Arctic Tern Migration, Pt. II

Last week Illustra Media offered up the first video in a two-part series on animal migration. Part I, which you can watch here, featured the amazing ability of the Pacific salmon to return after a two-year hiatus in the mid-ocean to the very stream in which it spawned.

Today's 8 minute follow-up looks at the equally amazing ability of the Arctic tern to make an annual non-stop migration from the Arctic circle to Antartica over the Atlantic ocean and then back again.

It's an astonishing feat and one that points to an intelligent design of these fascinating birds. Take a look:

Abstract Thoughts and Substance Dualism

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that among the things that a material brain cannot accomplish just by itself is abstract thought. Egnor concludes that this is evidence for mind/brain dualism because certainly human beings are capable of abstract thinking.

Why does he say that the material brain is incapable of generating abstract thoughts? He makes his case in a short essay at Evolution News, excerpts from which follow:

Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy.

He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.

His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.

Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.

During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:

There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mindaction"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind....If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact.

The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way.

But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[emphasis mine]

Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer, apparently, is that the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.

Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.

There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this: If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience but stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.

Penfield's work is not proof that there's a mind, of course, but it is certainly consistent with the dualist hypothesis that we are a composite of mind and brain and is certainly puzzling on the materialist hypothesis that the material brain is solely responsible for all of our mental experience.

Transgender Incoherence

Dan Hitchens, writing at First Things, raises an interesting point about the logic of the transgender folks. He begins the relevant section of his article by noting an irony in the postmodern mindset which on the one hand insists that one's conviction concerning his gender identity is "the truth" and on the other hand denies that truth, at least objective truth (which is actually the only kind of truth there can be), really exists.

He goes on to observe that regarding transgenderism,"There are two narratives, wholly incompatible and mutually destructive, which have somehow been fused into a single, all-conquering cause."

The first narrative holds that both maleness and femaleness exist and that some people have the misfortune of being one of these while inhabiting the body of the other:

Jan Morris, in the opening lines of the only trans memoir written by an acknowledged master of English prose, puts it like this: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

This kind of story is compelling at an emotional level: It speaks to the universal feeling of dislocation, of alienation, of longing for completeness, and at the same time resonates with the hope of the oppressed for justice, with the sorrows of every human being denied true flourishing by prejudice and fear.

Call it the “wrong body” narrative.

The second narrative, Hitchens claims, contradicts the first. This narrative...

asks whether maleness and femaleness are, in fact, real. It queries whether the kaleidoscopic diversity of human self-experience really can be squeezed into so restrictive a binary; it contends that language is always conditioned by the power structures of the day, that it rarely grasps life as it is actually lived; and it concludes that ultimately—to quote the very same memoir by Jan Morris—“there is neither man nor woman.”

This is the skeptical trans narrative which, of course, demolishes the “wrong body” one. If the ultimate reality has no place for gender, then Morris’s original epiphany was false: To “realize” that one has been “born into the wrong body” must be, not realization, but illusion.

The first narrative holds that there are both males and females ("wrong body" narrative) while the second narrative ("skeptical" narrative) denies this.

Literary scholar Jacqueline Rose wonders whether “a time will come when the distinction between woman and man will finally disappear, a metaphysical relic of a bygone age.”

It has a kind of logic to it, Hitchens admits, but it also shatters the idea that (as the much-repeated slogan has it) “trans women are women.” How can they be, if nobody is a woman?

Hitchens asserts that the "wrong body" narrative is ultimately unsustainable. The oft heard assertion that "I feel like a woman" is actually meaningless if there's no such thing as a "woman." How does one know if he feels like a woman if no one can even say what a woman is?

The transgender enthusiasm can survive only so long as logic is not allowed to play a role in the discussion. If and when our cultural elites ever demand logical coherence the movement will doubtless implode.

Do Democrats Really Believe What They Say about Trump?

At every opportunity Democrats are hammering the electorate with the claim that Trump is a danger to Democracy and that if he were to return to the White House a fascist dictatorship would be upon us, but do they really believe this?

Charlie Cooke at National Review writes that if they do believe that Trump is a threat to Democracy then they're exceedingly reckless. If they don't believe it then they're exceedingly deceitful.

Why are they reckless? As an Axios piece notes, a lot of Democrats are hoping that Trump is the Republican nominee because they think his candidacy would "energize" and "motivate" their voters and donors and that he'd be the easiest opponent for Biden to beat.

But Cooke points out that this hope is incredibly irresponsible if one truly believes that Trump is a threat to our Democracy.

Here's his argument:

I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot.

There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning.

The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do.

Add into this mix that President Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30s, and the approach becomes even more inexplicable.

It is not the Democrats’ fault that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee. That honor goes to the party’s primary electorate, which, of its own free will, has made this call.

