The Last Universal Common Ancestor

An article by Dirk Schulze-Makuch at Big Think tells us that researchers now believe that life originated very quickly after the earth cooled enough to allow the necessary molecules of life to form and to coagulate into cells. The age of the earth is estimated to be approximately 4.5 billion years, the moon is believed to have formed about 100 million years after the earth did, and new calculations put the origin of life at about 4.1 to 4.33 billion years ago.

This means that the first living cell, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living things, arose very quickly - in a space of about 200 million years. The article goes on to explain why a brief window for the origin of life is significant and the strange theory being resurrected to explain it:

While the exact dating of LUCA might seem unimportant to many readers — what’s a few hundred million years in the grand scheme of things? — the timing has far-reaching implications. If Moody and colleagues are correct, it means life arose extremely rapidly, almost as soon as our planet became habitable.

According to our present knowledge, Earth formed about 4.56 billion years ago, and the Moon formed (violently) about 100 million years later. That leaves a very short interval, maybe just 200 million years or so, before the first living cells appeared. Moody’s team also found that this early life was already quite complex, encoding about 2,600 proteins, comparable to modern bacteria. It even had a primitive immune system that defended it from viruses.

Can the appearance of life really be that rapid, something like the inflationary phase of the Universe right after the Big Bang? That’s certainly faster than most of us previously thought. And if it happened that fast, shouldn’t it be relatively easy to decipher the steps life took to develop?

Yet we still have no real handle on how all the functional components came together. We don’t even know for sure in which type of environment life originated. Maybe it was near “black smoker” hydrothermal vents, but it could also have been in ponds, tidal flats, or other locations. We just don’t know.

There are two important admissions in the above excerpt. Not only does recent research indicate that life arose amazingly fast, scientists don't have any idea how it could have done so. The level of complexity of the first cell, the LUCA, is so high that to think it came about through random chance and the laws of chemistry alone requires an enormous faith in the power of serendipity.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer writes about the difficulties involved in any naturalistic theory of the formation of the first life in two excellent books, The Return of the God Hypothesis and his earlier, perhaps more technical work, Signature in the Cell.

To put it in layman's terms, the chances of those 2600 proteins forming along with the instructional material encoded in nucleic acids, along with a membrane to encase them all, along with the ability to replicate itself is somewhat like imagining that all the minerals necessary to build a computer were scattered across the surface of the earth and that the action of natural forces like sun, wind, lightning, etc. acting over a span of 200 million years, somehow produced a fully functional computer along with the operating software necessary for it to work properly and also with the capacity to replicate itself.

The inconceivable improbability of such a feat places a severe strain on the credulity of many scientists so some of them, in order to avoid the conclusion that a transcendent intelligence designed the LUCA, are resorting to a theory called panspermia:

The breathtaking speed with which life appeared on Earth opens the door to another intriguing possibility known as “panspermia” — the idea that life originated on some other planet and arrived here inside meteorites. It’s an old idea, usually dismissed because it appears statistically very unlikely.

I agree with that evaluation if the incoming meteorite came from outside our Solar System: Traveling through interstellar space for eons would likely sterilize any life forms due to harsh radiation. What’s more, any object arriving from so far away would be much more likely to fall into the Sun or Jupiter due to their much stronger gravitational pull.

But it’s a different story if a life-seeding meteorite came from Mars. It’s entirely plausible that life arose on the Red Planet independently. Our two worlds formed at about the same time, but Mars cooled much faster than Earth, and the geological record suggests that, shortly after its formation, the planet was habitable with plenty of water.

Without a large moon to violently interrupt its early years, the life-starting window on Mars was actually longer than it was on Earth. And because Mars has lower gravity, rocks blown off its surface by asteroid impacts escape the planet more easily, to be hurled into the inner Solar System — toward Earth. The hundreds of Martian meteorites already discovered on Earth are proof of that.

Even naturalistic scientists keep drifting back to the idea that life on earth required an intelligent agent to at least get it started. Here's Schulze-Makuch:

As long as we’re speculating, we might also consider another theory known as “directed panspermia.” More than 50 years ago, Nobel laureate Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA) and Leslie Orgel suggested that a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization could have seeded Earth on purpose, exposing our planet to the first primitive cellular life, which, after gaining a foothold, would evolve to become more complex and even intelligent.

He acknowledges that the panspermia hypothesis has some serious problems, however:

As intriguing as the panspermia hypothesis may be, indications still point to life getting its start right here on Earth, considering, for example, the similarity of Earth’s primitive oceans to the interior of microbial cells in terms of elemental abundances (cells are essentially bags filled with salt water!). In any case, if life did indeed begin somewhere else and arrive rather than arise on Earth, we still don’t know how it happened.

Here's a question I have about all this: Suppose panspermia is ultimately found to be scientifically untenable. Where does that leave a scientist whose entire worldview is predicated on a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life?

Confusing Moderates and Conservatives

New York Times columnist David Brooks once undertook to describe the distinctive characteristics of political moderates but managed instead to give a pretty good description, inadvertently, of political conservatives.

He listed eight ideas which, he writes, moderates tend to embrace. In fact, for the most part he's describing political conservatives. Of the eight traits Brooks discusses three are ideologically neutral but five are actually characteristics which define conservatives. Wherever he uses the term "moderate" the reader can more accurately, I think, substitute "conservative." Here are the five in boldface with my comments:

1. Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things.

Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

This is precisely why conservatives argue incessantly for limited, decentralized government and for more autonomy for communities and families, what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" of society.

2. In politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The harm government does when it screws up — wars, depressions — is larger than the benefits government produces when it does well. Therefore the moderate operates from a politics of skepticism, not a politics of faith. He understands that most of the choices are among bad options so he prefers steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change.

Conservatives are not opposed to change, but they are opposed to change simply for the sake of change. All change should be tempered by experience and traditions which have proven themselves reliable guides over long periods of time. Conservatives are very suspicious of revolutions, whether political, cultural or social. Sudden, rapid change rarely makes things better and very often makes them worse.

