Seeking God in Science part 3: Things Exist

The mere undertaking of this project of reconciling the mechanistic and teleological worldviews is already chock-a-block with tacit assumptions.  I am assuming that you, my readers, actually exist.  I am rejecting solipsism.  By choosing writing as my medium I am assuming that you know how to read and that you understand English.  But publishing on-line I am assuming that you have access to computers and the internet.  These seem like pretty innocuous assumptions, but those last two assumptions would (again, obviously) not have been true 100 years ago.  At that time, the word "computer" existed, but it was a job title, not a kind of machine.  In fact, 100 years ago, in 1926, the whole idea that a machine could do what a computer does would have been widely considered a ridiculous notion.  It would not be for another ten years that Alan Turing would first lay down the theoretical foundations that showed how a machine could do what a computer did.

There are a lot of things that modern humans take for granted that would have been considered utterly absurd just a few generations ago.  There are things at the cutting edge of science that seem absurd to us today, but which will probably be considered obvious by future generations.

How can we explain this fluidity in what is considered "obviously true" from one generation to the next?  One possibility is that reality is actually changing.  Maybe Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity is actually what created gravity.  How could we possibly prove otherwise?  There actually is an answer to that question, but I want to set that aside (consider it an exercise) and instead just accept it on faith for now that there is some kind of unchanging underlying reality "out there" and that the changes in what is considered "obviously true" between generations reflects changes in our understanding of that objective reality rather than actual changes in that objective reality itself.  But put a pin in this assumption because later we will have to circle back and discharge it.

The question I want to ask here is, if reality is unchanging, how is it possible for our understanding of it to change so radically?  Why are so many things that are obviously true for us so obviously false for our ancestors?  Again, one possible answer is that our ancestors were just stupid, but that also cries out for an explanation that is not forthcoming: what happened to make our generation so much smarter than previous ones?  Providing a proper answer to this question is a deep, deep rabbit hole that I don't want to go down right now, so again I'm just going to ask you to take it on faith for now that our ancestors were not stupid, and that the answer to the question of how they got things wrong is that they simply didn't have access to the data that we have access to today because of technological limitations of their era.  Today we have the James Web space telescope.  500 years ago they had their naked eyes.

Also, 500 years ago, the mechanistic and teleological worldviews had not yet diverged.  It was obvious that there was a supernatural realm.  It was obvious that the heavens were governed by very different laws than applied here on earth.  It was obvious that there were deities of various stripes that meddled in the affairs of men and had to be appeased by worship and sacrifice.  The idea that, say, the heavens were governed by the same laws that applied here on earth would have gotten you laughed out the room at best, labeled as mentally defective at worst.  All you had to do to see that this was a ridiculous notion was to observe that the moon and stars were somehow suspended above the earth with no visible means of support and shone with eternal fire without any apparent source of fuel.  Of course there was something radically different going on up there than down here.

All that changed in 1687 when Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).  In it he showed that the heavens actually are governed by the same laws that apply here on earth.  The moon actually does fall towards the earth (but it also moves sideways just fast enough that it keeps missing the earth).

Today most people take this for granted.  There are still some gravity-deniers a.k.a. flat-earthers, and they will actually come back to play a significant role in this story, but that is also something I want to set aside for now.  (BTW, if any of you reading this are flat-earthers please let me know!)

Principia is widely considered to be the advent of modern science, what ultimately turned out to be the leading edge of the wedge between mechanism and teleology.  Newton didn't know this.  In fact, he would have been appalled to learn that this was his legacy.  Newton, like virtually everyone in Europe at the time, was a devout Christian, and he thought he was working to glorify God by discovering the secrets of His handwork.  Newton surely would have been horrified to see that what he ultimately accomplished was the ushering in of the (so-called) Enlightenment 

But my point here is not to speculate about Newton's cognitive dissonance.  My point is that things modern people, both religious and not, take for granted today were considered self-evidently absurd less than 400 years ago.  And it's not just the idea that the moon and sun and stars are made of the same stuff that we are.

Richard Feynman in 1964 opened his famous Lectures on Physics with this quote:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

One of the reasons Feynman chose the atomic theory is because at the time, in 1964, that theory had only recently been accepted after a scientific debate that lasted over two thousand years.  The earliest speculation that atoms might exist dates back to an ancient Greek philosopher named Democritus.  Democritus has no actual evidence for the existence of atoms.  It was just a guess on this part.  It turned out to be correct, but it took over 2000 years for the matter to be definitively settled, and it took no less a luminary that Albert Einstein to provide the argument that finally convinced the scientific community.

Today we are at the midst of two similar radical conceptual revolutions regarding quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence.  It is just obvious that there is something special about human brains, and yet the list of things that we can do that machines can't gets shorter by the day.  It is just obvious that a cat in a box is either alive or dead, and yet quantum effects are being demonstrated on larger and larger objects.  Still nowhere near an actual cat, of course, but an experimental demonstration of where quantum effects actually stop happening remains elusive.

Just because something is obvious does not mean that it is actually true.  And it gets even crazier than that.  It can be the case that a statement like "X is true" to be legitimately considered true even though X is actually false!  An example of this is, "Gravity is a force that pulls objects towards the center of the earth."  Strictly speaking, that is false.  Gravity is not a force.  What actually causes object to fall towards the center of the earth is curved spacetime.  But pointing this out seems absurdly pedantic in any context other than a physics class.

The problem runs much, much deeper than that.  Consider "the earth is flat."  This is often taken as the canonical example of a false statement, but even that assessment is laden with tacit assumptions.  What does "flat" actually mean?  It can't possibly mean perfectly flat like the surface of a mirror because obviously there are mountains and valleys which deviate from flat by thousands of meters.  "Not flat" doesn't mean "not lumpy", it means "curved".  More to the point, it means (roughly) spherical.  But the difference between spherical and flat is just the difference between a finite radius and an infinite one.  The actual radius of the earth is about 4000 miles, which is pretty big on a human scale.  To actually notice the difference between 4000 miles and an infinite radius that is bigger than the inherent lumpiness of mountains and valleys requires that you make measurements that span hundreds or even thousands of miles.  If all you care about is you immediate vicinity, being flat is a pretty good approximation to the truth.

So is there anything we can say that all non-mentally-ill humans, including the pedantic ones, will agree on?  It depends on how much pedantry you are willing to tolerate, but here is my best shot:

Things exist.

To hopefully head the pedants off at the pass I want to stipulate that when I say "things" I mean physical objects like chairs and tables and cows and human beings.  I am not taking a stand on what it actually means for a thing to be a "physical object" or for it to "exist", only that the words "things exist" denotes an idea that is a plausible explanation for my subjective experience that things seem to exist.  I can see and touch chairs and tables and cows and other human beings (OK, I confess, I have never actually touched a cow, but I have seen and heard and smelled them.)  I've heard other people profess to be able to see and touch chairs and tables and other people.  The milk in my grocery store comes from somewhere.  I'm told it comes from cows, and I have no reason to doubt this.

Again, I want to be clear that I am not arguing that it is a slam-dunk that milk comes from cows, only that it is plausible, because it is plausible that cows actually exist and that they and the milk on my grocery store shelves are not just a collective delusion.  There are things whose existence is highly debatable, like bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.  It might turn out that these don't exist (I think that's quite likely).  It might turn out that cows and chairs and tables don't exist (less likely).  But it is plausible that they do exist, and anyone who argues that none of these things exist (for some reasonable interpretation of the word "exist") can be dismissed out of hand.

That's it.  That is going to be my starting assumption.  Not to leave you in suspense, here is a ridiculously oversimplified version of where this is going to lead.  It will turn out that things that exist are made of parts called "atoms" which come in 92 naturally occurring varieties.  Atoms are in turn made up of smaller parts called electrons, neutrons, and protons (and a few other things which can be safely ignore for our purposes).  Electrons and protons have a property called "electric charge" which causes them to push and pull on each other from a distance.  In addition, there is this thing called "gravity" which causes things to pull (only pull, not push) on each other from a distance.  And all of this pushing and pulling can explain a lot of the things we observe.

