Scientism and Our Modern Madness

A classic work by Michael Aeschliman on C.S. Lewis has been reissued under the title The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism.

Scientism may be considered the dominant religious expression of modernity. It's the view that the scientific method is the only reliable means of attaining truth and that anything that can't be known through the methodology of scientific investigation is not knowable and not worth believing.

The definitive critique of scientism, in my opinion, is philosopher J.P.Moreland's 2018 book Scientism and Secularism, but Aeschliman's book is also worthwhile and geared more toward the literary reader rather than the philosopher.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says of Aeschliman's book that,

The long overdue reappraisal of C.S. Lewis as a serious social critic and public intellectual has been much helped by Michael Aeschliman’s incisive monograph; its appearance in a new edition is very welcome at a time when crude scientism and incoherent forms of reductionist ideology seem (bafflingly) more popular than ever — as if we really don’t want to be human if being human involves reasoning, irony, growth, wisdom and joy.

David Klinghoffer focuses on Williams' assertion that contemporary scientific and philosophical reductionism is stripping us of our humanity, "as if we really don’t want to be human."

Klinghoffer writes:

It’s no secret that our reigning culture is anti-human. As Wesley Smith has written, a major drift in modern thinking “seek[s] to push us off the pedestal of unique value,” with “many academics, biological scientists, and evolutionary philosophers hav[ing] joined the anti-human crusade.”

That many adults don’t wish to be adults, and fight determinedly against adulthood with what they consider its unwelcome trappings (responsibility for others, personal dignity, even adult clothing), is also well known. But that many of us “don’t want to be human” is an additional insight, and a profound one.

You could call this twist in our thinking species dysphoria.

Klinghoffer's analogy to gender dysphoria is interesting for the question it tacitly raises. If the belief of those who suffer from the conviction that though they possess all the biological appurtenances of maleness they are nevertheless female is to be respected and accommodated, by what logic can we deny someone the same consideration who, despite having all the biological characteristics of a human being, nevertheless believes he's a cow?

When common sense withers in a culture madness soon swoops in to take its place.

Dred and Harriet Scott

Most school students learn, or at least used to learn, that opposition to slavery mushroomed in the northern states with the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, but the details surrounding that infamous ruling are often less well known.

They are very interesting however, and David Hackett Fischer recounts them, and the stories of many other slaves in the antebellum years, in his magisterial work African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals.

Fischer tells us that Dred (short for Etheldred) Scott was born a slave in Southampton Co. Virginia in 1799. His owner, a man named Ben Blow, moved his slaves first to Huntsville, Alabama and then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830.

There Scott was sold to an army surgeon named John Emerson who took him to free states and territories where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In 1837 Scott was living in free Wisconsin territory near what is today Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he met another Virginia slave named Harriet Robinson. The two decided to marry and they were joined in a formal matrimonial service by Harriet's master, a justice of the peace named, Lawrence Taliaferro. The formal service was permitted only to free people. Taliaferro then sold Harriet to John Emerson so that the couple could live together.

Emerson was subsequently ordered to southern military posts, but he left Dred and Harriet in the north where they were leased as servants to other officers. They lived in virtual freedom and the first of their four children was born in free territory.

In 1837 the Scotts returned to Missouri, a slave state. Dred was hired out to numerous people but continued to live in virtual freedom while his new owner, the widow of John Emerson, continued to hire him out as a source of income for herself.

While working for a law firm he learned that, under Missouri's judicial principle of "once free, always free," slaves who lived in free territory became free themselves, so Dred and Harriet sued for their freedom.

In 1848 a Missouri court nevertheless ruled against them, so they began a series of appeals in 1850, all of which they lost. Even so, with the help of people who knew them, including members of Ben Blow's family, the case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.

Dred and Harriet Scott

 

The case was heard by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Fischer writes:

[Tawney was] an odd character, a Maryland Federalist who had become a Jacksonian Democrat. He was also a Maryland planter who had freed his own slaves in early life, but became a strong defender of slavery as an institution. On March 6, 1857 a majority of the court rejected Scott's suit.

Chief Justice Taney went further. He asserted that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 could not extend freedom or citizenship to any person of color. And the court ruled that the Missouri Compromise ...was unconstitutional in excluding slavery, depriving masters of their property, and extending freedom and citizenship to people of African ancestry....

Further, Taney and other justices added obiter dicta that went far beyond the case itself.They ruled that no slave or descendant of a slave could ever be free, or become a citizen, or bring a freedom suit in any court of the United States; that Congress could never abolish slavery anywhere; and that no federal or state court could deprive an owner of his property in a slave.

The Scott's lost the case, but were manumitted by their owners anyway. Unfortunately, Dred didn't live to see the consequence of his perseverance, dying in 1858 of tuberculosis.

The ruling seemed at first to be a great victory for southern slave owners, but it proved their undoing. Many northerners who were indifferent to the cause of abolition were outraged by the case, and as a result, slave owners and their northern allies lost control of Congress in 1858.

They then lost the presidency in 1860, and ultimately were devastated by a civil war that produced emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which abolished slavery throughout the United States and affirmed the rights of citizenship without limits of race, ethnicity, or previous condition of bondage.

Doubtless, abolition would've happened eventually, but it was accelerated by the determination of Dred and Harriet Scott and the foolish bigotry of Roger Taney.

Confirmation of Two Creationist Predictions about Origins

Long time readers of VP will know that I'm agnostic about much that has to do with the so-called Creation-Evolution debate.

I do stake my flag, however, on two simple propositions: 1) however life arose on the planet and however long ago it happened it's exceedingly unlikely that it arose through a blind, unguided process like naturalistic evolution, and 2) both the universe and living things show manifold evidence of having been intelligently designed.

Having said this, a story a few years ago at Phys.org discussed a paper which, I should've thought, would've created shock waves among naturalistic scientists and philosophers, but which has so far generated very little comment.

I thought it would've created a considerable stir because it confirms two predictions made by creationists (those who believe that the earth is relatively young and that all life forms were created at essentially the same time) and which are wholly unexpected on the assumption of a gradual evolution of life as posited by Darwinism.

A little background: Darwinian evolutionists argue that life on earth has been around for billions of years and that the various forms, were we able to see all that have ever appeared, would be observed to grade into each other almost seamlessly.

In a gradual process that takes millions of years, one species slowly transitions to a similar but slightly different form, until the original form and its descendents become reproductively isolated into two separate species.

On the Darwinian view different taxa would appear at different times in the history of the earth, and thus the age of one species might be substantially different from the age of another, perhaps by millions of years.

On the other hand, many creationists, at least those who reject the idea of universal descent from a common ancestor, assert that both of these claims are incorrect. They predict that all species on earth are approximately the same age and that since the major taxa were created independently there will not be significant evidence of transitions between them.

The article in Phys.org reveals that both of these creationist predictions, neither of which is entailed by Darwinian evolution, seem to have been confirmed. Here are a few excerpts:

The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. "This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," [said David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who co-authored the findings last week.]

