Death panels? Sure. The State? No Way

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Boy do they hate it when she’s right.

Note that this is from Jim Fedako.

Death panels? Certainly. I sit on one, and am subject to another. But, today, it’s all OK.

How is that so? How are death panels OK? Well, let’s start by defining the term death panel. A death panel is an entity with final authority to make decisions over the course of treatment, including the ending of treatment and removal of life support.

So, we do not want those. Right?

Well, death panels have been around since the close of Eden. In earlier times, in more advanced societies, panels consisted of the patient and his or her close family. Together, they decided how their collective, limited resources would be allocated to healthcare. And, at some point, and in many cases, the decision to reduce or end treatment had to be made—such being the human condition.

These panels functioned without government control—and they functioned well. Life and death were, for the most part, a family matter.

Recently, though, the structure of the panels has changed due to the ever-increasing state. The panel I sit on—for my parents—is structured under a legal contract—the power of attorney. This agreement purportedly provides me and my sister control of our parents’ well-being, should the need arise. But, in reality, the state has created a myriad of laws and regulations governing healthcare, including the ending of such care. So state has, in essence, appropriated at least one seat on the panel.

The same power my parents have given to me and my sister is the very same power I have given to my wife and children—to lord over my last days, basing decisions on their limited resources and other concerns, within the constraints imposed by the state, of course. An enormous power and responsibility. Nevertheless, it works as best as can be expected given an intrusive state. We are OK—not in the best situation, but OK nonetheless.

As stated above, the hand of the state has intruded into a very personal, family matter. And with each intervention, life—and death—has gotten more difficult to address. But these infringements on liberty are nothing compared to what may await us all in the near future.

Death panels are not per se evil. They are required given the realities of limited resources. However, death panels become evil when the state gains control. Replace the concerns of the family with the bony finger of a government agency and we all need to fear.

So how does the state justify its growth in such intimate matters? And, more importantly, why do its citizens allow it?

The modern state survives on one great lie: the state claims that it holds the power to end the human condition resulting from limited resources. An example of how this plays out: A parent is concerned about burdening his or her child in old age. The state comes along and says it will bear that burden, and it will do so at no direct cost to the parent or child. But the bargain is Faustian. In exchange for bearing the burden, the state claims the authority to make final decisions regarding how long and to what extent the burden will be borne.

And, most importantly, the state does not say that, in the end, it bears the burden by burdening the child. This is true because the state produces nothing, it only thieves what it can. So to bear the burden of the parent, it taxes the efforts of the child.

As a result, the parent and child gain thing, but liberty is lost.

In the coming years, I expect to see government-controlled panels first allocate only government resources (thieved from the taxpayers, of course), so the individual and his or her family will still be able to supplement as desired. But the progression will be toward more government control, until the point is reached where the state no longer allows individuals to trump its decisions. And when that occurs, death panels will truly be the death panels we fear.

Death panels are a reality due to the never-ending reality of limited resources. But death panels are not the issue. The issue is the state.

This is always true: A thing per se is not necessarily evil, but that thing in conjunction with the state are always evil.

Jim Fedako (send him email) is a business analyst and homeschooling father of seven who lives in Lewis Center, OH.

How The IPCC Buried Evidence Showing Good News About Global Warming

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Global Warming Policy Foundation

Here is the Executive Summary from our friends Marcel Crok and Nicholas Lewis in their report A Sensitive Matter which is available at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (preprinted by request and with my delight).

1. The scientific part (WGI) of the fifth IPCC assessment report (AR5), published in final form in January 2014, contains some really encouraging information.1 The best observational evidence indicates our climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate scientists had previously thought. The clues and the relevant scientific papers are all mentioned in the full IPCC report. However, this important conclusion is not drawn in the full report—it is only mentioned as a possibility—and is ignored in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

2. Until AR5, for 30 years the scientific establishment’s best estimate and their uncertainty range for climate sensitivity had hardly changed. The best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) started and ended at 3oC and the uncertainty range2 generally had a lower bound of 1.5oC and an upper bound of 4.5oC.3 However, several recent studies give best estimates of between 1.5oC and 2oC, substantially lower than most earlier studies indicated.

3. In the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the empirical estimates of climate sensitivity were largely based not only on data that has now been superseded, but also on an inappropriate statistical basis that biased them towards higher values, thus making the global warming problem appear ‘worse’. In AR5, many studies still use inappropriate data and/or statistical methodology. However, there is now a body of empirical estimates of climate sensitivity, prepared using sound methodology and appropriate data, that give substantially lower values—both of long-term warming and of transient warming towards the end of this century—than climate model simulations.