3. Truth before justice. All political movements must face inconvenient facts — thoughts and data that seem to aid their foes. If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism,....

For just these reasons conservatives are the strongest advocates of free speech and the free flow of ideas in our culture. Those who prohibit or restrict this freedom, or who suppress facts such as the Hunter Biden laptop, etc. are taking us down the road to Big Brother totalitarianism.

4. Partisanship is necessary but blinding.....Moderates are problematic members of their party. They tend to be hard on their peers and sympathetic to their foes.

This helps explain why conservatives have been such a thorn in the side of their congressional leaders for the last decade or so, and why some conservatives were until recently among President Trump's strongest critics. The Democratic party has until this last election been disciplined and unified largely because it has no conservatives in it.

5. Humility is the fundamental virtue.....The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.

Precisely because of the humility Brooks describes, conservatives tend to be skeptical when authorities in various fields speak apodictically about phenomena like climate change, covid immunity, biogenesis, morality, religion, and what's best for our children. Conservatives often suspect that neither we nor they know enough to warrant their certainty.

Brooks finishes with this:

Moderation requires courage. Moderates don’t operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know.

In fact, the people who must have courage today are those who stand against the Zeitgeist, who are legally hounded for their political and religious beliefs, who are shouted down in the university, who are threatened with violence and who lose their jobs, businesses, friends, and even family because of their beliefs.

Few of these folks today are moderates, they're almost all conservatives.

What Is a Christian Nationalist?

One of the allegations sometimes leveled against politically conservative Christians by their opponents is that they are "Christian nationalists."

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, if that's all Christian nationalists, believe then almost anyone who is a Christian in the U.S. would be ab defino a Christian nationalist.

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

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

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

Here we should balk.

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, if ever a conservative Christian is called a Christian nationalist the Christian would do well to ask his or her interlocutor what they understand a Christian nationalist to be. Quite probably the accuser won't be able to answer.

If Democrats Wish to Save Their Party

Peggy Noonan, writing at the Wall Street Journal (Paywall), has a succinct message for those Democrats who wish to return from the political wilderness in 2026 and 2028:

A word to Democrats trying to figure out how to save their party. The most eloquent of them, of course, think the answer is finding the right words. We need to talk more like working people, we need Trump’s touch with popular phrasing.

The answer isn’t to talk but do. Be supple. The Trumpian policies you honestly support—endorse them, join in the credit. If you think violent illegal immigrants should be removed, then back current efforts while standing—firmly, publicly—on the side of peaceful, hardworking families doing no harm and in fact contributing. Admit what your party’s gotten wrong the past 15 years. Don’t be defensive, be humble.

Most of all, make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work—clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids.

You want everyone in the country to know who you are? Save a city.

She's right. Every major city in the U.S is run by Democrats - Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York - and most of those cities are a disgrace. Mayors like Brandon Johnson in Chicago and Karen Bass in Los Angeles have demonstrated a stunning ineptitude in managing their cities. Taxes are high, the streets are filthy, corruption is ubiquitous, residents are afraid to leave their homes at night, and the teachers' unions block every common sense attempt to improve their schools. If given the opportunity many of those who live in these cities would move out.

Noonan's also correct that if Democrats want people to vote for them they should demonstrate that they have the ability to govern our cities. They should forget about DEI, pronouns, and "resistance" to Trump and fix the problems that people actually care about.

Fixing urban problems, however, takes talent, intelligence, and a free market economic philosophy unburdened by stultifying bureacracy, an exaggerated concern for environmental and LGBTQ sensibilities, and counterproductive commitments to racial and gender quotas. It requires that people at every level of city management hold offices on the basis of both competence and integrity with no regard to their race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Given those requirements, and given the ideological stranglehold the progressive left has on the Democrat party, it's very doubtful that the Democrats will anytime soon demonstrate that they have the ability to fix our cities.

The USAID Brouhaha

There's much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth among Mr. Trump's political opponents over his decision to transfer USAID (United States Agency for International Development) to the State Department and to shut down many of its programs.

There also seems to be some confusion among casual observers as to what USAID is. It's not an agency that dispenses aid to the world's hungry poor. Rather it's an agency that sends taxpayer dollars to various left-wing causes around the globe.

The Free Beacon's Adam Kredo explains why the Trump administration is attempting to rein it in:

As the Trump administration works to shrink the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and place it under the State Department's umbrella, congressional Democrats have argued that the move "endangers lives and undermines U.S. national security."

But away from funding for lifesaving medicines like HIV drugs, funding that is exempt from the State Department's broader foreign aid freeze, USAID has spent millions in taxpayer cash on left-wing priorities like climate activism—and bankrolled groups linked to Palestinian terrorism.

The agency's career staffers have battled the administration's 90-day freeze on foreign funding, seeking exemptions that would funnel tens of millions of dollars to agency bureaus that cover issues like "environmental justice" and "LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development," the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The Trump administration responded by putting scores of those staffers on administrative leave....[Secretary of State Marco Rubio] said that the State Department will not gut foreign aid altogether, but rather cut "programs that run counter to what we're trying to do in our national strategy."

Kredo give us some examples of the sort of USAID programs Rubio intends to cut:

• $1 Million To make disabled Tajikistanis 'Climate Leaders'
• $1 Million for foreign DEI programs, including 'Indigenous Language Technology' in Guatemala
• Nearly $100K to a Palestinian activist group whose leaders hailed the murder of an American
• $1 Million to a Hamas-linked charity
• $15 Million for 'Contraceptives and Condoms' in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan

Kredo elaborates on each of these at the link. Other examples of similar abuse of taxpayer money can be found here and here. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reads off a few more for the benefit of the press:

It should be mentioned, too, that the money sent to fund these recipient groups does not come directly from tax revenues. Rather the government adds to our multi-trillion dollar debt by borrowing the money it sends to the Taliban so that they can buy condoms.