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age? Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

In analysing the [genetic] barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

This doesn't mean that life is only 200,000 years old. It only means that 90% of the species on earth today have been in existence for about the same length of time. In other words, this is consistent with the creationist hypothesis that there was a major environmental event early on in the history of the human race that produced a biological bottleneck of sorts, out of which emerged most of the forms that we find inhabiting the planet today.

This does not, of course, refute Darwinism and establish creationism, but it is a finding that requires a secondary explanation on Darwinism but which is directly predicted by creationists.

Here's another:

And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between. "If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."

The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

In other words, the lack of transitions between species is perplexing on the Darwinian view of a gradual evolution of life. Creationists have long pointed to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, but this study shows that even in extant forms of life species seem to be genetically isolated from each other.

Again, there could be a satisfactory Darwinian account of why this is, but the point is that it confirms a direct prediction of the creationist hypothesis.

None of this means that creationists are correct and that Darwinians are wrong. The article offers some possible explanations for why, on Darwinian terms, the aforementioned findings may obtain. What it does seem to suggest, though, is that the Darwinian criticism of creationism, that it's a metaphysical, not a scientific, construct, is becoming harder to defend.

The distinguishing characteristic of science is what philosopher Karl Popper called conjectures and refutations. That is, scientific researchers make predictions (conjectures) based on theory and then test those predictions to see if they're confirmed or refuted by the evidence.

To the extent that the creationist hypothesis generates predictions that are confirmed by the empirical evidence, to that extent it confounds those who wish to exclude it from the realm of science and consign it to the sphere of religious faith.

The African Slave Trade Is Still Flourishing

Charles Jacobs is the president of the American Anti-Slavery Group. A few years ago he wrote a very important and interesting piece for The Federalist in which he informed us that black Africans are still being bought and sold by slavers in Africa, but there's very little interest in doing anything about it in Western nations or the press.

Unfortunately, little has changed since he wrote that column. Perhaps that's because the perpetrators are mostly Arab Muslims, a favored class among Western media liberals due to their status as an historically "oppressed" group, and the victims of this odious trafficking are largely Christian, and thus not deemed worthy of media attention.

If Israelis were selling Palestinians into bondage, or white South Africans were once again imposing apartheid on blacks it'd be all we'd be hearing from our media megaphones, but Arab Muslims enslaving black Christians elicits little more than a yawn from our "compassionate" elites. They're too preoccupied with climate change and imprisoning Donald Trump to concern themselves with genuine human rights atrocities.

Here are a few excerpts from Jacobs' article:

Every day across the African continent, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention. Human rights groups have marched and battled against abuses noticeably less cruel and evil than human bondage, yet no major organization has attempted to free today’s black slaves, much less taken meaningful steps to raise awareness about their plight.

For instance, in Mauritania, although slavery has been legally banned five times since 1961, it nevertheless persists with tens of thousands of blacks continuing to be held in bondage. While it is forbidden in the Qur’an for Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, in Mauritania, racism trumps religious doctrine — as it did in the West — as Arab and Berber Muslims enslave African Muslims.

Americans first heard about Islamist slave raids in Nigeria when Michelle Obama made it a cause célèbre with her “#BringBackOurGirls” hashtag, but interest quickly faded, and Boko Haram continued to kidnap hundreds of Christian girls into jihad slavery. So cruel are the events of their captivity that some girls prefer death as suicide bombers to the life of a slave.

Today, Fulani Muslim herdsmen raid Christian villages, massacring their inhabitants. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, has done relatively little to stop the assaults, even in the face of demands for action from the White House.

In Algeria, sub-Saharan Africans fleeing violence and poverty are enslaved by Algerian Arabs as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), 106,000 black Africans are estimated to be enslaved in Algeria. Migrant women and children of both sexes risk being forced into sexual slavery, while men perform unskilled labor.

The GSI estimates as many as 48,000 migrants are enslaved in Libya, with survivors reporting torture and sexual slavery.

Jacobs goes on to discuss two factors impeding any effective action that might eliminate this horrific practice, or at least diminish it. You can read about these and more of what Jacobs has to say about this modern plague at the link.

Our Nation Needs Strong Fathers

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family. Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out almost thirty years ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Yesterday was Fathers' Day so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

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

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

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

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

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

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

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

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

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

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

Fine-Tuned for Life

An article at Evolution News lists and explains the significance of the fine-tuning of 22 cosmic parameters which must be set to precisely the values they have else either the universe would not exist or if it did it wouldn't be a universe suitable for life.

To illustrate this astonishing precision imagine that if the mass of the earth deviated from its actual mass by as much as the mass of a grain of sand the earth wouldn't exist. That's the sort of precision required in not just one cosmic parameter but in dozens of them.

Examples of this fine-tuning include the expansion rate of the universe (the cosmological constant) which must be calibrated to one part in 10^120. To grasp the magnitude of this number consider that there are only 10^80 atoms in the entire universe.

Another example is the strength of gravity. Imagine that the range of possible values for the strength of gravity is represented by a ruler stretched across the entire expanse of the universe. The actual strength of gravity is located at some point on the ruler. If it were stronger or weaker than what it is such that its value deviated by just one inch on the ruler, no stars or planets would exist.

A third example has to do with the initial conditions that existed at the origin of the universe. For instance the distribution of mass/energy in the earliest stage of the Big Bang could've had any value but the odds that it would be a value that produces a life-permitting universe was calculated by Roger Penrose to be one in 10^10^123. This is incomprehensible.

How is it that a universe such as ours exists with so many factors being just right for intelligent life? Some people, like philosopher Bertrand Russell, just shrug their shoulders and tell us that, "The universe is just there and that's all," but this is to display a strange lack of curiosity. It's a "science stopper."

Here's a list of some of the fine-tuned parameters in our universe and in our solar system and earth. You can find an explanation for most of them at the link:

Cosmic Constants

1. Gravitational force constant
2. Electromagnetic force constant
3. Strong nuclear force constant
4. Weak nuclear force constant
5. Cosmological constant

Initial Conditions and “Brute Facts”

1. Initial distribution of mass energy
2. Ratio of masses for protons and electrons
3. Velocity of light
4. Mass excess of neutron over proton

“Local” Planetary Conditions

1. Steady plate tectonics with right kind of geological interior
2. Right amount of water in crust
3. Large moon with right rotation period
4. Proper concentration of sulfur
5. Right planetary mass
6. Near inner edge of circumstellar habitable zone
7. Low-eccentricity orbit outside spin-orbit and giant planet resonances
8. A few, large Jupiter-mass planetary neighbors in large circular orbits
9. Outside spiral arm of galaxy
10. Near co-rotation circle of galaxy, in circular orbit around galactic center
11. Within the galactic habitable zone
12. During the cosmic habitable age

Effects of Primary Fine-Tuning Parameters

1. The polarity of the water molecule

There are many more examples of both fine-tuning and planetary requirements for life, but these give a sense of why so many philosophers and scientists have concluded that neither the universe nor life are just accidents. The evidence from scientific discovery supporting the claim that God does exist continues to grow.