But it is the Democrats’ fault that so many within their party are asking the public to accept two contradictory messages at the same time. One cannot expect the electorate to believe both that the Republican candidate for president ought to be disqualified from consideration because he is an insurrectionist and that you hope he is the nominee because it helps energize your donors, voters, and volunteers.

That’s not “counterintuitive”; it’s deceitful. How many times, I wonder, does the party expect to play this game and get away with it?

I doubt that many Democrats really believe that Trump is "a threat to Democracy." I suspect that they're simply lying about it because the threat he poses is not to Democracy but to their power.

How Do You "Negotiate" with These People?

Khaled Mashal, a Palestinian political leader and former head of the militant organization Hamas was interviewed recently about Hamas' intentions in the Middle East, and said this:

I believe that the dream and the hope for Palestine from the River to the Sea and from the north to the south has been renewed. This has also become a slogan chanted in the U.S. and in Western capital cities, by the American and Western public.

Palestine is free from the River to the Sea—that’s the slogan of the American students and the [students] in European capital cities. The Palestinian consensus—or almost a consensus—is that we will not give up on our right to Palestinian in its entirety, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea and from Rosh Hanikra to Eilat or the Gulf of Aqaba.

Why he thinks the Palestinians have a "right" to the land of Israel is a mystery. It has no basis in historical fact, but as Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air.com:

It’s not as if Hamas has kept this ambition a secret. Its charter still proclaims that mission to this day, and its actions ever since its 2006 electoral win in Gaza continually prove it. They didn’t run for election to govern through the Oslo-based Palestinian Authority, Mashal explains, but to use it as a cover for its terrorist war to destroy Israel.

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Arabs Hamas represents will settle for a two-state solution. They want it all and will continue their war against Israel, encouraged by their supporters in the West, particularly university faculty and students, as long as they survive.

Here's Morrissey again:

It’s difficult for Hamas to make this any clearer. They don’t want peaceful coexistence with Israel in a separate Palestinian state. And just to make that even more clear, Mashal also scoffs at an alternate plan of returning to the 1967 borders to determine the boundaries of a two-state solution.

Why should Hamas accept 21% of ‘the Palestinian state’ when it can have 100%?

This is from the interview Mashal gave:

MASHAL: Why should the Palestinian agree to a fifth of Palestine, and accept it as a final solution?

Q: A fifth of Palestine is the 1967 borders?

MASHAL: The 1967 borders. The ’67 borders are 21%, a fifth of Palestine, so no.

Q: So what you are telling me is that after October 7th we don’t agree to ’67 borders? We want Palestine from the river to the sea?

MASHAL: No [i.e. they will not accept the '67 borders. They want 100% of Palestine].

Morrissey asks why Hamas would accept President Biden's two-state solution when...,

...throngs of useful idiots in America mindlessly chant their genocidal slogans in support of Hamas terrorism? When the streets of London fill with Hamas fellow-travelers in terror to demand Israel’s surrender to Mashal?

When the US and UK keep applying pressure on Israel to stop fighting back against Hamas and give them a sovereign base from which to continue their genocidal actions? Hamas went on a rampage of slaughter, rape, and kidnapping, and while it resulted in punishing losses in war, it has also bolstered their standing in the West.

Mashal’s not inaccurate in that assessment of the political outcome of October 7.

In case this hasn't penetrated the minds of some of the left-wingers demanding that Israel "negotiate" with these people, Morrissey cites Israeli journalist Hen Mazzig who tries to spell it out for "those still under the Hamas spell":

How many times must we tell you [Mazzig asks]: Hamas has one goal and that is the complete and utter destruction of Israel.

When you scream “from the river to the sea,” you are chanting for the genocide, erasure, and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people, the Jewish people, from their land.

You are siding with an evil that would not hesitate to do the same to you.

Morrissey concludes,

Indeed, and that’s literally true about America too. Hamas’ sponsors in Tehran routinely promise “death to America.” Only Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and their Obama-administration minders refuse to take that either seriously or literally.

Why our leadership can't see what's so obviously the genocidal nature of Hamas is a question, I suppose, for psychologists to answer. Meanwhile, as has been said in a different context, negotiations with people like Hamas, or any of the similar groups in the region, is like four wolves negotiating with a sheep about what to have for lunch.

Salmon Migration, Pt. I

There are several phenomena that any naturalistic version of evolution has an exceptionally difficult time explaining. Among these are the origin of life, the origin of human consciousness, insect metamorphosis, sexual reproduction, and animal migration.

The latter problem is the topic of a two-part series of short videos put out by Illustra Media on animal migration. The salmon life cycle is fascinating, but that it's able to return to the exact stream in which it spawned after having been off in the middle of the Pacific ocean for three years is just astounding.

How does it do it? The answer is by detecting and following the gradient of minute amounts of chemicals characteristic of that particular stream. This beautiful video explains how it does this.