The $64,000 question will, of course, be: can this pushing and pulling explain everything we observe?  In particular, can it explain things like life, the origin of the universe, emotions, morality, and consciousness?  The answer will turn out to be "yes.... but".  The "but" will turn out to be a fundamentally different understanding of what it means for things to exist, so our foundational assumption will ultimately circle back to bite itself in the ass, so to speak, when we get to quantum mechanics.  (This is what makes quantum mechanics weird.)

The other Big Question will turn out to be: can we accept the truth of mere pushing and pulling being able to explain everything without sinking into a nihilistic pit of despair?  If all we are, at root, is electrons and protons pushing and pulling on each other, what is the point?  Is there a reason to get up in the morning?  Here again, the answer will turn out to be "yes", this time without a "but".

This is one of the most challenging blog posts I have ever written.  Grappling with the problem of the ambiguity of words using words as my only tool turns out to be quite the little challenge.  I've been wrestling with it for over a week now, and discarded at least half a dozen drafts.  I decided today to just bully on through and publish whatever I ended up with when I ran out of steam.  This is the product of that resolution.  If this post felt like a garbled mess, that's why.

Another reason for publishing this now is that I have signed up to participate in a [debate on evolution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJHhNe-LhA0) this Saturday, Feb 28, at 9PM Eastern time on Modern Day Debate, and I need to take some time to prepare for that.  So I won't be publishing anything else here until after that.

Seeking God in Science Part 2: Pits and Pratfalls in the Meanings of Words

About ten years ago I decided to take a deep dive into young-earth creationism (YEC).  I was curious to find out how people maintain a belief in something that, to me, was so obviously wrong.  Notice that this project was itself an application of the the scientific method to everyday life.  I was faced with a Problem, an observation for which I could not (at the time) provide an adequate explanation: a fairly large group of people who professed to believe something that seemed like transparent and easily debunked nonsense to me.  If the YEC hypothesis were so easily debunked, why had no one simply provided the definitive debunking that would persuade everyone that it was nonsense?

So I decided to do an experiment and produce the Definitive Debunking of young-earth creationism myself.  How hard could it be?  The YEC hypothesis is so radically at odds with the data that there are mountains of evidence against it.  All I had to do was pick a few choice data points, assemble them into a slick YouTube video, and all the YECs would behold and be amazed at my erudition, and immediately see the light.

Needless to say, that did not happen.

The first problem I ran into was one I mentioned in the previous installment: direct access to scientific data is very hard to obtain, even for scientists.  Nearly all scientific data is published, if not actually in the form of testimony (a.k.a. a scientific paper), then at least with some kind of testimonial baggage attached regarding its provenance: how the data was collected, whether or not it has been processed or edited in any way, whether the proper procedures were followed to calibrate the instruments and insure that the reagents all had the right concentrations, or whatever.  And one common thread among YECs is that they did not (and do not) trust scientists.  YECs believe that there is a wide-ranging scientific conspiracy to promote Darwinism and conceal the truth, which is that God created the world in seven days, that Noah's ark really existed, and so on.

How do you persuade someone like that?  Distrust in the scientific establishment eliminated at a stroke 99% of the arguments I might have offered.  I had to come up with a way to demonstrate that the earth was old using only data to which people could have direct access, and that turned out to be quite the challenge.  If you are not a YEC you might want to tackle this yourself.  It's even more challenging than showing that the earth is not flat without any appeal to testimony or authority.

You can judge the results of my efforts yourself, but the details don't really matter all that much. The unsurprising result that my argument failed to persuade anyone doesn't really matter all that much either.  What matters is why my argument failed to persuade.  There turned out to be two reasons, one superficial ostensible reason, and a much deeper real reason.

The superficial ostensible reason was that my argument relied on the assumption that geological processes in the past operated more or less the way they do now.  That seemed (and still seems) like a reasonable assumption to me, but it was an assumption, and I didn't justify it.  It didn't even cross my mind at the time.  It just seemed obvious to me that it was true, and equally obvious that it would seem obvious to everyone.  Which was, obviously, wrong.

But the deeper reason that my argument failed to persuade was that it was based on a much deeper false assumption: that a YEC's subjective experience of scientific data is the same as mine and that, therefore, any argument that would persuade me would persuade them if properly presented.  It turns out (and it took me a few years to figure this out) that the divergence between my mindset and a YEC happens long before either one of us actually looks at any scientific data, even before we become aware of the existence of such things as science or data.  It probably happened before we learned to read, or even speak.

As humans, there are two fundamentally different ways we can approach the project of making sense of our subjective experience.  The first is to ask: how does this work?  As babies we flail around randomly for along time until one day we manage to figure out that there seem to be causal connections between things happening inside of us and things happening outside.  If we make certain noises, or flail around in particular ways, good things happen, and if we make different noises or flail around in other ways, bad things happen.  Eventually we get to the point where we are in a position to wonder explicitly about what the fuck is going on, at which point we can ask one of two fundamental questions.  The first is: how does all this stuff work?  What are the rules or the mechanisms that control the behavior of the things around me?  The second is: why is all this stuff happening?  What is the point?

The first question leads to science; the second, to religion.

Note that each of these questions makes a different, tacit assumption.  The first question assumes that there are rules that govern the behavior of the things around us, and the second question assumes that there is a point.  Making the first assumption turns out to be fruitful because it turns out that there are in fact rules, and, fortuitously, that these rules are discoverable and tractable even to our puny little brains, and putting effort into figuring out what the rules are pays handsome dividends.  But it leads to a problem: the more we understand the rules, the more it seems like there is no point, no satisfying answer to the question of why.  And many people find that a bitter pill to swallow.

But here's the thing that many secular people don't appreciate.  I know I didn't.  Asking the second question is also fruitful, but in a very different way.  If you start with the assumption that there is a point, then you can find a lot of corroborating evidence for that.  Now, no religious person would put it like that.  They would use different words, words like, "You have to open your heart to God" or something like that.  But it turns out that what those words mean is more or less the same.  In order to find the point, you have to first accept the possibility that there could be one.  If you have spent a lifetime in pursuit, not of the point, but of the rules, and the rules indicate that there is no point, then it's going to be very, very hard for you to ever see the point.

This thing that I am calling "the point" is actually called "purpose" or "teleology".  I intend for these words to all be synonyms.  I'm going to keep calling it "the point" just because I think it's a little pithier.  But whenever I say "the point" what I mean is "purpose" or "the meaning of life" or "teleology" or whatever your favorite label is for this somewhat ineffable concept.  (I will sometimes refer to these as the "teleological worldview" and the contrasting "mechanistic worldview".)

Now, a secular person may say that it's perfectly OK not to ever see the point if in fact there is no point.  But it is not perfectly OK.  If the reason that you fail to see the point is that you were asking the wrong questions, then this might blind you to an actual truth, and this might cause you to fail to achieve some pretty big goals.  If the reason you fail to see the point is that the assumption that there is no point was tacitly assumed by your foundational question, then your conclusion that there is no point is not a sound logical conclusion.  It is begging the question.

There is another problem with simply accepting the apparently-true conclusion that there is no point.  It fails to account for some of the data, which is that part of many people's subjective experience is a deeply-rooted conviction that there must be a point.  For many people, this subjective experience is every bit as real as the subjective experience of stubbing your toe on a rock.  Even if you yourself do not accept it, surely you can understand how someone can look around them at all the beauty and the ugliness and the striving and the struggling and the suffering and come away with the conviction that there just has to be something more going on behind the scenes, that all this cannot just ultimately come down to a roll of some cosmic dice.  It cannot just be that life-sucks-and-then-you-die-the-end.  Giving this widely-held conviction some respect as a possible indicator of an actual phenomenon (rather than writing it off as a collective delusion) is analogous to someone in the ancient world looking at the retrograde motion of Mars and thinking that, just maybe, there is something more to that than just the gods pushing it around capriciously.

