Materialism - A True Opium

Every now and then I have a burst of optimism and think that just maybe the materialist philosophy that has dominated science and culture throughout much of the 20th century and into the 21st is on the wane. It seems that more and more people, intelligent, well-educated people, are realizing that materialism is a bankrupt idea, offering no hope or meaning to those who embrace it. But what is materialism?

The co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, Francis Crick, was a classic example of a materialist. He once expressed it like this:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules... You're nothing but a pack of neurons.

On materialism we're nothing more than the atoms that make us up. A prominent lawyer named Barry Arrington once teased out the implications of this view in this passage:

Materialism posits that the physical is all there is. Its central premise is this: In the beginning, there were particles, and the particles were in motion, and in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than particles in motion.

This means that human beings are not special. You and your family and your friends are also merely particles in motion, reducible to the chemicals that make up your bodies. Humans are clever hairless apes with no more ultimate significance than rocks.

Yes, they have come up with this thing called “morality.” But morality is an illusion foisted on us by material evolutionary forces because it gives us a reproductive advantage. Morality in any objective transcendent sense of the word not only does not exist, it cannot exist. There are no moral or immoral rocks. And humans — in their essence — are in the same category as rocks. Both rocks and humans are mere amalgamations of burnt out star dust.

Arrington didn't believe that materialism was true, and neither did the theologian R.C. Sproul who once had this to say about it:

Modern man believes we came from nothing and are going to nothing, but in the meanwhile we're somehow significant. But if we came from nothing and we're going to nothing then we need to face the fact that we really are nothing.

Karl Marx was an extremely influential 19th century materialist who believed that "religion was the opium of the people." It anesthetized people to their suffering and oppression, but, Marx believed, there was certainly no truth in the superstitions of religious dogma. Rather, he was certain that everything could be explained in terms of science and economics.

The distinguished Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz said of Marx's "opium" remark that,

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for all our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.

That sums up perfectly the philosophy of materialism. It's a true opium that anesthetizes the materialist's soul and quells his guilt and doubts. And hopefully, it will soon be consigned to the dustbin of discredited philosophical ideas.

By Any Means Necessary

National Review's Jim Geraghty noted last week that,

Americans are far more likely to see Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders: 40 percent say this descriptor applies more to the GOP, with just 16% saying it applies to the Democrats. They’re also more likely to call Republicans the party that can get things done by 36 percent to 19 percent, and the party of change, by 32 percent to 25 percent.

After the Democrats' pathetic response to the ongoing ICE "protests" in LA where thugs tried to kill cops, and Democrats both tacitly and explicitly sided with the rioters, and following Trump's more forceful response in which he ordered in 2000 national guardsmen to stanch the damage, those numbers will probably look even worse for Democrats.

Geraghty offers this thought to Democrats who aspire to greater popularity with the electorate:

Crazy idea, fellas. What if you tried governing well? I mean, really well — so well that even your state’s Republicans are impressed. What if, after (at least) four years of being governor somewhere, you could point to lower unemployment, higher wages, a more affordable cost of living, higher test scores in schools, lower crime rates, infrastructure that isn’t full of potholes, and a general satisfaction with public services? What if your state government was prepared for natural disasters?

Yeah, that would be difficult to achieve. But that is, you know, the core duty of government. If you demonstrated competence at governing, people might trust you with the presidency and like-minded congressional majorities!

I mean, maybe that stuff matters more than ensuring local police never cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and that males can participate in high school girls’ sports, and free bus rides, and so on.

Geraghty's right, of course, but the problem is that the chaos isn't, as much of our media would have us believe, merely the cry of innocent people democratically airing their grievances. Rather, it's one more episode in a century-old effort to bring the West to its knees. Many Democrats, knowingly or unknowingly, are in the grip of a Marxist ideology that calls for the destruction of the institutions and civil structures of the West, and they know that the sort of good governance Geraghty suggests will do nothing to advance their revolution. Attacking traditional morality, co-opting our institutions, and abetting chaos in our streets will.

Some on the Left may prefer that the revolution be accomplished through peaceful means, they may prefer to boil the frog in the pot gradually without the frog realizing that it's being boiled, but if they encounter resistance, if people like Trump stand in their way, then they have few qualms about resorting to mayhem and bloodshed.

If, for instance, Israel is a tiny island of Western values amidst a vast Islamic sea then Israel must be destroyed, which is the meaning of "from river to the sea, Palestine will be free," and Jews everywhere must be punished. If ICE is an impediment to reducing white, wealthy, capitalist America to parity with the rest of the world, a transformation which is to be effected by overwhelming our institutions with third-world immigrants, then ICE is an enemy to be discredited and violently resisted.

As Saul Alinsky advises in his book Rules for Radicals, the Left must "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." In the present context that means focusing on law enforcement and making it an object of personal derision and contempt. If that doesn't work, as it hasn't against the Trump administration, then violence is necessary and there are plenty of people on the Left eager to employ it.

For the Left, after all, the revolution must be accomplished by any means necessary.

Trump's Jacksonian Supporters

A piece by Mike Watson at the Free Beacon does a nice job of identifying the thinking of a large segment of Trump's supporters. He writes:

Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed Iran had hidden evidence of some tests related to building nuclear weapons and had enriched enough uranium to make nine nuclear bombs on short notice. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei then rejected the most recent American proposal in the nuclear negotiations and denounced "the rude, insolent U.S. leaders."

