DNA Repair and Breast Cancer

I recently came across this short video which explains how healthy cells in the body repair damaged DNA, why damaged DNA can develop into breast cancer and how one common treatment for breast cancer works. It's pretty interesting:

Aside from the medical aspects of the video, the clip raises an important philosophical question. How do you suppose the repair mechanism ever arose?

Presumably it didn't exist early on in the evolutionary history of life, but if it didn't it's hard to see how the first cells would've survived given the frequency with which DNA is damaged. And if it did come to exist roughly at the same time as cells came to be, how did such a complex function, requiring specific protein shapes, ever emerge so rapidly in the early history of life?

Could blind, purposeless processes just by accident have created such a system? Which do you think is the more likely scenario, that random chance could've engineered the DNA repair system or that such complex systems were engineered by an intelligent engineer?

Fairy Tale or Miracle

The video below features a beautiful animation depicting the development of a child from insemination to birth.

When I watched this video for the first time I couldn't help wonder how the cells, both the sperm and the embryonic cells, "know" where to go. I marveled, too, at how the cells "know" to differentiate themselves into various tissues, and how the tissues "know" to arrange themselves in three dimensional patterns of a specific shape.

The amount of information and organization this whole process requires, the feedback and control systems that must be deployed, are all enormously complex and ingenious.

The developmental process from sperm to newborn appears to be wonderfully programmed and choreographed, but by what? The laws of chemistry? Natural selection? How does a purposeless, mechanical process like natural selection generate the incredible amount of information - far more information than what's required by, say, a computer operating system - that's needed for embryogenesis, even given a billion years of evolutionary time?

Perhaps some purely naturalistic, mechanical process did produce this amazing developmental sequence, but if so, it's as if a fairy tale has come true. Or maybe it's really a miracle.

This is breathtaking. Even moreso when we think that we're essentially witnessing the first nine months of our own existence.

Declawing the Bear

There seems to be a growing chorus of voices, especially from Republicans, that we're spending too much money in Ukraine and that there's no accountability for where it's going. The concern seems, however, to be based upon a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that Jim Geraghty clears up in his "Morning Jolt" column today.

According to Geraghty, who's currently touring eastern Ukraine, Republicans "become more supportive when they learn that one, the amount of aid is not that much relative to defense spending; two, Ukraine is winning; and three, Russia’s war-fighting capabilities are being severely degraded."

Take the first point.

[A]s of last week, the U.S. government had provided $43.8 billion worth of military support to Ukraine...[and] it is worth reminding some people that this kind of aid is not cash. It is all kinds of vehicles, guns, and ammunition that the Pentagon largely had in storage. (As I wrote back in April, there are certain weapons systems in short supply — HIMARs, Javelins, and Stingers, in particular — that the U.S. should not send any more of until our stockpiles are replenished to sufficient levels to deal with other potential threats, including one particular threat with a Great Wall. But the majority of weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and equipment that the U.S. is sending Ukraine is in great supply. Some of it was going to be scrapped!)

This $43.8 billion in aid sent to Ukraine since the beginning of the war is a drop in the bucket of the $5.3 trillion our government has spent on all expenditures just in fiscal year 2023

In other words, all military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war a year and a half ago adds up to about four-fifths of 1 percent of all U.S. government spending this year. Military aid to Ukraine since the start of the war is about half of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Transportation alone in one year. It is about a quarter of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is about one-sixth of what we spend on the U.S. Department of Education.

That Russia's ability to wage war is being severely degraded can be assessed in several ways. One is the difficulty the Russians are having in recruiting soldiers, another is the aborted Wagner Group mutiny a few months ago and the low morale it revealed among Russian forces. Another is the enormous manpower losses Russia has suffered 300,000 casualties including 120,000 dead.

Geraghty doesn't mention the loss of manpower but he does focus on the depletion of Russia's material assets:

[T]here is confirmed visual evidence of 11,906 Russian military vehicles being taken out, with 8,188 destroyed, 475 damaged, 444 abandoned, and ... 2,869 captured by the Ukrainians. (If you think the U.S. has given the Ukrainians a lot of vehicles, think about how many the Russians have given them.)

The comparable numbers for Ukraine are 4,322 vehicles taken out, with 2,901 destroyed, 331 damaged, 148 abandoned, and 942 captured.

Ever since the 1930s American strategists have predicted that the West was going to eventually face the Soviets/Russians in direct conflict*.

It's not likely that anyone expected the conflict to occur the way it has, but if war had to come, if the Russian bear was going to be declawed and rendered less of a threat, it's very fortunate for us that it's only costing Americans money and not costing American blood.

*Actually, Alexis deToqueville predicted it in Volume I (1835) of Democracy in America.

Rescuing Children

Maybe the biggest surprise of last summer's film offerings was the success of Sound of Freedom, the story of Tim Ballard the founder of Operation Underground Railroad. The movie was loosely based on Ballard's work in rescuing children who've been taken into sex slavery, but despite its powerful message that one would think everyone could agree with - that child slavery is a scourge that plagues the U.S. even more than many other parts of the world - the left was quite critical of the film and its theme.