As you watch the video ask yourself how this or any of the processes mentioned in the first paragraph, could have ever evolved by blind, unguided, purposeless mechanisms like Darwinian evolution. No Darwinian scientist has an answer to that question. They just believe in an act of blind faith that they did:

Illustra Media will release Pt.II next week.

Religion in America

A RealClear Opinion Research poll of Americans’ religious views surveyed 1,000 U.S. residents on December 19-21. The findings were interesting. Susan Crabtree discusses them in an article at RealClear Politics.

She notes that despite "steep declines in attendance at churches, synagogues, and mosques – trends that have captured far more headlines in recent years than the nation’s enduring faith," America remains a very religious nation.

Before proceeding I want to quibble a bit with terminology. Crabtree seems to conflate being "religious" with belief in God or some deity, but in fact, my sense is that even though a significant number of people claim to believe in God and even identify with some religion, I suspect that many of these folks are functionally secular.

The survey's statistics appear to support this suspician since only 30% of those surveyed who consider themselves members of a religion regularly attend worship services once a week or more. Another 12% reported attending once a month, 19% said they go a few times a year, and 11% said they show up once a year. Twenty-nine percent reported never attending formal worship services.

Their belief, I would guess, has little impact on how they live.

But setting that aside, she also notes that the survey shows that America is still a majority Christian nation, though other religious groups and affiliations and those identifying as non-believers are growing.

Here are some other interesting excerpts from her summary:

Respondents were asked a series of questions about their beliefs in religious, spiritual, and mystical entities: God, the devil, miracles, heaven, hell, reincarnation, ghosts, witches, and aliens.

Of the topics listed, respondents were most likely to believe in God, with 85% reporting they believe in a creator, compared to just 15% who don’t believe. The exact amount – 85% – also reported a belief in heaven, with just slightly less – 83% – believing in miracles. Of those surveyed, 80% also reported that they believe “Jesus is God or the son of God.”

A smaller majority of those surveyed – 72% – say they believe in hell, while 70% report belief in the devil. “Self-reported belief in God is highest in the South, at 89%, followed by the Midwest (85%), Northeast (83%), and West (81%),” said Spencer Kimball, who directed the survey.

A solid majority of Americans surveyed – 58.3% – identified as Christian, with 36.3% saying they consider themselves Protestant and 22% identifying as Catholic. Americans who said they belong to other religions or were non-believers were all in the low single digits: 3.2% said they are Muslim; 2.9% consider themselves Mormon; 1.9% identified as Jewish; Buddhists made up 1.6%; and Hindus accounted for just 0.5%. Meanwhile, 3.8% reported they are atheist and 3.7% identified as agnostic.

There's much more in her column. One rather surprising statistics that she cites is that, an overwhelming majority of all Americans – 94% – said they believe religious freedom is a fundamental human right. That figure is 10 points higher than those who view healthcare as a basic human right.

Anyway, although the numbers are encouraging to those of us who believe religion is a crucial aspect of a healthy society, stating a belief in the basic tenets of Christianity is not, unfortunately, the same as living by them. Hopefully, the apparent gap between the two will close in the years ahead and American society and culture will recover some of the moral vitality it seems to have frittered away over the last century or so.

About Those Civilian Deaths

The media frequently report that Israeli military action in Gaza is responsible for 23,000 dead Palestinians. Our President, as expected, is beginning to go wobbly in his support of Israel as his political left flank turns up the heat to persuade him to stop providing aid and comfort to our ally because of the toll.

Progressive supporters of the Palestinian cause - a cause adumbrated in the chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," i.e. Israel will be exterminated - demand a cease-fire in Gaza, citing the 23,000 casualties as their proximal reason, but also wishing, perhaps, to prevent Israel from destroying Hamas.

So what are we to make of the figure of 23,000 fatalities?

First, it's a number provided by Hamas itself, a group willing to commit the most horrific atrocities. It's hard to believe that this group would draw the moral line at lying if it would be to their benefit to inflate the number of deaths.

Second, the figure does not distinguish between Hamas militants and civilians. The Israeli Defense Force estimates that 9000 of the deaths have been militants killed in combat.

That leaves 14,000 "civilian" deaths. I put "civilians" in quotes because many Palestinian "civilians" took part in the horrors of October 7th and have assisted and cheered Hamas as they've perpetrated their atrocities.

In any case, as British Colonel Richard Kemp says in a recent tweet, the UN calculates that the civilian to combatant death ratio in conflicts around the globe is 9:1. In Gaza the IDF seems to have achieved a ratio of only 1.5:1, a fact which evinces remarkable restraint.

In the run-up to the Normandy invasion in WWII the allies bombed German-occupied French villages and towns, killing 50,000 French. In the campaign to take the Philippines back from the Japanese, 100,000 Filipinos were killed in Manila alone by allied shelling.