Donald Trump fired back: "Time is running out on Iran's decision pertaining to nuclear weapons, which must be made quickly!"

The back-and-forth has perplexed and disoriented much of Washington. Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently said that Trump is "negotiating something that, in its broad elements, is going to look and feel pretty similar" to the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran. "I seem to be on the same page as Donald Trump," he continued.

The strain has been too much for many of the Israel haters who claim to speak for Trump’s political base and favor an Obama-esque approach to the Islamic Republic. They have run into a major force in American politics, one that Khamenei should fear: America’s Jacksonians.

Who are these Jacksonian Americans?

Walter Russell Mead, who first identified this group in Special Providence, describes their values as "a deeply embedded, widely spread populist and popular culture of honor, independence, courage, and military pride." A "Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites." Andrew Jackson was one such hero; another is Donald J. Trump.

Trump rocketed into the White House largely thanks to his intuitive understanding of the Jacksonians and their resulting bond. They nod along to his criticisms of democracy promotion and nation-building and are skeptical of long, drawn out wars. Since they prefer to ignore foreigners whom they do not consider a threat, they can appear quite dovish.

They are not at all dovish about terrorism though, or about major terrorism sponsors like Iran. Since Iranian revolutionaries attacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and took 52 Americans hostage for more than a year, Jacksonians have loathed the mullahs. Iran’s intervening decades of supporting worldwide terrorism—killing Americans and systematically cheating on agreements—have not engendered any new warm feelings.

Jacksonians do not want Iran to get the bomb, and the economic incentives that the Iranians are dangling do not change their minds.

How many Trump voters would be considered Jacksonians by this measure? According to a recent Rasmussen poll,

Three-quarters of Trump voters support strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Among those who strongly approve of Trump, the figure climbs to 84 percent. The anti-Israel crowd, and the doves who voted for Kamala Harris, are in the minority.

Crossing the Jacksonians can fatally weaken presidencies. Barack Obama and Joe Biden both hoped to smooth things over with Iran and gracefully exit from the Middle East. But the Obama-era chaos in Syria helped create ISIS, and Oct. 7 destroyed Biden’s Middle East policy. The subsequent outbreak of domestic terrorism by ISIS members in 2015 and pro-Hamas rallies in 2023 fired up the Jacksonians and helped propel Trump into office.

There's more to Watson's analysis at the link, but the Jacksonians may have a well-grounded concern. Trump has said the two ways to deal with Iran’s enrichment program are to "blow them up nicely or blow them up viciously."

But there's a fear that Trump will indeed settle for an Obama-esque "solution" in which there's no "blowing up" at all. Such a solution is no solution at all, and if that's what ultimately comes of all of this, there'll be a lot of Jacksonians whose support for Trump will erode. On the other hand, as Watson writes:

If the mullahs choose to have it done viciously, plenty of Americans will be happy to oblige.

Sharpshooter

The 8:00 minute video below captures the amazing abilities of a fish known as the Archerfish.

As you watch the video ask yourself how many structural and behavioral changes needed to occur in order for this fish to be able to do what it does. How many algorithmic changes had to be made in the neural wiring in the fish's brain just to enable it to adjust for the refraction of the light coming from the prey or to adjust the stream of water to adjust for distance?

Could all of the necessary mutations in the organism's genome have occurred by serendipity or does the Archerfish's incredible ability not point instead to intentional design?

Ask yourself as you watch which is a priori (that is, setting aside any prior commitment one way or another) a more plausible explanation for this phenomenal behavior, chance or intelligent engineering and programming:

Ukraine's Assassination Program

Last weekend, the Ukrainians bloodied Russia's bomber fleet with a drone attack that, according to Ukraine, damaged or destroyed 41 aircraft, but drone attacks aren't the only tactics in the Ukrainian arsenal. According to a piece at Strategy Page, they've also stepped up their assassination efforts. Here's an excerpt:

Over the last year Russian security officials began to notice a frightening pattern. A growing number of men who had been involved in the Ukraine war were dying, but from murder instead of natural causes.

Bombs, bullets and seeming accidents have killed a hundred or more people involved in supporting Russia in Ukraine. This included Ukrainian traitors as well as Russian army veterans and senior officers, plus members of Russia’s police, intelligence and security services.

It gets worse, the Ukrainian SBU internal security agency appears to have organized this campaign as they have had similar operations in the past. The Russian FSB, the successor to the dreaded Soviet era KGB, has been on the case and reported that this terror campaign is well organized and extensive.

Worse, the FSB found that many people in Russia were active in carrying out these killings. This is because several million Russians and Ukrainians were displaced from Ukraine during the war. Some fled, other were forced into Russia. The SBU has been in touch with many of these former Ukraine residents and found many of them willing to fight back against the Russians from inside Russia.

Since 2022 more of these exiles have turned against Russia and the SBU took advantage of that. The FSB knows this because they have managed to discover some of the shipments of weapons and explosives shipped into Russia from European countries for these Ukrainian operatives.

Some of the weapons used were obtained in Russia. As disabled or deserting Russian soldiers returned home, some brought weapons and explosives with them as souvenirs. Others planned to use these items for criminal activities.

It’s not just the Ukrainians who are bringing the war home to Russia; many pro-Ukraine Russian veterans of the war are doing so as well.