Some USAID programs are worthwhile and Rubio assures us that these will be continued under the aegis of the Stae Department. Jim Geraghty lists a number of good causes in his Morning Jolt column, but there has to be responsible oversight to separate the good from the ridiculous.

That oversight has been missing at USAID so there's been no serious attempt to ensure that the money goes to worthwhile causes or even to the people and groups it's earmarked for. For instance, money that's sent to a charity in Gaza to help people suffering from the ravages of war may well be going to equip Hamas fighters, but apparently no one at USAID knows where it winds up.

It's gratifying that we now have an administration in place that intends to be better stewards of our resources than the previous administration had been.

Nietzsche Vs. Aristotle

Most ethical systems in our contemporary world can probably be subsumed under the names of either the Greek philosopher Aristotle (d.322 B.C.) or the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900). Aristotle thought that human beings had a telos, that there was something that man was for, a purpose or an end, for which he was on the earth.

Virtuous acts for Aristotle were those which helped men achieve their telos. The good life was a life which conformed to the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice - which Aristotle argued were objectively right to live by.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, denied that there was any overarching purpose to being human and therefore there was no objective moral right or wrong. Morality was all a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how we see things, a matter of individual subjective preference.

Thus the ubermensch or overman creates his own values. He rejects the "slave moralities" of theism and embraces the "master morality" of the Promethean man. This is what makes men great, and great men define their own good.

Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche believed in the existence of a personal moral law-giver, which fact makes for an odd state of affairs.

Aristotle's telos makes no sense unless the purpose or end of mankind is somehow conferred upon man by a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, how does man come to be endowed with a purpose? Where does such a purpose come from? If there's no personal law-giver or telos-giver then neither humanity nor individual men have any purpose, and the "virtues" that Aristotle touts are just arbitrary conventions.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, is correct that in the absence of a transcendent, personal law-giver what constitutes a virtue is just a subjective bias. On Nietzsche's subjectivism the virtues extolled by the Nazis are no more wrong nor right than those embraced by St. Francis of Assisi. They're just different.

If theism is true, however, if there actually is a God who creates man and endows him with a telos, then the moral law and the classical virtues really are objective and obligatory.

So, the way the theist sees it, Aristotle, by denying a transcendent, personal God, was inconsistent but nevertheless right about there being objective moral duties, and the atheist Nietzsche was consistent but wrong in his denial of objective moral right and wrong.

Only if theism is true, the theist believes, can one be both consistent and right about the existence of objective moral virtues and duties.

Iron Beam

National Review's Jim Geraghty has an informative column on why we need President Trump's "Iron Dome" anti-missile defense system. He writes that,

On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the creation of an “Iron Dome for America.”

Mitch Kugler, who has worked on missile-defense policy and programs in the U.S. Senate and the defense industry since starting on the SDI program in 1988, wrote in our pages Tuesday that Trump’s order “calls for the application of the incredible advances in American technology since 1999 — among other things, increased and miniaturized computing power, reduced launch costs, and the application of sundry other commercial advances to national security needs — to finally make it a priority to put defenses in space; that’s where they will be most capable against longer-range threats.”

It is worth noting that Israel’s Iron Dome system is designed to shoot shorter-range incoming rockets, which are slower and traveling through the atmosphere, not intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Built by Raytheon Missiles & Defense teams with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Iron Dome is considered the most advanced and effective missile-defense system in the world. It is also one of the most expensive missile-defense systems in the world: “Each battery has radar, control equipment, and 3-4 missile launchers (each with 20 missiles) and costs $37 million to 50 million depending on how many missiles it is shipped with . . . if the computers predict a rocket coming down in an inhabited area one (or often two to be sure) $50,000 Tamir guided missiles are fired to intercept the rocket.”

According to Raytheon, “Ten Iron Dome batteries protect the citizens and infrastructure of Israel, with each battery comprising three to four stationary launchers, 20 Tamir missiles and a battlefield radar. Each of the batteries can defend up to nearly 60 square miles.”

You can do the math on that: Ten batteries protecting 60 square miles is 600 square miles.

Israel’s total landmass is more than 8,000 square miles, and each coast of the U.S. is hundreds of thousands of square miles. But when it comes to air defense, countries prioritize population centers and critical infrastructure, and the Iron Dome batteries are designed to only fire at rockets projected to hit a vulnerable area; it doesn’t go chasing after every rocket, if the likely landing area is unpopulated desert.

Depending on the kind of system that Mr. Trump envisions, it could be very expensive, although the cost of not building it could be catastrophic. An alternative to using only missiles is to employ a "layered" approach that includes lasers.

The laser component is called "Iron Beam" by the Israelis. Here’s how the Israeli manufacturer Rafael describes the system:

IRON BEAM is a 100kW class High Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) that is expected to become the first operational system in its class. It quickly and effectively engages and neutralizes a wide array of threats from a range of hundreds of meters to several kilometers. Engaging at the speed of light, IRON BEAM has an unlimited magazine, with almost zero cost per interception, and causes minimal collateral damage.

Complementing RAFAEL’s IRON DOME, it can be integrated with a range of platforms and can become part of any multilayer defense system.

Israel has said that Iron Beam should be integrated within the existing Iron Dome system “within a year.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. lags far behind in developing such systems. Even so, a laser system would be far less expensive than a system based on interceptor missiles. Maybe we could get the Israelis to sell it to us.

Anyway, Geraghty has more on the topic at the link. Toward the end he adds this: "Every dollar spent on missile defense seems like a waste, right up until the minute a missile is fired at you. Then you wish you had spent a whole lot more." Indeed.

Deportation Resistance

There's something odd about the resistance that some countries are trying to erect against American deportation of their citizens who've come here illegally. Repeatedly we've been told that these immigrants are hard workers who make a valuable contribution to American society and that America is better off for having them in it.

