Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

The arrogance and ignorance of atheism

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There is an article in The Australian today that is supposedly a reply to another that had originated in The Wall Street Journal in this case arguing the case for atheism. I dealt with the earlier article here under the heading, And who created the God particle? But this latest effort is so superficial that if this is the best that the atheist community can come up with, there is no case to answer for any of us who cannot see how the world we inhabit ever came to be. You don’t wish to believe in even the possibility that we are the conscious outcome of something in the universe, that made the world as it is so that we could have a home to live in, then don’t. But your belief is a matter of will, not of evidence and probability.

The title is typical of someone arrogant enough to believe that everything that has been brought together must absolutely have been for the benefit of humans. It is a reflection of the article itself, Why did the almighty create mosquitoes? Since he cannot think why mosquitoes were created, he does not believe there was a conscious attempt to allow the world to exist. Instead he comes down to this:

As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-prize winner in the field, put it at the turn of the century, the more plausible, if daunting, hypothesis is that we are part not of a “universe” but of a “multiverse”, in which universes come and go with infinite variations. We just happen to be in one in which things worked out this way.

Instead of some creator, we have a fantastic expansion of what is out there that has allowed us to have come into existence, built on a will to believe that it just happened by itself. This is what he is forced to resort to:

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of infinite or finite possible universes (including the universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. The various universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes or “alternate universes”.

He thus finds it more plausible that there are an infinite number of universes – in some versions an infinite number of parallel universes that exist even at the same time as our own – but in one of these, simply by chance, things turned out just so, which has allowed you and I to come into existence. There is a will to disbelieve. He finds it preferable to believe that it just happened by itself, in one of the trillions of universes that have meandered through time. That is a belief system, based on no evidence at all.

So let me again mention the famous Higgs boson. The wikipedia discussion of the Higgs boson, the “God particle”, is hilarious because it never actually gets around to explaining what its hypothesised existence is needed for, or why it got the name it has. Here’s why it has been hypothesised:

The Higgs boson, or “God particle,” is believed to be the particle which gives mass to matter.

Got that? The issue is how did pure energy become matter. The big bang was all energy but no mass. The Higgs boson apparently existed at the moment of the big bang and allowed at least some of that energy to be turned into mass, into matter, into the things we are made of. You can hypothesise this as yet undiscovered particle so that you can live without the thought that we are here by design, for reasons unknown to us, and probably never knowable. Why the universe should be created with this embedded principle is a question that anyone with an inquiring disposition would immediately turn into the notion of a presence that had something in mind when the process was begun.

To live in certainty that we are not the conscious creation of some other presence in the universe is so empty that I cannot understand how anyone cannot see just how improbable such a belief must be. Certainly more improbable that assuming some creator, whose characteristics, and original aims and intentions are unlikely, ever to be known.

Invaders from planet stupid

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A very interesting post by Steve Hayward at Powerline with the title, First they came for the Sociologists. But in spite of its title, the post is mostly about economics.

The one field in the social sciences where there is the least presence of post-modern oppression-“privilege” types is Economics, which prompts me to propose the theorem that the presence of politically correct nonsense in an academic department is inversely proportional to the emphasis placed on rigorous regression modeling in the discipline (or knowledge of ancient languages).

I personally think modern economics is well to the left as an academic subject. The veneer of bourgeois respectability is important to economists if their economics message is to influence the political class. Mainstream economics is no longer about the need for free markets, but the importance of controlling free markets. It may be disciplined by various sets of data, but economic theory is no longer Adam Smith. It is, instead, the nearest thing to Marxism that still retains that overlay of markets, best represented by Keynesian theory. Keynes disarmed the Marxists of his time by siding with them over Say’s Law, which had perennially been the province of the economics far left and central to their critique of capitalism.

I have half a chapter on this in my Free Market Economics, beginning with the notion of “perfect competition”. “Perfect” implies that this is the ideal, and is contrasted with “imperfect” competition. Perfect markets cannot exist, given its definition (e.g. perfect knowledge). All other markets are imperfect, which leaves much room for intervention at every turn.

But even with my continuous criticism of mainstream theory, I believe there is only one economics. The “political economy” department at Sydney is merely a cop out. Whatever sociological version of economics that might be taught, unless they also do supply and demand and marginal analysis along with the full panoply of mainstream theory, it is useless, other than as a leftist critique of markets. This is a quote from Greg Mankiw who was on the other end of these barbarian invaders:

Those who attended either of the sessions I was involved with at the ASSA meeting know that the audience included some hecklers. During the first session, I was the target. During the second, Larry Summers was. (At one point, the moderator Bob Hall threatened to call security.) Here is a Washington Post article about the hecklers.