When people say there is no evidence that a God exists what they mean is that they just haven't bothered to avail themselves of the evidence that's there.

Reparations

The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley is a frequent home run hitter on the subject of race in America, and he "goes yard" in a recent column on reparations. He begins with some lines from the movie "Barbershop", a comedy about a black barbershop owner and the people in his orbit.

Riley quotes one character who says, “We don’t need reparations. We need restraint. Don’t go out and buy a Range Rover when you livin’ with your momma. And pay your momma some rent.” He adds,

Those lines come from Ricky, a character in the hit 2002 comedy “Barbershop.” The movie has a nearly all-black cast and is set mostly in a clip joint on the South Side of Chicago, where Ricky and his fellow barbers engage in free-wheeling nonstop banter with customers. Ricky was responding to a small-time crook who had said that ancestral slavery “ruined my whole life” and to another customer who suggested that black people demand reparations from the government.

Another barber, an old-timer named Eddie, sides with Ricky. “We’ve had welfare and affirmative action. Is that not reparations?” When another customer says that he thinks each black American is entitled to at least $100,000, Eddie responds, “What do you think that’s gonna do? That ain’t gonna do nothing but make Cadillac the No. 1 dealership in the country.”

Twenty-one years ago, as I watched the movie in a Brooklyn theater full of other black people, these exchanges brought howls of laughter from the audience. What also struck me was that a couple of minutes of film dialogue had produced a more honest conversation about racial preferences than book-length treatments of the subject from some of the nation’s most celebrated black intellectuals.

That's certainly true. Eddie is irreverent and criticizes everybody from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, but he can get away with it because he's funny and he's black.

Riley continues:

More than 20 years later, we’re still debating the topic. Last week New York voted to follow California down the slavery-reparations rabbit hole. Nutty ideas that originate in the Golden State often spread to other parts of the country over time, so the development isn’t too surprising, and more states are sure to follow. But it is another indication that the progressive left isn’t interested in getting past race, and that social justice in practice amounts to little more than a power grab.

New York state lawmakers concluded the legislative session on Thursday by creating a commission to study the lingering effects of slavery. California set up a reparations task force in 2020, and last month the state Legislature voted to make direct cash payments to black descendants of slaves that could amount to $1.2 million per person.

Neither Kathy Hochul nor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governors of New York and California, respectively, has committed to signing off on this nonsense, yet it’s notable that proponents have moved the ball this far.

This shows how far our society has descended into absurdity. No one living in California or New York today ever owned slaves or was enslaved. Most people paying taxes in these states are either themselves immigrants or are descended from immigrants who came here well after slavery had been abolished. Many of the blacks living in these states are descended from people who were never enslaved or were released from bondage long before the American Revolution.

Riley agrees:

California was never a slave state, and New York outlawed slavery in 1827, but the absurdities of these proposals don’t end there. Slavery was an atrocity, but all the slaves and all the slaveholders are long gone. Furthermore, the vast majority of whites living in the antebellum period, even in the South, never owned slaves.

Most white Americans alive today are descendants of people who came to the U.S. after the Civil War. Proponents of reparations want people who aren’t even descendants of slaveowners in the U.S. to compensate black people who were never slaves.

So how is it just to squeeze taxpayers who had nothing to do with slavery to give a huge handout to people who've never been slaves?

Progressives insist that there is a direct link between the past mistreatment of blacks and black outcomes today, but that claim is undermined by the experience of other groups. Chinese- and Japanese-Americans were also mistreated in the U.S. They were lynched, placed in internment camps, forced to attend segregated schools and denied property rights.

Yet today both Asian groups outperform white Americans academically and economically and have done so for decades.

Conversely, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, median black weekly earnings are slightly higher than those of Hispanics, yet no one would argue that Hispanics have experienced more discrimination in the U.S. than blacks.

Riley argues that it's not slavery that's responsible for black poverty and/or under-performance today:

Those who want to blame the legacy of slavery for outcomes today are overlooking the legacy of the welfare state, which grew dramatically beginning in the late 1960s. The Great Society programs implemented under President Lyndon B. Johnson subsidized counterproductive behavior that took a huge toll on the black family.

Subsequently, many of the positive trends among blacks in the first two-thirds of the 20th century—from declining crime rates to educational and economic gains that were narrowing the gap with whites—either stalled or reversed course.

Indeed, the black family was in much better shape in the years following WWII than it's been in the years since the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s.

In his excellent study of the black experience in America from the 17th century through Emancipation titled African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, David Hackett Fischer notes that in Pennsylvania as early as the late 18th century those blacks who had been freed from slavery were forming stable families, becoming prosperous, raising educated children, forming churches and benevolent societies, etc.

They accomplished this despite racial tension and antipathy, the lack of any social safety net and despite in some cases having only recently been enslaved. To argue that blacks today can't do likewise and therefore need to be given a massive handout is an enormous slander against black ability.

Riley concludes that,

Reparations can’t solve these problems, as Ricky and Eddie pointed out, because they are mainly cultural deficiencies. Another government-imposed wealth-redistribution scheme won’t do the trick, but it will almost certainly make race relations worse and encourage blacks to continue seeing themselves primarily as victims who have no control over their lives.

Compensating blacks today for the suffering of their ancestors wouldn’t be just. It would be corrupt. “When you trade on the past victimization of your own people, you trade honor for dollars,” Shelby Steele writes. “And this trading is only uglier when you are a mere descendant of those who suffered but nevertheless prevailed.”

Despite it's often off-color allusions, I commend the movie "Barbershop". It's politically incorrect and funny, but it conveys several very important messages.

For those inclined toward a more scholarly look at the black experience I can't recommend Fischer's book highly enough. It's 749 pages long, but it's fascinating and an excellent counterpoint to the views of Hannah Nicole-Jones' 1619 Project.

The Reptilian Brain and Thinking Critically

How many of us learned at some point in our education about the triune brain - the theory that the brain consists of three parts, reptilian, mammalian and human?

According to this theory, the most evolutionarily primitive part of the brain, the reptilian brain, i.e. the brain stem, which controls basic body functions like movement and breathing. It's called the reptilian brain because reptiles' brains are similar.

Somewhat more advanced is the mammalian brain, i.e. the limbic system, which controls emotion. Sitting at the apex of evolutionary development is the human brain, the cerebral cortex, which controls language, reasoning, etc.

Denyse O'Leary at Mind Matters News notes that this theory, published in the 1960s by Yale University physiologist and psychiatrist Paul D. MacLean, was made popular by astronomer Carl Sagan in his best-selling 1977 book Dragons of Eden.

The theory was popular because it fit the evolutionary paradigm that holds that the brain was constructed gradually by building more advanced parts on top of more primitive parts. Thus, our reptilian brain is a holdover from an earlier stage of our evolution.