This surprised me until I watched a Prager U. video of the real Tim Ballard telling his story (you can watch it here), and about 3/4 into the 13 minute video he mentions that he thinks that attempts to stock elementary school library shelves with pornography and to sexualize kids with drag shows and what-not are feeding into the child sex industry.

Of course, the library books and drag shows are supported by the left. Even President Biden has criticized Republicans for wanting to ban obscene materials from school libraries and to limit talk of sexuality by teachers. Ballard's indictment of such behavior is thus an indictment of the left which is perhaps the root of their disdain for Sound of Freedom.

Ballard himself has not escaped criticism, much of which seems to me to be either unsupported by evidence of just frivolous, but you can read more about O.U.R. and Ballard at Wikipedia and draw your own conclusions.

In any case, if the opportunity presents itself, watch the movie. It's very good and you won't be quite the same after having seen it.

Also, you might get a copy of my book Bridging the Abyss (see the radio button above) which is a novel based on the same theme as Sound of Freedom although it was published well before I was aware of Operation Underground Railroad and the methods used to rescue children in the novel are probably not the same as the methods employed by O.U.R.

Teaching Ethics in Public Schools

High school teacher Paul Barnwell had an article in The Atlantic a couple of years ago in which he expressed deep concern for the lack of moral education in today's public schools.

He noted that, among other things, the emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests has squeezed out opportunities for the addition of ethical instruction to the curriculum, and that the results are reflected in dispiriting attitudes among students toward matters like cheating, bullying, stereotyping, etc.

He wrote:

As my students seemed to crave more meaningful discussions and instruction relating to character, morality, and ethics, it struck me how invisible these issues have become in many schools. By omission, are U.S. schools teaching their students that character, morality, and ethics aren’t important in becoming productive, successful citizens?

Barnwell goes on to lament that schools are almost devoid of any formal moral instruction, a consequence, no doubt, of the fear of treading into the domain of religion.

Indeed, religion in public schools is taboo, as is any topic that even hints at having theistic implications. But how can one teach ethics unless one is free to answer the question that inevitably arises in the minds of at least some of the more perceptive students: Why?

For example, a teacher can present to her students the utilitarian concept of maximizing human flourishing, but what does she say when the student asks why he should care about the flourishing of anyone but himself, or in what sense would it be wrong for someone to impede the flourishing of another, or how does his cheating on a test impede another person's flourishing anyway, or what makes humans special that we should maximize human flourishing and not the flourishing of all living things?

As soon as those questions come up, the discussion is effectively at an end because the only answer that avoids an eventual appeal to one's emotions and feelings - which itself leads to the conclusion that everybody should just do whatever feels right to them - is that there must be a transcendent moral authority whose very nature serves as an objective moral standard for right and wrong and which has the power and authority to hold us accountable for breaching that standard.

But that answer, the only answer which could possibly have purchase in a teenager's mind, is the very answer that our courts have forbidden teachers to offer to their students.

Yet, if there is no such authority then, as the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky asserts several times in his marvelous novel The Brothers Karamazov, everything is permitted. If there is no such authority then there's no ultimate accountability for our behavior, the word "wrong" has no objective meaning, and the only ethical principle is, practically speaking, do whatever you can get away with.

Even if the existence of such an authority is offered to students they still may not know what's right to do, they still might not do what is right, but at least they have an answer to the ultimate question of whether there actually is an objective right and a wrong.

By banishing not only explicitly religious ideas but also ideas with religious implications from our public schools we've essentially neutered those schools in terms of what they can do to formally instill in students a sense of virtue and moral character. Then we wring our hands when we read about cyber bullying, violence, cheating, drug use and sexual promiscuity among the young.

Why are we dismayed? What did we expect?

The Secular Theocracy

In an essay titled Lilies that Fester, written in 1955, the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis displays his characteristic prescience, although I want to register a quibble.

In the essay he touches on the fear that some then had, and many have today, that Christians wish to impose a theocracy - i.e. a government by the clerical elite ruling in accord with their interpretation of the will of the deity - on the rest of society.

Lewis writes,

The loftier the pretensions of the power, the more meddlesome, inhuman and oppressive it will be.

Theocracy is the worst of all possible governments. All political power is at best a necessary evil; but it is least evil when its sanctions are most modest and commonplace, when it claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets itself strictly limited objectives.

Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle in our private lives.

Thus far I think Lewis is correct, as he almost always is, but then he says the following:

Theocracy, I admit and even insist, is the worst corruption of all. But then I don't think we are in any danger of it. [Emphasis mine]

Lewis is talking about the prospect of a Christian theocracy, and though he may have been correct that a Christian theocracy was not a real threat in 1955, there's a very real threat of both a religious and a secular theocracy today.

The religious threat is most pronounced in Western Europe and comes not from Christianity, which in Western Europe is not a significant political force, but from Islam, which is maybe a decade away from wielding decisive power in many European capitals.

The secular theocracy is a threat here in the U.S. where the left has sought to deify the state and convert it into an all-powerful vehicle for rule by the priesthood of our secular elites.

Lewis calls the rule by elites by the rather clunky term "Charientocracy," but what he means by that is essentially a secular theocracy.