After the first session was over, one of the hecklers came up to me and asked, “How much money have the Koch brothers paid you?” My answer, of course, was “not a penny.”

I don’t find it odd that people disagree with me. I am always open to the possibility that I am wrong about lots of things, and I much enjoy talking with students and colleagues who have views different from mine. But I do find it odd that people who disagree with me are sometimes quick to question my sincerity. If I am wrong, it is sincere wrong-headedness, not the result of being on some plutocrat’s payroll, as some on the left want to believe.

The hecklers probably limit their own effectiveness by questioning the motives of those who disagree with them. I have found that to convince other people, it is usually best not to assume your own moral superiority but rather to talk with them as equals who just happen to have a different point of view.

Personally I think Greg was too mild in his criticism of these know-nothings. I disagree about a lot, but I am never in doubt that the economists I deal with know a lot more about economies than their non-economist critics, a lot lot more and within a proper contextual setting. The true worry is how sympathetic the Washington Post article is to these invaders from the planet stupid.

You would think this would get more attention

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Roger Simon quotes from a New Year’s day speech by the President of Egypt:

I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing—and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before.It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!

Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible!

I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.

All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.

An interesting comments thread at the original source for the quote.

And then there is this from Daniel Pipes, An Arab Prince Denounces Islamism. This is about Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, the crown prince of Bahrain, who understands the danger better than just about anyone. As Pipes make clear:

Salman’s remarks fit into a growing trend among Muslim politicians directly to confront the Islamist danger. Two recent examples:

In an important conceptual breakthrough, the nearby United Arab Emirates government has placed the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and many other non-violent groups on its terrorism list on the grounds that they engage in incitement, funding, and the other precursors of terrorism.

The government of Egypt issued an INTERPOL arrest bulletin for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 88, the hugely influential spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, for “incitement and assistance to commit intentional murder, helping … prisoners to escape, arson, vandalism and theft.”

This new tendency has great importance. As I often say, radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution. Now, we may add another influential leader, indeed a crown prince, to the ranks of those Muslims who wish to find a solution.

Gramscian prescriptions

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This is from a much longer post on Gramscian Damage by Eric Raymond which is interesting even if you don’t know what “Gramscian” means. It’s a wicked world out there, as he explains:

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

He also linked to an earlier post of his, Suicidalism, which has a convenient list of ways in which we are ruining our own culture by adopting ideological positions that no other society would ever come close to copying. Why we create such rabid enemies from among our own citizens, I do not know. But all this is much too familiar to need to have to argue about since you can come across each of these sentiments pretty well everywhere across the West:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying
with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

But we might still save our selves in the end, since none of these are true while all are pernicious as more and more people are beginning to find out. In the meantime, read both of his posts.

China’s Christian future

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The world does move in mysterious ways. Think of this: Christians Now Outnumber
Communists In China.

Though the Chinese Communist Party is the largest explicitly atheist organization in the world, with 85 million official members, it is now overshadowed by an estimated 100 million Christians in China. It is no wonder Beijing is nervous and authorities are cracking down on Christian groups.

Christianity is growing so fast in China that some predict that it will be the most Christian nation in the world in only another 15 years. By far, the greatest growth is coming outside the official state-sanctioned churches, which are rightly considered subservient to the Communist Party. Numbers are increasing, rather, in unofficial Protestant “house churches” and in the underground Catholic church.

Tell me about the world in a hundred years, with this factored into the story:

Unrecognized Christian groups have been subject to crackdowns for years, but observers say the atmosphere is getting worse as their numbers increase and the governing Communist Party takes a more nationalist tone under President Xi Jinping.

Particularly hard hit has been a Beijing Christian group called Shouwang. “Things have got worse this year because the police started to detain us. I was detained for a week,” said Zhao Sheng, 54, musical organizer for the group’s Christmas service.

“But Christmas is still a happy time. No matter what happens, God is with us,” he added with a smile.

Not everything has to be for the worse.

UPDATE ON JANUARY 15: Another report: Christianity Is Exploding In China And The Communist Party Isn’t Happy.

While Christianity is waning in many parts of the world, in China it is growing rapidly – despite state strictures. The rise in evangelical Protestantism in particular, driven both by people’s spiritual yearnings and individual human needs in a collective society, is taking place in nearly every part of the nation.