Given that Hamas has hidden behind civilians, killed many of their fellow Palestinians themselves, built their tunnels under civilian buildings, used civilian structures such as schools and hospitals as sites from which to launch their rockets and store their weapons, it's really commendable that the IDF has been able to keep the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths so low. It's a testament to Israel's commitment to do all they can to protect Palestinian civilians.

It's too bad our media doesn't do a better job of letting people know Israel's side of the 23,000 dead Palestinians all of whom would be alive today if Hamas simply surrendered at the outset and gave back it's hostages.

Not Enough Time

Biologist Ann Gauger, co-author of Science and Human Origins, argues in this video, and in her book, that the time necessary to fix the number of mutations necessary to evolve a human from a chimp-like predecessor is greater than the age of the universe.

In other words, even if it were possible to coordinate the needed mutations so that they bring about the desired effect, it would take billions of years for these mutations to occur in just the right sequence, at least if they were to occur by chance.

Gauger is not saying that man did not arise from an ape-like ancestor, but rather that if he did, it is astronomically improbable that his evolution was driven solely by physical mechanisms like chance mutations, genetic drift, and natural selection. In order to make such an evolution plausible there must be something else, something in addition to the physical processes, that can drive biological change toward a goal, something that has foresight and engineering genius. In other words, a mind.

Apart from a mind, or something like mind, behind the process there's very little reason to think that Darwinian evolution is anything more than a materialist fairy tale.

Gauger's book is a good read and very informative, especially her chapter in which she discusses all the changes that would need to take place to derive a human from an ancestral ape.

Types of Antisemitism

Gary Saul Morson, a professor at Northwestern University, begins an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) with this:

If you ask students why they support Hamas’s call to eliminate Israel and murder Jews, many will deny—sincerely—that they are antisemitic. How is that possible? Some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may also sign statements condemning antisemitism and resent accusations that they hate Jews.

We can’t move them by showing the harm antisemitism has done because they don’t regard themselves as antisemitic.

Why not? Well, according to Morson it's because there are actually three types of antisemitism: The core type, which most people have in mind, is hatred of Jews simply because they are Jews. Reasons may be advanced, but the hatred isn’t based on reasons. Rather, the reasons stem from the need to justify the hatred. If one justification won’t do, another will be sought.

The readiness to switch between divergent, even contradictory, justifications is usually the best indicator of this incorrigible antisemitism.

This is the version of antisemitism evinced by the architects of the holocaust, for example. Not all of the students who've participated in the recent protests, however, are of this first type. The second type is a consequence of the near-universal inculcation on campuses of the doctrine of intersectionality which has the pernicious effect of,

[dividing] people into good and evil: racists and antiracists, victimizers and victims, colonizer and colonized. Once such thinking becomes routine, it is almost inevitable that opponents in any new conflict will be pigeonholed. And so Jews become colonizers and Palestinians, represented by Hamas, become their hapless victims.

Since one side is entirely evil, anything done to them is justified. One must prevail “by any means necessary.” That is why Hamas’s brutality can be accepted, even praised.

People who think this way believe they aren’t antisemitic because they didn’t start with some preconceived hatred. Rather, they applied a familiar, widely approved framework. Today the evil party is Israel; tomorrow another great Satan may be designated. Under different circumstances, Jews could have found themselves in the victim category.

So the first type of antisemite hates Jews just because they're Jews. The second type hates Jews because they see them as oppressors. The fact that many Jews are white amplifies their culpability in the minds of the intersectional zealots.

In a third type of antisemitism, hatred is based on specific reasons, which aren’t merely excuses....if one really believes that the elders of Zion plot to enslave the world or that Jews have constructed a state based on apartheid and genocide, then militancy against Israel will seem rational.

These antisemites may really imagine they are drawing rational conclusions from the facts. The problem is that their “facts” are entirely spurious.

Morson asks rhetorically why these ignorant antisemites don't see the real facts. His answer is that they've simply shut themselves off from any source of information that doesn't support their ideological worldview:

In [today's America] educated people voluntarily silo themselves. They close themselves off from any unapproved voice and commonly favor censorship of “misinformation.”

It is, he asserts, willful ignorance.

"[All] three [types] can lead to the same horrors," Morson avers. "Antisemitism is a big tent, and in any group of antisemites we can find all types hating Israel."

In his conclusion Morson says that intersectionality must be eliminated from university curricula. I agree. Intersectionality, or perhaps more accurately, the critical theory upon which it's based, is a spawning ground for all sorts of hatreds - ethnic, religious, economic, racial, et al.

Young people are being taught that good and evil are properties of races, ethnicities, or economic classes, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom Morson quotes, was much closer to the truth when he explained that "The line between good and evil runs not between classes, nations, or parties, but through every human heart."

Political Violence

In recent months there has been a building media refrain around the theme that Donald Trump is a threat to Democracy and that the possibility of violence instigated by Trump was growing increasingly likely.