He writes that the coalescence of two groups, the unofficial, self-appointed aristocracy of the Cultured and the bureaucrats who hive away in the bowels of our alphabet agencies - Lewis calls them "Managerial rulers" - will bring upon us this Charientocracy or secular theocracy.

Culture, exemplified, perhaps, by an Ivy-league education, "is a bad qualification for a ruling class because .... the things we really need in our rulers - mercy, financial integrity, practical intelligence, hard work, and the like - are no more likely to be found in cultured persons than in anyone else."

This is certainly true. It reminds me of the late William F. Buckley's quip that he'd rather be governed by the first 500 names in the phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

In any case, when the state is elevated to a kind of national deity those who run the state will be tempted to exercise their power to control every aspect of our lives, just as the clergy in a religious theocracy would take it upon themselves to do.

Lewis didn't think worry about a (Christian) theocracy was very realistic, but today's secular theocrats are another story. We see the state worshipers aggrandizing their power with every executive order that by-passes the people's representatives in Congress and with every attempt to limit the rights of ordinary citizens guaranteed us by our Constitution.

Perhaps Lewis never foresaw a Charientocracy being identical to a theocracy in which the state was god, but we may well be in danger of seeing it in our own day.

Three Possibilities

A couple of years ago I did a post on a book by two cosmologists named Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos.

The book details a number of the parameters, forces, constants and ratios that have to be just what they are to a breathtakingly fine precision or else the universe either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be the sort of place that could sustain life.

I thought the book to be so important, and the style in which Barnes and Lewis wrote it to be so accessible to laymen, that when I came across this short video publicizing it I thought it'd be good to post it on VP in hopes that some readers may want to read the book.

This cosmic fine-tuning as it's called constitutes a powerful cumulative argument for the existence of an intelligent mind responsible for it all. There seem to be no other very plausible explanations, but some who are queasy about the support fine-tuning gives to traditional theism have adduced other possibilities.

Some have posited that our universe is the product of a computer simulation somewhat like the Matrix.

Of course, this explanation still relies on an intelligent transcendent being. Others have sought to abandon the idea of an intelligent creator altogether and have embraced the idea of a multiverse which incorporates every possible universe in one unimaginably vast array of worlds.

If such a multiverse exists, the thinking goes, then since our universe is certainly possible it must exist somewhere in this enormous ensemble of worlds.

So, there are essentially three competing explanations for why our universe exists: It's a computer simulation designed by a mind in some other world; it's one of an infinity of universes (Geraint Lewis' position); or it's the product of a supernatural agent (Luke Barnes' position).

The problem is that both of the first two explanations themselves must be explained. If the creator of our world is an alien computer wizard, then how did the wizard come to be? Or, if the reason for our universe is some sort of multiverse generator, how did that come to be?

On the other hand, if the creator of the universe is the God of classical theism then the creator is a necessarily existent mind upon which all contingent existents depend. The creator's existence requires no further explanation because the creator is not a contingent being. The explanation of its existence is in itself.

Here's a short video which elaborates on this argument:

My Sentiments Exactly

Jim Geraghty a National Review journalist responds to an accusation that his coverage of the Ukraine/Russia war is too heavily slanted in favor of Ukraine. He's unapologetic:

Indeed, I am very anti-unprovoked massive brutal invasions to annex territory and the wholesale slaughter of civilians, and I am very pro-defending your country when it gets invaded by the hostile autocracy next door run by a maniac with delusions of being a modern czar. I don’t think there’s “another side of the story” when it comes to soldiers raping civilians of all ages, from four to 82 years old.

If you’re looking for coverage with the tone of, “Maybe that Putin fellow has a point, or isn’t such a bad guy, or maybe the invasion is justifiable,” you’re going to be deeply disappointed.

I’m surprised by people who demand neutrality between the oppressor and the oppressed. Wait, did I say “surprised”? I meant appalled.

I feel exactly the same way about this war. There's no moral equivalency between Ukraine and Russia. Russia's invasion and the subsequent conduct of their military is a connotative definition of evil.

Despite what commenters on both left and right seem to think, I doubt that there are very many issues in which there's a moral equivalency between actors.

I've claimed in the past that I think the moral argument against supporting Trump is neutralized by the fact that his electoral opponents, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, are no less morally corrupt than he, so on that matter I do agree that there's a moral equivalency, but I do not believe there's a moral equivalency between Ukraine and Russia or Zelensky and Putin. Nor do I believe there's a moral equivalency between Israel and its enemies, or between the United States and any of its historic foes.

In fact, I'll go further and state that in my opinion the "moral equivalency" argument is quite often intellectually otiose. It's often made by people who are unwilling to look at a conflict between persons or nations deeply and objectively.

I hope that that's not an unfair judgment, but that's been my experience which, I admit, is not universal.

Where Does the Information Come From?

One of the most perplexing problems, if not the most perplexing problem, for any naturalistic account of the origin and development of living things on our planet is the source of the enormous amount of information that programs the functioning of biological organisms.

In order for even a single cell to function entire libraries of information are required, but since everywhere we find information it's a product of intelligent agents, and since it's astronomically improbable that any significant amount of information could arise by chance, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the information in biological systems is also the product of an intelligent agent.