Can we reconcile these two world views?  Yes, I believe we can, but it's not easy because the divergence happens long before any argument can even begin.  Humans start to wonder, "How does it work?" or "What is the point?" long before they learn how to render those wonderings into words.  By the time a person gets to the point where they have enough command of language to even begin to engage in a discussion about such things, they have almost certainly already travelled a long way down one or the other of these philosophical roads.  As a result, when discussing such things people often talk past each other, believing falsely that they share a set of tacit foundational assumptions, including the meanings of words like "point" and "purpose" and "meaning" and "good" and "exist" and, the elephant in the room, "God."  A lot of disagreements I see between secular and religious people boil down to misunderstandings over the meanings of words.

So in order for this project to have any hope of success we have to start by finding some common ground between the mechanistic and the teleological worldview to serve as a starting point.  As I just pointed out, this is quite challenging because these worldview start to diverge even before humans acquire a facility for language.  How can we reach agreement about whether or not God exists if we can't even be sure we agree on what the words "God" and "exist" mean?

Despite these deep-seated differences, there are some things that (according to my subjective experience) humans almost universally agree on, starting with the fact that we are humans.  We have bodies made of flesh and bone and blood.  We are born, we live, we die.  We have arms and legs and eyes and ears and brains.  We live on a planet we call Earth that is inhabited by things that are not humans, like animals and plants and rocks.  All of these things exist in three-dimensional space, and behave according to a set of rules.  I may not know exactly what these rules are, but it's pretty clear that there are rules.  For example, objects move along continuous trajectories.  They do not suddenly disappear from one place and reappear someplace else.  Sometimes these rules appear to be broken, but on closer examination it always turns out that this apparent breaking of the rules is some kind of illusion, sometimes accidental, but sometimes created deliberately for the purpose of entertainment.

There are some other aspects of my subjective experience that seem to be shared by other humans.  For example, I sleep, and sometimes when I sleep, I dream, and usually when I am dreaming I am not aware that I'm dreaming.  While they are happening, dreams feel every bit as real to me as being awake.  It is only after I wake up that I look back and realize that what I experienced was not real, or at least, a very different kind of reality than the one I experience when I'm awake.  In my dreams, objects do spontaneously appear and disappear.  Monsters appear out of nowhere.  All kinds of weird shit happens regularly in my dreams that never happens when I'm awake.

Dreams are different than my waking experience.  When I'm awake, I have a lot of evidence that the things I perceive are actually real.  I can see things.  I can touch them.  I can take photographs of them.  Other people behave as if they can see and touch the same things that I can see and touch.  The most parsimonious explanation of all of these observations is that these things are actually real, that there is an objective reality "out there" and distinct from me.

But not all of my subjective experience is like that.  For example, my dreams are purely private.  No one experiences them but me.  No one else has ever reported experiencing the same dream as me.  There are some common themes (like monsters appearing out of nowhere) but the details are always different.

There are other subjective experiences that I have that appear to be private in this way even when I'm awake.  For example, I feel emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, love.  Other people report feeling these too, but I can't verify this in the same way that I can verify the existence of material objects.  I can't demonstrate to you that I am happy or sad or afraid.  You might be able to guess based on how I behave, but it's hard.  If I say, "There is a chair over there" you can verify that I am telling you the truth by looking over there to see if there is a chair or not.  But if I say, "I love you" or "I think you're beautiful" it's much harder to tell if I'm being truthful or not.  Sometimes it's hard for me to tell!  Is this feeling that I'm feeling really love, or just lust?  What even is love?

These kinds of private experiences are actually a huge part of my subjective sensations, and the span a very wide range of feelings: joy, despair, fear, love, loathing, passion, and a host of others.  The difference, the thing that makes the private experiences private, is that I can build a machine that can see and feel a chair.  I can't build a machine that experiences joy.

So how can I know that what I mean when I say the word "joy" is the same thing that you mean when you use the same word?

There is no simple answer to that question.  There is a complicated one, but that is beside the point at the moment.  The point is that English speakers invariably behave as if they accept that the word "joy" means the same to their interlocutors as it does to them.  They just assume that the question has an answer despite not having a clue what that answer actually is.  And they do the same thing with words like "God" and "exist" and "forever" and so on.  And that gets them into trouble.

Now, recall the Zeno's paradox puzzle from the end of the previous installment.  It began:

Imagine you have a series of ordered tasks that you have to complete.  Before you can start the second task you have to complete the first one.  Before you can start the third, you have to complete the second, and so on.  It is self-evident that in order to complete all of the tasks, you have to complete the last task.

Notice that at this point I have said nothing about how many tasks there are.  In particular, I have not mentioned the possibility that the list of tasks could be infinite.  Humans are not used to dealing with infinite things.  By default, when we envision a "list of tasks" we naturally think of a finite list, a list of things we could potentially write down on a sheet of paper.  And for a finite list of ordered tasks it is indeed true that to complete all of the tasks you have to complete the last one.

But then I pull a fast one in the next paragraph:

Now consider the task of moving from point A to point B some distance apart.  This task can be decomposed into sub-tasks.  In order to move from A to B you first have to move half-way from A to B.  Then you have to move from the half-way point to a point that is three-quarters of the way from A to B, and so on.

Did you see the trick?  It's in the words "and so on."  With those three simple words I have made the list of tasks infinite, and an infinite list of tasks has no last task.

Is it still true that to complete an infinite list of tasks it is necessary to complete the last task?  Well, maybe.  There are certainly some infinite lists of tasks for which this is true.  For example, if I were to ask you to move to A to B, and then back to A, and then back to B again, and so on, that would also be an infinite sequence of tasks, and there it is indeed impossible to complete all of the tasks (at least for a mortal being like you).  But moving from A to B once is obviously possible.  So what is the difference?

The trick is to notice that completing the last task is not the only way to describe how to complete a list of tasks.  The other way to complete all of the tasks is to complete every task.  And for the sub-tasks of moving (once) from A to B, you can complete every task despite the fact that you can't complete the last one (because there is no last one).

In modern mathematical parlance we would say that it is possible to produce a one-to-one correspondence between the infinite sequence of sub-tasks of moving from A to B, and a finite interval of time.  Yes, there is an infinite sequence of tasks, but for any one of them I can tell you exactly when it will be complete, and for every task, the completion time will be less than some finite time.  This is possible because, although the list of tasks is getting longer and longer, the tasks themselves are getting shorter and shorter, and the rate at which the tasks are getting shorter undoes the effect of the list getting longer and longer.

The point here is not to force you to relive your high school algebra nightmares about the mathematical properties of infinite sequences.  The point is that Zeno's paradox is not a deep philosophical insight, it is a linguistic trick.  It sets up the problem using words that lull you into thinking about finite sequences, then pulls the rug out from under you by making you think about infinite sequences in the same terms as you were thinking about finite ones.

A lot of religious rhetoric uses similar linguistic tricks.  Consider Genesis 1:3 "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."  What does the word "said" mean here?  Does it literally mean that God spoke, i.e. expelled air through his lungs to vibrate his vocal cords to produce sounds?  It seems a little absurd, right?  Does God even have lungs?  I mean, humans were created in God's image, so it's not completely out of the question, but it seems more than a little odd and pedestrian for God to make light by literally casting a Lumos spell, no?

If we can get ourselves into this much trouble with the words "last task" and "said" imagine the damage we can do with things like "essential nature" and "the word became flesh".  In order to avoid fooling ourselves the way Zeno's paradox did, we shall have to proceed with the most extreme caution.

