians from Vladimir Putin on down to those infantry troops who are shooting, torturing and raping civilians are war criminals, and one hopes that the world will not forget their crimes and return to the status quo ante once this conflict is over.

Those responsible for the death, terror and destruction visited upon the Ukrainian people should remain international pariahs as long as they live and as long as history is written.

What Is a Woman?

Those in thrall to the current transgender fashion sometimes give the impression that they believe that one is what one says or thinks one is, but this is clearly nonsense. Just because someone says they're a tree or even genuinely believes they're a tree it doesn't follow that they are a tree.

Others give the impression that they believe that if a man, say, identifies as a woman and dresses like one that that makes him a woman, which is also nonsense. If someone thinks he's a space alien and dresses like a space alien no one else thinks he really is one, no matter how adamantly he insists that he is.

Still others apparently believe that if a man believes he's a woman and has himself surgically altered and has estrogen treatments that that makes him a woman, but being a woman is more than having superficial secondary sex characteristics.

A woman is born with two X chromosomes and either has at birth or will develop during puberty all the appurtenances thereunto. She is born with a uterus, fallopian tubes and a pair of ovaries holding a million ova.

She has a history of developing her secondary sex characteristics and beginning menstruation. No man has that history, and if a woman who claims to be a man does have that history she's not a man regardless of what she thinks.

Moreover, a woman has an entire suite of chemical hormones in her body that men don't have and do not obtain simply by having themselves surgically emasculated. A few of these are follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), which stimulates the follicle to ripen, luteinizing hormone (LH) which orchestrates the menstrual cycle and estrogen, which a female body produces naturally.

Other hormones are produced if an ovum is not fertilized which allow the body to discharge the corpus luteum, but if fertilization were to occur, if a male-identifying female nevertheless became pregnant - the state of affairs that causes some to claim that "men" can become pregnant - her body would produce a host of other hormones which would guide the pregnancy process. An actual male body can produce none of these. The list includes progesterone, human chorionic gonadotropin, relaxin, placental lactogen, oxytocin, prolactin, etc.

In other words being a man or woman is far more complex than one's psychological state alone or one's superficial appearance or anatomy. The differences are deeply-rooted in our genetics and physio-chemical makeup.

Individuals should be free to decide to let their psychology trump their biology, but no one should think that he or she has the right to demand that everybody else go along with that decision.

A Disproof of God's Existence?

Skeptic magazine features a piece by philosopher Colin McGinn which they title A Disproof of God's Existence. It's an eye-catching title, but it's very misleading. The article which follows is not at all a disproof of God's existence but rather a critique of the layman's definition of the term "omnipotent."

Even at that the column is something of a straw man since no serious theologian or philosopher subscribes to the definition McGinn critiques.

After arguing that God cannot have certain powers, like the power to digest food (because He has no digestive system), McGinn concludes that God is not all-powerful. He lacks powers that other beings (e.g. animals) have, and if He had those powers then He would be an embodied being and thus not God. Therefore, either He's not all-powerful or not really God. The concept of an all-powerful God, he surmises, is incoherent.

McGinn finishes his essay with this:

The difficulty for God is to specify what kind of omnipotence he is supposed to possess. (Actually, McGinn must mean here that this is a difficulty for the theist, not for God. God has no obligation to specify anything of the sort.)

And the dilemma is obvious: either he has powers that do not properly belong to his nature as divine, or he lacks powers that other things possess, thus being less than all-powerful.

The concept of an all-powerful being is actually, when you think about it, incoherent. To be a thing of a certain type is necessarily to have a limited range of powers, because powers and natures go hand in hand.

It's hard to tell what McGinn's point is here. He's a world-class philosopher. Surely he knows that no one, at least no theistic philosopher, believes that God has the power to do just anything at all. By "omnipotence" theists mean that God can do whatever is not inherently absurd, is logically possible to do, and consistent with His nature.