That's doubtless true for many of them, but then why is it that when Mr. Trump tries to fly them back to their country of origin the leaders of those countries refuse to accept them?

First Mexico refused to cooperate, then Columbia, and now Haiti. Leaders of the first two countries have since been persuaded by Mr. Trump that they should reconsider, which they quickly did and have subsequently declared that their initial refusals were something of an April Fools joke they played on their own public.

Haiti's interim president, Leslie Voltaire, is pleading with Pope Francis to help him because Mr. Trump's promise to send back most of the 1.5 million Haitians would be "catastrophic" for the country which is already reeling from anarchy and violence.

It's not clear that all of these 1.5 million Haitians are in the country illegally, but even so, why would Mr. Voltaire not want these his citizens, many of whom are doubtless among the most enterprising of his country's population, to return to Haiti where they can do some good for their fellow Haitians?

If the deportees are such an asset to the U.S. wouldn't they a forteriori be an asset to their home country? Why don't the leaders of these countries want their own hard-working citizens returned so that they can work to improve their native land? Perhaps there are at least two reasons:

1. They're lying to us about the quality of the migrants: Many, maybe most, migrants are in fact poor and unskilled and are thus a drain on services provided by governments that are already under financial stress. Sending them off to the U.S. is a kind of social safety valve that eases the pressure on the government to provide care for these people.

Furthermore, a not insignificant percentage of the migrants are criminals and otherwise undesirable ne'er-do-wells that their home countries are glad to be rid of. The leaders of those countries are more than happy to make their thugs our problem.

2. They're own economies benefit to some extent from "remittances" sent back from the U.S. by those migrants who find work here but who may not have opportunities in their home countries to be productive.

In either case, the benefit to the U.S. from Mr. Biden's "no border" policy is dwarfed by the costs to American citizens. Mr. Trump was elected largely because he promised to put a stop to the insanity of the last four years, and he seems so far to be following through on the promise.

18 Trillion Feet

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

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

See here for some additional details.

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

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

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

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

Teleportation and Personal Continuity

Imagine that you're a crew member of the Starship Enterprise and are voyaging to another galaxy. Imagine, too, that you're a philosophical materialist who believes that all that exists is matter and energy.

When you arrive at your destination you're teleported to the surface of a planet. This process involves the total disintegration of your body on the Enterprise and instant reassembly out of completely different atoms on the surface of the planet.

Star Trek Teleporter

Assume that the reassembled person (RP) has all the memories and knowledge that you did before being disintegrated. Is RP really you?

If materialism is true, it's hard to see how it could be since RP is made of completely different material stuff than you were.

If you say that the material stuff has the same form as it did before being disintegrated you're adopting a kind of Aristotelian/Thomist view of the soul, which materialists would find offensive.

If you say that you have a mind that survives the disintegration process then you're again renouncing materialism because you're positing the existence of an immaterial substance, i.e. a mind or soul, that's an essential part of your being.

So, what is it that makes RP the same person as you? Memories? If it's memories how many of your memories must you retain in order for RP to be you? Every day we lose many of our memories. Can you remember word-for-word a conversation you had yesterday or the day before? Probably not.

Nor can you remember much about yourself from ten years ago, so what percentage of your memories must you retain for RP to be you? If memories give us our personal identity then an amnesiac or an Alzheimer's sufferer would be a different person than before losing his or her memory.

Besides, it's not clear in any case that our memories are material or physical. Perhaps the brain stores electrons or chemicals on neurons which somehow get translated into a recollection, but those electrons aren't the memory itself any more than an inflamed nerve is identical to the sensation of pain.

When you remember your mother's face you have a picture or image of her face, but the image is not electrons or chemicals in neurons. It's arguably something immaterial.

Perhaps you might say that you and RP are the same person because the genetic code inscribed on your DNA would be the same in both of you, but identical DNA would only mean that RP was a clone of you. It doesn't mean that RP would actually be you. Moreover, identical twins have identical DNA but they're not the same person.

It seems that the materialist has to assume that you have ceased to exist and that RP is not you but a new person very similar to you. Either that or they need to acknowledge that materialism needs to be rejiggered somehow.

Maybe, though, there's another option. Maybe materialism is just false and there's actually something immaterial about us that makes us who we are. Perhaps we have a soul that bestows upon us our identity and which is unaffected by the teleporter.

One more question: Suppose an exact replica of you appears on the planet but you do not disintegrate on the Enterprise. Which one is you? Could you and RP be the same person having a single soul but possessing two distinct bodies? Could it be instead that your soul splits betwen the two bodies such that now there really are, at least momentarily, two of you?

I'll leave you to wrestle with that scenario on your own.

Why Does the Left Oppose Trump's Border Policy?

President Trump is making good on his promise to close the border and deport those who are here illegally, especially those who have a criminal record in their country of origin or have committed crimes since they've been here (other than illegally crossing our border).

The left strenuously objects to these measures. They tell us that it's uncompassionate to deny people the opportunity to live in this country. They tell us that under Biden and Mayorkis the border was secure and that immigrants are all good people just trying to make an honest living. They tell us that it's cruel to separate families by sending parents back while the children, who may be U.S. citizens, remain.

They insist that a wall won't work and that it's somehow inhumane. The pope himself weighed in on how awful it is for the U.S. to use a wall to exclude people, apparently forgetting that the Vatican is enclosed in one of the most massive walls in the world and that no one without a special clearance is allowed to stay there.

The Vatican Wall

None of the left's arguments against the Trump policy is very convincing.

They say that they think it morally repugnant to keep the needy out of the country, but I have little doubt that every person who makes this argument locks the doors to their homes and cars to keep people out who might otherwise benefit from having access to what's inside. If we have an obligation to let whomever wishes to come into the U.S. and enjoy the benefits of our welfare system, schools, hospitals, etc. why do we not have an obligation to keep the doors to our homes open for the same reason, albeit on a smaller scale?