The tendentiousness of these claims would be amusing were they not so frustrating. One wishes to attribute honest motives to journalists, even progressive journalists, but how can sincere motives explain the utter moral blindness of this refrain?

Eddie Scarry at The Federalist reminds us that political violence and calls for violence, were until January 6th, solely the province of the Democrat left. From Antifa to BLM to the Pro-Hamas demonstrators, violence, harassment and vandalism, both actual and threatened, have been an almost exclusive staple of leftist political action in this country.

As examples of progressive hand-wringing over the possibility of right-wing excesses ling right around the corner Scarry gives us these:

An article at the leftist Vox site at the start of the year acknowledged that threats of violence “are coming from across the political spectrum.” It said, however, that “the most important ones … emanate from the MAGA faithful.”

The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie ominously predicted last week that the former president might “use the threat of violence to make officials and ordinary election workers think twice about their decisions.”

On the same day, his neckbeard colleague David French claimed in a separate column that “while political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.”

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Friday whined that Trump has “fanned the flames” of prior “acts of political violence.”

All of this immediately followed — purely by coincidence, no doubt — a series of public remarks by Joe Biden making a big show about how he strongly, seriously, emphatically condemns political violence....

The above warnings notwithstanding, extremist, destructive behavior is much more likely to be a resort of the left than of the right. Yet the media seems oblivious, either willfully or otherwise, to this fact:

The advantage Democrats have had in recent years is that, unlike independent and Republican voters, they know their activists put politics above everything else. For them, only one thing matters: getting their way. If that means destroying public property and private businesses, so be it. If a few people are hospitalized or die for it, that’s a price they’re willing to pay.

Intimidation and harassment are their default strategies. It’s their voters who screamed in the faces of perfect strangers for not wearing face coverings. It’s their voters who torched and trashed inner cities in the name of “racial justice.” It’s their voters who showed up to menace Supreme Court justices at their private residences.

It’s their voters ginning up a second Holocaust over a religious conflict between two nations 6,000 miles away.

He's correct, of course. He's also correct in his conclusion:

If there has been any increase in violent threats from the right, Democrats have themselves to thank for it. They might do themselves a favor this time and knock it off before any of those threats are made good.

If there is violence perpetrated by the right in 2024, one of the main catalysts for it will be breaking-point frustration with a judicial system that allows leftists to get away with it- and a media that excuses it - while transgressors on the right are punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Does Matter Exist?

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe - including our bodies, our brains, our thoughts, our sensations - all of it is reducible in principle to material "stuff". There's no mental substance, no mind, just brains and the functions the brain performs. But if that's so, then what is the material stuff everything is made of? What, exactly, is matter?

Physicists, many of whom are materialists, tell us that matter is made up of particles which are themselves simply a "wave function", but then what's a wave function? What's it made of? No one seems to have an answer.

This video takes the viewer down to the smallest bits of matter, but when we ask what these smallest bits are comprised of the only reply from physicists is a shrug of the shoulders. At some point matter just seems to dissolve into energy, forces, and fields which are themselves inscrutable. They can be measured, but if we ask what it is, precisely, that we're measuring we just get another shrug for an answer.

The fundamental nature of matter is a riddle:

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor helps us understand the provenience of the idea that everything is made of matter. He writes:

The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.

Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia and intentionality, were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?

In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right.

Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.

Modern materialists have ... discarded Cartesian mind but retain Cartesian matter.

To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter.

Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:

How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?

Matter is a mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.

There's no reason, in fact, not to believe that the fundamental stuff of the universe isn't material at all but rather mental. Indeed, this is the direction that modern physics has been moving in since the early years of the twentieth century. Perhaps, so far from mind arising from matter, the sensation of matter actually is a product of mind.

Just as Copernicus sparked a revolution in science by getting us to look at the solar system from a different perspective - a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective - looking at the world from the perspective of mental substance rather than material substance could spark an analogous revolution not only in science but also in metaphysics.

Honoring Martin Luther King

One of the differences between Martin Luther King's approach to the race problem and that of many of those who celebrate him today is that many of our contemporaries see racial guilt as a collective stain whereas King saw it as individual and color-blind. To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the guilt for crimes of the past runs not through races nor through nationalities but through every individual human heart.

The collective view, that whites, for example, share moral responsibility for what other whites did to blacks in the past, is implicit in demands for reparations and other racial preferences, but it's nonsensical.

Suppose you are of English descent and you read about how some Englishman two hundred years ago committed an atrocity against a Frenchman, would you feel that you personally owed contemporary French some sort of apology?

Suppose you are a male and you read about the horrific murder of four Idaho college students by Bryan Kohberger, another male. Would you feel that you are somehow responsible because you shared the same gender as Mr. Kohberger?