O'Leary, however, is skeptical. She asks, "Do we have a three-part brain - reptilian, mammalian and human? Curiously, psychology textbooks teach us that we do and neuroscience studies teach us that we don’t. Who to believe? And how did that happen anyway?"

Neuroscientists scoff at the idea that the human brain is organized the way the triune brain theory suggests. O'Leary writes:

As University of Oslo psychology professor Christian Krog Tamnes puts the matter in an interview at Science Norway, “Those of us who research brain development and brain evolution have known for quite some time that this isn’t true.”

Tamnes points, to a paper on the topic last year: Despite 320 million years of separate evolution, lizards and mice share a core set of neuron types that are found all over the brain, “including in the cerebral cortex, challenging the notion that certain brain regions are more ancient than others.”

Eldrid Borgan, in an article titled “No, you don’t have a reptilian brain inside your brain,” states that,

Emotions, such as fear and sadness, are not made in one specific place in the brain. In fact, several parts of the brain are always involved. Which parts of the brain are active vary from time to time, and from person to person.

Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers, “So if we absolutely need to have a metaphor, it’s much better to think of the brain as an orchestra. Even playing a simple song requires a lot of pieces to talk together effectively and in a coordinated way.”

So we can still have lots of problems but our Inner Lizard is not one of them.

Despite the findings of neuroscientists, psychology students are apparently still being taught that we do indeed have an "Inner Lizard."

Psychology lecture rooms and textbooks have been curiously slow to let go of the reptilian brain myth however....In 2020, Joseph Cesario and colleagues reported on a study of what psychology students are told about such matters:

This belief [the triune brain theory], although widely shared and stated as fact in psychology textbooks, lacks any foundation in evolutionary biology.

Our experience suggests that it may surprise many readers to learn that these ideas have long been discredited among people studying nervous-system evolution. Indeed, some variant of the above story is seen throughout introductory discussions of psychology and some subareas within the discipline…

There's more on this at the link, but one lesson we might take from the above is that we should mix any pronouncement from scientists, and a forteriori the media, with a healthy dose of skepticism until were shown compelling evidence. Scientific ideas and political ideologies which were yesterday's fashion are often today's rubbish.

Regarding any claim made by anyone which we're urged to accept we should ask, does it offend common-sense, what's the evidence for it and to what consequences does it appear to lead? Until we're shown persuasive evidence for a scientific claim presented to us by others, particularly any claim that has political implications, violates common sense or conflicts with other beliefs we hold, we're intellectually justified in withholding acceptance.

If more people were to remain skeptical, not just about scientific theories which sound far-fetched, but also about some of the dogmas advanced by contemporary social movements, such as those involving climate, race, religion and sexuality, our culture might be a lot less confused and adrift today.

Consciousness All the Way Down?

Materialism is the view that everything that exists can be reduced to material stuff. There's nothing in reality that's immaterial or which doesn't somehow derive from matter. There's no immaterial mind or soul, no immaterial beings like angels or God.

The Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick (1916–2004) expressed it this way:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

Of course, if materialism is true, as a considerable majority of 19th and 20th century philosophers and scientists assumed, then consciousness is some kind of illusion generated by the material brain. Moreover, if materialism is true theism becomes much more difficult to defend, since God is not made of matter.

Unfortunately, for materialists, however, there's increasing evidence accumulating in the 21st century that materialism is false.

A number of contemporary philosophers are embracing a view called panpsychism which holds that all matter down to the tiniest atom is to some degree conscious. If this is true (I'm skeptical) then consciousness is not just something that arises in complex vertebrate brains, but inheres even in the simplest material entities.

The authors of a recent scientific paper don't go quite that far but hint strongly that consciousness is a property not just of brains but of every living cell. They argue that "all biology is cognitive information processing."

Denyse O'Leary at Evolution News raises an eyebrow at the word "cognitive":

The word “cognitive” is worth examining. According to Merriam–Webster, it means "of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)", or "based on or capable of being reduced to empirical factual knowledge."

Which definition do the authors...mean when they tell us that “As the internal measurement by cells of information is self-referential by definition, self-reference is biological self-organization, underpinning 21st century Cognition-Based Biology.” Do they mean that cells, in some sense, think?

They don’t quite say but the hints are intriguing....they write of "the contemporary recognition that cellular cognition governs the flow of biological information.”

The authors cite as evidence the astonishingly complex feedback loops in every cell in the living world. O'Leary quotes from their conclusion:

When biology is framed as an informational interactome, all forms of biological expression interact productively in a continuous, seamless feedback loop. In that reciprocating living cycle, there is no privileged level of causation since all aspects of the cell as an organized whole participate in cellular problem-solving….

So, O'Leary remarks, the cell acts on itself (self-organization) instead of merely being acted upon by [its] genes. But also, they write,

The origin of self-referential cognition is unknown. Indeed, it can now be declared biology’s most profound enigma. Yet, that instantiation can be properly accredited as equating with the origin of life.

In layman's terms if the workings of the cell exhibit consciousness then presumably the very first cell was conscious. How did something like this just pop into existence? How did consciousness arise from unconscious substrate, and if even the substrate is conscious how did the universe come to be like that?

O'Leary states:

In short, we have no idea how cells, which have been around for billions of years, could become so complex that they can be compared to intelligent beings (“self-referential cognition”) without any design in nature at all. Well, maybe they couldn’t have. Maybe the main thing to take away here, whether the authors intend it or not, is this: If biologists don’t want intelligent design, they will surely need to come up with something more convincing than Crick’s materialism.

There's more in her article. One thing she points out is that puzzles like the ones the authors of the paper adduce go some distance in explaining why panpsychism is beginning to supplant materialism among scientists if not yet in the popular culture which always lags a generation or two behind science and philosophy.

Where Did Whales Come From?

Yesterday's post highlighted the complexity of the elephant's trunk and how difficult it would be for such structure and function to emerge from random genetic mutations and fortuitous selection unguided by any intelligence.

Today's post offers up a video of another of the largest mammals on the planet - the humpback whale. The humpback whale poses the same sort of problems for a naturalistic account of origins as does the elephant's trunk, but the problems are far more numerous.

Until recently the consensus opinion among biologists was that whales evolved from land animals, but recent finds have made this view increasingly untenable. Not only is the window of available time for all the requisite changes to adapt a terrestrial creature to a marine environment very narrow, but the sheer number and scope of the changes strains credulity.