If the immigration of eleven million people into the U.S. is viewed by the left with approbation why do they object so vociferously to the movement of a few hundred or a few thousand Israeli settlers into the West Bank? What's the significant difference? And if the left is concerned about families being separated why don't they encourage illegal aliens who are parents of U.S. citizens to take their children back to their countries of origin with them?

The reasons given for opposing President Trump's border initiatives are so flimsy that one may be forgiven for thinking that there's some other reason in play that they'd rather not acknowledge. I probably shouldn't speculate about what that reason might be, but it's quite possible that they see so many millions of immigrants as potential citizens and voters who'd likely be inclined to vote for the party they credit with allowing them to come in.

This may not be the reason that all on the left oppose closing the border and deporting illegals but do a thought experiment: Suppose it was demonstrably the case that once granted citizenship these immigrants would overwhelmingly vote Republican. Do you think the Democrats would still stand firm against a border wall and deportation?

Another reason some on the left, particularly the Marxists and their fellow-travelers, are eager to keep the flood of illegal immigration coming is because they embrace something called the Cloward-Piven Strategy. This is an argument put forward by two Columbia sociologists in the 1960s that the nation could be brought to its knees by overloading its institutions. Burden the schools, hospitals, law enforcement, etc. with so many people, especially poor people, and the whole capitalist system would collapse under the weight.

Cloward-Piven may well be behind a lot of the support on the left for open borders. In any case, it appears that President Trump is not a fan and neither is his border czar Tom Homan, and right now they're the ones whose opinion counts.

Scientism and Nice Nihilism

In Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality the author unabashedly promotes a scientistic view of knowledge. "Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it describes a view based on "scientism" which is the view that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not something we should even believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism."

Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, truths about justice, rights, beauty, and morality, for example, but Rosenberg thinks it's neither good science nor good epistemology to hold beliefs about these things.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor morally "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unrelentingly dark world and even this little glimmer is beset with problems.

Here's one: If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved behaviors that are not "nice." If we're the product of evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and nothing which is wrong to do.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to bravely and honestly face up to these consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in both of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of the page) that the consequences outlined in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism. The atheist who lives as if none of these consequences exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief or a worldview that entails conclusions one cannot live with, however, stands in serious need of reexamination.

The Not-So-Dark Ages

A lot of high school and even college students are taught that the historical period roughly from the fall of Rome to the 15th century was a time of intellectual stagnation with little or no scientific or technological progress.

The alleged ignorance that descended over Europe during this epoch has caused it to be called the "Dark Ages," a pejorative assigned to the Middle Ages by historians of the 18th century hostile to the Church and desirous of deprecating the period during which the Church wielded substantial political power.

Lately, however, historians have challenged the view that this epoch was an age of unenlightened ignorance. Rodney Stark has written in several of his books (particularly, his How the West Won) of the numerous discoveries and advancements made during the "dark ages" and concludes that they weren't "dark" at all.

The notion that they were, he argues, is an ahistorical myth. Indeed, it was during this supposed benighted era that Europe made the great technological and philosophical leaps that put it well in advance of the rest of the world.

For example, agricultural technology soared during this period. Advances in the design of the plow, harnessing of horses and oxen, horseshoes, crop rotation, water and wind mills, all made it possible for the average person to be well-fed for the first time in history.

Transportation also improved which enabled people and goods to move more freely to markets and elsewhere. Carts, for example, were built with swivel axles, ships were more capacious and more stable, and horses were bred to serve as draught animals.

Military technology also made advances. The stirrup, pommel saddle, longbow, crossbow, armor, and chain mail eventually made medieval Europeans almost invincible against non-European foes.

Similar stories could be told concerning science, philosophy, music, and art, and thus the view espoused by Stark that the medieval era was a time of cultural richness is gaining traction among contemporary historians who see the evidence for this interpretation of the time to be too compelling to be ignored.

This short video featuring Anthony Esolen provides a nice summary:

If someone in your presence refers to the "Dark Ages" you might ask them what it was about them that was so dark.

Our Amazing Universe

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

Here's another example courtesy of biologist Ann Gauger. Gauger quotes philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon who writes that,

[I]f we measure the width of the observable universe in inches and regard this as representing the scale of the strengths of the physical forces, gravity is fine-tuned to such an extent that the possibility of intelligent life can only tolerate an increase or decrease in its strength of one one-hundred-millionth of an inch with respect to the diameter of the observable universe.

To which Gauger responds,

That is literally awesome. That 1/10^8 inch movement is the same as 0.00000001 of an inch, or about the width of a water molecule, in either direction compared to the width of the observable universe. That is an incredible amount of very fine-tuned order — the relationship between the strong nuclear force and the gravitational force has to be that precise for stars and planets to form, and the elements that are necessary to support life.

Just one water molecule’s width compared to the width of the whole universe — if the ratio were just a little too little, stars’s lives would be cut short and there would be no time for life to develop; too much and everything would expand too fast, thus preventing star and planet formation.

No wonder fine-tuning is called one of the best evidences for intelligent design. People have proposed ways around the challenge, mainly to do with the multiverse hypothesis. But there are so many other instances of fine-tuning and design perfect for creatures like us that it begins to look like a genuine plan.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Gauger refers to the assumption held by some that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must inevitably exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many moderns choose.

The lengths to which people go in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are quite remarkable.

Belief Doesn't Always Require Evidence (Pt. II)

I closed yesterday's post with the assertion that just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

Yet the alleged lack of evidence for theism has long been one of the most popular reasons adduced for the refusal to accept it. As the 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell famously said when asked what he would tell God were he to stand before Him after his death and be asked why he never believed, Russell declared that he would simply tell God that "there wasn't enough evidence."