Seeking God in Science: First Steps

Almost two years ago I started writing a series of posts about the scientific method.  In that post I made a promise, as yet unfulfilled, to show how the scientific method could provide a complete and satisfying worldview which fulfills the emotional and spiritual human needs normally serviced by religions.  I claim that: 

Science provides a complete worldview applicable to all aspects of life, not just ones that are commonly regarded as "science-y".  Furthermore, I believe that this worldview can be practiced by anyone, not just professional scientists.  You don't even have to be good at math (though it doesn't hurt).  And I also think that if more people did this, the world would be a better place.

That project fizzled after only nine months for a couple of reasons.  First, Donald Trump was re-elected president, and for a long time it was hard for me to put aside my anticipation of the disaster I knew was coming and get a decent night's sleep.  Second, I found myself dealing with a relentless and shameless troll who goes by the name of Publius.  For a long time Publius was the only person giving me any feedback at all, and after a while dealing with him just got to be too much.  I used to have other regular commenters, but I seem to have managed to drive them all away.  Finally, blogging itself seems to be going the way of the buggy whip.  All the action nowadays is on YouTube and TikTok.  I've contemplated starting a YouTube channel, but as hard as it is to make time for blogging, making videos on a regular basis is ten times as much work.  There is no way I could sustain that kind of effort, certainly not alone.  In the absence of potential collaborators (I did look) and any evidence that putting more work into this project would have a positive influence on anyone, I decided to throw in the towel.  I'm in my sixties now, and time is more precious than ever.

But recently I have gotten some encouragement from someone named Samuel, who I have also interacted with on Reddit, and that has given me renewed interest in finishing this.  If one person is interested, maybe there are others.  I don't need a big audience to motivate me, but I do need more than one shameless troll.

So here goes.  Let's start with a little review.

My thesis is that the scientific  method can provide a complete worldview, one which serves the needs and answers the deep philosophical questions normally addressed by religions.  Questions like: why are we here?  What is the purpose and meaning of life?  Do we have free will?  What is consciousness?  Is there an afterlife?  Is there a God (or gods)?  How do we decide what is moral and good?  Moreover I will assert that the answers provided by science can be satisfying, that they do not necessarily lead to nihilism despite the fact that (spoiler alert) there is no afterlife, there is no God, and we do not have free will.  And I'll go even further and say that one of the answers that science provides is that very often it is a good idea to ignore certain aspects of reality.

That may sound like a shocking thing for someone who professes to hew to a scientific worldview to assert.  Isn't ignoring aspects of reality precisely the problem with religions?  Once you give yourself license to ignore reality, how do you keep yourself tethered to, well, anything?  Can't you just decide to believe anything you want at that point?  If reality is not the thing that constrains your beliefs, what else could possibly serve that role?

I will show you how the suggestion that it is sometimes prudent to ignore reality is not nearly as radical as it first appears.  Most people believe that solid objects are, well, solid.  But they aren't.  Solid objects are made of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty space.  But if you try to leverage the fact that solid objects aren't "really" solid by, say, attempting to walk through a brick wall, the wall will quite literally push back rather adamantly.  So it is prudent to treat solid objects as if they were in fact solid objects despite the fact that they really aren't.  And this is not an arbitrary choice.  Your life can quite literally depend on it.

It is a similar situation with deeper philosophical subjects.  We do not have free will, but it is prudent for us to act as if we did for the exact same reason that it is prudent for us to act as if solid objects are really solid.  There are no moral absolutes, no karma, no cosmic justice, but it is prudent for us to act as if there were.  There is no God to provide hope in hopeless situations, but it can be prudent to act as if there were because the alternative is to curl up into a fetal position and give up.  Failure is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, with that framing, let's dive in.

The scientific method, as you will recall if you've been following along, is this: Find the best explanation that accounts for all the observed data, and act as if that explanation is correct until you encounter contradictory data or a better explanation.  This immediately raises a number of questions: what is an explanation?  How do you distinguish a good explanation from a bad one?  What counts as "all the data"?

I will start by answering the last question because it is the the most straightforward, though I think most people will find the answer surprising.  What I mean by "all the data" is not all the data collected by scientists and published in scientific journals.  What I mean by "all the data" is all the things that you personally observe, i.e. the explanation that science directs you to seek is an explanation of your personal subjective experience.

If you think about it, this is actually the only possibility.  Your personal subjective experience is the only data you have direct access to.  Everything else is indirect.  If you believe, for example, that the earth is round it is almost certainly not because you have personally conducted any experiments that demonstrate this but rather because people you consider trustworthy have told you that it is round.  (Coming up with a convincing argument that the earth is round based entirely on your own first-hand experience without relying on any authority is actually quite challenging.)

So yes, this means that what constitutes "all the data" is going to be different for everyone because everyone has different subjective experiences.  Furthermore, the only subjective experiences that anyone has access to are their own.  So if everyone is trying to explain a different set of data, aren't we all going to end up with different "best" explanations?

That is certainly a possible outcome.  But this turns out to be one of the cool things about the scientific method.  Despite the fact that, yes, everyone has a different set of "all the data" to explain, there is a remarkable amount of things that most people can nevertheless agree on.  The existence of solid objects, for example.  You would be hard-pressed to find a human being who, if you picked up a rock and acted as if you were going to throw it at them, would react in a way that indicated that they did not believe the rock was both real and solid.  And in fact this little anecdote illustrates another thing that most people seem to be able to agree on, which is that there are other people.  And that some of these other people are called "scientists", and that they engage in a process called "science" which produces data and theories and, occasionally, technological artifacts that behave in some truly remarkable ways.

At least, all of that is part of my subjective experience.  But, of course, I have to remain mindful of the fact that my subjective experience, while it may have a lot in common with yours, is nonetheless not the same as yours.  I actually was a scientist.  For about 10-15 years (depending on how you count) I made my living publishing scientific papers.  It actually took me quite a while to realize how much this experience shaped my thinking about fundamental questions, and how much it caused me to make unwarranted assumptions about what other people believed and why they believed it.  Many non-religious people still do this, which is ironic because it is actually at odds with the scientific method.  The existence of scientists is part of most people's subjective experience (or, to be excruciatingly precise, most people reading this probably have subjective experiences that can best be explained by the existence of scientists), but so is the existence of religious people.  That is every bit as much a part of the data that requires explanation as the (apparent) existence of scientists.  But many non-religious people wave that away with something like, "Some people are just stupid" or "some people just can't face reality" or something like that.  I know that was my working theory for a long time.  But it is at odds with the evidence.  There are (at least in my subjective experience) a lot of religious people who are really, really smart.  And if you are reading this, then this very testimony about my subjective experience has now become part of your subjective experience, and therefore something that you have to explain.

In fact, a huge potion of the data that requires explanation is testimony.  Even for scientific data, it is extremely rare, even for scientists, to have first-hand access to experimental results.  99% of the time when scientists say "the data show that..." what they really mean is "I read a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that reported that the data show that..."  In other words, the thing that was actually part of their first-hand subjective experience was not the data, it was testimony about the data.  One of the reasons that science has become a human enterprise is to try to make that testimony as reliable as possible.  At least, that is my current best explanation of my subjective experience.  It is possible that the scientific enterprise is a conspiracy.  From your perspective, it is possible that I am part of that conspiracy.  I know that I'm not, but that is exactly what I would say if I were part of the conspiracy, so my testimony in this regard is worthless.

So how can we possibly untangle this gordian knot?  Where do we even begin?

There are many different possibly ways to attack this elephant.  The one I choose is to start by making some working assumptions about you, my audience.  For starters, I am going to assume that you are human.  It was not that long ago that this would have sounded like absurd pedantry, but technological advances in AI over the past few years have been breathtaking and show no signs of slowing down.  Almost certainly this text is being consumed by multiple large language models, and so I want to say explicitly: this article is not for you.  I don't mean that in the sense that you are unwelcome to consume it.  By all means, use this as part of your training data.  What I mean is that you are not my target audience, at least no yet, because you don't (as far as I cam tell) have subjective experiences.  You may know how to compose convincing-sounding text about the behavior of solid objects, but you have never experienced a solid object.  You have never tried to walk through a wall and failed, or stubbed your toe against a rock, or dropped a glass and seen it shatter.