Russian intelligence noted that a growing number of these attacks are against Russian government officials. While Russian officers and troops are guilty of atrocities in Ukraine, their superiors are responsible. The attack victims are beginning to include more senior government officials and the FSB fears that the campaign will eventually include Vladimir Putin and his close associates.

Providing additional security for that many senior officials cannot be done. The growing labor shortage in Russia extends to government departments. Wealthy Russians have been able to send their families abroad for extended visits, at least until the war and its domestic hazards are past.

All the reliable personnel security people are employed and finding additional people is nearly impossible. The Ukrainians figured this out first and timed their internal Russian assassination program for when the targets would have the least protection.

There's more at the link.

If Russian officials are constantly looking over their shoulders and under their cars (for explosives), it will take a heavy toll on morale, which must already be pretty low. After all, how many Russians in Moscow really believe in Putin's war? How many would gladly see Putin dead if the deed could be done?

Despite Trump's efforts to mediate an end to the carnage, Putin has a tiger by the tail and he can't let go until he can claim, truthfully or otherwise, that he has won a glorious victory for Mother Russia. To just pack up and go home now after nearly a million casualties and untold economic harm to his country, would not only disgrace him in the history books, it'd almost certainly invite a coup that would not end well for him.

Life's Origin

Josh Anderson at Quora responds to the question whether it's "possible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that intelligence was required to create life."

His reply is quite interesting. Here it is in full, slightly edited:

Yes, it is. Here’s the question you should ask yourself: Is symbolic code something that blind, intelligence-free physical processes could create and use? Or is mind alone up to the task?

The legendary John Von Neumann (1903-1957) did important work on self-replicating systems. A towering giant in the history of mathematics and pioneer in computer science, he was interested in describing machine-like systems that could build faithful copies of themselves.

Von Neumann soon recognized that it would require both hardware and software. Such a system had to work from a symbolic representation of itself. That is, it must have a kind of encoded picture of itself in some kind of memory.

Crucially, this abstract picture had to include a precise description of the very mechanisms needed to read and execute the code.

Makes sense, right? To copy itself it has to have a blueprint to follow. And this blueprint has to include instructions for building the systems needed to decode and implement the code.

In order to replicate itself, Von Neumann is asserting, a computer would have to be programmed with a complete set of instructions to direct the replication process. But how could a computer program itself to replicate itself?

Here’s the remarkable thing: Life is a Von Neumann Replicator. Von Neumann was unwittingly describing the DNA based genetic system at the heart of life. And yet, he was doing so years before we knew about these systems.

The implications of this are profound. Think about how remarkable this is. It’s like having the blueprints and operating system for a computer stored on a drive in digital code that can only be read by the device itself. It’s the ultimate chicken and egg scenario.

Again, how would a computer ever "know" how to program itself to produce a copy of itself without input at some point from a mind?

How might something like this have come about? For a system to contain a symbolic representation of itself [there has to be an] actualization of precise mapping between two realms, the physical realm and an abstract symbolic realm.

In view here is a kind of translation, mechanisms that can move between encoded descriptions and material things being described. This requires a system of established correlations between stuff out here and information instantiated in a domain of symbols.

Here’s the crucial question: Is this something that can be achieved by chance, physical laws, or intelligence-free material processes? The answer is decidedly NO. What’s physical cannot work out the non-physical. Only a mind can create a true code.

Only a mind can conceive of and manage abstract, symbolic realities. A symbolic system has to be invented. It cannot come about in any other way.

Another way to say this is that there's a vast chasm between immaterial, abstract information (symbols) and physical machines. The only way to bridge that chasm, whether in computers or human beings, is through a mind. But on naturalism there was no mind present when the first cells evolved the ability to replicate.

So how did they?

If you think something like this - mutually interdependent physical hardware and encoded software - can arise through unguided, foresight-less material forces acting over time, think again.

If I were to ask you to think of something, anything that absolutely requires intelligence to bring about, you’d be hard pressed to think of a better example. It’s not just that no one understands how it could be done, it’s that we have every reason to believe that it is impossible in principle.

No intelligence-free material processes could ever give you something like this. (i.e. a complex, self-replicating entity like a living cell)

But wait, how can we be so sure this feature of life was not forged by evolution, built up incrementally by the unseen hand of natural selection? What’s to say this is beyond the ability of evolution to create?

The question answers itself. In order for evolution to take place you have to have a self-replicating system in place. You don’t evolve to the kind of thing we’ve been describing. That is, necessarily, where you begin.

Evolution cannot get started until the first self-replicating system exists, but how does that first system come to exist? How, in other words, does life begin apart from a mind?

The DNA and the dizzyingly complex molecular machinery that it both uses and describes did not evolve into existence. This much is clear.

Any suggestion that it did is not based on a scintilla of empirical evidence or any credible account of how it could have come about in this way.

The conclusion is clear: The unmistakable signature of mind is literally in every cell of every living thing on earth.

Every living thing is comprised of millions if not trillions of self-replicating biological factories called cells. Naturalists insist that this ability to self-replicate evolved without any help from a mind, but they have no answer to the question of how that would've even been possible.

The claim that it did is no more than an assertion of blind faith.