4. Since the last IPCC report was prepared greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to increase, yet global temperatures have not risen; more importantly, estimates of the cooling efficacy of aerosol pollution have been cut. This combination of factors is indicative of the climate system being less sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously appeared to be the case. But the new evidence about aerosol cooling is not reflected in the computer climate models.

5. Global climate models used to predict future climate change still generate model climate sensitivities in the range 2–4.5oC, averaging just over 3oC. Large parts of the IPCC reports are built around the computer model simulations. Almost all the projections of future climate change are based on them,4 and a complete chapter is devoted to model performance. Admitting in the IPCC report that the best observationally-based estimates5 of climate sensitivity are now only 1.5–2oC would imply that large parts of the AR5 report are out of line with the latest scientific evidence.

6. In our view, the IPCC WGI scientists were saddled with a dilemma. How should they deal with the discrepancy between climate sensitivity estimates based on models and sound observational estimates that are consistent with the new evidence about aerosol cooling? In conjunction with governments—who have the last say on the wording of the SPM—they appear to have decided to resolve this dilemma in the following way. First, they changed the ‘likely’ range for climate sensitivity slightly. It was 2–4.5oC in AR4 in 2007. They have now reduced the lower bound to 1.5oC, making the range 1.5–4.5oC. By doing this they went some way to reflect the new, lower estimates that have been published recently in the literature.

7. They also decided not to give a best estimate for climate sensitivity. The tradition of giving a best estimate for climate sensitivity goes all the way back to the Charney report in 1979, and all subsequent IPCC reports (except the third assessment report in 2001) gave one as well. In AR4 the best estimate was 3oC. At the time of approval of the SPM by governments in September 2013, the decision not to give a best estimate for climate sensitivity was mentioned only in a footnote in the SPM, citing ‘a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies’. Only in the final report, published in January 2014, was a paragraph added in the Technical Summary giving slightly more explanation.

8. At a minimum, the SPM should have given a more informative explanation of the decision to widen the ECS ‘likely’ range and not give any best estimate for ECS. That could have taken the form of a straightforward statement that the best-quality observational evidence, based on improved estimates of the effects of aerosol pollution and the extended record of warming now available, points to a best estimate for ECS of 2oC or slightly less, while evidence from global climate models still suggests that it is about 3oC or slightly more. We—the authors of this report—were both expert reviewers of AR5 and in our review comments suggested that the IPCC should go further and give separate ranges for climate sensitivity based on models and on high quality observational studies.

9. In this report we suggest that the new observationally-based ‘likely’ range could be 1.25–3.0oC, with a best estimate of 1.75oC.6 If the IPCC had made that change—which would have been in line with the best quality scientific evidence available—it would have been picked up by all the major news outlets in the world as one of the major, if not the major, outcomes of the report. And rightly so.

10. In AR5 the IPCC felt even more certain (95% certain, compared to 90% in AR4) that humans have caused most (more than 50%) of the warming since 1950. The media treated this as the major conclusion of AR5, but it is in fact a relatively trivial finding. The high-quality observationally-based estimates for climate sensitivity discussed in this report assume that virtually all the measured warming (not just since 1950, but over the last 100–150 years) is due to humans. The far more important question now is how much warming is likely in the future under various scenarios.

11. Transient climate response (TCR), a measure of warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) over a seventy-year period, reflects ocean heat uptake efficiency as well as climate sensitivity and is often seen as providing a better guide to warming over the twenty-first century than ECS.7 AR5 lowers the 10–90% range for TCR of 1–3oC established in AR4 to a ‘likely’ range of 1–2.5oC. In this report, we suggest that an observationally-based ‘likely’ range for TCR could reasonably be 1–2oC, with a best estimate of 1.35oC. The average TCR for global climate models is much higher, at just under 2oC.

12. These lower, observationally-based estimates for climate sensitivity and TCR suggest that considerably less warming and sea level rise is to be expected in the future than the model projections imply. Projected future warming based on the best observationally-based estimate of TCR is 40–50% lower than the IPCC’s model-based projected warming, and on the IPCC’s second highest emissions scenario cumulative warming would still be around the international target of 2oC in 2081–2100.

13. Our criticisms are directed at the IPCC as an organisation,8 on the constraints its process imposes, and on the excessive emphasis put on projections and other results derived from climate models. The scientists’ hands were largely tied; the scopes and even titles of the various chapters had already been determined. Even discriminating between models would have been awkward politically.