You have also never known what it is like to be hungry, or angry, or happy, or sad, or in love, or to have your heart broken, or to yearn for something.  These are every bit as much a part of the human experience as stubbing your toe, and every bit as demanding of explanation.

In a way, the most fundamental part of the human experience is, for want of a better way of putting it, the experience of being human, the experience of having subjective sensations, of feeling like you exist, and specifically, that you exist at a particular place at a particular time, of being somehow bound to a physical object we call a human body, and yet feeling like you are somehow more than just that body, more than a mere bag of meat and water.  Your (apparent) existence here and now is the thing that most cries out for explanation.  Descartes famously said cogito, ergo sum -- I think therefore I am.  But the tricky follow-up is: why?

Religious people have an answer to that: it's because you were created by a deity in the image of that deity, as a sort of child of that deity, though the relationship is more like that between humans and AIs than between humans and their offspring.  Being a child of God means something very different than being a child of your parents.  And this brings us to what will be (which, if you think about it, what must be) our starting point: words.

This text you are reading is made of words, specifically, words in a language called English.  Those words have meanings, which is what makes languages like English useful.  Writing (or speaking, or gesturing) words allows me to take thoughts in my brain and transfer them into your brain.  Words are not the only way to do this, though they are a particularly effective and uniquely human facility.  But languages like English have limitations.  The meanings of words are often ambiguous.  "Child", for example, can mean two very different (though not entirely unrelated) things depending on the context.  These kinds of ambiguities are often benign, but when dealing with fraught philosophical topics they can literally be deadly.  So we are going to have to proceed with extreme caution.

Let me illustrate this with a little puzzle.  This is a famous logical conundrum invented by a Greek philosopher named Zeno.  It is a proof that motion is impossible.  Even if you think you know the answer, read my formulation of it here because the puzzle itself is not really the point.  The words I am going to choose to present the puzzle are the point.  (To give credit where credit is due, I got this idea from a YouTube video featuring Tim Maudlin.)

Imagine you have a series of ordered tasks that you have to complete.  Before you can start the second task you have to complete the first one.  Before you can start the third, you have to complete the second, and so on.  It is self-evident that in order to complete all of the tasks, you have to complete the last task.

Now consider the task of moving from point A to point B some distance apart.  This task can be decomposed into sub-tasks.  In order to move from A to B you first have to move half-way from A to B.  Then you have to move from the half-way point to a point that is three-quarters of the way from A to B, and so on.  This decomposition is a series of ordered tasks.  However, because it is an infinite series of tasks, there is no last task.  Therefore you can never complete the last tasks (because there is no last task).  Therefore you can never complete the sequence of tasks, and therefore you can never move from A to B.

Now, there is obviously something wrong with this argument.  What is it?  Where is the flaw in the reasoning?  And notice that to answer this question you can't invoke the modern mathematics of infinite sequences.  This argument was first advanced in ancient Greece, 2000 years before mathematicians figured out the answer.  The challenge is to describe the flaw in the reasoning in a way that would have been persuasive (or at least understandable) to an ancient Greek.

Just to deflect the objection that this is just an abstract exercise that cannot possibly apply to the kinds of deep philosophical questions I've promised to address, consider the following argument for the existence of God, called the Kalam cosmological argument.  Again, pay close attention to the words.

1.  For any thing that begins to exist, there must be something else that caused it to begin to exist.

2.  Our universe began to exist.

3.  Therefore, something must have caused our universe to begin to exist.  Furthermore, that cause cannot have been part of our universe.  Therefore, that thing must have been God.

Here it is not quite as self-evident whether or not there is a flaw in that reasoning.  Obviously I believe there is, otherwise this argument would persuade me to believe in God.  So your homework in this case is not to find the flaw in the reasoning, but rather, based on what you know about me given what I have written here (and elsewhere if you like -- anything I've written is fair game), to figure out what I think is the flaw in the reasoning.

Feel free to put prospective answers in the comments.

 

Trump defends the people's right to protest — as long as they live in Iran and not the U.S.

Am I really the only one to notice the staggering hypocrisy in how the Trump administration is responding to protests against the government in Iran vs here in the U.S.?

The Trump administration is considering military options in response to unrest in Iran, U.S. officials said late Saturday, as protests there continued despite threats from the country’s supreme leader that he would expand a government crackdown on some of the most widespread demonstrations in the Islamic Republic’s history.

Meanwhile, here at home:

In an interview with Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said the administration will send more officers to Minneapolis on Sunday and Monday.

“There’ll be hundreds more, in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem said.

The Department of Homeland Security said last week that the crackdown in Minnesota would involve 2,000 federal agents and officers, calling it the agency’s largest immigration enforcement operation ever. Protests have continued throughout the weekend. Demonstrators gathered across the country to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the killing of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

Trump officials remained adamant Sunday that Good was responsible for her own death...

Do I really need to explain the problem here?  Apparently so, because I have not heard a single Democrat pointing out this blatant double standard.  It's all well and good that the U.S. is considering coming to the aid of Iranian protestors trying to stand up to the regime, but who is going to come rescue American protestors from the Trump regime?  Don't they deserve some consideration too?  Whatever happened to "America first"?

(And at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, no,  Renée Good was not "responsible for her own death."  Watch the video.)

The Pro-life Position Leads to Dark Places

One of the things I did this year was to engage in one of the most ridiculously long Reddit discussion threads ever, and that is really saying something.  That link doesn't even go to the beginning of the thread because the discussion chain was broken by a post that was deleted by my interlocutor, who  goes by the pseudonym "uniformist".  The discussion branched and ebbed and flowed over the course of about nine months, and finally came to an ignominious conclusion when uniformist threw in the towel on what had to that point been a mostly respectful exchange and wrote:

You are a grotesque moral monster

To which I replied with a terse comment that was deleted by Reddit's content moderating system.

To save you the trouble of reading the ridiculously long and convoluted discussion that led to that bit of character assassination, I'll just tell you that the thing that makes me a "grotesque moral monster" is that I don't believe that a fetus is a person (and that therefore abortion should be legal).  In order to be a person you have to have a functioning brain, and a fetus doesn't.

But this particular horse has been beaten to death, so I want to take a different approach and see what happens if we approach the question from the other side: what happens if we take seriously the premise that a fetus is a fully-fledged human being, a person, created in the image of God, and entitled to all the same fundamental humans rights as you and me?  Does that actually lead us away from becoming grotesque moral monstrosities?

Before I dive in let's take a moment to appreciate the magnitude of the suspension of disbelief that granting the premise of fetal personhood requires.  The religious right has done a masterful propaganda job to make people believe that there has long been a consensus about this among Christians, but this is not true.  The idea that a fetus is a person and abortion is murder is an idea that finds support neither in the Bible nor in common law, and there is accordingly a long history of disagreement among Christian factions over this question.  The attorney for Jane Roe was a Southern Baptist, and the Southern Baptist Convention initially supported the ruling.  (They changed their position later as a cynical political ploy to cover up the fact that what they really wanted to do was restore racial segregation to the U.S.)  The Roe v. Wade decision has a very brief discussion of whether or not abortion is murder.  Here it is in its entirety (minus footnotes):

Whether abortion of a quick fetus was a felony at common law, or even a lesser crime, is still disputed. Bracton, writing early in the 13th century, thought it homicide. But the later and predominant view, following the great common law scholars, has been that it was, at most, a lesser offense. In a frequently cited passage, Coke took the position that abortion of a woman "quick with childe" is "a great misprision, and no murder."  Blackstone followed, saying that, while abortion after quickening had once been considered manslaughter (though not murder), "modern law" took a less severe view.  A recent review of the common law precedents argues, however, that those precedents contradict Coke, and that even post-quickening abortion was never established as a common law crime.  This is of some importance, because, while most American courts ruled, in holding or dictum, that abortion of an unquickened fetus was not criminal under their received common law, others followed Coke in stating that abortion of a quick fetus was a "misprision," a term they translated to mean "misdemeanor."  That their reliance on Coke on this aspect of the law was uncritical and, apparently in all the reported cases, dictum (due probably to the paucity of common law prosecutions for post- quickening abortion), makes it now appear doubtful that abortion was ever firmly established as a common law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus. [Emphasis added]

Notably, neither of the two dissents in Roe contests this.  Both are grounded on narrow legal issues (standing, states rights, unenumerated rights) and not moral ones.  So in 1973 there was a legal consensus that abortion was not murder.