Would you feel some shared responsibility if your name was also Bryan? What if your surname just by happenstance was Kohberger? How much guilt would you bear for the Idaho murders?

If you think you would indeed be in some sense responsible, why do you? And if you think it absurd to claim that you are in any way responsible, that one's nationality or gender or surname do not make someone guilty for crimes committed by others who have those things in common with you, why is your race uniquely different?

Specifically, why are whites collectively expected to repent for what other whites did to blacks two hundred years ago?

Does a black man in Philadelphia share guilt when a black man in Los Angeles murders a white man? If a black man's great, great grandfather murdered a white man's great, great grandfather, does the contemporary black man bear guilt for the crime?

If your brother commits a crime and is sent to prison is it just to imprison you as well, just because you're related, if you had no part in the crime?

Interestingly, the notion of collective guilt, a favored trope of the left, only applies when it works against whites. The left is today insisting that Israel is harming Palestinians for what other Palestinians did on October 7th. But if collective guilt is a legitimniate concept, why shouldn't all Palestinians pay for the atrocities of Hamas?

In fact, left-wingers are holding Jews in this country reponsible for what Israelis are doing in the Middle East, yet they claim it's a war crime to punish the Palestinians for what the people the Palestinians elected, and cheered for, did to Jews on October 7th.

The concept of collective guilt is absurd. Guilt and merit are individual, not collective. No one today is guilty for what people of their same race did to others a century or more ago or are doing today. They're only guilty to the extent they themselves participate in harming others or explicity or implicitly condone harming others.

We'll have a much healthier, cohesive society when everyone follows Martin Luther King's example and acknowledges that simple fact.

What's the Universe Made of?

An idea that has percolated through this site over the years - because I find it fascinating - is that the universe, contra the materialists, is not fundamentally comprised of material particles, nor, contra the physicalists, is it fundamentally made up of fields and forces. Rather, the idea is that ultimately the universe and everything in it reduces to information.

An article by Philip Perry at Big Think elaborates on this strange sounding notion:

There are lots of theories on what the basis of the universe is. Some physicists say its subatomic particles. Others believe its energy or even space-time. One of the more radical theories suggests that information is the most basic element of the cosmos. Although this line of thinking emanates from the mid-20th century, it seems to be enjoying a bit of a Renaissance among a sliver of prominent scientists today.

Consider that if we knew the exact composition of the universe and all of its properties and had enough energy and know-how to draw upon, theoretically, we could break the universe down into ones and zeroes and using that information, reconstruct it from the bottom up. It’s the information, purveyors of this view say, locked inside any singular component that allows us to manipulate matter any way we choose. Of course, it would take deity-level sophistication ....

Indeed, which is why scientists committed to metaphysical materialism aren't eager to hop on board. The implications of the information hypothesis sound too much like what theists have been saying for centuries.

Following a discussion of the work of Claude Shannon, the creator of classical information theory, Perry notes that most physicists still maintain that matter, material particles, is the fundamental stuff of the universe. But not all scientists agree:

The eminent John Archibald Wheeler in his later years was a strong proponent of information theory. Another unsung paragon of science, Wheeler was a veteran of the Manhattan Project, coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” helped work out the “S-matrix” with Neils Bohr, and collaborated with Einstein on a unified theory of physics.

Scientists in Wheeler's camp argue that:

To look at information theory from a quantum viewpoint, the positions of particles, their movement, how they behave, and all of their properties, gives us information about them and the physical forces behind them. Every aspect of a particle can be expressed as information and put into binary code. And so subatomic particles may be the bits that the universe is processing, as [if it were] a giant supercomputer.

In the 1980s, [Wheeler] began exploring possible connections between information theory and quantum mechanics. It was during this period he coined the phrase “It from bit.” The idea is that the universe emanates from the information inherent within it. Each it, or particle, is a bit. It from bit.

In 1989, Wheeler produced a paper for the Santa Fe institute, where he announced "every it--every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself--derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely--even if in some contexts indirectly--from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits."

A team of physicists earlier this year announced research conclusions that would make Wheeler smile. We might be caught inside a giant hologram they state. In this view, the cosmos is a projection, much like a 3D simulation....

If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor.

All of which implies not only a mind on the receiving end but also a mind at the generating end. Information is not just recognized by minds, but is the product of a mind. If the universe really is, at bottom, information then there's very good reason to believe that there is a mind of incomprehensible computing power that has produced it. It's a breathtaking implication.

Perry links interested readers to this video for more on information theory as the basis of the universe. If you like slightly zany videos give it a look:

Either Naturalism or Evil

The horror in Israel last October 7th was yet another reminder of how deep lies the depravity in the human psyche. That human beings could take such glee in wantonly wreaking such horrific pain on so many individuals and families is a vivid manifestation of the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece some years ago in the New English Review, offered some insight into the depravity we're witnessing with alarming frequency in our modern world.