Western visitors used to seeing empty sanctuaries in the United States or Europe can be dumbfounded by the Sunday gatherings held in convention center-size buildings where people line up for blocks to get in – one service after another. In Wenzhou, not far from Hangzhou, an estimated 1.2 million Protestants now exist in a city of 9 million people alone. (It is called “China’s Jerusalem.”) By one estimate, China will become the world’s largest Christian nation, at its current rate of growth, by 2030.

Indeed, an acute problem facing urban churches in China is a lack of space. Chongyi Church is building a million-dollar underground parking lot to replace one that worshipers under age 30 have taken over as a meeting place.

“I come because I found a love here that isn’t dependent on a person,” says Du Wang, a young businesswoman in Hangzhou. “It is like a river that doesn’t go away.”

There is hope yet for the world.

Winston Churchill on our Judaic inheritance

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A fascinating article by Steve Hayward of Powerline on Winston Churchill and Islam, in the midst of which he brings up this quote:

We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.

With his views today, he could not survive in public life. Read the article.

And who created the God particle?

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There is an article that originated at at the WSJ, but has been reproduced in The Australian: Is science showing there really is a God?, according to which “the rumours of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself.” Said the same thing the other day myself. The article adds:

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

The God particle, so called, may actually exist, that allowed energy to be immediately turned into mass at the moment the universe was created. But that still doesn’t answer the question, who created the God particle?

The most educated ignoramuses in history

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reading percentages

On Christmas Day we were at friends who had other friends we had not met before. And one of these friends – wearing the largest diamond ring I have ever seen, not that it is relevant – brought up in conversation that she never read. Nor did she bring it up after some prodding, or as part of an explanation for anything else. She brought it up as a matter of some pride, as if this were some kind of evidence of a higher intellect and refined taste. So, I asked her about this. Was it true that she never read any fiction, ever? And if not, why was this a good thing? No never, she said, had never read Dickens, or Shakespeare, and never wanted to and never would. So I asked – but only once I had reached the staircase – whether she would admire someone who had told her that they hated travel, and never wanted to go anywhere? But we know the answer to that, and would she anyway have seen the point?

I was reminded of this in reading Hal Colebatch’s article at Quadrant Online dealing with Celebrity Culture and Literacy’s Decline, which is mostly about the UK. This is not from Colebatch, but from someone he quotes, who was teaching would-be journalists:

These were people who were mostly studying for A-levels in media studies … The standard of literacy in their written work was roughly what I would have expected to find 25 years ago in the work of one of the less-able classes of nine-year-olds in an inner-city state school.

I cannot tell if this is a form of “these kids today”, or whether we are on the edge of some kind of descent into much worse. We may have enough people to run the technology, and if the rest of the population is pig ignorant, how does it matter? I am, of course, with Colebatch in seeing these trends not just as a disgrace but as a fearsome menace, although I would happily listen to someone who told me otherwise. I think this is the part of what he wrote that worried me most:

In June 2007 the think-tank Civitas claimed that issues and knowledge vital to education had been scrapped in schools in favour of trendy subjects and fashionable causes. No major subject area had escaped, its report, The Corruption of the Curriculum, claimed. The authors included Chris McGovern, chairman of the History Curriculum Authority. It said traditional subject areas had been hijacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender-awareness, the environment and anti-racism. In science-teaching controversial reforms had made fewer, not more, pupils interested in the subject. The new science curriculum replaced laboratory work and scientific probing with debates on abortion and nuclear power. In geography, it concluded, children were no longer taught facts about the world but how to be global citizens.

The state education system apparently paid little regard to teaching mathematics, physics or science. Only 7 per cent of pupils were educated in private or fee-paying systems (including the last remnant 164 grammar schools) but these comprised 40 per cent of pupils specialising in maths and physics at A-level. In 2005 there were only 3000 undergraduates studying physics and eighteen university physics departments—nearly one third—had closed since Labour came to power in 1997. By 2006 chemistry departments had also closed at some of Britain’s best universities, including Exeter, King’s College London, Dundee, and at Sussex, which had previously produced two Nobel chemistry laureates.

In my own area – the history of economic thought – the major issue of the moment is whether we should shut the entire enterprise down as a component of economics, and move it over into the history and philosophy of science. Till now, HET has been about the historical development of economic theory, and has been almost entirely undertaken by economists, who are the only people who know enough about economic theory to actually do it. This shift would turn it over to the sociologists of knowledge, who would have no need to know in dealing with any economics question, which way was up (for supply and demand curves, say), but could endlessly pontificate on power relations and white privilege.