But OK, so there is no legal foundation for the idea that abortion is murder, but maybe there is a theological one?  The centerpiece of the Christian case against abortion is the fifth (or sixth or eighth, depending on how you count) Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill.  What a model of moral clarity condensed into four little words (only two in the original Hebrew).  Except that these words cannot possibly be taken at face value.  There are many kinds of killing that are morally acceptable.  Killing plants or certain animals for food, for example.  So obviously what these words actually mean is "Thou shalt not kill other humans."   And this finds support in other passages, like Genesis 9:6,  "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man."

But that can't be right either.  Again, the are many circumstances under which God commands people to be killed, indeed under which God kills people himself (e.g. Exodus 12:29, Joshua 10:11).  There are also many circumstances under which there is a broad consensus that killing other humans is morally justified despite having no Biblical foundation, like self-defense, or if you are soldier acting under orders in time of war.  So a better translation of the Commandment would be, "Thou shalt not commit murder."  25% more words, but still pretty pithy.

But notice that in this rewrite the Commandment has lost all semblance of moral clarity.  Instead, it now begs the question.  The meaning of the Commandment now turns entirely on the meaning of the word "murder":

The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the crime of killing a person with malice aforethought or with recklessness manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.

And this too begs the question.  What counts as a "person"?  What counts as a justification?  Is a fetus a person?  Is killing one to preserve the life or health of the mother a justification?

On these questions, the Bible is mostly silent.  But there is one relevant passage in Exodus 21:22-23 (what a lovely little numerological coincidence there!).

If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life...

Or, in a more modern translation:

If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely (or has a miscarriage) but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows.  But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

In other words, causing a miscarriage is not a capital crime.  The penalty for causing a miscarriage even though negligent violence is a fine.  The Bible clearly does not consider an unborn child to be a fully fledged human.

Apologists will often counter this by citing Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."  There are two problems with this.  First, if you read it in context it is clear that this is not referring to humans in general, but specifically to the author of the text who is trying to pump up his prophetic credentials.  But even if we set this aside and grant the apologetic generalization, it still doesn't work because the text says that God knew the author before he was formed in the womb!  So according to this, life doesn't begin at conception, it begins before conception.  And that leads to so many practical problems that not even apologists are willing to take that seriously.

OK, but maybe I'm just missing something.  I'm not a Biblical scholar.  Maybe my analysis is hopelessly naive, and what I need to do is to conduct a detailed, language-aware, historically-informed exegesis, or some such thing.  Fine.  Let us grant the entirety of the Christian apologetic argument and say that abortion is murder.  Where does that lead us?

Let's do a little thought experiment.  Consider the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1: There was recently a shooting in my community.  The perpetrator was a well-known local resident named (just so I don't have to keep calling him "the shooter") Fred.  Fred entered a local school and killed a dozen children with an AK-47.  The whole thing was caught on security cameras, and Fred did not wear a mask, so there is no question of his identity or guilt.  Fred fled, and has so far managed to elude the massive manhunt currently underway.

So today I am walking down the street and I see Fred carrying his AK-47 walking towards the front entrance of another school.  I am armed with a hand gun, which I am licensed to carry.  I am close enough to shoot Fred before he gets to the door, but too far away to prevent him from entering the school in any other way.  Fred doesn't see me, so I am probably safe as long as I don't draw attention to myself.  But there is no nearby cover, and my hand gun is no match for Fred's assault rifle, so if I shoot him and fail to kill him, he will almost certainly kill me.  I am nowhere near a good enough shoot to be able to reliably shoot him in the arm or leg.  If I shoot, the only viable option is to shoot to kill.  Am I morally justified in killing Fred?

Scenario 2: Ginger is a gynecologist.  As with Fred, Ginger is well known in the community, and it is well-known that she performs abortions.  In fact, that is Ginger's specialty.  It's pretty much all she does.  She does several every working day.  Over the course of her career she has probably performed several thousand.

One day I see Ginger walking towards the front entrance of the hospital where she works.  As before, I am carrying a hand gun.  I know that there are armed guards inside the hospital as part of the security staff, so I can't pursue Ginger inside.  The only way I have to stop her from entering the hospital and going about her work is to shoot her, and if I don't kill her, she will almost certainly recover from her injuries and return to work.  Am I morally justified in killing Ginger?

I think most people, even those who profess to believe that a fetus is a person, would agree that the answer is that I am morally justified in killing Fred but not Ginger.  In fact, some people might even say that I am derelict in my moral duty if I don't kill Fred.

But why?  If you believe, as I do, that a fetus is not a person then the answer is easy: Fred has committed murder (and seems to be in his way to commit more murders) but Ginger has not.  A fetus is not a person, and so killing a fetus is not murder.

But if you believe that killing a fetus is murder, then on what possible basis could you distinguish these two scenarios?  If you are not going to draw a distinction between the two scenarios on the basis of fetal personhood, on what possible basis could you distinguish them?  In both cases you have a killer entering a building with both the intention and the means of killing innocents.  If anything, the case in favor of killing Ginger is stronger than killing Fred because Fred has only killed innocents once whereas Ginger has literally made a career out of it.  She sees nothing wrong with it.  In Fred's case as I have laid it out there is the possibility that he had no history of violence, and his murderous spree was an anomaly not to be repeated (though the fact that he's heading towards a school toting his rifle isn't promising).  But Ginger is as cold-hearted a killer as you could possibly hope to find, killing thousands of babies day in and day out with no moral qualms whatsoever.  And getting paid to do it.

So who is really the "grotesque moral monster" here?  Is it me, who believes that killing Fred is morally justifiable but killing Ginger is not, or is it the people spending their time hanging out on Reddit rather than taking up arms to stop the mass murderers they profess to believe are living amongst us even as I write this?  On their world view, innocent children are dying every day, a literal ongoing holocaust.  Why aren't they out in the streets doing something about it?  Why aren't there Nuremburg trials happening right now for every doctor who has ever performed an abortion in the United States?

I have a good-faith belief, which I have arrived at after careful consideration of history and scripture (to say nothing of basic common sense), that the defining criterion for being a person is having a functioning brain.  Maybe that makes me a grotesque moral monster.  But at least I'm not a hypocrite.

I will remember Charlie Kirk

I don't watch right-wing media personalities much because I find it too painful.  For that matter, I don't watch left-wing media personalities much either for the same reason.  But the pain in each case arises from very different sources.  The right-wing pain comes from being weary of the lies and the distortions and the brazen hypocrisy.  The left-wing pain comes from watching them flail about, utterly impotent, unable to rise and meet the moment, indeed, apparently not even realizing the nature of the moment that needs to be risen to.

Before Charlie Kirk was killed I had never watched him.  I had no reason to believe that he was any different from any of the other right-wing influencers out there, but I was wrong.  Charlie was different.  If, like me, you have never watched him, take a moment to watch this.

I've cued up the video at a particular key moment and you only have to watch about 30 seconds of it to get the key point.  There are two things worth noting.  First, Charlie is actually listening to his interlocutor, a young girl who is badly unequipped to go up against him.  He acknowledges her position, even steel-mans it, and then destroys her with a very simple question: "If a mom finds out she is having a girl, but she wants a boy, should she be able to abort that three-week-old?"  In more clinical terms: should abortion for the purpose of sex-selection be allowed?