The 19th century writer W.K. Clifford insisted that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” and the 20th century philosopher Antony Flew, before his conversion to theism, wrote that,

If it is to be established that there is a God then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until or unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either atheism or agnosticism.

Theists contend that notwithstanding the skeptic's claim that there's not enough evidence to support a belief in God, the evidence is substantial and indeed, overwhelming.

It's not to the purpose of this post to recount that evidence here, but doubters are urged to read philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's latest book Return of the God Hypothesis to get an idea of why many theists believe the evidence is indeed dispositive for anyone who's not already dead set against it.

What is to the purpose in the present post, though, is to show that the demand for evidence before belief is warranted is very selective. What I mean is that religious skeptics often believe a lot of things for which they not only don't have evidence but for which evidence may not even be theoretically possible.

Here are some examples:

1. Memory beliefs (I believe I had a dream last night.)
2. Belief that we have (or don't have) free-will.
3. Belief that logical axioms are true and self-evident (If A then not ~A.)
4. Belief that there are an infinity of other universes.
5. Belief that every event has a cause.
6. Belief that nothing can cause itself.
7. Belief that life arose in some "warm little pond." (Darwin)
8. Belief that life is the product of material causes only.
9. Belief that justice is right and cruelty is wrong (What evidence justifies this or any moral belief?)
10. Belief that there is a past, present, or future.
11. Belief in the principle of cause and effect.
12. Belief that "the cosmos is all there is, ever was, or ever will be" (Carl Sagan).
13. Belief that evidence is necessary to warrant belief (Is there any evidence to support this belief?)

If skeptics hold these beliefs even though there's no empirical evidence for any of them, why is it thought to be a legitimate criticism of theists that they believe in the existence of God, especially since, as I mentioned above, there's lots of evidence that God exists?

Belief Doesn't Always Require Evidence (Pt. I)

It's not uncommon to hear religious believers criticized for holding beliefs they can't empirically demonstrate to be true, or at least probably true. The critic assumes that if no scientific evidence can be adduced in support of the belief then it's mere superstition.

This was in fact a popular view among skeptical philosophers from about 1870 to about 1980, and is still trotted out and dusted off every so often today. It's a view called evidentialism, and philosopher Alvin Plantinga has a great deal of fun dismantling it in his book titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Indeed, since Plantinga's book came out philosophers are much more shy about using this argument against religious believers, but others unfamiliar with the philosophical literature are not so reticent.

Plantinga asks,inter alia, why our beliefs should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Why should beliefs not be counted innocent until proven guilty?

He wonders, too, why a person of sound mind, convinced in her heart that God exists, and who has never been confronted with an antitheistic argument that she found compelling, should be required nevertheless to suspend her belief until she has acquired overwhelming evidence that her belief is true.

Suppose, for instance, that you were accused of a crime. There's substantial evidence against you and little that you can offer to offset it. Even so, you're convinced you're innocent. You know you're innocent. You can't explain the contrary evidence, but it doesn't matter. You just know you didn't commit the crime. Should you, despite this assurance, acknowledge anyway that you're guilty because you can't present an argument to explain why you're certain of your innocence?

Many people believe in God on the basis of a totally subjective experience that they can't document or prove but which leaves them with an assurance that they could not deny even were they so inclined. The experience of former atheist Kirstin Powers, a liberal journalist, provides us with a good example. She writes:

Then one night in 2006, on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, "Here I am." It felt so real. I didn't know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn't shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

You can read her full account of her experience at the link.

There's a scene in the movie Contact, which was based on a book by atheistic astronomer Carl Sagan, in which the character played by Jodie Foster, a scientist named Ellie Arroway, is part of an experiment in which she's transported to the center of the galaxy. However, upon her return she's unable to offer any evidence that she actually left earth.

None of the data collected by her colleagues from her transporter confirm that the experiment worked. Yet she's convinced that she actually experienced all that she claims to have experienced.

Is she justified in holding that belief? If her belief is the product of properly functioning cognitive faculties belonging to an accomplished scientist not given to imaginative flights of hysteria, is what she says in the following exchange with an interrogator discredited by her inability to present empirical evidence?

Michael Kritz: "Wait a minute, let me get this straight. You admit that you have absolutely no physical evidence to back up your story."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that you very well may have hallucinated this whole thing."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that if you were in our position, you would respond with exactly the same degree of incredulity and skepticism!"
Ellie Arroway: "Yes!"
Michael Kitz: [standing, angrily] "Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony, and concede that this "journey to the center of the galaxy," in fact, never took place!"
Ellie Arroway: "Because I can't. I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish... I... could share that... I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish."

Ellie Arroway, in Sagan's telling of the tale, had what amounts to a religious experience. Sagan clearly wants us to believe that her experience was veridical and that she's warranted in believing her experience was veridical despite the lack of proof, or even of any objective evidence.

But if that's so, why are Christians faulted, by folks just like Sagan, for believing in God on the basis of a subjective assurance similar to that possessed by Arroway?

Indeed, far more people have had an experience like Kirstin Powers had than have had an experience like Ellie Arroway. If Arroway is justified in believing that she actually encountered a different world why would people like Powers not be similarly justified?

Just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

More tomorrow.

The End of the Biden Administration

It'll come as no surprise to readers of Viewpoint that I'm not sorry to see Joe Biden and his administration leave Washington. What kind of president Donald Trump will be, I can't predict, but he can hardly do worse than Mr. Biden.

Mr. Biden's administration was deeply disappointing, although no one who's been paying attention over the course of the last sixteen years should've been surprised at this. Mr. Biden has demonstrated himself throughout that time to be a venal, unprincipled man whose chief concern was himself and his family.

Mr. Biden has corrupted the executive offices he's held, allowing his family to peddle influence abroad to enrich themselves and then awarding them "pre-emptive" pardons on his way out the door to protect the family from accountability.