Here are a few of the changes that would need to have occurred within the span of about 3-5 million years for whales to make the transition from land to sea:

• Counter-current heat exchanger for intra-abdominal testes
• Ball vertebra
• Tail flukes and musculature
• Blubber for temperature insulation
• Ability to drink sea water (reorganization of kidney tissues)
• Fetus in breech position (for labor underwater)
• Nurse young underwater (modified mammae)
• Forelimbs transformed into flippers
• Reduction of hindlimbs
• Reduction/loss of pelvis and sacral vertebrae
• Reorganization of the musculature for the reproductive organs
• Hydrodynamic properties of the skin
• Special lung surfactants
• Novel muscle systems for the blowhole
• Modification of the teeth
• Modification of the eye for underwater vision
• Emergence and expansion of the mandibular fat pad with complex lipid distribution
• Reorganization of skull bones and musculature
• Modification of the ear bones
• Decoupling of esophagus and trachea
• Synthesis and metabolism of isovaleric acid (toxic to terrestrial mammals)
• Emergence of blowhole musculature and their neurological control

This excellent nine minute video from the talented filmmakers at The John 10:10 Project illustrates some of the difficulties in evolving a completely aquatic mammal from terrestrial ancestors:

This animated video explains how a sperm whale uses its sense of echolocation, another evolutionary enigma, as it hunts giant squid:

It may have happened that whales evolved from land animals and that, indeed, all forms of life on earth descended from a single ancestral form, but it seems that the more we learn about the difficulties such a process entails, the less reason we have for thinking that they did.

The Elephant's Trunk

Over the almost twenty years that Viewpoint has been online, I've expressed a lot of skepticism about the ability of unguided natural processes to create the "many forms most wonderful" to quote the concluding lines of Darwin's Origin of Species.

One has to believe that so many fortuitous and extraordinarily improbable events, including, but not limited to, just the right genetic mutations, had to occur in just the right sequence to give rise to the millions of incredible structures we see in both the plant and animal kingdoms. A fascinating example of this is the wonderful structure and function of the elephant's trunk as the 8 minute video below illustrates.

Some would argue that just because I (and increasing numbers of scientists and philosophers) find the naturalistic explanation of the evolution of the elephant's trunk literally incredible is no argument against the claim that it actually did evolve. The naturalist scoffs at skepticism based on incredulity, calling it, as does Richard Dawkins, the "Argument from Personal Incredulity," insisting that such reasoning is extremely weak.

As philosopher William Lane Craig points out, however, the argument is actually quite sound. He formulates the "Principle of Personal Incredulity" (PPI) this way:

PPI: We should believe something that we find incredible only if we are aware of overwhelming evidence in its favor.

This is a perfectly reasonable principle, and indeed it's one that even underlies much of the atheism of our day. Whatever arguments atheists might adduce to justify their lack of theistic belief many of them actually reduce to the fact that the atheist finds the existence of a supernatural mind quite literally incredible.

The problem for the atheist, however, is that there's a great deal of evidence in favor of the existence of God and very little against it whereas there's scant evidence that natural selection coupled with genetic mutation, unaided by a purposeful mind, could produce something like the elephant's trunk.

Watch the video and see what you think:

The Gates of Hell (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at the first part of Gene Edward Veith's review of Matthew Heise's study of the history of the Lutheran church in the Soviet Union from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to WWII. Heise's book is titled The Gates of Hell and hell is an apt description of the state that the communists, and especially Stalin, established in the Soviet Union.

We'll conclude Veith's review today. Veith writes:

The German Lutherans faced yet another danger. Once Hitler came into power and World War II approached, Stalin declared that all German citizens and Russians of German origin were subject to arrest. They were all suspected of Nazism and of spying for Germany.

The NKVD—the predecessor of the KGB—began rounding up pastors and church members. The donations the Lutheran church had received from foreign churches became prima facie evidence of treason, subversion, and espionage. Church youth groups were defined as Nazi cells. Sermons were interpreted as pro-Nazi agitation.

In at least one case, a pastor’s preaching on “the Kingdom of God” was interpreted as a symbolic reference to the Third Reich.

Heise uncovers two confessions from NKVD agents, including the chief interrogator of the Leningrad Lutherans who was himself arrested years later and admitted that the cases against the believers were all fabricated and that the recorded testimonies were written by the officers themselves.

In other words, these men lied to insure that innocent people would be subjected to horrible suffering and death in the Soviet prison camps. Such was the morality of the communists.

In Stalin’s “German operation,” some 42,000 Russian citizens of German background were executed. Still more, including entire villages, were put into boxcars and shipped to Siberia. Nevertheless, Heise records the astonishing faith of the pastors and laity who persisted even as the persecutions got worse and worse.

We read about the seminary, whose students kept coming, even though they knew that upon their ordination they would become “former persons,” lose all their rights, and be targeted themselves for arrest and possible execution. Still, they kept studying. The seminary had to spend half its budget on taxes. One by one the professors got arrested.

Yet, when no more were left, the administrators started teaching their classes.

Bishop Meier, knowing that before long no church buildings would be available and the last pastor would soon be gone, began teaching parishioners how to keep the faith alive without clergy. He taught his people how to baptize, how to conduct weddings and funerals, how to teach their children the catechism, how to come together for prayer and worship.

On November 27, 1937, the last pastor was killed.

The courage of these simple people is as inspirational as it is astonishing. They continued to practice their faith and serve their Lord and His people despite having lost almost everything and knowing that eventually they'd probably be sent to the camps to be worked and starved to death, or, if they were lucky, get a bullet in the head.

Heise’s book ends with the apparent extinction of the Lutheran Church and the beginning of World War II. It doesn’t continue with the story of those Lutherans in Siberia and elsewhere who did what the bishop had taught, preserving and handing down their faith by means of the ordinary practices still performed today by Lutherans everywhere—learning the catechism by heart, learning the hymns, memorizing Bible verses—and carrying out the priesthood of all believers by worshiping and baptizing.

Heise does, though, include an epilogue, which jumps past the postwar years to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policies and to the collapse of the Soviet Union. During that time, the victims of Stalin’s “Great Terror,” including the Lutherans, were cleared of the accusations against them.

Survivors and their children and grandchildren came out into the open and identified as Lutheran. They organized into congregations. Church property, including the “swimming pool” church, was restored to them. The old, vandalized buildings once again became houses of worship. They had pastors again.

Just as Jesus promised of His body, the church, the gates of hell did not prevail against the church in Russia.

Veith then appends his own epilogue, tying the persecution inflicted by the leftists in the Soviet Union on Christians to the trends we see forming today in our own society:

In reading this chronicle of persecution, we can’t help but see the parallels, faint now but real, with today’s leftist opponents of religious liberty. Religion can be tolerated only if it remains inside a person’s head and is neither acted upon nor expressed in the public square. “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear.”

Children should be indoctrinated against the beliefs of their parents. Religion is only a mask for oppression. And we see how religion can be persecuted not only through violence but also through economic sanctions (threatening churches with the tax code), cultural pressures (undermining the values Christians try to instill in their children), and the law (punishing those who won’t conform to the prevailing secularist ideology).

Reading this book is a heart-wrenching but inspiring experience. It begins with the mundane efforts to bring Russian Lutherans into one church body, so we hear about meetings, fundraising, personality conflicts, and church politics. This is the ordinary stuff of the “institutional church” that so many American Christians are tired of.