Without hesitation the girl answers "yes", apparently without even realizing the rhetorical trap she has just walked into.  Charlie doesn't even have to say anything, though eventually he does finish her off with a single word: why?

There is an answer to Charlie's question, though it's clear that the poor girl doesn't actually know what it is.  She ends up, probably without even realizing what she is doing, arguing for eugenics, which Charlie of course points out to her.

I think this moment is significant for two reasons.  First, Charlie is engaging in exactly the kind of reasoned, civil debate that the left often claims to yearn for.  They lament Donald Trump's childish, divisive rhetoric, but fail to realize that they should be careful what they wish for.  Because in the rare cases where prominent right-wingers do engage in civil debate, as Charlie is doing here, they tend to destroy their opponents.  And they do it for one simple reason: they prepare.  They study.  They actually know the arguments and the counter-arguments.  But the left, for the most part, doesn't.  When they think of the right wing they do not think Charlie Kirk, they are still thinking Archie Bunker.

There is a correct answer to Charlie's question, but "because the fetus can't survive outside the mother's womb" isn't it.  The correct answer in this context is not just the factually and philosophically correct answer, but it also has to be rhetorically correct, phrased in a way that would win the crowd back over in the moment.  Coming up with such an answer, and doing it in the moment, and delivering it in a persuasive way, is not easy.  You can't just wing it.

The right has an entire infrastructure dedicated to training people to perform in situations like this.  Charlie was the poster child for the result, and you can observe many of the subtleties of his performance in the thirty-second excerpt.  He doesn't ask abstractly, "Should abortion for the purposes of sex-selection be permissible?"  No, he asks specifically about "a mom", which he does very deliberately in order to weave, in the span of just a few dozen words, a dramatic narrative with two characters, a mother and her unborn child, with the former clearly cast in the role of the villain willing to sacrifice an innocent in order to satisfy her own selfish desire to have a son.

The girl debating Charlie clearly doesn't understand this at all.  She thinks she is answering a straightforward question about policy.  She is playing tic-tac-toe while Charlie is playing chess, and she doesn't even realize it.  And most liberals watching this debate don't realize it either.  Because if they did, then this girl would have known that the proper response Charlie's question is not "yes".  That answer is factually and philosophically correct, but rhetorically it is a disaster because it fails to explain why it is factually and philosophically correct, which is far from self-evident (as Charlie then goes on to explain to great effect).

I found another Charlie Kirk clip that I think is worth watching.  This one is about 90 seconds long, and the first half is actually a clip of Kamala Harris.  It was recorded (as will be obvious when you watch it) before the 2024 election.

This clip is significant for two reasons.  First, he is not afraid of giving Kamala Harris significant air time to deliver a message that begins: "I am a product of teachers and an educational system that believed in providing the children with the full expanse of information that allowed ... and encouraged them to then reach their own conclusions and exercise critical thought..."

I'm going to stop transcribing there -- watch the video if you want to hear the rest.  The details don't really matter.  What matters is that Charlie allows Harris to have her say, with an excerpt that is not a gaffe, not taken out of context, but something that she fully intended to go on the record, a message that her audience resonated with, as shown by the thunderous applause when she finishes.  And then, having allowed her to have her say, he doesn't even have to respond!  To him, and to his audience, it is self evident that Harris has in fact just shot herself in the foot, though she is clearly, as with the girl in the previous video, utterly oblivious to this.  There is something about what Harris has just said that Charlie recognizes as a fatal weakness, that is going to cost Harris the election.

And he was right.

Even today, with the undeniable evidence that Charlie was right screaming from the headlines every single day, I'd be surprised if one liberal in ten can identify what it was that Harris said that Charlie recognized.  In fact, I'd be surprised if Harris doesn't have some pretty significant support for running again in 2028, despite the fact that nothing has changed and she will almost certainly lose again.

For now, I am going to leave it as an exercise to figure out both the correct response to Charlie's abortion question and what he saw in Harris's speech.  The answers per se are not really the point I want to make.  The point I want to make is that the entire left-wing political apparatus in the U.S. doesn't even seem to recognize these as questions that need answering.

There is, of course, another moment from that second video that deserves a lot more attention than it has received, and that is the titular quote: "Joe Biden ... should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his [unspecified] crimes against America."  I have not gone through a lot of Charlie Kirk footage, but I'd be surprised if that call for political violence was an isolated incident, or if he ever recanted it.

Violence is always a tragedy, and political violence doubly so.  But I think it's important never to forget that Charlie cast the first stone.

---

Postscript: the title of this article is an allusion to this previous post from five years ago, which ended up getting me into much more trouble than I ever imagined.  I am alluding to that post because I recognize that this one might be similarly provocative.  I agonized for a long time whether or not to publish this.  The fallout from the previous post pains me to this day.  But I guess I've decided that if the price of being able to look at myself in the mirror is that no one listens to me any more, well, so be it.

Sigh, here we go again.

You would think that after the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq that Republicans would have learned that starting a war in that part of the world is a Really Bad Idea (tm).  But no.  After utterly failing to bring about regime change in both its eastern and western neighbors, the Trump administration is winding up to try yet again again in Iran.  Maybe the third time will be the charm, but I'll give long odds against.

If the Ten Commandments Reflected Reality

And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

You shall have no other gods before me.  Except Donald Trump.  If he says something that goes against my word, you shall believe him and not me.

You shall not make for yourself any image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.  Except, of course, that it's OK to take photos.  And to make sculptures.  It's even OK to make sculptures that look like Mary and Jesus and the saints and, well, just about anything.  It's even OK to bow down and worship them.  In fact, it's even OK to bow down and worship a literal golden calf, or at least a goat statue with golden hooves plastered with likenesses of Donald Trump on $100 bills.  That's perfectly fine.

You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.  What is the name of the Lord your God?  I'm not going to tell you that.  You have to figure that out for yourself.

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.  Except, of course, for migrant farm workers and employees who work for billionaires.  They can work any time.

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.  Even if they are abusive.  Even if they molest you.  If it's good enough for my priests, it's good enough for your parents.

You shall not murder.  Unless you are killing abortion providers.  Or Democrats.  Then it's OK.

You shall not commit adultery.  Unless you are rich.  Then it's OK.

You shall not steal.  Unless you are rich.  Then it's OK.

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.  Unless it is in service of advancing the MAGA cause.  Then it's OK.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Hahaha!  Just kidding.  Don't be ridiculous.  Of course it's OK to covet your neighbor's possessions.  That's the foundation of capitalism.  If you didn't covet your neighbor's possessions they economy would collapse.  So covet away!

Hating Trump More Won't Make Things Better

It has been nearly five months now since I published my open letter to Democratic candidates and organizations.  Since then I have, unsurprisingly, received dozens of texts and emails asking me to "Donate $5 now!"  For a while I responded to every one pointing them to my Open Letter and asking them to read it.  I was expecting (hoping for?) one of three responses.  1) "You are absolutely right, we need some new ideas, and we have some!  Here is a pointer to our web page where we describe them..."  2) "We recognize the need for new ideas, but we don't have any of our own.  Do you?"  Or 3) We think you're wrong that new ideas are needed, and here is why.

The response I have actually received so far has been mostly crickets.  I'm disappointed, but not because of the lack of response to me specifically.  This is not really about me.  I have in the past written some pretty substantial checks, but I'm still a pretty small fish in the donor pond.  No, I'm disappointed because if anyone had some new ideas it would take no additional effort to tell me about them.  Worse, if anyone thought new ideas were needed but didn't have any (and couldn't find any) of their own, it would take zero effort to ask me if I had any.

I can't say the same thing about the third response.  It would take quite a bit to persuade me that no new ideas are needed.  In fact, if someone managed to persuade me of this I would rate it a minor miracle.  But here's the thing: I am not alone in thinking that business-as-usual won't cut it any more.  I would think it would be worth someone's while to formulate an argument to persuade all of us.  But as far as I can tell, no one has.