Of course, an intelligent agent that generates the information in living things would have to be either God or something very much like God and that's a conclusion that is still widely resisted by many in the sciences and elsewhere in academia. Yet it seems inescapable.

The following video features Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe explaining the role of information in life and making the case for an intelligent mind behind it. The video's a bit long (17 minutes) but worth the time. It's episode 8 in a series titled Secrets of the Cell.

More Believable Than One's Family or Clergyman?

This article in the Jerusalem Post contains a stunning statistic. It's based on a You Gov/CBS poll, apparently of Republicans, although the article doesn't make that clear. Nor does it say whether the survey respondents were likely voters, but even so,

Of those who believe honesty is very important in a candidate, 61% said that they would likely vote for Trump, while only 17% said the same for DeSantis. The theorists behind the poll explained that Trump’s persecution has increased the perception of Trump as honest because Republicans are more likely to view the political system as corrupt. By positioning the corrupt system against Trump, he is conceived as a protagonist character.

In one of the more shocking finds of the survey, a large number of Trump-voting participants expressed that they trusted what Trump would tell them is true (71%) more than they would trust what their friends/family (63%), other conservative media figures (56%), or religious leaders tell them as true.

This is a breath-taking statistic, and if it's correct it either indicates an astonishing level of credulity among many Republican voters or it speaks very poorly of the integrity of their families and/or their religious leaders.

Trump is credible when compared to the current president, to be sure, but compared to many other human beings, certainly compared to those in one's family or leading one's church, Trump's believability surely ranks considerably lower.

Of all the qualities he's known for based on the last six years, being more honest than the average family member or religious leader isn't something I would've guessed would make the list.

Anyway, there are lots of other interesting stats in the article although most of them are pretty much what one might expect from a survey of Republican voters.

Educated

Some time ago I read Tara Westover's autobiography titled Educated and thought of it recently when reading about how some students feel that coming from a disadvantaged background pretty much condemns them for life. Her story should serve as an inspiration to every young person who has been cheated out of an education by having attended a failing public school.

Westover was raised in a rural "survivalist" family in Idaho by a father who thought Armageddon was just around the corner and who was preparing for the day when the government would control every detail of every person's life.

Neither she nor her six siblings, at least most of them, ever went to a hospital, ever saw a doctor, ever got vaccinated, ever attended school and ever received a birth certificate. Whatever education she had - which consisted largely in midwifery and the manufacture and use of various home remedies - she picked up at home from her mother.

Despite these disadvantages, despite her father's recklessness, paranoia and general whackiness, despite being terrorized by a psychopathic older brother, despite her mother's extraordinary submission to her husband's will, even to the point of allowing her children to suffer both physical and psychological harm at the hands of the older brother, Tara managed to get accepted at Brigham Young University, and within about a decade she had earned a PhD at Cambridge University.

Notwithstanding her lack of even the most rudimentary background knowledge - she had never heard of the holocaust and had no idea what it was when she entered BYU - she was like a dry sponge soaking up knowledge, teaching herself math, writing and history, eventually achieving her doctorate in history and writing a best-selling book of her own.

It's an incredible story and one from which young people can take the lesson that a weak educational background doesn't have to condemn one to a life of ignorance. It's possible through hard work to compensate for the learning and social skills one never received growing up.

Nor does a dysfunctional home environment have to determine our destiny as adults. Tara and her six siblings were raised in poverty in an auto salvage yard run by her apparently bi-polar father and a timid, acquiescent mother.

The Westover siblings all had fairly similar backgrounds. Yet three of them eventually earned PhDs and managed to transcend their intellectually and socially disadvantaged childhoods.

It seems nearly miraculous, but it's apparently true, and what she and her siblings accomplished can also be accomplished by others who have the will and determination to surmount the environment into which they were born and reach their fullest potential as human beings.

Tara Westover's story is an inspiration, but one hopes that the scars of her childhood and the trauma of being estranged from her family, as she subsequently has been, don't prevent her from enjoying healthy relationships with others in the years ahead.

Going Old School in Education

Often when the topic of improving education arises increased funding is claimed to be critically necessary, but having taught at the high school level for 35 years I never thought that the lack of money was really a primary requisite for fixing education.

I may have been mistaken, but in my opinion the three indispensible necessities for building a quality education were teachers who loved their students and their subject matter, administrators whose top priority was educational excellence, and high building-wide discipline standards. Any school that has these will perform well and none of those need place an intolerable burden on taxpayers.

Jeremy S. Adams is a man after my own heart. He's a high school and university teacher who has written a column for The Federalist in which he declares that it's "time to go old school in education."

Here's his lede:

Enough with the endless torrents of education reform and the modern obsession with infusing technology into every facet of the learning experience. Enough dumbing down of the curriculum, tolerating egregious student behavior, and politicizing the curriculum of the classroom. Enough self-censorship of America’s teachers and administrators who know deep down (but are often afraid to say out loud) their students are graduating with a depleted battery of skills and knowledge that would have been unrecognizable and unacceptable a generation ago.