But then the pressures begin and intensify, grow worse and worse, more and more lethal. Yet we see these ordinary pastors, church ladies, Sunday school teachers, youth group members—so very much like those we know in our own congregations—holding on to Christ, trusting in God’s Word, no matter what the NKVD does to them, and becoming blessed martyrs, and in some cases even living witnesses.

Veith is right that some of the book, that which deals with church administration and politics, is a bit tedious, but Heise's account of the suffering these men and women, old and young, endured for the sake of the gospel, is simply extraordinary.

The Gates of Hell (Pt. I)

Some time ago Gene Edward Veith reviewed a book titled The Gates of Hell by Matthew Heise, director of the Lutheran Heritage Foundation and a long-time missionary in the region from the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

Heise's book is essentially a history of the Lutheran church in Russia from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II. After reading Veith's review I read the book and found it to be just as gripping an account of the Soviet state's efforts to crush the Lutheran church as Veith said it was.

The Soviet atheists were as brutal and cruel as one could imagine, not just to Lutherans but to all Christians, Catholics, Orthodox and protestant. Their cruelty also extended to Jews and Muslims. No religious person or organization was exempt, but Heise's research focused on the fate of Lutherans.

Veith's summary of Heise's very well-researched book begins with a brief period of freedom after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that deposed the Czar:

At first, with the czar’s restrictions lifted, the Lutherans flourished. They managed to organize themselves into one church body, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Russia, with two bishops. They opened a seminary in Leningrad. They worked with American government and church-related relief agencies in the famine and food shortage that followed the revolution.

Then the Bolsheviks began to implement their anti-religion policies. They proclaimed freedom of religion but only as a private matter; all religion had to disappear from the public square. They confiscated church property, took over all schools, and censored religious publications.

Priests and pastors were labeled “non-productive elements,” since they engaged in no physical or other productive labor, and so were excluded from the “workers’ paradise.” They were described as “former persons,” along with czarist aristocrats and functionaries of the old regime.

As such, they had no rights of citizenship, could not vote, were given no food rations, lost their parsonages, and had to pay higher taxes. In addition, their children were not allowed to attend universities.

In response, church members, many of whom also lost their homes and farms, tithed like never before to support their pastors and their congregations. Lutherans from other countries, especially the Russian Germans who had migrated to the American Midwest, sent contributions.

Despite enormous hardship, the church still managed to cope and survive, but the came Joseph Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, in 1929, one of whose goals was the complete elimination of Christianity in Russia. The main target, Veith writes, was the very belief in God, which violated the Marxist tenets of “scientific materialism.”

He continues:

But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state.

One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”

It wasn’t just a matter of punishing church leaders and other religious believers for “anti-Soviet activities” or for being “counter-revolutionaries.” Communists assumed that religion would simply die out if they could prevent it from being transmitted to children. But even more than that, the very reminders of religion—the very memory that there used to be a religion—had to be erased.

The only way to achieve this was to ratchet up the persecution. The Soviets devoted an astonishing amount of effort to destroy the church:

In an effort to make religion disappear, the Party imposed a new, five-day week, with four days of work, then one day off. The cycle was staggered so that the day off fell on different days for different individuals. The purpose was to eliminate Sunday. The day set apart for worship ceased to exist. But churches responded by meeting once a week at night.

Taxes were weaponized. Exorbitant taxes were levied on religious workers and institutions, including a special tax “to support atheist culture.” Heise records a church in 1928 having to pay taxes of 393 rubles; in 1931, it had to pay 3,609 rubles. Other economic sanctions were designed to force churches out of existence.

Churches had to pay up to 22 times the normal rate for utilities.

When a congregation could no longer pay its taxes and other fees—and eventually none of them could—its building would be taken over by the state, to be converted to a factory, a theater, or, in the case of St. Peter’s in Leningrad, an indoor swimming pool.

All churches had been considered state property, but when the bills couldn't be paid congregations lost the right to meet in them.

The new policy also forbade churches from holding religious instruction for children. So pastors met in their apartments with Sunday school teachers to go over the lessons for the week. The Sunday school teachers then met with children in their apartments.

But informers from the League of the Militant Godless uncovered this work-around. The pastors responsible were arrested. So were the elderly women and teenage girls who taught Sunday school.

They were sent to penal labor camps for as long as 10 years. Seventy-year-old pastors and aged church ladies were given picks and shovels to dig out Stalin’s arctic canal. The elderly died in the brutal conditions, but the younger pastors and young women who survived completed their sentences, after which they returned to their church work.

The hatred of the communists for Christians is inexplicable in a secular worldview. Why would they condemn good people to hard labor in the bitter cold of Siberia? There's no naturalistic explanation for so many people being infected with such irrational hatred and barbarism.

Despite the cruelties inflicted by the Stalinist communists they failed to extirpate Christianity:

In 1937 a government poll was taken designed to measure the success of the anti-religion policies. Citizens were asked, “Do you believe in God?” Despite the elimination of Sunday worship, the restrictions on religious teaching, and the suppression of the church, a majority of Russians—56.7%—not only said yes but were bold enough to admit it despite the consequences, as some respondents lost their jobs or their university enrollment because they professed their belief in God.

The Communists were flabbergasted. So they launched a more thorough wave of persecution, targeting not only pastors but also choir directors, organists, and ordinary laypeople. And they increased the use of the death penalty.

The savagery was just beginning. We'll continue Veith's summary of Heise's book tomorrow.

Trust and Performance

Simon Sinek is a motivationaL speaker who in this two minute and twenty second video relates a bit of wisdom he learned from talking with Navy SEALs. The language is a little salty, but the message is excellent:

This line in the video was especially interesting to me:

One SEAL put it this way: “I may trust you with my life but do I trust you with my money or my wife?”

The implicit message is that if someone's character is such that he can't be trusted in some areas of life, it'll be very hard to trust him in other areas of life, especially when lives depend on the man's character.

I remember back in the 90s having a discussion with someone about Bill Clinton and saying that if a man will cheat on his wife he'll certainly cheat on the country. The fellow I was talking to insisted these were entirely different things. What matters, he argued, is not character but competence.

I think Mr. Sinek would say that that's nonsense.

The Iris Effect

Andy Kessler writes on tech topics for the Wall Street Journal and this week's column addresses climate change. It's interesting because he thinks the earth has a built-in means to heal itself. It's called the Iris Effect.

Here's his lede:

Stop with all the existential-crisis talk. President Biden said, “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also talks about the “existential threat” of climate change. National security adviser Jake Sullivan identifies an “accelerating climate crisis” as one reason for a “new consensus” for government picking winners and losers in the economy.

Be wary of those touting consensus.

But what if the entire premise is wrong? What if the Earth is self-healing? Before you hurl the “climate denier” invective at me, let’s think this through. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years—living organisms for 3.7 billion. Surely, an enlightened engineer might think, the planet’s creator built in a mechanism to regulate heat, or we wouldn’t still be here to worry about it.