Moreover, his administration's attempt, at Mr. Biden's behest, to destroy Donald Trump through criminal indictments that would never have been brought against anyone else has besmirched trust in American legal institutions. Not only has this "lawfare" been brought to bear against Trump but also against many of his associates and some ordinary people who on January 6th were guilty of nothing more serious than trespassing on federal property.

He campaigned on bringing us together, on being a unifier, but he repeatedly disparaged ordinary citizens who disagreed with him, implying that they were "fascists" and at one point explicitly calling them "garbage."

The outgoing president was not only personally corrupt, he was lawless in other ways as well. He refused to obey the law requiring him to control the border, he refused to heed the judgment of the Supreme Court which ruled that his plan to pay off student loans was unconstitutional, and he absurdly announced last week that he was declaring the ERA to be constitutional and the law of the land.

His Attorney General's use of the FBI to harass ordinary citizens at school board meetings, branding those concerned parents as terrorists for expressing angry opinions at those meetings, was a disgrace, as was the DOJ's harassment of pro-lifers, and the pressure the Biden administration applied on social and other media to restrict the circulation of opinions at odds with the administration's narratives.

Mr. Biden and his aides lied to us repeatedly about matters great and small. Among the former were Mr. Biden's insistence that he would never pardon his son, that he never talked to his son about his business dealings, that Donald Trump called Neo-nazis "good people" after Charlottesville, and that Mr. Biden himself was cognitively sound. Anyone who offered a contrary opinion, as did special prosecutor Robert Hur, was smeared in the media.

The Biden administration coddled the progressive left and their most absurd ideological conceits such as DEI in general and the trans ideology in particular. The administration and the party have been congenial to some of the most vicious antisemitism we've seen in this country since the 1930s, and they also did enormous damage to our economy by trying to impose their green energy agenda on businesses and consumers and by restricting our ability to drill for fossil fuels.

Ironically, the Biden administration's commitment to green energy, particularly offshore wind energy, is endangering the Right whale and has caused the deaths of countless migratory birds.

Reckless infusions of trillions of dollars into the economy drove inflation up over 20% during the Biden presidency and caused mortgage rates to jump from 2.8% to over 7% which has erected a huge impediment to young first-time home buyers.

Mr. Biden's disastrous Afghanistan pullout and his ridiculous talk about how a minor incursion by Russia into Ukraine wouldn't be so bad encouraged Vladimir Putin to launch a massive invasion in 2022. Biden's reluctance to give needed military supplies to both Ukraine and Israel has prolonged both of those conflicts, needlessly increasing the death toll. He released billions of dollars to Iran when that terrorist state was all but moribund from the Trump sanctions. The infusion of cash allowed the Iranians to get back on their feet, finance more bloodshed in the Middle East, and accelerate toward their goal of achieving a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, at home, our own military preparedness and recruitment have been allowed to wane.

Finally, it's doubtful that Mr. Biden, who spent 40% of his time in office on vacation, was even the person running his administration. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that when he asked the president why he signed an executive order freezing the exports of natural gas crucial to Europe Mr. Biden was unaware that he had in fact actually done so.

I can't think of any positive accomplishment for which President Biden will be remembered, and he may well be regarded by future historians as perhaps the worst president of the modern era. It's hard to feel regret - at least it is for me - that he and his associates are no longer in charge.

A Thought for MLK Day

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 the Russian writer 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 2022 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 would justice be served by imprisoning you as well, merely 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 has been cruelly punishing the Palestinian people in Gaza for what other Palestinians did on October 7th. But if collective guilt is a legitimate concept, why shouldn't all Palestinians pay for the atrocities of Hamas?

In fact, campus left-wingers at some of our major universities hold American Jews reponsible for what Israeli Jews are doing in the Middle East, yet these leftists claim it's a war crime to punish the Palestinians for what the savages that the Palestinians elected, supported, 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 that they themselves participate in harming others or explicity or implicitly condone harming others.

We'd have a much healthier, cohesive society if everyone honored Martin Luther King by following his example and acknowledged that simple fact.

Living With the Incoherence

Readers of Viewpoint are doubtless well-aware that I think the question of how we ground our moral beliefs is of paramount importance.

They're doubtless aware, too, that we live in an era in which some secular folk are extremely judgmental of the behavior of others, to the extent that they're willing to destroy the careers of those who deviate from what the censorious deem morally acceptable opinions or behavior.

One of the ironies of this is that the most judgmental people in our society are often secularists or non-theists yet these are the very folks who should be the most non-judgmental of all.

I say this not because I think that non-theists (or naturalists) are more noble than others but because a naturalistic worldview, which naturalists presumably embrace, offers them no basis for making any judgment at all about the moral rightness or wrongness of other people's behavior.

Here's why:

Humanity, generally speaking, shares a basic moral understanding (i.e. that loyalty is good, betrayal is bad; kindness is good, cruelty is bad; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad, etc.). This understanding seems to be inherent in human beings as though it were somehow inscribed on our DNA.

Granting that this is so, how do we explain the existence of this basic moral understanding?

There are, it seems, two possibilities. Either we've acquired this understanding through an impersonal, unguided, naturalistic process like Darwinian evolution, or we've acquired it through the intentional act of a creator (i.e. God).

There's no plausible third option. It seems that naturalism and theism exhaust all the possibilities.

Suppose then, that the answer is that we've evolved this moral understanding naturalistically. If so, then what makes acting against this understanding "wrong"? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal processes like gene mutation, the accidents of genetic drift, and natural selection impose an obligation on us today to live according to a moral understanding that evolved to suit us for life in the stone age?

Moreover, if evolution is the source of our moral sentiments then it's also the source of our propensity for selfishness, violence, and tribal hatreds. That being so, if a propensity for kindness and a propensity for cruelty have both evolved in human beings, why should we assume that it's right to be kind and wrong to be cruel?

If we insist on making that assumption then we must be comparing kindness and cruelty to some higher standard that transcends our evolutionary history, but naturalism admits of no such higher standard.