Going “old school” is much more than a cranky trope or cantankerous canard extolling the “good old days” when kids worked hard and had respect for their elders. Going old school means recognizing that the solution to many of our problems does not require more money, more innovation, or elite schools of education promoting vogue (and usually leftist) notions of instruction and curriculum.

It’s time to bring back pencils and paper, teachers who lecture rather than largely facilitate class projects and online activities, discipline policies that actually discipline, and, most of all, adults who are ready to be in charge of the children they are educating.

While the headlines about education these days are often centered around the razzmatazz of critical race theory and the 1619 Project, the controversies of transgender bathrooms and sports, and the conferences of Moms for Liberty, they pale in comparison to the real crises in American education.

These topics certainly make for flashy television spots and viral op-eds, but the hardship for most teachers is rooted in a more banal reality: We ask little of our students and in return get even less from them. Many are borderline illiterate, can’t pull themselves away from their devices, and their attendance is spotty at best.

Here's one more excerpt:

While schools should certainly offer “wrap-around” services to support our most disadvantaged students, the solution to almost all of these problems is to look backward, to go old school. Schools should remember a time when they were more than counseling centers and places where breakfast and lunch are provided, a time when teaching was more academic than therapeutic, a time when highly objectionable student behavior (like cursing at a teacher) had serious consequences for student and parent alike, and a time when high expectations were considered a blessing, not a clandestine form of bourgeoise oppression.

In what areas of modern education would an old-school approach be preferable? A few.

Adams goes on to discuss those areas of education that would benefit from a return to the values and pedagogical methods commonly employed by schools two generations ago. If you're a teacher, an aspiring teacher or a citizen concerned with the quality of education your local school is delivering you should read the rest of Adams' column.

Ten Truths

Aside from Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis the rest of the GOP primary field seems to be languishing. One exception to this may be Vivek Ramaswamy a multimillionaire biotech entrepreneur who's showing signs of rising above the pack.

Ramaswamy recently articulated what he calls "10 Truths" about life, and they're bound to be a hit with conservative Republican voters looking for an alternative to Trump.

They're also a thumb in the eye of the progressive left which would strenuously object to most, if not all, of them. Here they are:

1. God is real.
2. There are only two genders.
3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.
4. Reverse racism is racism.
5. An open border is no border.
6. Parents determine the education of their children.
7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
8. Capitalism lifts people from poverty.
9. There are three branches of government, not four.
10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

I wonder, though, what Ramaswamy's concept of God is since he himself is a devout Hindu. There are many varieties of Hinduism, many of which are polytheistic and some of which are monotheistic, so where he stands will be of interest to many evangelical Christians.

Another difficulty, although many evangelicals may not be aware of it, is that in India Hindus are very intolerant and frequently persecute Christians so Vivek will have some questions from evangelicals to answer if he hopes to catch Trump.

But perhaps the chief question is whether a monotheist who is genuinely devout, moral and truly conservative will be more appealing to evangelicals than Donald Trump who is arguably none of those things.

The GOP Dilemma

The Republican party appears to be looking ahead to a very dispiriting fourteen months, faced, as they are, with several possible scenarios to the upcoming election season, all of which are bad. Here are three:

• Trump wins the nomination and many Republicans and Independents simply refuse to vote for him in the general, and the Democrats breeze to another four years, probably with control of both Houses of Congress.
• Trump loses the nomination and much of his base just sits out the general election while Trump trashes whoever the nominee of the party happens to be, and the Democrats breeze to another four years, probably with control of both Houses of Congress.
• Trump loses the nomination, but the winner of the primary vows, if he or she wins the presidency, to pardon Trump, relieve him of the his legal jeopardy, and thus gain Trump's enthusiastic support.

Surely the GOP pooh-bahs are hoping for this last outcome, but it strikes me as the least likely of the three. Trump appears to have a lock on the nomination so the first option is the most probable, but even if he should lose and not trash the winner, it's hard to imagine him enthusiastically campaigning for whomever the winner is. At least, it's hard to imagine him campaigning strenuously enough to persuade the millions of his adoring supporters to get excited for someone other than him.

It could be that Trump wins the primary and also wins the presidency in November of 2024, but in order for that to occur something unforeseen has to happen. Perhaps a liberal third party candidate makes a significant dent in the Democrats' support. Perhaps Joe Biden somehow self-destructs just before the election and before the Democrats can come up with a substitute. Perhaps the economy goes into a nosedive.

But failing something like this transpiring it's hard to see at this point how the Republicans avoid self-immolation. Even so, I devoutly hope I'm wrong.

Atheism Is Cool?

A lot of young people seem to be under the illusion that it's somehow cool to claim to be an atheist. Belief in God, they think, is a superstition whereas science has proven there is no God. Atheism is intellectually sophisticated whereas belief in God is for ignorant rubes.

This is nonsense, but a lot of people who haven't really thought about it have been persuaded by somebody on YouTube or Tik Tok that it's true.

So far from having proven that there is no God, science has amassed an enormous amount of evidence in the last three decades that there is very likely a Creator of the universe and of life, and as for being intellectually sophisticated, few people base unbelief on intellectual reasons any more.

In fact, many atheists admit that their unbelief is a matter of the heart not the head. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche was ahead of his time in the 19th century when he wrote in his book The Gay Science that "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."

And contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel admits that,

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

In other words, like Nietzsche, Nagel's unbelief is a matter of his will and/or desires, not the result of a rational investigation of the evidence.

But where would a rational investigation lead? What are the existential consequences of atheism? I'd argue, and a lot of atheist philosophers would agree, that the consequences of atheism are philosophically, psychologically and emotionally depressing.

They're not cool at all. Understand that atheism entails materialism - the belief that everything in existence is, or reduces to, material substance - and materialism entails that everything is subject to the laws of physics.

Thus,

• There's no self (no soul). We're just material bodies. There’s no “you” who has a body. Your body constantly changes so who you are today is not who you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You have no real identity.

“Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality.” Philosopher Thomas Metzinger

• There's no free will. Our belief that we’re free to choose is an illusion. Our choices are produced by chemical reactions in our brains that are themselves the product of our genetic inheritance or environmental influences.

“A scientific account of mankind has no more place for free-will or the equal capacity of each individual to be good and act justly than it has for the soul.” Alisdair Palmer

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear ....There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…." Evolutionary Biologist Will Provine

• There's no basis for human dignity or human rights. If there's no God where do dignity and rights come from? Our right to govern our bodies, our right to be treated equally under the law are simply arbitrary legal conventions given us by the state, but they have no objective basis or reality.

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Cosmologist Stephen Hawking

"When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

• There's no basis for hope. There’s no explanation for evil. It’s just the way our genes have programmed us, but if that’s so then there’s no hope that we’ll ever change, and because we’re just physical beings, no hope of anything beyond our physical suffering and death.
• There's no ultimate justice. If physical death is the end of our existence, which it must be if we're just material bodies, then no one is ever held ultimately accountable for how he or she lives.
• There are no objective moral values or duties. If there's no moral standard beyond ourselves and we're just the product of physical forces, what makes our moral beliefs anything more than our subjective opinion? And, if all morality is subjective and arbitrary no one can say that anything or anyone is morally wrong. Every time an atheist says that something like racism, school-shootings or homophobia is morally wrong they’re acting as if there really is an objective right and wrong. They're free-loading on theism.

“There seems to me no doubt that our ethical judgments all claim objectivity but this claim, to my mind, makes them all false.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell

“There are no objective values.” Philosopher J.I. Mackie

In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. Biologist E.O. Wilson and Philosopher of Biology Michael Ruse

• There's no ultimate meaning to life. We're born, we suffer, we die and are extinguished. What's the point?

"Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre

"The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence." Psychologist Sigmund Freud

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins

Each of the people quoted is, or was, an atheist. Their atheism, if it were followed to its logical conclusion, leads to nihilism, the view that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters. And that's anything but cool.

Why Is Inequality Wrong?

Some time ago the science magazine New Scientist ran a story (paywall) that was titled Inequality: How Our Brains Evolved to Love it, Even Though We Know it's Wrong. Because the article requires a subscription I didn't read it so it'd be unfair to assume too much about it, but the title itself is puzzling.

Even though I don't want to assume too much, I am going to assume that the editors of New Scientist, or at least many of their readers, lean metaphysically in the direction of naturalistic materialism. That is, I'm going to assume they hold to the view that nature is all there is and that all of nature is ultimately explicable solely in terms of matter and the laws which govern its behavior.

If I'm wrong in my assumption, I apologize at the outset. But assuming that I'm correct, I have a couple of questions for New Scientist's editors.

Doubtless they explain in the article what they mean by inequality, but whatever is meant by it, how do we know it's wrong? In order to know that X is wrong there must be some objective moral frame of reference to which we can compare X to see if it conforms to that standard.

On naturalistic materialism, however, there are no objective moral reference frames, there are only subjective preferences and biases.

On naturalism when someone says, for example, that racism, murder, or political corruption are wrong all they're doing is emoting. They're saying something like, "I really don't like racism, murder or political corruption."

Moreover, inequality is the natural, expected outcome of the evolutionary process. Evolution by its very nature generates inequalities of all sorts. Why should anyone think that one evolutionary by-product, inequality among humans, is any more or less wrong than any other unless those by-products are being compared to some higher level moral standard? How can we say that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong if both are simply the products of impersonal processes like random mutation and natural selection?

If oour brains' fondness for inequality is merely a product of evolution then to declare that it's wrong is a lot like declaring that our fondness for sweet foods is wrong. Nothing that has resulted from a blind, impersonal process like evolution can be either right or wrong. It just is.

We like to think, of course, that the evolution of sympathy or kindness is good and the evolution of greed, racism and aggressiveness is bad, but how can we justify such an assessment in the absence of an objective moral standard? And, to repeat, on naturalism there is no higher moral standard.

At bottom, everything is just atoms jiggling in the void, and jiggling atoms are neither moral nor immoral.

Conscious but Comatose

Anyone who has had a family member in a coma from a brain injury has probably wondered whether their loved one could hear them and wondered what it must be like for someone to be conscious but completely unable to express themselves. We've discussed this on VP on several occasions in the past, but whenever I come across an article on the topic, I feel like I should mention it again.