The theory of climate change is that excess carbon dioxide and methane trap the sun’s radiation in the atmosphere, and these man-made greenhouse gases reflect more of that heat back to Earth, warming the planet. Pretty simple. Eventually, we reach a tipping point when positive feedback loops form—less ice to reflect sunlight, warm oceans that can no longer absorb carbon dioxide—and then we fry, existentially.

But nothing is simple. What about negative feedback loops? Examples: human sweat and its cooling condensation or our irises dilating or constricting based on the amount of light coming in. Clouds, which can block the sun or trap its radiation, are rarely mentioned in climate talk.

He goes on to talk about why clouds are difficult to model in the computer simulations run by climatologists and then he explains why clouds may be the means by which the earth prevents the runaway greenhouse effect:

Cumulus clouds, the puffy ones often called thunderclouds, are an important convection element, carrying heat from the Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere. Above them are high-altitude cirrus clouds, which can reflect heat back toward the surface.

A 2001 Lindzen [Richard Lindzen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of an early Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] paper, however, suggests that high-level cirrus clouds in the tropics dissipate as temperatures rise.

These thinning cirrus clouds allow more heat to escape. It’s called the Iris Effect, like a temperature-controlled vent opener for an actual greenhouse so you don’t (existentially) fry your plants. Yes, Earth has a safety valve.

Mr. Lindzen says, “This more than offsets the effect of greenhouse gases.”

There've been numerous attempts to debunk Lindzen and the Iris Effect, Kessler writes, but the theory has withstood these critiques. If cirrus cloud cover diminishes as the temperature rises beyond some equilibrium point all the concern about impending global catastrophe will look silly in retrospect.

Kessler concludes with this:

A 2021 paper co-authored by Mr. Lindzen shows strong support for an Iris Effect. Maybe Earth really was built by an engineer. Proof? None other than astronomer Carl Sagan described the Faint Young Sun Paradox that, 2.5 billion years ago, the sun’s energy was 30% less, but Earth’s climate was basically the same as today.

Cirrus clouds likely formed to trap heat—a closed Iris and a negative feedback loop at work.

In a 2015 Nature Geoscience paper, Thorsten Mauritsen and Bjorn Stephen at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology reran climate models using the Iris Effect and found them better at modeling historic observations.

One question Kessler's column raises is, if the Iris Effect is a real thing how hot does the planet have to get before the valve opens up and we can see that the effect is real and that it works?

Time and Human Free Will

Philosopher David Johnson has written an interesting article in which he argues that the concept of block time eliminates the possibility of free will and that block time is almost certainly, he believes, the correct temporal picture of the universe since it's entailed by Einstein's theory of relativity.

What he means by block time is this: Our common sense view of time is that the past no longer exists and the future is not yet. All that exists is the present moment. According to the idea of block time, however, every moment - past, present, and future - exists now. Your future marriage is happening now and has been happening as long as the universe has existed.

Think of all these moments as the moments in a movie on a dvd. The universe is like the dvd and every moment in the movie exists simultaneously on the dvd. Or think of a movie on a reel of film. The whole movie exists simultaneously, but only the frame passing in front of the projector lens is experienced.

In any case, if the block theory is correct then the future exists now which means that it is already established, which means that we're not free to change it, which means that there's no free will.

Here's Johnson:

The first and most obvious “threat” that the block universe theory raises is to our free will. If what I will do exists before I even do it, it doesn’t seem I freely choose to do what I do....if the future already exists, only one action is possible. And on the block universe view, the future already exists. It’s as set as the end of a movie I am already watching....So, my choice to do the action is not free.

Johnson fleshes this argument out in his article and, if the block universe is an accurate description of reality, then I think most of what he says is correct, but he nevertheless draws a couple of conclusions that I think are mistaken. For instance he writes:

Now, it would still be possible to judge a person’s character—to recognize the difference between morally good and morally bad kinds of persons. But it wouldn’t make sense to judge them for having a bad character. Why? Because they didn’t freely choose to have the character they do; you could only judge (evaluate) the character itself. And if you recognize that it’s the character, not the person, that is the problem, you must approach reproaching them in an entirely different way.

The mistake here, in my opinion, is to assume that in a deterministic universe there are morally good and bad characters in the first place. If everything is determined, what does it mean to say that someone is morally bad? There can only be morality if people can choose between acts, but in a block universe there is no genuine choice and therefore no moral good or bad.

Further on he invites us to, "Imagine if people started doing good actions merely because they recognized them as good rather than because they fear they will be punished if they don’t."

Yes, but how is he defining good? And good for whom? However we define good, my good may conflict with the good of others so why should I not put my good ahead of theirs? Why is what's good for me not better and more important, at least for me, than what's good for someone else?

The block theory has its attractions, as does the common sense view (not the least of which is that we can't really escape thinking that time really is how our common sense pictures it), but one question it raises for me is this: If it's true and if, as philosophers like Johnson assume, we've evolved to fit our environment, why did we evolve in such a way as to completely misperceive the nature of the temporal world? Why did we not only evolve the illusion of past, present and future but also the illusion of free will?

After all, we certainly didn't need the common sense view of time in order to survive. Many other creatures probably have no sense of a past or a future and they survive pretty well.

Anyway, there's much else that's interesting in Johnson's essay. If you're fascinated by the philosophy of time you should check it out.

Pride Month and Corporate Hypocrisy

We're well into June, LGBTQIA+ "Pride Month", and undeterred by the Bud Light and Target fiascos, we're being beseiged by corporate endorsements of "Pride". One amusing aspect of this is the hypocrisy of corporations which loudly and proudly fly the rainbow flag here in the states but go mute about their enthusiasm for LGBTQIA+ causes in foreign lands in which they do business.

Jim Geraghty notes that many corporations which tout their gay rights sympathies here in America nevertheless find it inconvenient, or risky, to do so elsewhere.

Geraghty writes:

You will be amazed at how many big U.S. and multinational corporations who are enthusiastically celebrating “Pride Month” have significant operations in countries that criminalize homosexuality. It’s not just China and Saudi Arabia, and it’s not just manufacturing in countries such as Pakistan or Indonesia.

No, you’re going to be flabbergasted by which particularly controversial company at this moment has operations running in . . . Uganda, which just enacted what are probably the most anti-gay criminal laws on the planet. Corporate America gets to market to LGBT consumers stateside, and then turn around and make a bundle in some of the most anti-gay countries in the world, and apparently everyone is just fine with this systemic hypocrisy.

With so many problems, you might wonder who would want to do business in a place like Uganda. The answer turns out to be quite a few multinationals: Coca-Cola, Unilever, Diageo, Citibank, Hilton and Sheraton hotel chains and . . . Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Apparently, some corporations' principles stop at the waters' edge. Anheuser-Busch, Geraghty tells us, "operates breweries, factories, and distribution networks in a country, Uganda, that criminalizes homosexuality."