14. The purpose of the IPCC is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change’.9 We believe that, due largely to the constraints the climate model-orientated IPCC process imposed, the WGI report and the SPM failed to reflect satisfactorily such an assessment in the case of climate sensitivity and TCR, arguably the most important parameters in the climate discussion.

——————————————————————

1The accepted final draft of the AR5 Working Group I report and the approved version of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) were published in September 2013. Corrected final versions of the SPM and the full AR5 WGI report were released in January 2014.

2‘Likely’, defined as the central two-thirds probability in the last two IPCC reports; until then it was not
defined probabilistically.

3The fourth IPCC assessment report, published in 2007, increased the lower bound to 2oC.

4Projected warming increases less than proportionally with ECS due to the moderating effect of heat uptake by the ocean. Projected warming in the models could conceivably be in line with observational evidence despite their ECS not being so. But it is not.

5Observationally-based methods do involve some limited use of models, but the ways they are used to help derive climate sensitivity estimates from observations differ greatly from the way global climate models are used to produce sensitivity estimates.

6This is based on giving precedence to high-quality estimates that use a long period of instrumental temperature data, in line with AR5′s appraisal of the different types of estimate, and discounting studies with identified substantial failings.

7However, sea level response depends more on the relationship between ECS and TCR than on TCR itself.

8The IPCC is not a research organisation, but its assessment report process significantly influences research carried out by climate scientists, in particular that involving simulations by climate models.

9http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_history.shtml

The Wrong-Side-Of-History Fallacy

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Ride 'em, cowboys!

Ride ‘em, cowboys!

If there’s one fallacy the Enlightened love more than any other, it’s this one. Invoking it is a pure self-esteem boost; it jolts the system like a small shot of espresso. Says to the utter to himself, “Boy, are you something: how far above the others you are!”

Statistical proof of the fallacy’s standing comes from New York‘s “‘Wrong Side of History’ Seems to Be on the Right Side of It”, which showed the phrase appeared over 1,800 times in bien pensant organs in 2013, up from 500 in 2006. The magazine calls the fallacy “the soft bullet of utter dismissiveness” and that “[p]rogressives have made it their mark of Zorro.” (Also showing explosive growth is the logically equivalent “The right side of history”.)

Examples.

Our dear leader, perhaps fatigued from delaying Obamacare one more time, said of Vladimir Putin’s entry into Crimea that the Russian ruler was “on the wrong side of history“. Mr Obama meant that it was politically and morally wrong for Putin to have done this because on this side of history, these actions are wrong.

If that’s so, then there was a date at which invasions like this were not wrong, and not wrong is right, or at least acceptable. Before (say) 1789, mankind was in darkness, brutish, ignorant, and in agreement that territorial expansion was the bees knees. Then, somehow—nobody knows how, perhaps a miracle—the light appeared! Mankind (womankind, too!) stepped into the blazing sun of truth and, aided by the guillotine, expunged the blackness.

Unfortunately, guillotines dull, the hangman’s rope wears, and the axeman’s arm tires. So there are still a few unenlightened wandering to and fro, literally mired in the wrong-side-of-history. What these folks need is a stern “dialoging”, they need their “awareness raised”, they need “exposure” to new ideas. Then the world will glow.

Or Mr Obama’s statement might imply not an Enlightenment but a gradual shift. After some date (say) 2000, sufficient numbers of mankind voted against incursions. This carries the idea that if sufficient numbers hadn’t, then incursions would till be dandy. In other words, moral and political truths are defined by votes. A lovely and clear, but appallingly frightening idea. Any demagogue with a pretty tongue can make “truth.”

Whoopi “It Wasn’t Rape-Rape” Goldberg lectured Nigerian and Ugandan presidents Goodluck Jonathan (I adore his name) and Yoweri Museveni on their countries’ adoption of laws to discourage man-on-man sex. “People,” she said, “Would face up to seven years in jail for promoting equality.” “Wrong side of history,” she said. There is no logical difference between Goldberg’s and Obama’s arguments, except that Goldberg was careful to say “My opinion” several times.

Notice, and notice with all your might, that neither Obama nor Goldberg nor anybody who uses this fallacy offer as argument anything but the fallacy. Mr Obama did not say why Mr Putin’s actions were wrong other than they were on the “wrong side of history.” Obama may have had other arguments but he assumed everybody knew them and, a fortiori, that everybody accepted them, even Mr Putin. Since Mr Putin obviously did not accept them, as anybody exposed to these missing-but-tacit arguments obviously should have, then something is wrong with Putin. Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested a weak form of mental illness, and others are eagerly believing this.