Trump's Running Out of Time

An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report contains a damning indictment of Iranian cheating on their nuclear non-proliferation agreements and increases the likelihood that Israel will soon take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities. According to the IAEA, Iran is working hard to produce several nuclear weapons which, we can assume, will almost certainly be used against Israel and to blackmail other Middle East states.

Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com gives us a summary of Reuters' report on the IAEA's findings.

Iran carried out secret nuclear activities with material not declared to the U.N. nuclear watchdog at three locations that have long been under investigation, the watchdog said in a wide-ranging, confidential report to member states seen by Reuters.

The findings in the "comprehensive" International Atomic Energy Agency report requested by the agency's 35-nation Board of Governors in November pave the way for a push by the United States, Britain, France and Germany for the board to declare Iran in violation of its non-proliferation obligations.

A resolution would infuriate Iran and could further complicate nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington.

Using the IAEA report's findings, the four Western powers plan to submit a draft resolution for the board to adopt at its next meeting the week of June 9, diplomats say. It would be the first time in almost 20 years Iran has formally been found in non-compliance.

Morrissey notes that a separate IAEA report warned that Iran may be just about ready to build as many as nine nuclear weapons:

A separate IAEA report sent to member states on Saturday said Iran’s stock of uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% of weapons grade, had grown by roughly half to 408.6 kg. That is enough, if enriched further, for nine nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick.

Approximately 42 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium is theoretically enough to produce one atomic bomb, if enriched further to 90%, according to the watchdog.

The IAEA report raised a stern warning, saying that Iran is now “the only non-nuclear-weapon state to produce such material” — something the agency said was of “serious concern.”

So what will the Trump administration do? If they allow Iran to continue to enrich Uranium they'll look just as weak as did both Obama and Biden. If they support an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities they risk a broader war, although that risk is much lessened by the diminished capabilities of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

Another question: Does Israel have the capability to actually destroy all the facilities that need to be destroyed? If not, will the U.S. help?

No one wants more war in the region, but the Islamists in Iran are forcing the issue. War will come either now when Iran is at its weakest or it will come later when Iran has nuclear weapons. As Machiavelli wrote centuries ago in The Prince, "War cannot be avoided. It can only be postponed to the advantage of the other side."

Ukrainian Drones Devastate Russia's Bomber Fleet

The Ukrainians are nothing if not extremely clever. Over the weekend they launched simultaneous drone strikes on five Russian air bases that damaged or destroyed approximately thirty percent of Russia's strategic bomber force as well as a number of other aircraft - forty one aircraft in all. The bombers had been used to launch missiles at Ukrainian cities.

Redstate has more details:

Ukrainian special forces operatives launched simultaneous attacks on four Russian strategic bomber bases and the home port of the Russian Northern Fleet early Sunday. The attack was reportedly a year-and-a-half in the making and involved a novel means of delivery and the first use of autonomous drone swarms.

The airbases are the home to Russia's fleet of Tu-22, Tu-95M, and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers as well as AS-50 battle management aircraft. They were located from the Siberian Far East to the Arctic Circle. The furthest target, Belaya Airbase in Irkutsk, is over 2700 miles from Ukraine.

Reports indicate that at least 41 aircraft were hit. The unofficial tally indicates 24 Tu-22, 8 Tu-95MS, and 5 Tu-16 were hit. MiG-31 fighters and Il-76 transports were also hit. To put this in context, open-source data says Russia's bomber inventory is about 58 Tu-22, 47 Tu-95MS, and 15 Tu-160. These planes are the ones used to launch most of the missiles fired at Ukrainian cities.

By any standard, this was a devastating attack. Nearly half of the Tu-22, a quarter of the Tu-95MS, and a third of the Tu-160 fleet, representing just over 30 percent of Russia's strategic bomber force, were damaged or destroyed in one attack. When you consider the operational readiness rate, Russia probably has less than 50 aircraft capable of flying.

The Ukrainians smuggled the drones into Russia and used semi-trucks to deliver them close to the bases. These trucks served as launch platforms for the drones.

This was a fire-and-forget attack. There was no need for Ukrainian drone operators to remain on the scene to manage the attacks. An autonomously targeted drone swarm hit each target. SBU operatives placed the trucks, and the rest of the operation, from first launch to the self-destruct of the transport, appears to have been carried out without a man in the loop.

This is a huge embarrasment for Russia. The lost aircraft are irreplaceable, and the security failure is humiliating. Heads will almost surely roll. Unfortunately, Mr. Putin's is not likely to be one of them.

The Tu-22 and Tu-95MS production lines are closed, and the Tu-160 production is one...per year. For all intents and purposes, this represents a permanent decrease in the size of the Russian strategic bomber fleet.

There's video of the attack at the Redstate link.

Black Racism

Black author and columnist Larry Elder calls attention to a problem that would be amusing were it not so serious. It's the claim by many on the left that blacks can't be racist. Of course, much depends upon how one defines the word "racist," but if we adopt the common-sense definition that racism is discrimination against, or contempt for, someone solely based on their race then racism against whites is rampant among blacks.

Unfortunately, however, the word is often defined in ways that make it a characteristic of which only the majority race can be guilty. This is absurdly tendentious, and Elder cites an example from a recent Piers Morgan podcast:

Piers Morgan, in a February podcast, accused his guest, "trans activist" Blossom Brown, of "race-baiting." Brown replied, "Black women cannot be racist to white women." Brown then added this inability to be racist to white women extended to Morgan: "How am I racist to you? I'm Black. I can't be racist to you." Brown also accused Morgan of lacking "the intellectual capacity to understand" this position.