But that is only mentioned as an example. This is not the informed citizenry the enlightenment wished to create. These are the fodder for a succession of revolutionary mobs, know-nothings about everything other than global warming, social injustice and their own desires.

Progressive internationalism and the withering away of the state

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I was reading a book that has turned out as good as I thought it might be before I started, Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism by someone I had never heard of, Alan S. Kahan. And there on page 145 I came across this sentence:

For Marx, the ideal form of politics is not the state, which he famously predicted would wither away, but free association.

And immediately as I read those words, the entire matrix of ideas that sit behind the progressive internationalist of our day, the elites who wish to subvert the nation state, the kinds of people who set up the EU, or open the borders on the American southern frontier, presented itself to me as a completely closed circle of ideas. This is the utopian vision of the far left, is and has always been. Obama is an empty vessel, generally with no serious wit and depth. But the animating ideas that drive those who fund and fill his head with the rhetoric he reads, that is their vision, the end of the nation state and the mixing of us all in one global village.

It is a nightmare vision, where the worst will ultimately pull the framework down, because the best will be drowned in the flood. And whatever you may wish for yourself, it is the outcome that is step by step being put into place, and cannot be stopped because the only answer is to recognise the problem, and then put that problem into words that will shape the politics of a people. And the fact is that there is virtually no place on the face of the globe where such politics is allowed to prevail, and where it is – Israel say – the enmity of the world, driven by its progressive elites, makes impossible a defence of any social order built on the historic circumstances of a particular people over the longer term.

Morality and the rise of the capitalist west

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Mary Thoreau at the Independent Institute on If You Like Rights, Liberty, and Economic Opportunity, Celebrate Christmas.

Those of us enjoying the multiple benefits of societies built upon respect for our human and economic rights ought especially to pause to give thanks for God’s incarnation as Christ, celebrated this week.

There is thankfully now a rich literature from which we can learn how the many principles and laws we take for granted today would have remained undiscovered had Christ not lived.

Joseph Schumpeter, Murray Rothbard, Alex Chafuen, and others have well documented the earliest roots of modern-day Austrian economics in medieval Christian scholarship—including the development of just price theory, the subjective theory of value, support for capitalism and free trade, and sophisticated thinking on money and banking (including fierce criticism of fractional-reserve banking).

[The Spanish Scholastics] taught morals and theology at the University of Salamanca, a medieval city located 150 miles to the northwest of Madrid, close to the border with Portugal. They were mainly Dominicans or Jesuits, and their view on economics closely parallels that stressed by Carl Menger more than 300 years later.

A short overview is in this excellent interview with Jesús Huerta de Soto, and Rothbard’s “New Light on the Prehistory of the Austrian School”.

These findings by Christian scholars were no accident: their discoveries were possible only because of their theology: believing that the universe was created and ruled by a just, loving, and rational Creator who had endowed His creatures with minds with which to come to know Him, they set out to discover His laws.

The sociologist Rodney Stark’s accessible ouvre traces the history of Christianity and its myriad contributions to the well-being of humanity. Among my favorites is his showing why women were especially drawn in great numbers to convert, as, for example, Roman noblewomen. The early Christian church accorded women unusual status and rights, in stark contrast with Roman society, where women were subject to their families and husbands, often forced to abort (generally a death sentence to the mother as well), and married off prepubescently to much older men. Romans also widely practiced infanticide, especially of girls. Christian women held positions of authority in the early church, chose whom they married (and married much later, as adults), and could hold title to and control of their own property.

Early Christian practice of charity and care for the sick, as during frequent plagues, also contributed to growing segments of Roman society converting, alarming the Emperor Julian so much that he ordered pagan priests to emulate their practices:

The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.

Stark also shows Christian theology as the font of reason, and lays lie to the claim that Christianity, reason, and science are somehow at odds. He documents, for example, that as with the politicization of science around today’s global warming hysteria, the much-repeated dispute between Galileo and the pope was largely a matter of political power, rather than scientific debate. (Similarly the “flat earth” myth, largely a construct of the late-nineteenth century debate over evolution. The primary medieval astronomy textbook was titled, On the Sphere.)

A short version of Stark’s thesis is in “How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West”.

None of this, of course, is a denial that much cruelty and stupidity has been carried out in the name of Christianity. Thus the need to look primarily to the source: Christ, his life and teachings, and their implications for how we each ought to lead our lives.

We are fortunate to have many great thinkers’ assistance in doing so, but, ultimately, it is a matter between God and each of us. This week we celebrate His making that relationship more possible, reaching out to all His creation in coming to earth as man.