Goldberg, and the Goldberg inside all progressives, acted identically. The arguments which purport to show man-on-man sex is moral and that marriage should be redefined are never stated, they are assumed. “Equality” as Goldberg used the word is like an incantation, meant to be all the proof needed.

Longtime reader Luís Dias contributed this last example, which shows the “wrong side” isn’t always a fallacy. Suppose you and a friend witness a guy clonking another on the head with a portable plastic newspaper kiosk and your friend says to you, “How medieval.” Your friend is clearly not saying the action is wrong because a preferred method of dispatching enemies in the eleventh century was conking, only that that method was then popular.

But people often use “It’s medieval” fallaciously, particularly with regard to cultural institutions like the Catholic Church, calling its rules “medieval” and therefore wrong. Of course, the Church got its start well before the medieval period, so not only do people argue badly, their grasp of history is like a drunken ninety-year-old arthritic’s who lost two fingers in a hunting accident.

Update Apropos from George Will:

…Secretary of State John Kerry: “It’s a 19th-century act in the 21st century. It really puts at question Russia’s capacity to be within the G8.”

Although this “19th-century act” resembles many 20th century (and 16th, 17th and 18th century) acts, it is, the flabbergasted Kerry thinks, astonishing in the 21st century, which he evidently supposes to be entirely unlike any other. What is more disconcerting—that Kerry believes this?…

What Are The Chances Of That?

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A random Wikipedia picture about dice. Because posts have to have pictures.

Go ahead and ask me. I’ll even pretend to laugh. Just as I chuckle warmly with you when you quote Mark Twain (or Disraeli) abut damned lies.

(Secretly, I’ll be looking for the nearest exit. But, oh yes, I’ll laugh.)

Whenever any weird, comical, or seemingly unusual event happens—like when I was walking with a friend and a school bus drove by and a kid threw a crayon out the window which landed plop into his pop1—and a guy like me is around, somebody hilariously asks, “What are the chances of that!”

Here’s the universal answer: if it happened, then the chance is 100%. I’m not kidding. That’s the real answer. Why? Because all chance is calculated conditional on circumstance. And the circumstances were whatever it was that caused the strange thing to happen. And since the strange thing happened (as it was caused to) the chance is 100%.

If that sounds like a lawyer’s answer that’s because nobody ever means the question in this sense. They want to know what are the chances the strange thing happens again.

Same answer: 100%. It’s the same answer for the same reason. Because all chance is calculated conditional on circumstance, and the question does not specify any change in circumstance, the probability must also remain unperturbed.

Probability isn’t alive, it is a zombie, a perfect slave to the information which specifies it. If nothing changed, if the world really were to reset itself to the precise same condition before the strange thing happened, and there is no change to the physical laws and (all) causes which drive everything, then the strange thing must happen again.

But nobody means the question in this sense either.

So what sense do they mean it? That’s not clear. Two things are needed in any chance or probability calculation. The first is the proposition of interest, which is our strange thing. When somebody asks “What are the chances?” they clearly mean to keep this proposition intact. The second thing, as discussed, are the conditions. We’ve already seen that we’re not meant to keep these conditions precisely identical, so people must be imagining these undergo some sort of shift. What kind?

Let’s switch examples in the hopes of clarification: an American roulette wheel. The proposition is “The ball lands on the 5″, which isn’t especially strange, but the proposition isn’t the problem. What are the circumstances? A bunch of slots (38) on a wheel, one of which labeled “5″, and a ball which must land in one of the slots. Probably, based on this and no other evidence (“no other” means no other), is 1 in 38.

Now if the ball in fact landed on 5, and somebody asks, “What are the chances of that happening again?” we’d say “One in thirty-eight”. Why? Not because we expect the circumstances to be identical on the next spin—because if they were then a 5 must again show—but because we keep the same evidence in mind (that the wheel has 38 slots, etc.).

Inveterate gamblers start the same but change the evidence. They say to themselves something like, “It just came up 5, it probably won’t do it again. Of course, the wheel still has 38 slots and so forth.” Now the probably the inveterate gambler then calculates based on this changed evidence probably won’t be zero, but he’d say it was close.

And that’s okay, because he did change the evidence (as I cannot emphasize enough). A pedant would wag his finger at the gambler and insist he’s using the wrong evidence. Well, and so he is, but the gambler’s not coming to the wrong probability based on the evidence he used.

The best evidence to use nobody has: that would be the full physics of the circumstance (weight of wheel, forces on the ball, friction of the slots as ball hits, and on and on). Now this sounds a bit like listing the circumstance for the strange thing, doesn’t it? But if we had that information, we’d know whether the 5 was going to show with certainty.