He cannot, for example, make a dog that's a better rhetorician than a cat or make one color sound better than another. Nor can He create a world in which He doesn't exist, nor take pleasure in evil.

Given the foregoing definition, then, what God can do is create any logically possible universe, a feat or capability that requires unimaginable power. This power further entails that He has the power to create capacities that He Himself does not exhibit because they would be inappropriate to, or incompatible with, the kind of being He is.

Nevertheless, even though He doesn't "possess" these "powers" Himself, His power to create them is itself an enormous potency. For instance, He creates green plants which have the "power" to photosynthesize and creates as well the process of photosynthesis itself. That He Himself can't or doesn't photosynthesize is hardly a limitation on His power, and it's ludicrous to suggest that because God doesn't photosynthesize that He's therefore not omnipotent.

In fact, it's beyond ridiculous to claim, as the title of McGinn's article does, that God's "lack" of such powers is somehow a proof that God doesn't exist.

Russian Savagery

No European nation since the Germans in WWII has perpetrated so many horrific atrocities on another European nation has have Vladimir Putin's Russians against the Ukrainians. Michael Weiss at Yahoo News elaborates. Here are a few excerpts:

Details of brutal war crimes committed by the Wagner Group in Ukraine have been published by Gulagu.net, a Russian human rights organization. In the horrifying testimonies, Azamat Uldarov and Alexei Savichev, who say they served as Wagner unit commanders, confess in explicit detail the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians, injured Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian servicemen who had deserted or refused to take part in the massacre.

Wagner has played a key role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by filling out the Kremlin’s front lines with waves of its mercenary fighters. Moscow has allowed Wagner to recruit convicts like Uldarov and Savichev directly from Russian prisons, offering amnesty even for the most violent offenders in exchange for throwing them into the maw of war.

In January, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Wagner as a transnational criminal organization, accusing it of having “engaged in an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and physical abuse in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali.” The killings described by Uldarov and Savichev allegedly took place during the recent Russian offensives in Bakhmut and Soledar.

The mercenaries gave Gulagu.net explicit details about how Russian forces were ordered to go house by house in Bakhmut, killing anyone they found inside, civilian and military alike. “To kill everyone. Not to take anyone prisoner." Uldarov claimed, adding that his forces carried out these orders ruthlessly.

“When I went into the basement, there were children there. And I was instructed not to release any. I was in command. Me and my group killed everyone. Then we all left. We didn’t let anyone out,” he said. “There were about 40 children there. I gave the command to kill everyone. It was a big house, nine floors. The whole basement was packed and mined. I made the decision to ‘zero’ everyone.”

In another chilling video, Uldarov describes how he personally murdered a young Ukrainian girl. “She is screaming. She’s little, you know? Five, maybe 6 years old. And I took a kill shot, you know?”

In separate video testimony, Savichev detailed to Osechkin the murder of unarmed young Ukrainian teenagers earlier this year. Savichev recounted how teenagers captured by Russian forces were made to pull up their shirts to reveal any possible tattoos — a common Russian tactic to determine their ideological disposition.

Wagner mercenaries shot those with tattoos, Savichev said. He attempted to justify his actions by claiming he didn’t consider the teenage Ukrainians to be “civilians.” The presence of tattoos, he asserted, was evidence that his victims were members of the Azov battalion, a nationalist unit in the Ukrainian military.

Supporting evidence of the ex-mercenaries’ atrocities was further published by Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU. On its Telegram channel, the organization published what it claims was an intercepted phone call between a Russian soldier and a woman who is apparently his wife, supporting the testimonies made by Gulagu.net.

In the recording, the unnamed Russian soldier details a similar “no quarter” policy, explaining how he, too, had to kill women, children and teenage girls. The woman attempts to justify the murder of civilians, claiming that “anyone peaceful will have already left.”