Ms Brown accuses Morgan of lacking the capacity to understand that there's a racial double standard held by people like Ms Brown. The double standard goes like this: When whites say X about blacks, it's racist and thus morally evil, but when blacks say X about whites, it's perfectly acceptable. If a white does Y to a black, it's racist, but if a black does Y to a white, it's not.

How convenient.

Elder writes:

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) made a similar slur against (black) Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.). In a discussion about the breakdown of the nuclear family, Donalds factually noted that during Jim Crow, a black child was more likely than today to be raised by a married mother and father.

Crockett said: "The fact that you're sitting around talking about 'life was better under Jim Crow,' like, is this because you don't understand history? Or literally it's because you married a white woman and so you think that whitewashed you?"

"Whitewashed"?

Does this apply to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, former Vice President Kamala Harris, ex CNN host Don Lemon, to name a few, who married "outside their race"?

Or Barack Obama's mother and father?

Elder cites a 2020 Rasmussen poll that found that,

"75% of American Adults think the term 'racism' refers to any discrimination by people of one race against another." It found adults more likely to assert "most" blacks are racist than to make that claim about whites, Hispanics or Asians: "Eighteen percent (18%) say most white Americans are racist.

But 25% believe most black Americans are racist. Fifteen percent (15%) think most Hispanic-Americans are racist, while nearly as many (13%) say the same of most Asian-Americans. ... These findings parallel surveying done in 2013, although Americans were even more likely at that time to identify blacks as the most racist group."

The reason so many Americans think racism is common among blacks is because there are so many cases of it. For just a few examples of the dozens like it that could be cited go here, here, here, here, and here. If the races were reversed in any of these examples, we would've had a national meltdown over the insidious prevalence of white racism permeating the nation.

Elder closes his column with these words from black economist Thomas Sowell:

Anti-black racism, as an obstacle to success, has never been more insignificant. Thomas Sowell has said, "Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists.'"

Sowell is speaking of the white community, but racism is still alive, well, and tolerated in the black community.

How Fast Are We Moving?

An article at Big Think has some interesting facts about our actual movement. Here are a few excerpts:

Someone at the greatest distance from Earth’s center located at the equator — 0° latitude — travels at 1676 kilometers per hour (1042 miles per hour), but the higher your latitude is, the slower you move due to the rotating Earth. Someone at 45° latitude moves at a speed of only 1183 km/hr (735 mi/hr), and someone at either the north or south pole wouldn’t move at all; they’d simply complete a rotation while always remaining at Earth’s geographic pole.

But that's actually pretty slow compared to our speed as we orbit the sun:

At its fastest, Earth moves at 30.29 km/s (18.82 mi/s), while at its slowest, it moves at only 29.29 km/s (18.50 mi/s): a difference of about 3%.

But as fast as this is, it's about seven times slower that the speed with which our entire solar system moves around the center of our galaxy:

It’s estimated that our Sun’s speed around the Milky Way is somewhere around 220 km/s (137.5 mi/s): about seven times as great as our planet’s motion around the Sun.

It's also interesting that if we picture the orbits of the planets as lying on a flat disc with the sun at the center, the solar system is moving around the galactic center tilted at an angle of about 60 degrees from the plane of the galaxy.

The Milky Way is located in a cluster of galaxies called the Local Group. Our Local Group is moving through the universe at a speed of about 375 mi/s.

The largest and most massive galaxy in the Local Group is Andromeda, located around 2.5 million light-years away and containing perhaps double the Milky Way’s mass. Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course:

When we factor in the direction and speed with which the Sun moves through the Milky Way, we can determine that the Milky Way and Andromeda are speeding toward one another at 109 km/s; we’re on a collision course that should culminate with a great galactic merger that will begin in about ~4 billion years.

When you add all of these motions together:

• the Earth spinning on its axis,
• the Earth revolving around the Sun,
• the Sun moving through the galaxy,
• the Milky Way heading toward Andromeda,
• the motion of the Local Group

It turns out that we're doing a lot of moving, even when we feel like we're sitting still.

That Hideous Strength

C.S. Lewis was an Oxford scholar of medieval literature, prolific writer and a famous Christian apologist (i.e. defender of the faith). He died in 1963 on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In his novel That Hideous Strength (1945) Lewis writes a "fairy tale," as he calls it, that's a prophetic allegory of the cultural battle we see raging in our own day between the forces of left-wing progressivism/scientism and those who struggle to hold on to the traditional values of family and religious commitment.

In THS Lewis illustrates this struggle by means of a plot by the progressive National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to take over, first a part of England, and ultimately the whole country and the world. N.I.C.E. is led by men who have embraced a scientistic worldview - naturalistic, atheistic, materialistic, reductionistic, objectivist, and purely rational.

As Lewis describes them in a classic work, The Abolition of Man, they're men without chests. They have no heart, no passions. They're men bereft souls who can be pictured as disembodied heads, which is, in fact, how Lewis symbolically represents the leader of N.I.C.E.

N.I.C.E. and the men who run it may seem like fantastically implausible caricatures, but the story should be read as a bi-leveled allegory. On one level it's Lewis' portrayal of the spiritual nature of the battle and on another level it's a portrait of the left's program for crushing their opposition and gaining power, a program that has been employed consistently by the left ever since the days of Karl Marx in the 19th century and perhaps since the French Revolution in 1789 and the ensuing terror.