So where do we stand? For the strange thing, the asker means to change the circumstance/evidence, as we saw, but he never specifies how to change it. We know the circumstances must be different to get a probability different than 1, we just don’t know in what direction they should be modified.

Since we can’t know what aspects of the circumstances should change, there’s no way to know what the probability of the strange thing is. Consider the crayon. Should the bus be moving or stationary? At what distance is the cup? What color crayon? Should color matter? Which angle is the cup mouth facing the bus? Is the cup moving or stationary? And on and on endlessly. Unless we are prepared to say exactly which evidence we’re considering, there’s no way to know the chance.

What a disappointing answer.

—————————————————————————-

1That’s right. I said pop. You barbarian.

Bake Your Own Damn Cake

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Still just one man, one woman

A new joke. Setup: What do you call it when two guys head to City Hall and undergo a ceremony meant to tie their finances together until one of them tires of the other? Punchline: I don’t know, but it isn’t marriage!

And it isn’t. No matter what the State might choose to call it, two guys (and two gals, but for the sake of brevity I shall say only the former and expect you to include the latter) who want to have sex and who exchange paperwork samples at a bureaucrat’s office aren’t married.

Marriage, I unfortunately have to remind you, is the lifetime union (or matrimony) between a man and woman, a state orientated towards procreation. That is the religious view, yes, but also the natural law definition. It must make detractors choke to acknowledge it, but it’s also the scientific designation.

Never mind that, because I’m talking here to those who already know this. For those who refuse to acknowledge these truths, well, you’re welcome to stay, but I’m not interested in a debate over fundamentals today. (See here for that).

Now states have a long history of passing laws calling what is not so “true” and requiring its citizens to play along or else. It’s the “or elses” that I want to talk about.

Good place to start is Ross Douthat’s unconditional surrender. His reasoning in parts is somewhere south of coherent,1 but his predictions are good.

First, the dissolving of religious freedom. Religious bakers will have to bake cakes for the men who want to have sex with men or they will pay fines, face legal harassment, even lose their businesses. “So what,” say the Tolerant, “Serves them right for being bigots.” That the Tolerant are being bigoted themselves is never noticed. Religion, as soon-to-be defined by the “elite” (cue Anthony Kennedy), will be worship in church and not part of a man’s “public identity.” (The Obama administration trotted this out to scattered applause during its contraception “mandate.”)

Second, the closing of charitable religious organizations such as orphanages because they refuse to place children in homes which don’t contain married couples (don’t forget ersatz unions don’t count as marriage). “So what,” say the Tolerant, “Serves those kids right for being near bigots.”

Third, schools and colleges which maintain truth will be sued, especially if they accept any form of state lucre. Those that do will be forced to adopt “sex codes,” affirming man-on-man sex is swell and to be encouraged. This is already happening, incidentally.

Fourth, loss of tax exempt status for religious groups who refuse to participate in state man-on-man ceremonies. The viciously circular argument will be, “Those that refuse aren’t serving the public” (logical fallacies are the last concern of the lust brigade, which is why they shout “bigot!” which also assumes what it wants to prove).

What should those who oppose the state do?

Call real marriage what it is, real marriage, and call the government mandate what it is, (say) “government unions.” This small step will cause fury in the Tolerant. You will lose business (Yours Truly has, and this article won’t help him), but stick to it. You cannot let the enemy control language. This move will also prove that the “other side” does not want mere “marriage equality”, which might have been a reasonable civil compromise, but that they will settle for nothing less than full-throated celebration of their desires and the destruction of all who disagree. This is called “tolerance”.

Do not talk to the media, but use them. Never, never, never grant an interview which you do not control.

Have your church, temple, or mosque (especially mosque) head to a bakery run by men who want to have sex with men and ask them to bake cupcakes for your organization’s party with messages like “Homosexual behavior is sinful”, “Gay sex is disgusting”, “True marriage is one man one woman”, “We love you, but you’re wrong”? I do not kid. Doesn’t have to be a bakery, any business which “serves the public” will do. T-shirts, anything in the fashion industry.

The loss of orphanages will be hard, but make it known to your local community that your organization can find homes for kids, then figure out how to do this. We should not be looking to the government but to ourselves. Strengthen families, not bureaucracies.

Homes school your kids or send them to a faithful parochial school. Get them out of the government’s hands and back into yours. This will be the best money you ever spend.