Francis writes:

The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:

. . . All of us are his [God] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life. Nietzsche is reported to have run over to the horse and held it in his arm to protect it before he collapsed to the ground. Such cruelty, devoid of morality and human compassion, knows no bounds.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment similarly highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.

When the crowd laughs at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it.

All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath.

But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter. All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!

Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?

The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:

. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.

Well, yes, there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them.

The naturalist has a choice. He can hold onto his naturalism or he can hold onto his belief that evil exists. He can't have both.

Islamism

The biggest threat to the safety and freedom of those living in the West today is an extreme form of Islam called Islamism. The ambition of its votaries is to impose strict Islamic law, sharia, on the entire world, including Europe and the United States.

These fanatics realize that they can't persuade Westerners to adopt Islam and sharia through the free exchange of ideas and rational argument because their religion, based as it is on a strict fundamentalist totalitarianism, has very little appeal to people who are accustomed to the freedoms enjoyed in the West for the last two and a half centuries.

Their hope, therefore, is that by overwhelming democratic states with refugees and other immigrants who will eventually be given the right to vote they can gradually acquire sufficient political power to enact at least some of the strictures of sharia legislatively.

If and when they succeed the very freedom they exploited to gain their ends will be curtailed or even abolished and people will one day awaken to find themselves under the thumb of an alien, fascistic theocracy with the power to dictate every aspect of their lives and to compel everyone to conform to the teachings of the Koran.

Meanwhile, the Islamists know that in the postmodern West the highest values of millions of people are mere peace and security. Believing in little else, many Westerners would rather submit to the dominance of the Islamists than live with the anxiety of being second class citizens.

Thus, the will to resist the capitulation of the West to the Islamo-fascists is being steadily eroded, especially in Europe, by acts of terror committed by religious zealots willing to die in order to sap whatever confidence remains among Westerners in their values and institutions.

We're often told that terrorists are a small number of those who adhere to Islam, and in relative terms that's probably true, but in absolute terms they number in the millions.

Prager U. has a helpful primer on Islamism which packs a lot of facts into a five minute video. Give it a look:

Russian Morale

As winter sets in along the war front in Ukraine news reports are full of stories about how the war is going nowhere and the Ukrainians and Russians are at a stalemate or the Ukrainians are being slowly ground down.

A report from Strategy Page has a different take, however. To be sure, there are no quick victories on the horizon, but it seems, if SP is correct, that it's the Russians who are being ground down.

Here's an excerpt:

January 8, 2024: The morale and willingness to fight among Russian troops continues to plummet. One reason for this is the heavy losses, about 350,000 dead, Russia has suffered in Ukraine so far.

Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian troops who would surrender at the first opportunity and often do it in a dramatic fashion. This included dropping their weapons during their first encounter with Ukrainian soldiers. In other cases, Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to.

While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.

Russian commanders are aware of this and had orders to do something to prevent these surrenders and efforts to avoid combat. That proved to be an impossible order to comply with. Physical punishments did not improve morale and willingness to fight.

The main problem was that troops had no confidence in their commanders (assuming they had any at all). These officers were often just as dismayed at the situations they faced on the battlefield. The government was often not supplying food, ammunition, and medical care for the troops.

It is now winter in Ukraine and once more the government has not supplied enough cold weather clothing and equipment for the troops. Worse, the clothes and equipment were often almost useless cheap imitations instead of purported standard issue.

There's much more at the link. The Russians have superior numbers and firepower, but morale counts for far more than either of those. Troops who are hungry, cold and sick, fighting in a war that none of them really understands, aren't usually eager to give their all for a government which they have good reason to believe is betraying them.

Toward the end of their report SP adds this:

Numerous veterans are no longer in the military because they refused to renew their contracts. Many more soldiers remained in the army but refused to return to Ukraine and got away with it.

Putin ordered that these soldiers be officially described, in their military records and military ID, as unreliable and unwilling to fight. In any other country a soldier who refuses to fight during wartime is subject to severe punishment, often execution.

That still happens to reluctant Russian soldiers inside Ukraine where officers have the authority to shoot reluctant troops.

Initially, as Russian casualties grew and progress was nonexistent, some officers did shoot troops refusing to fight. That soon changed as the troops threatened to and sometimes did shoot back or, in at least one known case, ran over an insistent officer with a tank. Not to mention troops sometimes shooting undesirable officers first.

Ukrainian forces have provided additional confirmation of this violence and collapsing morale within Russian units. Many Russian troops will surrender to the Ukrainians at the first opportunity and admit it to Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign journalists. This prompted Ukraine to equip some of its quadcopters to notify and lead surrendering Russian troops safely to Ukrainian front-line forces.

One wishes our administration would stop dithering on the matter of the kind and quantity of assistance we provide to Ukraine and enable them to drive the Russians back across their borders into Russia.