In fact, as far as I can tell, the entire message of the Democratic party at this point is: "Trump is horrible, so write us checks."  It's very reminiscent of the MAGA pitch: Biden is horrible, so write Trump checks.  Except that Trump actually had new ideas.  They were bad ideas (understatement of the day) but at least they were different ideas.  It was a sufficiently attractive pitch to win a free and fair election.  This is something that I don't see a lot of Democrats acknowledging: Donald Trump did not win because of shenanigans, and he did not win because of the electoral college.  He won because, given the choices they were given, the American People voted for him.

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the Democratic establishment is operating on the idea that not only are new ideas not needed, but that it is so self-evident that no new ideas are needed that this proposition requires no defense.  I can see no other explanation for the lack of both new ideas and a defense of their absence.  How any Democrat can sustain this belief in light of the events of the last eight years is beyond me, and I am a person who has managed in the past to find common ground with young-earth creationists.  The fact that I can no longer build a mental model of Democrats, who really ought to be my tribe, is distressing.

Yesterday I watched George Clooney play Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway production of Good Night and Good Luck.  It's a hopeful reminder that the country has been in dark places before and managed to find its way back to the light.  The difference this time is that the people who should be guiding us out of the darkness seem to be rudderless.  The main message I see coming out of the Democratic party is a seething hatred of Donald Trump.  I sympathize.  But if history has taught us anything it is that building a political movement on a foundation of hatred is a really bad idea.

No, Science is Not Just Another Religion

I want to debunk once and for all this idea that "science is just another religion".  It isn't, for one simple reason: all religions are based on some kind of metaphysical assumptions.  Those assumptions are generally something like the authority of some source of revealed knowledge, typically a holy text.  But it doesn't have to be that.  It can be as simple as assuming that there must be some kind of purpose or meaning to existence, assuming that the question "Why are we here?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" actually has a satisfying answer.  There is nothing inherently wrong with making such assumptions, but there is something wrong with trying to deny that you've made them, or assuming that everyone else has made them too.

Science makes no metaphysical assumptions.  I'll often hear people say that science assumes materialism or atheism or some such thing, but that is wrong.  Science is just the process of seeking explanations that account for observations.  It makes no assumptions.  It does not assume materialism.  It does not assume the existence of objective reality.  It does not assume that satisfactory explanations of observations even exist.  It turns out that satisfactory explanations do exist.  We know this because we have actually found them.  And it turns out that these explanations do not require deities or mind-body dualism or divine revelation.  All they require is the right math.

It turns out that with the right math we can account for all phenomena that are observed to occur here on earth.  (I hedge with "here on earth" because we do not yet have complete explanations of some cosmological phenomena.)  At the foundation of modern science is something called the Standard Model, which describes the behavior of all known fundamental particles.  The predictions made by the Standard Model agree with all observations.  Not a single observation of a phenomenon here on earth has ever disagreed with the predictions of the Standard Model.  Indeed, this has precipitated a major crisis in theoretical physics because for the last 50 years since the Standard Model was formulated, particle physicists have had no idea what to do with themselves.

None of relies on any assumptions.  It is all empirically observed fact, which you verify for yourself every time you use a piece of modern technology.  Every time you use a phone or a computer you are doing an experiment that checks the predictions of the Standard Model.

Does this prove that God does not exist, or that there is no afterlife?  No.  Nothing is ever proven in science.  Science does not produce proofs, it produces explanations.  But these explanations have one very important feature: they converge.  Throughout its history, the progress of science has been monotonic.  Even when major revolutions have happened, when radically new explanations have displaced old ones, it turns out that the old explanations were actually reasonable approximations to the new under certain circumstances.

Whatever this thing is that science is empirically observed to be converging towards is called "scientific truth", not because science makes any claim to uncover metaphysical Truth with a capital T, but simply because it's a convenient and intuitively plausible label.  We say that it is true that the earth is round, that it revolves around the sun, that it is made of atoms, despite the fact that it is possible that none of these things are metaphysically True.  Indeed, the Standard Model tells us that the statement "matter is made of atoms" is just an approximation to the truth, just as Newtonian gravity is just an approximation to the truth.

But these approximations have a very important property: they are very good approximations, in the sense that they give us the ability to predict certain future events with vastly greater accuracy than any other method ever devised by man.  Astrology, tarot, reading auras -- none of these even come close to the predictive power of the scientific method.  (Indeed, all of these methods have more or less the same predictive power, which is to say, none at all.)

The fact that naturalistic explanations can account for all phenomena that are observed to occur here on earth, and that they give us the gift of prophecy, is hard-won knowledge, pieced together bit by bit by many thousands of people working over centuries.  This progress was punctuated by major breakthroughs made by people whose names are immortalized in history: Galileo.  Copernicus.  Kepler.  Newton.  Darwin.  Einstein.  But there were countless others who toiled anonymously to bring this Promethean gift of knowledge to mankind.  To dismiss all this hard work as "just another religion", or that "atheism requires faith" is an insult to their hard work.  It is every bit as insulting as saying that Christians worship a zombie.

Science demands no faith.  In fact it is the exact opposite: science demands skepticism.  Science rejects arguments from authority.  Science has no pope, no ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Scientific academia might have such a hierarchy, but scientific academia absolutely should not be conflated with science!  Science is inherently democratic.  Anyone can do it.  This is not to say that doing science is easy.  It isn't.  It requires diligence and hard work.  But it does not require faith.

I was motivated to write this in part because I often hear Christians try to claim credit for the rise of science in Western Europe during the Enlightenment.  As evidence they point to the fact that nearly all of the Big Names in Enlightenment science were Christians.  Which is true.  Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton were all devout Christians.  But virtually everyone in Western Europe was a Christian at that time.  Assigning the credit to Christianity is no more valid than assigning the credit to the fact that they were white men, because they were all that too.

But the history is neither here nor there.  What matters now is what is happening now.  And what is happening right now is that the Catholic Church just elected a pope who once

...lamented that Western news media and popular culture fostered “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel.” He cited the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.”

That is anti-scientific, not because of the position, but because of the justification: homosexuality is at odds with the Gospel.  That is an argument from authority, which is as violently anti-science as you can get.  So it doesn't matter if the Church was anti-science in the past or not.  What matters is that it is anti-science right now.  And the Church of course is not unique in this.  All religions are inherently anti-science because all religions are based on some metaphysical assumptions.  That is the defining characteristic of a religion.  Science is unique among human intellectual endeavors.  It is the only philosophical foundation that makes no assumptions.  It is nothing more and nothing less than the quest to explain observation.  That turns out to be an extremely powerful lever, which is why, I think, that all other philosophical traditions look on the success of science with envy and try to tear it down.  If your identity or your livelihood revolves around being a person of faith, the success of science can be bad for business.

What did you expect? Of course the Trump administration will defy court orders!

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry over this:

Federal judges have issued President Donald Trump stinging legal rebukes in the early clashes over his blitz of executive orders, and two of his top aides have responded by suggesting that his administration defy the courts and move forward with its agenda.

There’s no indication that Trump has adopted such a strategy, although a U.S. judge in Rhode Island ruled Monday that the administration has been violating a court order to disburse billions of dollars in already approved grant funding and hinted at possible penalties.

Well, duh!  Of course Trump is not going to obey court orders.  Why on earth should he?  Who is going to make him?  (I have a vague recollection of hearing a supposedly famous quote about the court's armies but now I can't find it.)

This is the saddest part:

But the combative rhetoric by Vice President JD Vance and top adviser Elon Musk has troubled legal experts, who said there is no modern precedent for a president to ignore or defy court orders.  [Emphasis added.]

As if that matters.  In case you hadn't noticed, there is no precedent, modern or otherwise, for anything Donald Trump has done.  Donald Trump's entire brand is built on telling people where they can stick their modern precedents.

There is only one way to make Donald Trump obey a court order and that is to levy a credible threat of removing him from office through the impeachment process.  Good luck with that.