Accept the loss of tax-exempt status gracefully. It was always a matter of time, anyway. Be more creative about how funds flow into and out of your group so that not everything has to count as income.

Update Be interesting to see what the intelligentsia makes of this case, which pits a woman who wants to have sex with other woman and Muslim barbers (who care nothing about the woman’s proclivities but fret about her biological sex). Screeching at Christians is one thing, but at Muslims? Well, the left’s bravery only goes so far. My bet is with Islam.

Update In the wake of Arizona’s SB 1062, “Jim Crow” is the new “Hitler”. The only thing you can trust the media to do is to get it wrong.

Update Not everybody in the lust brigade is unreasonable in the sense of asking for more state control (which the state is always happy to provide). See this at Reason.com.

Update Long past the point of parody, folks. Judge dismisses witness in Mich. gay marriage trial.

The state had planned on having its first witness — Sherif Girgis — on the stand for up to two hours. Prior to getting dismissed, Girgis spent about 20 minutes on the stand listing his credentials, most of which included lecturing and writing academic papers on the philosophical debate surrounding the definition of marriage. He also has written a book, “What is Marriage, Man & Woman in Defense.”

But [Judge] Friedman dismissed the witness following arguments from the plaintiffs’ side, who noted that Girgis is not a lawyer, child development expert, psychologist or expert in Michigan law. He has no experience in the issues that matter in this case, the plaintiffs argued.

Friedman agreed.

Update From Sheri. “[Male] Gay hair stylist drops [female] New Mexico governor as client because she opposes same-sex marriage”. The media applauds.

——————————————————–

1Douthat says, “Christians had plenty of opportunities—thousands of years’ worth—to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance….So being marginalized, being sued, losing tax-exempt status—this will be uncomfortable, but we should keep perspective and remember our sins, and nobody should call it persecution.” Nothing in this paragraph is sensible. Even if sexual “orientation” were a real thing and not just a recent invention, and even if Christians 1,000 years ago chose “intolerance”, what is that to today? Those Christians are dead and the men who wanted to have sex with men are dead. It’s now that counts. Besides, the argument assumes what it sets out to prove, that we should be tolerant of man-on-man sexual behavior even to include “marriage”. And persecution is persecution. Sheesh.

You Can’t Get Something From Nothing: The Experience of God, Part II

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Himself

Himself

Read Part I

You can’t get there from here

It’s difficult, thus far impossible, to get Enlightened persons to understand nothing. Lord knows it’s been tried. Some physicists—Larry Krauss, Vic Stenger, Stephen Hawking, others—make a nice living misunderstanding nothing. Still, where there’s life there’s hope. So let’s try again.

Nothing is no thing. It is not some thing. It is not some thing very small or difficult to see. It is not some thing far away in time or distance. It is not a quantum field, for a field is something. It is not a set of mathematical or physical laws, for sets of laws are something. It is obviously not an infinity of universes, for an infinity of universes is certainly something. It is not time, for time is not nothing.

I assure you, dear reader, whatever exceptions you believe you have discovered to this definition are mistaken. Nothing means just what it says: nothing. That’s our first premise.

Second premise: some things exist. Like the monitor or screen on which you’re reading this. Even you exist and are something, despite what our government or some rogue materialist philosopher might have told you.

This leads to the Big Question: why is all this stuff here? Pay attention, now. I do not mean to ask, though we will ask later, when all this stuff got here, but I want to know why anything is here right now, right this very moment.

Well, no surprise that the answer is God, a.k.a. I Am That I Am. If you don’t find that name spine tingling, even if you’re an unbeliever, than you haven’t understood it. And you must understand it, because it is this God you claim to reject (with all the others). So let’s try to.

You yourself are composed of parts, you are made of things which are in movement in the sense that they change, perhaps not from one place to another, but from actual states to other potential states. Example? Well, you have to scroll down to read this article, so you move your hand to the mouse (say), press its button, and drag the mouse to scroll the page.

Your hand moves because the muscles pullings on tendons and bones move simultaneously, and your muscles contract because of changes (which don’t matter here) inside the cells, and these changes occur because of chemical interactions, which are themselves changes in the position of certain electrons, protons, and neutrons, and these change because (to make it short) the quantum field in which these objects are “embedded” changes, and the field changes…because why?

Well, because of something. Maybe because there is something smaller and more fundamental than the field that causes the field to change, but anyway something is causing it to change. Even if there is something smaller and more fundamental than the field, this series of simultaneous, here-and-now causes-and-effects must have a first cause, a base which starts the whole thing off. This simultaneous, here-and-now cause-and-effect chain can not go on forever. It must terminate somewhere or nothing could ever happen.