Last week, a video circulated on social media showing a captive Ukrainian soldier being beheaded by his Russian captors. Another video showed two beheaded Ukrainian soldiers near a destroyed Ukrainian M113 armored personnel carrier.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, told the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda that his office has received “dozens” of videos showing Russians publicly executing Ukrainians. "There are beheadings, cutting off genitals, ears, nose, limbs or phalanges on the hands,” Lubinets said. “Some [of the perpetrators] have been identified.”

When there's no moral compass in a man's life he finds that there's really nothing preventing him from behaving like a beast, which is, after all, what a secular society claims we actually are. Ever since Darwin children around the globe have been taught that we're just a bundle of appetites, that there's no soul, no objective right and wrong, no transcendent moral judge who will hold us ultimately accountable.

So far from being created in the image of God, children have been taught that we're created in the image of apes. It's no wonder that men in war behave so savagely. We reap what we sow.

The Scientific Case for Theism

During much of the 19th and 20th centuries it was simply assumed among philosophers and scientists that atheism (naturalism) was obviously true and that any belief in any non-natural or god-like entities was irrational. Naturalism implied materialism and materialism entailed that there are no immaterial entities like souls, minds or God.

The universe was assumed to have had no beginning, it was infinitely old, and thus there was no need to account for an origin of space, time, matter and energy. Moreover, Darwin made it possible to explain life, it was thought, without recourse to a creator.

Everything could ultimately be explained in terms of physics and chemistry and naturalism was seen as the intelligent, educated worldview for anyone not in thrall to delusion and superstition.

It's remarkable that starting about fifty years ago all that began to change.

The universe was found to have actually had a beginning. It was also found to consist of forces, constants and other parameters that were exquisitely fine-tuned to life-permitting values. Life itself was found to be information-rich, and consciousness turned out to be inexplicable on a materialist view of life.

Philosophers, and gradually scientists, began to realize that these facts all pointed away from naturalism and toward the hypothesis that the universe and life had been intelligently engineered by a Mind.

This is not to say that everyone today is on board with this revolutionary development in philosophy and science, the intelligent engineer view is still in the minority, but it's no longer possible to say that this view is irrational, uneducated or superstitious. Indeed, it has proven itself to be extremely compelling for anyone who's not dead-set against it.

Dozens of books have been published in the last thirty years outlining the arguments for jettisoning a naturalistic worldview and adopting a theistic perspective. One of the most recent and also one of the best is a book by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer titled Return of the God Hypothesis.

The book itself may be a bit too sciency for anyone not familiar with some basic concepts in physics and chemistry, but Andrew Klavan of the Daily Wire interviewed Meyer about the book and Meyer does a good job of simplifying the argument so that any college educated and reasonably interested viewer can understand it.

The interview is twenty minutes long and can be viewed below. If you're interested in why there's dissatisfaction among philosophers and scientists with naturalism and a deepening appreciation for the greater explanatory power of theism, check it out:

Why Ukraine Matters

George Weigel has an essay at First Things (Subscription may be required) in which he explores the meaning of the Ukraine war - for Ukraine, for Russia and for the West, including the U.S. He writes:

So what does Ukraine mean? What has the Russian war on Ukraine this past year revealed?

What Ukraine means for world politics is that the seemingly stable post–Cold War settlement in Europe was in fact a truce.

What Ukraine means for Russia is that its political culture is suffering from a false historical-cultural narrative that has metastasized into a form of paranoia, accelerating the country’s descent into kleptocratic autocracy and international pariah status.

What Ukraine means for Ukraine is that an impressive process of nation-building, which has accelerated since 2013, must be continued and intensified amid a war for national survival.

What Ukraine means for the United States is that there is no holiday from history and no escape from world politics for America and Americans.

At the macro level of world politics, the Russian war on Ukraine has falsified the post–Cold War conviction of many in Western Europe, and some in North America, that a Europe without wars was possible. Perhaps there would be occasional flare-ups in the ever-restive Balkans. But big wars between big states were a thing of the past, it was thought, because alternative security arrangements, underwritten by economic interdependence, were securely in place.