He continues:

For several years now, sharp-eyed observers have noticed that many multinational corporations add rainbows to their logos in the West, but keep them unchanged in the Middle East, where governments and the populaces are much less supportive of gay rights.

In Saudi Arabia, gay men get executed after their confessions are extracted during torture. The list of U.S. companies doing business in Saudi Arabia is like the Fortune 100.

Gays in China are subject to “censorship, surveillance and intimidation, at times even detention by police.” Just about every major multinational corporation operates in China and never speaks out against the policies of the Chinese government.

You know who’s got four “sourcing centers” located in China? Target. You know, the big box-store company that signed up a design company with a line of Satanist-inspired merchandise to help create the store’s 2023 “PRIDE” collection.

You know where else Target has a sourcing center? Karachi, Pakistan, where “same-sex sexual activity is prohibited under the Penal Code 1860, which criminalizes acts of ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’. This provision carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.”

Target also operates a sourcing center in Jakarta, Indonesia, where gay men get publicly flogged for violating Sharia law.

Big multinational corporations love standing up for gay rights, as long as it means more people buying their stuff. They are not interested in standing up for gay rights if it might cost them something.

Big American companies will throw their weight around in opposition to all kinds of state laws, from restrictions on explicit materials in school libraries to limitations on hormone treatments, but then turn around and avert their eyes from governments that literally execute people for being gay.

Disney objects to Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law. The company also has no problem staging “Disney on Ice” in Saudi Arabia.

Not that long ago, a Saudi court sentenced a man to 450 lashes for “setting up a Twitter account to promote and practice homosexuality.”

What this demonstrates is that vast swaths of corporate America have no fundamental, principled objection to violent anti-gay views, as long as the profits are high enough.

Indeed, one might think that were profit incentives high enough, many of these corporations would happily endorse laws in the U.S. mandating prison sentences for homosexual behavior. Their only principle, it seems, is profit.

But setting corporate hypocrisy about "Pride Month" aside, it's not at all clear why one's sexual proclivities should be a matter of pride in the first place. If one's sexual orientation is determined for us at conception and not freely chosen then why should it be any more a matter to be proud of than the size of our ears or the shape of our skull?

We might be happy or satisfied that we are the way we are, but expressing pride in something we really had nothing to do with and can't really help, if, in fact, we can't, seems narcissistic and not a little preposterous.

C.S.Lewis talks about pride in a chapter of his classic work, Mere Christianity. Lewis writes that of all sins pride is actually the worst:

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is pride....Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.... Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man....Power is what Pride really enjoys....Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Lewis was certainly correct in his assessment of pride, and perhaps especially when he notes that pride is really about power. In our day the power that's being sought by those who promote pride in their sexual inclinations is both political and social.

Political power is necessary to normalize whatever sexual desires people have by codifying them into law.

Social power is necessary as a means to intimidate anyone who may have reservations about the effects of the LBGTQIA+ agenda on the health of society into silence and conformity. People must be made to affirm the normalcy and "goodness" of the sexual agenda, whether they really think it to be good or not, and they must be punished, perhaps by losing their livelihoods, if they openly dissent.

The LGBTQIA+ Pride agenda is achieved, in other words, by turning us all into the sort of hypocrites which inhabit many of our corporate boardrooms.

Rousing the Conservative Dragon

Stanford historian Victor Davis Hanson has a column out in which he suggests that perhaps the conservative behemoth is stirring in this country and is about to put an end to the insanity that seems to have descended over our culture like a fog (my words, not his).

Here's his lede:

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst. How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?

They don’t see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues. Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events. They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.

Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.

In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.

Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.

How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

Hanson goes on to offer some answers to that question:

Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them. They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.

They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.

Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.

They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.

The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.

So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.

Now, though, it seems that people are finally being roused from their slumber. Hanson cites the significant economic hit suffered by Target, Anheuser-Busch, Disney and perhaps others to come as signs that the conservative dragon has had enough.

You can read the rest of his column at the link. I hope he's right that we've had enough, but the problem is that cultural decline is on a ratchet. We accept so much deviance and then say "enough!" The decline pauses, but it has established a new baseline. It never recedes. A decade or so later, starting from the new baseline it proceeds to push the limits again and a new generation, having become accustomed to the level of deviance previously established, tolerates further decline.

At some point we become Sodom, if we haven't already.

But maybe not. Perhaps there'll come a time when our culture will wake up and roll back the moral, social and economic delusions under which we've been living. Hanson's column reminded me of the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence:

"...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

It might be germane to quote, too, the next sentence:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

We'll see.

Running the Movie Backwards

A student recently dug this old post out of the archive, and I thought I'd re-post it:

There is a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views invites us to imagine a scenario which illustrates this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards!

The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the simplest explanation for the phenomena in the video, certainly simpler than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell wants to relate this to the problem of undirected Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a professor describing the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class. “Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms was formed by pure chance with the ability to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were also able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors that crept in.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded into a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have reversed the pictures! You did it backwards” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

That's the problem with Darwinian evolution. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as sexual reproduction or butterfly metamorphosis, or create human consciousness or a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain, requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these things were the intentional product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

Of course, if a mind was somehow directing the process that would change everything.

Are We All Created Equal?

Yuval Harari is the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and a secular materialist who nevertheless recognizes the distressing shortcomings of his materialism. In Sapiens he notes that,

[T]he American Founding Fathers . . . imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of [human beings], and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.

In other words, when a secular modern speaks of ideals like justice and human rights, he or she is simply reciting contemporary fairy-tales. The ideals of which these folks speak are socially fabricated illusions employed to oil the gears of society to make it function better.

Indeed, the claim to be "fighting against injustice" is a foolish absurdity unless one is operating out of a Christian (or theistic) worldview. Every time our secular social justice warriors speak of "justice" and "equality" they're actually parasitizing the Christianity many of them reject.

Harari continues,

It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal?

. . . According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal.’ The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God.

Apart from Christianity there's no foundation for the principle of human equality and therefore no foundation for the idea of justice. Those who march down our cities' streets shouting "No Justice, No Peace" are yelling an empty, meaningless slogan, unless they're standing in a Christian worldview.

Those who complain of the injustice of income inequality, discrimination and racism are doing nothing more than emoting. They're expressing their displeasure with things as they are, but there's no more intellectual heft to their complaint than if they simply said "Ugh! I really don't like that."

The question they should be asked is why are these things wrong? Why are they "unjust," and why is injustice wrong? Unless they stand on a Christian understanding of the world, or at least a theistic understanding, they can have no coherent answer. One can be a secularist or atheist or one can believe that injustice and inequality are objectively wrong, but one can't do both.

Harari clearly recognizes the problem for secularists such as himself:

However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.

Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently.’

Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.

It's intriguing that people can accept all that and still think it's somehow more sophisticated, virtuous or rational to live their actual lives as though it's all false. When a secular (or atheistic) materialist's life day after day repudiates the secular materialism he claims to believe, the one thing he can't claim is that his secular materialism makes sense.