The whole shebang must have a first cause, a cause which itself is not caused by anything else. Now it doesn’t take much to see that it’s this same first cause that must also be causing every other simultaneous, here-and-now cause-and-effect chain. Every as in every. This first cause, as we’ll see, is why there is something and not nothing right here and right now.

This first uncaused cause is what we call Being Itself, the Unmoved Mover, I Am That I Am, which is to say, God.

You can get something from God

Judaism and Christianity are not the only traditions to have noted these curious facts, albeit in different contexts. Hart: “Everything available to the senses or representable to the mind is entirely subject to annicha (to use the Buddhist term): impermanence, mutability, transience.” God “is beyond all mere finite beings, and is himself that ultimate ground upon which any foundations must rest. Thus the Mundaka Upanishad speaks of Brahma, the first-born among the gods, coming forth from Brahma, the eternal Godhead who is the source of all being”.

What of existence itself? It “lies logically beyond the system of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, ‘hyperphysical,’ or, shifting into Latin, super naturam.” Boy, howdy, is that a frightening word. Just imagining the demons set loose upon “reason” by this word is probably what causes prominent scientists to confuse a universe (or multiverse, or whatever stuff there is) transitioning “from one physical state to another, one manner of existence to another” with coming into being out of nothing.

These guys figure that if the somethings they describe are smaller and more basic, that somehow the infinite bridge between non-existence and existence can be crossed. This is an example “of what might be called the ‘pleonastic fallacy’: that is, the belief that an absolute qualitative difference can be overcome by a successive accumulation of extremely small and entirely relative quantitative steps.”

More metaphysics, which are the physics beyond the physics, the stuff which we must know before we can even discuss, say, molecular bonding and quantum chromodynamics. We need at least these two things:

[T]the Principle of Causation—whatever does not have the cause of its existence in itself must be caused to exist by something beyond itself—and the Principle of Sufficient Reason—any true proposition1 must have some sufficient explanation for why it is true…The latter principle in some sense presumes the former, because a proposition about an event or about some object’s existence will generally be explicable chiefly by reference to the cause of that event or object.

And hear Hart makes my heart sing: “But one must remember that propositions can be true in a numbers of ways, depending on their form and content, and that propositions are not “caused” to be true, even if they are true because they accurately describe how something has been caused.” The distinction between what we know and what is must not be forgot, though it often is. That is, we can’t mix up these two principles, and it’s the Principle of Causation which is of more importance to the question “Why is there anything?”

Now since the universe (or multiverse, or whatever) is logically contingent on something for its existence, and since this something cannot be itself by the Principle of Causation, it must be contingent on something outside itself, i.e. the “Absolute”. What’s what? You say that not everything needs a cause? Well, you can say it, you can even imagine it, but you can’t really believe or conceive of it. For once you imagine any “inexplicable”, “uncaused” event (The philosopher Edward Feser has a purple rabbit, or whatever, popping “into existence” in front of you), you immediately ask, “How did that get there?”

“Not so, Briggs. You have failed to consider quantum mechanics, where we know there are no ‘hidden variables’ causing things which are unpredictable.” True, but that does not mean that “nothing” causes these events, just that we finite stuck-in-time beings cannot know what it is. But we know enough that we can pin the probability of events occurring. And by the Principle of Sufficient Reason these probabilities are all conditional2 on the knowledge of certain things already existing; i.e. quantum events “do not literally emerge from nonexistence” but in the presence of the already-existing subatomic soup.

As for when it all got here, well, Hart like Aquinas and most other theologians are content to let Science (it must be capitalized) tell us. The universe (etc.) might have been here forever, expanding and contracting and doing its dance, or it might have got its start some thirteen billion years ago. Or there might really be a multiverse (or whatever). All fascinating questions, but regardless of when, Science can never ultimately say why.

One last thing, to those who shout, “Sez you! God might have caused the universe, but what caused God? Ha!” This retort shows two things: that I have done a poor job showing that God is a logically necessary being and that He must exist, and that in making this argument you are conceding the unpalatability of the infinite regress (think about it).

A simple Being

Hart goes into detail about how God is metaphysically “simple”, i.e. that He is not composed of parts, that He is unchangeable and what “unchangeable” means, that He exists outside time and what that really means, that He is utterly transcendent and just what that means.

That we can only speak analogically of God, or negatively: we can say what God is not. After all, none of us has any idea what it’s like out at infinity, and we have only the dimmest concept of what (say) omnipotence or omniscience are. We say God is good and wise, but those terms are only crude approximations, because really they are the same thing. God is simple in that his essence and existence are the same.