In a partial transcript of a podcast interview with neuroscientist Michael Egnor, Egnor elaborates on the work of Adrian Owen who discovered about fifteen years ago that many comatose patients were capable of thinking and could hear what was being said to them.

Subsequent research has determined that in a significant number of cases, as high as 40%, comatose patients are indeed able to hear what is being said to them and, with modern MRI techniques, even able to respond.

Here's part of Egnor's discussion of Owen's work:

Owen took a woman who was in a persistent vegetative state—she’d been in a car accident and had severe brain damage, and she’d been in this state for several years—and he put her in an MRI machine and did what’s called a functional MRI test. A functional MRI test looks at changes in blood flow in the brain that we believe correspond to activation of parts of the brain. So you can kind of tell what’s going on inside the brain during the time they’re in the machine.

So he put her in the machine and he put headphones on her and he asked her to think about things. Now remember, she’s a woman who, supposedly, is the deepest level of coma, just a hair above brain dead. And he said, “Imagine you’re walking across the room.” “Imagine you’re playing tennis.” “Think of things.” And he found activation in her brain.

Even though she had massive brain damage, there were patterns of activation.

So he then took fifteen normal volunteers, put them in the machine, and asked them the same questions. And her patterns of activation were identical to theirs. So he said, well, to a first approximation, it looks like she can think just like they can think.

But, he said, you know, maybe the activation that we are seeing in the brain isn’t because she understands. Maybe it’s just the brain’s reaction to sound. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand, maybe just the noise from the headphones is causing this activation.

So he scrambled the words so, instead of saying, “Imagine walking across a room” he would say “across walking imagine room your”. So it made no sense. And the activation went away in her brain and in the volunteers’.

So he showed that the only time she had activation in her brain was when what was asked of her made sense. And her activation was completely indistinguishable from the activation of completely conscious people. So he concluded that she was able to understand and think about things that he was asking her to understand and think about, even though she was in the deepest level of coma.

This alone is astonishing, but there's more:

His research has been repeated by a number of other laboratories on many, many patients with persistent vegetative state. And about forty percent of people in persistent vegetative state show high levels of intellectual functioning even in deep coma.

There are ways of conversing with people in deep coma where you can, for example, look at the activation state representing "Yes" and the activation state representing "No" and you can ask them questions. You know, “Are you lonely?” “Do you wish your mother were here?” “Would you like something to eat?”, stuff like that, and they can answer you, with these brain states.

In addition, some people can do mathematics in a coma. You can ask them “Is the square root of 25, 6?” and they do a "No." And “Is it 5?” and they do a "Yes." So there can be very high levels—not in all patients that we have found—but in many patients, forty percent, at least—of mental function in profoundly damaged brains. To the point where the medical profession has actually added a category to this list of ways you can be in a coma, and this is called minimally conscious state.

So patients who have evidence of intellectual functioning in deep coma are called “minimally conscious,” although, frankly, they’re not really minimally conscious, they’re quite conscious.

I've always wondered whether the comatose patient was in pain but unable to communicate their suffering to anyone. If so, it would be hellish. These sorts of developments give hope that medical professionals will be better able to care for and comfort those who appear to be unconscious but aren't.

The Mystery of Enucleation

Reading a few books on evolution and Intelligent Design inspired me recently to browse through some old posts on the topic, and I stumbled upon this one. It recounts an interview with geneticist Michael Denton who discusses one of the strangest phenomena in cell biology and a huge problem for Darwinian explanations of the evolution of the cell.

Denton is the author of several outstanding books, including Evolution: A Theory in Crisis which explains many of the shortcomings of Darwinian explanations of life and Nature's Destiny which addresses how the laws of physics and chemistry and the properties of water and carbon dioxide are all precisely suited to make the world an extraordinarily fit place for the emergence of higher forms of life.

He's interviewed at a site called The Successful Student and the interview is a must read for anyone interested in how discoveries in biology consistently refute the Darwinian paradigm.

Here's just one of the problems he discusses, a problem I confess I had never heard of before reading the interview:

At King’s [College in London] the subject of my PhD thesis was the development of the red [blood] cell and it seemed to me there were aspects of red cell development which posed a severe challenge to the Darwinian framework. The red cell performs one of the most important physiological functions on earth: the carriage of oxygen to the tissues. And in mammals the nucleus is lost in the final stages of red cell development, which is a unique phenomenon.

The problem that the process of enucleation poses for Darwinism is twofold: first of all, the final exclusion of the nucleus is a dramatically saltational event and quite enigmatic in terms of any sort of gradualistic explanation in terms of a succession of little adaptive Darwinian steps. Stated bluntly; how does the cell test the adaptive state of ‘not having a nucleus’ gradually? I mean there is no intermediate stable state between having a nucleus and not having a nucleus.

This is perhaps an even greater challenge to Darwinian gradualism than the evolution of the bacterial flagellum because no cell has ever been known to have a nucleus sitting stably on the fence half way in/half way out! So how did this come about by natural selection, which is a gradual process involving the accumulation of small adaptive steps?