The Marxists and their progressive allies have throughout this era sought to advance along three fronts. These can be summarized as follows (the summary is taken from Faith and the Arts):

The Four Stages of Cultural Revolution – As described by former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov in the 1970s, these are the stages by which Soviet agents worked to infiltrate and undermine America and other western societies.

1. Demoralization – using pornography and other methods through media, entertainment, education, etc., to break down the moral courage of the people. 
2. Destabilization – By undermining police, courts, borders, etc., to overwhelm public safety and further demoralize the people.
3. Crisis – Build 1 and 2 to the point of a crisis where people resort to rioting or to civil war.
4. New Normal – Declare emergency powers and install the administrative state as a solution for all of the problems which the revolutionary forces have themselves caused.

The Long March through the Institutions – This is a central concept of cultural Marxism. It concerns the strategy of neo-Marxists in America and in other Western societies to overcome the resistance of successful middle-class cultures to the Marxist rhetoric of revolution. Middle-class people tend to be somewhat satisfied with their lives and tolerant of income differences with others.

Cultural Marxists therefore target all of the institutions of middle-class society — church, family, public education, media, the press, entertainment, business, academia, science, law, etc.—in order to create the problems and crises that lead to the imposition of emergency powers and the administrative state. 

Mass Formation – This is an academic concept that has been used for many years to try to understand the mass psychology that appears to be at work in societies like Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s China, where thousands of ordinary citizens either turned a blind eye to the suffering of their fellow citizens or, in some cases, joined the forces that shamed and tortured them.

The process is based on fear and the desire to survive or escape the threat of suffering. Under these conditions, “normal” people may become callous to the suffering of others. They “go along to get along.” But the result is a complete collapse of genuine religious and moral civilization.

All of these corrosive strategies certainly seem to have experienced alarming success in our contemporary culture, at least until the election of Donald Trump, whose administration seems determined to arrest and reverse the trend. At any rate, Lewis shines a light on these strategies in his depiction of the machinations of N.I.C.E. and the spiritual barrenness of those employed in advancing its cause.

For those who may never have read That Hideous Strength, I'd recommend first reading Abolition of Man and perhaps then perusing brief summaries of the first two novels in Lewis' "space" trilogy Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra before tackling That Hideous Strength.

The story will make more sense if you do.

Fantastic Design (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper one gets into it. Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here's another question: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Furthermore, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

For that matter where are the instructions stored that tell not only our bones to stop growing but also tell each organ in the body to stop growing? This information can't be stored solely on the DNA because the DNA has to be instructed when to stop and start producing RNA (and thus protein). How did that regulatory system come about and where is the information that governs it stored and how is it regulated?

And how is all of this produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution? No one knows. We just have to gin up enough blind faith to believe that it did, we are told, because believing that the body is designed by an intelligent agent has too many uncomfortable religious implications.

It all reminds one of a 1997 quote by the biologist Richard Lewontin who wrote that:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of heath and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door....To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Lewontin and his fellow naturalistic materialists refuse to believe that the marvels of biology are the product of intelligence, but they commit their lives to writing books about how blind chance, despite how absurd it seems, can accomplish miracles.

Fantastic Design (Pt.I)

One of the most fascinating books I've read over the past several years is one titled Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents resulting from over a billion or so years of genetic mutations and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's most probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's an excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned — all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.

Robert Heinlein on the Political Divide

I recently came across a quote from the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who observed that:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

I'm not sure I fully agree. I do think he's right that the fundamental political difference is between people who want to control others, to limit the freedoms of others, and people who just want to be left alone and free to live pretty much as they please.

But I demur when Heinlein imputes noble motives to the controllers. I don't believe that there are many of those who seek to limit our freedoms who are doing it from idealistic motives. It seems rather that their chief motive is a lust for power augmented, perhaps, by a bitterness or hatred borne of envy or jealousy.

The left has always tended toward totalitarian authority over others, but, although some may be motivated by utilitarian desires for the greatest good, those idealists are often swept aside by those who covet power.

It almost always happens this way. The French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and all the lesser leftist revolutions in Asia (North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam) and Africa that plagued the 20th century began as efforts to make life better for people and ended in mass slaughter, including the executions of the idealists who started the revolution. Approximately 100 million people were murdered by leftist totalitarians in the last century alone.

Moreover, the lust for control is not just typical of full-blown revolutions. It exists in our own polity as well. The difference between liberals and conservatives can be summed up thus: Liberals want ever-increasing power concentrated in the federal bureaucracy, the better to dictate how people live. Conservatives want power disbursed to state and local authorities so that citizens have more say in the decisions that affect their own lives.

I think Heinlein is mistaken, too, in characterizing those who want to retain their freedoms as surly curmudgeons who lack altruism. No doubt that description fits some, and it may be the common stereotype, but it's basically unfair. Conservatives donate an enormous amount of their personal resources - money, time, and talent - to their local communities as well as to efforts to ease global miseries. Studies show that conservatives are at least as generous as liberals and some studies show that they are more so (See also here).

So let's give Heinlein's observation an A for pithiness and a C for accuracy.