On the other hand, if that moral understanding - call it conscience - is instilled in us by a perfectly good, all-knowing creator of the universe who both loves us and has the authority to insist that we act in accord with that moral understanding, and if that creator also possesses the power to hold us accountable for how we live, then we have a good reason for thinking that we have an objective duty to live according to what our conscience tells us is good and right.

On naturalism we can certainly intuit that we should be kind rather than cruel, selfless rather than selfish, but we have no obligation to follow those intuitions. Human nature being what it is we're often pulled and tugged in a direction opposite to what we think we should go, and in a naturalistic universe there's no compelling reason why we should resist those tugs. It's not morally wrong to yield to them.

In sum, if naturalism is true then ethics is just a bunch of socially fashionable and arbitrary conventions which have no real moral binding force.

If theism is true, though, there can be genuine moral right and wrong and genuinely objective moral obligations.

Anyone who believes that we have a moral obligation to do justice and to show compassion to the poor and oppressed should, if they're consistent, be a theist.

If they're a non-theist and nevertheless maintain that there are objective moral obligations they're irrationally importing those beliefs from an alien worldview (theism). Their own worldview offers no basis for them.

It's one of the more remarkable features of our times that so many secular people who pride themselves on their intellectual perspicacity either don't see this or don't mind living with the incoherence.

Are We Alone in the Cosmos?

In an interesting piece at Evolution News physicist Jonathan Witt asks whether there other thinking, speaking creatures living on faraway planets? What are the chances? Just focusing on the odds of intelligent life forms existing on planets in our galaxy the improbabilities are daunting.

There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy and possibly several trillion planets so it might seem likely that intelligent life has arisen on at least one of them, but there's much more to be considered than just the number of stars and planets.

As scientists' knowledge of the factors necessary for a planet to produce intelligent life grew it became apparent that it could very well be that our earth is the only planet in the entire galaxy, and maybe in the entire universe with its up to two trillion galaxies, that satisfies the conditions necessary for life.

Witt points us to a book written by astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards titled The Privileged Planet, in which the authors compile a list of factors necessary for a planet to be habitable. Here's the list with some explanation that I added in parentheses:

• Orbits an early G dwarf type star (These are stars that are very close to the sun’s mass, temperature, brightness, and spectral type. Most stars are either much more massive or much less massive than G dwarf type stars) that is at least a few billion years old.
• Orbits a star in the galactic habitable zone (The habitable zone is a region not too close to the galactic center and not too distant from it).
• Orbits a star near the co-rotation circle (This is the circular band around a spiral galaxy’s center where the stars move at about the same speed as the spiral arms) and with a low eccentricity galactic orbit (This is an orbit that's almost circular).
• Orbits a star outside the spiral arms (A planet within a spiral arm would be constantly bombarded with space debris).
• Is a terrestrial planet the right distance from the host star to have liquid water on the planet’s surface (a distance known as the circumstellar habitable zone).
• Is near enough the inner edge of the circumstellar habitable zone to allow high oxygen and low carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
• Orbits a star with no more than a few giant planets comparable in mass to Jupiter and that are in large, nearly circular orbits (so that the gas giants do not mess up the earth-like planet’s orbit).
• Has a low eccentricity orbit outside of regions around a star that would destabilize a planet’s rotation axis and orbit due to the gravity of giant planets.
• Is in the right mass range (A planet that's too massive would retain toxic gases in it's atmosphere due to it's strong gravity. If it were not massive enough, its graavity would be too weak to hold oxygen and nitrogen which are necessary for life).
• Has the right concentration of sulfur in its core.
• Has a large moon and the right planetary rotation period to avoid chaotic variations in its obliquity (i.e. its tilt on its axis).
• Has the right amount of water in the crust.
• Has steady plate tectonic cycling (No planet without crustal movements can recycle nutrients to the surface).
• Is a habitable planet where single-celled life actually emerged.
• Experienced a critically low number of large (meteorite) impacts during its history.
• Experienced a critically low number of transient radiation events from outer space during its history.
• Is a planet where plant and animal life successfully evolved from single-celled life.
• Is a planet where an intelligent, technology-wielding life form evolved from lower animals.
• Is among that subset of planets that have hosted technological life where the technological life has not destroyed itself or otherwise gone extinct.

Witt goes on to explain that,

Gonzalez and Richards assign a 10 percent chance for each of these 19 factors, but they make a strong case that the odds are much slimmer in many instances. Some of the factors may have an infinitesimally small probability of occurring by happenstance. For instance, perhaps the origin of the first self-reproducing cell is improbable or even impossible given the limited tool kit of materialists (chance + natural laws). The same may hold for the origin of plants and animals.

Richards and Gonzalez are skeptical that chemistry and natural selection alone can evolve fundamentally new forms of life, as am I. But for the sake of argument they generously grant even these factors a 1 in 10 chance of occurring on any terrestrial planet where all the other necessary factors are in place.

We are multiplying out fractions here, so the odds get geometrically smaller with each additional factor. Multiply out just the first 13 [to avoid the controversial evolutionary assumptions] and we find that the odds of any one star system having a habitable planet is less than one in a trillion, meaning that even with all the billions of stars in the Milky Way, the odds are strongly against there being even one other habitable planet in our galaxy besides Earth.

And note, Gonzalez and Richards further low-balled the odds by leaving out several factors. Also keep in mind that for some time now the calculated odds have been getting slimmer and slimmer as new habitability requirements are discovered.

So, is it reasonable to think that there are intelligent beings elsewhere in our galaxy? No. Such a phenomenon is exceedingly improbable, unless, Witt points out, our galaxy is not the product of chance and natural forces at all, but is instead the product of a unfathomably intelligent and powerful Creator.

If that's the case, our galaxy could be teeming with life, but unfortunately that's not a hypothesis open to the naturalist.

Read more on this topic at the link.