But I have used up my space so you’ll have to refer to the book for these details.

Next time: God and consciousness.

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1Hart also has some interesting things to say about Fregean-style analytic philosophy that I am anxious to discuss, such as the view (he doesn’t put it this way) that if only we can work out just the write symbols, where each symbols is perfectly defined and unique, then we can have a purely logical language. As the kiddies say, good luck with that!

2As I say again and again and as nauseam, all probability is conditional.

Best Picture Oscar Winner: Model Prediction

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Who is the captain now?

For several years I have been predicting (with perfect accuracy) the best picture Oscar. (See this and this for past years.)

The “model” pick for this year is Captain Phillips. Update The model fails. See below.

To do this I created a “model”, i.e. a set of probative observations, which ranked movies from most to least likely to win. Yet I worry the observations are no longer probative because the Academy is on to me.

The “model” is this: the lead actor—not actress—is at least forty, the other featured actors are mainly older men, and the picture took in only around 20% of the money earned by the year’s top film. Women in winning movies play only a peripheral role and their parts could easily have been played by other women, or even left out.

But, like I say, the Academy is on to me. This year there have been cries of—what else?—sexism! How tedious. Women, and the men who resemble them (I do not mean sexual activity), are saying that the Best Picture should have something more to do with femaleness. This will have some effect on the voting, but how much is anybody’s guess.

In the absence of “gender” politics, here are the “model” picks. Note: I did not see any of the nominated movies (nor any others). I’m relying on public descriptions of the films. As in previous years, I used Boxofficemojo.com for movie grosses.

First, the anti-Catholic Philomena is out: all about a woman. Gravity with its one whole woman and one half is also out. However this movie wins if the politics kicks in. Her focused on Joaquin Phoenix, who was 39 when the film was released. He also played what the male sex has today become, i.e. not quite a man. Movie had to have female support, so this movie doesn’t make the grade.

The main contenders (in alphabetical order) are these.

American Hustle with Christian Bale squeaks in: he was 39 (now 40). The movie also heavily featured a woman (Amy Adams, 39), whose part looks irreplaceable. The movie took in $145 million, which was 34% of the highest grossing movie, $424 million from the latest installment of the live action cartoon Hunger Games. That’s a little high.

Captain Phillips has a lead actor at 58 (Tom Hanks), with mostly men as support; however the main antagonist (Barkhad Abdi) is only 28, which is on the young side, as are the other men. The box-office take was in the sweet spot of 25% of the top’s.

Dallas Buyers Club with Matthew McConaughey at 45, with other 40-plus men in support. The main woman (Jennifer Garner) appears replaceable. But it only made about $25 million, which is only 6% of the best. We’re all “gay” now, so that works in the movie’s favor.

Nebraska has Bruce Dern as the lead actor, who is well past 40. The other main actor is a man (Will Forte), who is 44. While there are women in the movie, they are not the main focus and all appear to be replaceable. A weakness is that the film pulled in only about $17 million, which is a rounding error to the top movie (5%).

12 Years a Slave. There’s nothing Hollywood likes better than celebrating past civil rights victories, so this would seem a shoe-in. But it starred Chiwetel Ejiofor who was only 37 (he looks much older). There are also a lot of women and younger people, but are they dispensable? Took in about $49 million; only 12% of the top. The money is important as a proxy for Academy-member viewing. Why? Because movies are like books used to be and Academy members lie about seeing all the movies they vote on, just like people used to lie about reading “must read” books.

The Wolf of Wall Street edges into competition, but barely. Leonardo DiCaprio is now 40 but was only 39 when the picture was released. He was supported, however, by mainly 40-plus men. The women in the film misbehave themselves to the extent they are not memorable (as far as I have read). Movie made $113 million, which is in the ballpark: 27% of the top.

None of these fit the model perfectly, but Captain Phillips is more probable than 12 Year which is more probable than Wolf. Barkhad Abdi and his pirate crew are young, but their deeds and ways of holding weapons ages them. The movie, though it has a female (and whose role could have been played by anybody), is really all about men.

Naturally, this is a model and not a perfect prognostication. I do not attach a probability to the prediction other than to emphasize that, given the evidence I am using and the assumptions I made, the prediction has the highest probability. This “model” is in the minority, too: scarcely anybody is picking Phillips, which (if they’re right) proves that “models” are only models.

Update And here is why I haven’t seen a new movie in over two years.

Update 12 Years wins, which suggests my model should take into account politics. Just how remains to be seen.