The complexity of the process — which is probably a type of asymmetric cell division — whereby the cell extrudes the nucleus is quite staggering, involving a whole lot of complex mechanisms inside of the cell. These force the nucleus, first to the periphery of the cell and then eventually force it out of the cell altogether. It struck me as a process which was completely inexplicable in terms of Darwinian evolution — a slam-dunk if you want.

And there’s another catch: the ultimate catch perhaps? Is an enucleate red cell adaptive? Because birds, which have a higher metabolic rate than mammals, keep their nucleus. So how come that organisms, which have a bigger demand for oxygen than mammals, they get to keep their nucleus while we get rid of ours?

And this raises of course an absolutely horrendous problem that in the case of one of the most crucial physiological processes on earth there are critical features that we can’t say definitively are adaptive.... Every single day I was in the lab at King’s I was thinking about this, and had to face the obvious conclusion that the extrusion of the red cell nucleus could not be explained in terms of the Darwinian framework.

And if there was a problem in giving an account of the shape of a red cell, in terms of adaptation, you might as well give up the Darwinian paradigm; you might as well "go home." .... It’s performing the most critical physiological function on the planet, and you’re grappling around trying to give an adaptive explanation for its enucleate state. And the fact that birds get by very, very well (you can certainly argue that birds are every bit as successful as mammals). So, what’s going on? What gives? And it was contemplating this very curious ‘adaptation’ which was one factor that led me to see that many Darwinian explanations were “just-so" stories.

Denton also talks about another fascinating development in biology - the growing realization that everything in the cell affects everything else. That even the shape, or topology, of the cell determines what genes will be expressed and that the regulation of all of the cellular activities is far more complex than any device human beings have ever been able to devise.

Denton's books should be read by every science major or person interested in science. They include, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Firemaker, The Wonder of Water, Children of Light and The Miracle of Man.

Peter Kreeft's Intro to Philosophy

The Federalist's Casey Chalk reviews Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft's new four volume introduction to philosophy titled Socrates' Children and it sounds excellent.

I've read a number of Kreeft's works in the past and always thought it was a worthwhile use of my time. He has a very winsome manner and always speaks and writes at a level any reasonably intelligent person can understand.

You can watch the video below of an excellent recent commencement speech Kreeft gave as a sample of his style. The speech was titled Ten Lies of Contemporary Culture.

Here's how Chalk begins his review:

I’m always surprised by the reactions I get when I tell people my interest (and sincere trust) in philosophy as a means of understanding the world and getting at the real truth. A lawyer friend told me an introductory university philosophy class convinced him there are no objective truths (that’s the same conclusion Steve Martin drew from his college philosophy courses).

A former colleague disparaged Aristotle — one of the greatest philosophers, and the originator of syllogistic logic — as absurd because of the Greek philosopher’s flawed physics.

Sadly, contemporary philosophy does the discipline few favors. The academy has made philosophy about as arcane as possible, persuading many that it is impractical and irrelevant for everyday purposes.

The philosopher of public imagination is a pretentious, condescending windbag, enamored with his own supposedly clever use of six-syllable words; or, perhaps, more charitably, a well-intentioned ideological zealot who believes it her mission to regularly remind everyone that they have terribly misunderstood themselves, each other, and the world.

It’s all too bad, really. Our society, government, and economy, not to mention every single human institution, all exist, function, and perpetuate themselves based on various philosophical premises — whether about ourselves, the natural order, or how we acquire knowledge.

We’re all doing philosophy (either well or poorly) all the time: every time we articulate an argument, conduct research, or even weigh options for spending our money. So it would certainly be nice if someone could help us better appreciate the connection between philosophy and our actual everyday experiences.

Thankfully, venerable philosophy professor and prolific author Dr. Peter Kreeft has done just that with his new four-volume series, Socrates’ Children: An Introduction to Philosophy from the 100 Greatest Philosophers.

I encourage you to read the whole column. It may even make you want to order the set.

Bidenomics

News that the House Oversight Committee has discovered that Hunter Biden received some $20 million dollars from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs for doing nothing while his father was vice-president gives new meaning to the term "Bidenomics."

Incredibly, some in the media are still insisting that there's no proof that any of this money benefited Joe Biden in any way. These folks could look at the sky on a clear day and still not see the sun.

Democrats have been at pains to demand that conservative Supreme Court justices are culpable of failing to avoid the very appearance of impropriety by taking trips with wealthy supporters, but they're twisting themselves into knots to convince us that, although Hunter's conduct is regrettable, his father has been beyond reproach.

Set aside the testimony of Hunter's business associate Tony Bobulinski that Joe was getting a cut of the take, set aside the millions of dollars of income on Joe's 2017 tax returns whose provenience is questionable, set aside Hunter's own claims on his laptop that he was contributing to his father's support, the fact is that it's delusional to think that the people paying Hunter millions of dollars were doing it because they thought Joe's crack-addled son was such a good guy. They expected access to Joe himself and were getting it through Hunter.

In other words, the vice-president of the United States appears at the very least to have been colluding with his son in a massive bribery operation.

Anyone who wishes to pooh-pooh this and claim that this is jumping to unwarranted conclusions need only ask him or herself whether they'd have the same response were the people involved named Donald Trump and his son Don, Jr.