A Great Book

What makes a great book great? At Biola College they offer an honors program in which students read, by the time they graduate, about one hundred of the books considered to be among the very best ever written, but how do they determine which works should be included?

Fred Sanders, at The Scriptorium, lists and discusses eight characteristics or criteria of a great book. I've listed the eight, but to read his discussion of them you'll have to visit his article: He writes that a great book...

1. speaks from an important original setting.
2. is written in a way that is relevant for readers today.
3. is well-crafted.
4. is one that provokes excellent discussion.
5. is inexhaustible, so no reading of it is the final reading, and no discussion ever runs it dry.
6. is time-tested. People from multiple generations have had their hands on it, and have judged it to be worth passing along.
7. is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted.
8. is smarter than the best teacher, but within reach of the average student.

How many books have you read that meet the criteria of a great book?

Strange How Things Sometimes Work Out

Sometimes things in life work out in ways completely unforeseen and unforeseeable. Just when it seems nothing good can come of one's life, when we've all but given up hope that anything we do will amount to anything worthwhile, sometimes something wonderful happens.

The following is taken from a book by Robert Petterson titled The Book of Amazing Stories. The excerpt is titled The Chambermaid’s Choice and it truly is an amazing story:

Maria had hoped that her second marriage would make for a better future. Though born the daughter of a cook, she had dreams of being in high society. But at sixteen, she fell madly in love with a nobleman’s valet. When they married, she consigned herself to be dismissed as one of the serving class. After Maria gave birth to a son, her valet husband died. At age eighteen she was a grieving widow and a single mother. Not long after, her little boy died too.

Then she got a second chance at love [with a musician]. But when her young musician took her home to meet his prominent family, they looked down their haughty noses at this girl from the serving class. His father would ever after refer to her as “the chambermaid.” Her husband’s family would always view her as an inferior interloper. It was no wonder that Maria’s second marriage soon soured.

She later referred to her life as “a chain of sorrows.” The couple’s first child died six days after he was born. The “chambermaid” would bury five of her eight children. But her worst heartache was watching the decline of a husband who enjoyed the tavern more than practicing his music. If he wasn’t in a drunken stupor, he was with other women.

Then the beatings began. After he took advantage of her in one of his brutal rages, Maria discovered she was pregnant.

She determined that she wasn’t about to bring a child conceived by rape into her miserable world. She found her way to a woman who traded in concoctions that induced miscarriage.

Three drops of that deadly liquid would kill her baby. Any more might end her life too. She dumped it all into a cup of tea. But before she was able to drink it, the cup was accidentally knocked off the table. At first she was hysterical. Then she resigned herself to the fact that God must have a purpose for her unwanted child.

He turned out to be a strange little boy, often reclusive and unresponsive. But he did have his family’s love for music. When a local teacher took him on as a piano student, no one imagined that she was gaining a prodigy.

Maria was forty years old when Wolfgang Mozart allegedly declared that her son was destined for greatness. Two months later, the teenage prodigy rushed home to be at her deathbed. She told her son that giving birth to him was the best thing she ever did in her unhappy life.

We should all be grateful that Maria van Beethoven did not abort little Ludwig, a child of rape who would grow up to write the world’s greatest symphonies.

Maria's life, like that of so many others in her day and in ours, was tragic, yet out of her tragedy she gave the world a wonderful gift. Her son's symphonies, especially the fifth and the ninth, as well as many of his concertos, are marvelous, but his life, too, was tragic. He went deaf while he was still at the height of his powers, allegedly from beatings he received from his father as a child. Yet out of his sufferings he produced works of astonishing beauty.

Reading this I was reminded of a few lines from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who asked, "What is a poet?" "A poet," he replied to his question, "is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them they sound like beautiful music."

Kurt Gödel's Belief in an Afterlife

Kurt Gödel is one of the most prominent logicians and mathematicians of the last few centuries. His achievements in mathematics, logic, and computer science are momentous.

In a rather lengthy article at Aeon Alexander Englert discusses the argument Gödel makes for his belief in an afterlife. His reasons are found in a series of several letters he wrote to his mother Marianne in 1961.

The crux of his argument is contained in these words to his mother:

If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case [that there's an existence beyond this one]. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

His argument has Kantian resonances, and his basic reasoning makes sense. If the universe is rational then human life is rational. But human life cannot be rational if physical death ends it before it achieves anything meaningful. Thus, if the universe is rational, which he believed it certainly was, then physical death must not be the end of our existence.

Gödel writes this:

What I name a theological Weltanschauung [Worldview] is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence – since it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning – can be a means to an end for another existence.

Englert offers the reader much more insight into Gödel's reasoning, which the great logician elaborates over the course of several letters to Marianne, and there's a lot more analysis by Englert of the argument as well.

It's a fine essay written about one of the towering intellectual figures of the 20th century.