A war whose stated purpose was the restoration of Russian greatness has become the war that has finally stripped the mask from post-Soviet Russian corruption, incompetence, and self-delusion, while further exposing the extraordinary social and cultural damage done to Russia by seventy-four years of communism.

It has also shown the Russian leadership for the savages that they are. Deliberately bombing apartment complexes and schools, shooting unarmed civilians, kidnapping and transporting thousands of children from Ukraine back to Russia, and ghastly tortures of civilians and soldiers:

As Oleksandra Matviichuk, executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, told Jay Nordlinger, Ukrainians are fighting, not just for the territory that is historically theirs, but for the people living in those areas:

This war started not in February 2022 but in February 2014 [when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and occupied parts of eastern and southern Ukraine] . . . I am very aware of what Russians did to people in the occupied territories. I have interviewed hundreds of people. They have told me how they were beaten, how they were raped, how their fingers were cut off, how they were crammed into wooden boxes, how they were tortured with electricity. One lady reported that her eyes were dug out with a spoon. We will never leave our people alone in these occupied territories. It would be inhuman to leave them . . .

In a recent op-ed that Weigel excerpts, Sen. Tom Cotton explains why the U.S. must help the Ukrainians:

We should back Ukraine to the hilt because the likeliest alternative isn’t peace, but rather another “frozen conflict” that favors Russia and harms our interests. Russia would retain key strategic terrain and much of Ukraine’s industry and agriculture. Food and energy prices would remain high, potentially starving many nations and exacerbating the migrant crisis in the West.

Meanwhile, Russia could rebuild its strength and seize the rest of Ukraine when the opportunity arose. Such an outcome would create millions more Ukrainian refugees, drive inflation higher, and worsen supply-chain disruptions. Russia would also extend its border deep into Europe. Next on the chopping block would be Moldova, site of another frozen conflict. And after that, a NATO nation.

Stopping Russia also will allow the U.S. to focus on the greater threat from China. A Russian victory would force us to divert more resources for a longer time to Europe to deter Russian expansionism, creating persistent threats on both fronts. But a Ukrainian victory and a durable peace will secure our European flank as we confront China.

This excerpt doesn't mention it, but the United States also has a moral obligation to help Ukraine by the fact that we strongly urged Ukraine to give back to Russia the nuclear arsenal that the Soviets had placed there during the cold war.

The Budapest Memorandum (1994) that we pressured Ukraine to sign, and which was also signed by the U.K., Russia, et al. guaranteed that Russia would respect Ukraine's borders in exchange for the nuclear weapons that were left on its soil after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1990-1991). Russia clearly violated the memorandum in 2014 when they first invaded Ukraine, sending a stark message to the nations of the world that if they have nukes they better not give them up, and if they don't have them they better get them.

Russia's further invasion in 2022 imposes on us a responsibility, having been largely responsible for Ukraine's having forfeited a potential nuclear deterrent, to help provide Ukraine with the resources - short of actual troops - necessary to repel the Memorandum's violaters.

Weigel continues:

America is not going to be great, stay great, or become great again — choose your slogan — if we do not soberly face the reality that America’s interests are deeply implicated in the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Rebuffing Putin’s aggression and sustaining Ukrainian sovereignty will make the world, and Americans, safer, while demonstrating to China that the mature democracies that are the backbone of a decent global order have not decayed into fecklessness.

Western civilization is suffering from a wasting disease of self-absorption, based on defective ideas of the human person, human community, and human happiness. The dominant cultural forces in the West insist that we are mere bundles of desires, all of which are morally commensurable or equal; that the gratification of those desires is the meaning of happiness; and that seeing to the satisfaction of those desires is, in the name of human rights, the primary responsibility of the state.