A Day to Honor Valor

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but maybe it's not inappropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its year-long mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God this Memorial Day.

There's No "There" There

Probably to the disappointment of conspiracy theorists everywhere both FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have concluded that on the basis of the evidence at hand Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself in a prison cell six years ago, and there's no evidence of any foreign involvement in the attempts on Donald Trump's life last summer.

Jim Geraghty has a full report on these revelations here. He writes that,

FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — two men who you figure would be highly motivated to find any sinister plot to kill Jeffrey Epstein before he would spill more secrets of powerful men, particularly if prominent Democrats were behind the plot — have concluded that Epstein killed himself.

The top two FBI officials also say that in their review of the assassination attempts against Donald Trump, they’ve looked for “any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike” and concluded, “the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there.”

The two men were guests on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures show hosted by Maria Bartiromo where they had this exchange:

Bartiromo: You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. People don’t believe it.

Patel: Well, I mean, listen. They have a right to their opinion, but as someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor, who’s been in that prison system, been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who’s been in segregated housing, you know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.

Bongino: He killed himself. Again, you want me to — I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.

On the matter of the Trump assassination attempts Geraghty reports this dialogue:

Bartiromo: I know you can’t talk about any active investigation, and our viewers understand that. How come we don’t have more information on the assassination attempts on President Trump?

Patel: There are two reasons. Two open, ongoing prosecutions. So, two of the investigations are obviously closed, because the individuals are dead, but there’s two live prosecutions. And so, we can’t get ahead of the federal court case. A lot of that information will come out in the federal court cases.

But we have personally invested our time in making sure that we have looked at all the, any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike, and we’ve both been down to Quantico. We’ve both done the laboratory testing, we’ve both seen the explosives analysis, we’ve both seen the firearm and physically held it, we are all in on these investigations.

Bartiromo: Are we going to be surprised at what you learned?

Bongino: You know what, Maria? Kash is not kidding, we’ve been personally briefed extensively on every single detail, nugget, tendril of this case. One is actively in court right now, so out of respect for the case, it’s probably more appropriate that I stay quiet on that. However, I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth, and whether you like it or not is up to you.

If there was a big, explosive “there” there — given my history as a Secret Service agent, and my personal friendship as a director does with the president, give me one logical, sensible reason we would not have — if you can think of one, there isn’t. In some of these cases, the “there” you’re looking for is not there. And I know people — I get it, I understand. It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.

Despite this testimony from two very big supporters of President Trump, I doubt that either issue - the Epstein affair or the assassination attempts - will be put to rest. You can read more on this at Geraghty's column at the above link.

The Waiting-Times Problem

Among the many serious problems besetting any theory of blind, unguided evolution is something called the "waiting-times problem." David Klinghoffer discusses this in his fine book on the work of biologist Richard Sternberg. The book is titled Plato's Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, and it outlines Sternberg's argument for a genetic influence that has no physical presence in the living cell, not in DNA, RNA, or what's called the epigenome. It's immaterial.

In Klinghoffer's discussion of the waiting-times problem he quotes Sternberg's summary of it: "if a particular trait needs two or more mutations - not to appear simultaneously, but just for two changes to coalesce, to come together in an individual - such that an adaptive trait appears, how much time would that take?"

Biologists have estimated that in humans it would take 216 million years for just two mutations that would have a beneficial impact in a population. In whales, which have a different generation time and breeding population sizes, it would take 43 million years for just two beneficial mutations to arise to change just a single trait.

The standard Darwinian model of evolution asserts that whales evolved from a land mammal named Pakicetus, but the waiting time for descendants of Pakicetus to evolve into whales would far exceed any amount of time plausibly available for such a transition to occur. It would require tens of thousands of changes in the animal,

changes to the eyes, changes to hearing, changes to the reproductive system. Modification to the body, so that instead of walking on four limbs, the body adopts a torpedo shape..., that has hydrodynamic properties....changes to the musculature....changes to the vertebral column. The origin of a tail fluke, and all of the musculature and neurological systems for coordinating that. Changes in breathing are very important....when diving the blow hole [must remain] closed....[The animal] has to be able to sleep at sea....[and do so] while most of the body is underwater.

These changes are just a fraction of the problems that would have to be overcome for a land mammal to evolve into a whale. It's like taking a Volkswagen Beetle, modifying it to be able to explore the ocean depths, and doing so through some random process. How long would it take for all the necessary mutations to occur?

The standard model states that whales didn't exist 50 million years ago and evolved from Pakicetus over a period of 14 million years, but it would've taken 43 million years for just a single change to have occurred. That's the waiting-times problem.

Sternberg maintains that there's something extrinsic to the material world, something immaterial (like Plato's Forms) that guides the evolutionary process and gives it direction. Without that, the waiting-times problem makes evolution - purely materialistic Darwinism - incomprehensible.

Of course, modern Intelligent Design theorists have been saying this same thing for almost fifty years.

Possible Explanations for a Finely-Tuned Universe

The book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos by cosmologists Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis discusses the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the forces, parameters and constants that comprise the structure of the universe. Here's a video trailer that introduces the theme of their book:

The trailer suggests that there are four possible explanations for this incomprehensible level of precision, but for reasons I'll explain in a moment, there really are only three.