Meanwhile, woke culture, spreading out from our institutions of higher learning like a plague and infecting the bureaucracies of the administrative state, is creating a society of silos in which race-mania, “gender identity,” and “isms” of all sorts are somehow supposed to foster living in solidarity, although they are fostering precisely the opposite: social fragmentation leading to perilously high levels of mental illness, violence, and public irrationality.

Over the past year, Ukraine and Ukrainians have provided the West with an alternative vision of the human condition.

By looking death in the eye and refusing to flinch, Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, have reminded the West that we are more than our subjectivity — that we can know, embrace, and live by truths greater than “me.” We can make sacrifices. We can exhibit courage. We can refuse to be mastered by evil. We can live in a solidarity that is based on the truths built into the world and into us.

Such courage and character deserve our support.

Arguing Well

Casey Chalk at The Federalist gives us three principles for arguing well which he borrows from ethicist Matthew Petrusek. Chalk is writing for conservatives in particular, but the principles apply to anyone.

1. Know Their Arguments Better Than They Do

In order to effectively argue, we need what Petrusek calls a disposition for constructive debate rather than simply point-scoring (as fun as it may be to “own” the other side). That includes trying to sympathetically understand our opponent’s position.

A great way to do that is to try to repeat the person’s argument back to them in your own words. It can be as simple as saying, “Tell me if I understand you accurately: What you are saying is [fill in the blank]?”

The purpose of this is not simply to be charitable to the other side (though that’s certainly important). It’s also a way to force your opponent to actually make an argument, rather than simply an emotive, often aggressive assertion.

Petrusek explains: “Central to playing the game of truth-seeking is knowing the opponent’s position at least as well, if not better, than he or she does.” And by helping the person package an argument, their errors usually become manifest.

2. Insist That People Define Their Terms

Arguments can only go so far when two or more people aren’t using the same terms in the same way because the two camps define their words differently. Thus before jumping right into the point-counterpoint debate, we should ask our interlocutors to define their terms. Sometimes the result of that will be that people realize they don’t know what those terms even mean.

Alternatively, it could become clear there is a deeper origin point for the disagreement.

“Without pinpointing where the conflict originates, there can be no authentic debate; the disagreeing parties will simply be talking (or more likely, shouting) past each other,” writes Petrusek.

3. Find the Underlying Philosophical Principles

This points to another important element of real, productive debate: identifying the underlying philosophical principle often doing the unmentioned work in an argument. Petrusek explains that isolating arguments and breaking them down into parts enables us to more clearly recognize their faulty premises because “sound arguments have valid propositions and unambiguous terms.”

Consider the claim that, “We shouldn’t legislate morality.” This claim is premised on the empirical belief that certain laws are based on hard, empirical truths, while other laws are based on flimsy, subjective definitions of morality. But the problem is that all laws are moral in the sense that they obviously communicate that some behaviors are good, and others are bad. Not legislating morality is, in a word, impossible.

A lot of what gets labeled an “argument” today is less true argumentation and more just fighting and name-calling (claims about alleged racism, white supremacy, or “the patriarchy” often fall into this category).

It is not hard to identify opportunities to employ these tactics. Think about how you could respond to those who claim people need to be protected from “harmful” or “dangerous” speech. Typically, these arguments amount to little more than emotivism and voluntarism: the assertion that a person’s emotions and individual will trump everything else, even, ironically, things they otherwise claim to believe in, such as logic, science, or democracy.

Chalk gives a bit more by way of examples at the link, but it's certainly true that our society would be better off were we all better trained in the art of argument. An argument should be a rational attempt to find truth, it should never be a shouting match or name-calling, yet that's what it too often is.

The hardest part about good arguing - a calm, reasoned exchange of ideas and defeaters - is admitting when the other side has the better argument and being willing to accept that one's own beliefs need to be modified, held less confidently, and/or abandoned altogether.

This, for most of us is a bitter pill and our pride often prevents us from going this far. Our pride, in other words, often stands between us and the truth, which is really a shame and a tragedy.