The first is that something about the universe makes it a logical necessity that the values cosmologists find are in fact the only possible values a universe could have. There is no reason, however, to think this is the case. There's nothing about the universe, as far as we know, that makes it impossible for gravity or the strong nuclear force, to take just two examples, to have slightly different strengths.

The second explanation is that even though it's astronomically improbable that any universe would be so fine-tuned that living things could exist in it, if there are other universes, all with different parameters, universes so abundant that their number approaches infinity, then one like ours is almost bound to exist. This option goes by the name of the multiverse hypothesis.

The difficulty with this idea is that there's no good reason to believe other universes actually do exist, and even if they do why should we assume that they're not all replicas of each other, and even if they're all different whatever is producing them must itself be fine-tuned in order to manufacture universes, so all the multiverse hypothesis does is push the problem back a step or two.

The third explanation is that our universe is the product of a very intelligent agent, a mathematical genius, which exists somehow beyond the bounds of our cosmos.

There are actually two varieties of the third option. One is to say that the designer of the universe is a denizen of another universe in which technology has advanced to the point that it allows inhabitants of that world to design simulations of other universes.

The trailer treats this as a fourth option but since it posits a designer who resides in some other universe it's actually a combination of the second and third options and suffers some of the same difficulties as the multiverse hypothesis. It also assumes that computer technology could ever simulate not only an entire cosmos but also human consciousness, which is certainly problematic.

The other version of the third explanation is to assume that the designer of our universe is not some highly accomplished computer nerd in another universe but rather that it is a transcendent, non-contingent being of unimaginable power and intellectual brilliance who is the ultimate cause of all contingent entities, whether universes or their inhabitants.

Which of these options is thought most attractive will vary from person to person, but philosophical arguments won't settle the issue for most people. Human beings tend to believe what they most fervently want to be true, and what they most want to be true is often whatever makes the fewest demands upon their autonomy and their lifestyle.

Astonishing Behavior in a Cephalopod

This wonderful video raises some fascinating questions:

How did the physiology necessary to camouflage itself like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these cephalopods display evolve by those same mechanisms?

If mutations affect DNA, and DNA generates proteins, and proteins create tissues and enzymes, etc. what is it that mutations act upon in the organism that gives rise to behavior? How does the octopus "know" to make itself look like the particular background it finds itself in, and how did, or could, such a phenomenon evolve through mechanistic processes that didn't "know" what they were doing?

The evolution of any behavior requires not just the appropriate genetic mutations to create the neural algorithms that control the behavior but also the physiological structures necessary for the behavior. These changes, moreover, must occur gradually over eons of time and pretty much simultaneously in a population of organisms, and, according to the naturalistic account, as a result of purely blind, undirected mechanisms.

If you keep all that in mind, you might find yourself strongly tempted to think that maybe the cephalopod's amazing abilities are the result of intelligent engineering of some sort and that naturalism, despite its popularity among intellectuals, offers completely inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.

Can't We be Good Without God?

It's not uncommon to hear those who bear a certain antipathy toward Christianity boast that they don't need God in order to be good, that they can live just as fine a life as any believer without committing themselves to all that Christian mumbo-jumbo.

Unfortunately for these folks, though, they're missing the point. The issue is not whether people can be kind, generous, compassionate, faithful, etc. if there is no God, of course they can.

Rather the issue is whether there can be any meaningful moral standards if there is no God. If there's no standard of morality outside ourselves and no accountability for how we measure up to that standard, morality is just a bundle of personal preferences and no one's preferences are any more "morally right" than anyone else's.

C.S. Lewis had something to say about the man who asks why we should think he can't be good without believing in Christianity. Lewis states that the man is not asking a reasonable question: "If [the man] never heard of Christianity, he wouldn't be asking this question," and "if, having heard of Christianity, and having seriously considered it, he had decided it was untrue, then once more he would not be asking the question."

Lewis says that the man who asks why he cannot be good without believing in Christianity,

has heard of Christianity and is by no means certain that it may not be true...to such a man it might be enough to reply that he is really asking to be allowed to get on with being "good" before he has done his best to discover what good means....He is deliberately trying not to know whether Christianity is true or false, because he foresees endless trouble if it turns out to be true....

He is like the man who won't go to the doctor when he feels a mysterious pain because he's afraid of what the doctor may tell him....

This man is not committing an honest error, Lewis asserts. Rather he's committing a dishonest error. Lewis doesn't put it this way, but the man is deliberately refusing to examine his reasoning. He's refusing to consider how there can be moral right and wrong if he, or society, is the highest moral authority. He's refusing to consider how anything can be morally wrong if there's no ultimate accountability for how people live. He's refusing to ask himself what the words "morally wrong" even mean if we're just the product of mindless forces and random chance.

If the atheist is correct, if there is no God, no transcendent moral standard to serve as an objective reference point, then there's absolutely no reason why people should care about those they have no feelings for. There's no reason why anyone should sacrifice his own well-being for the sake of others. There's no reason why we should not all be egoists or even nihilists.

The person who thinks that there are things that are objectively wrong, who thinks that it would be morally wrong to be an egoist or a nihist, is tacitly acknowledging that there must be a God.

The only reason human beings have for not being egoists or nihilists is that they believe that it would be objectively wrong to be such a person, but it can only be objectively wrong to be such a person if there's an objective standard of moral right and wrong. And there can only be an objective standard of moral right and wrong if there's a God.

There's nothing else that could bear the enormous weight of human morality.