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Republicans push for election integrity to avoid repeat of 2020 election

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Prior to the 2020 election, Democrats expanded mail-in voting and drop box vting in states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia. The election results showed that there were 65.6 million mail-in ballots in 2020, up from 33.5 million in 2016. Drop-box voting surged, too. When the votes were counted, Democrats got 15.4 million (23.4%) more votes in 2020 compared to 2016.

To prevent this from happening again, Republicans  are pushing hard to enhance election integrity.

Here’s the story from Daily Caller:

As President Donald Trump moves at breakneck speed to enact his agenda, the Republican National Committee is quietly racking up election integrity wins and gearing up for the next election cycle, the Daily Caller has learned.

The RNC won three lengthy legal battles related to the prevention of election fraud in March across the key states of Arizona, Georgia and Washington.

“These cases represent that a lot of times, things get started and resolved during an election year, but many times they don’t, and the RNC doesn’t walk away from them,” an RNC official told the Caller. “We are here to see these things through.”

Here is an interesting story about Arizona, which got a lot of press for failure to count their ballots in a timely way. It turns out that their Democrat Secretary of State (in charge of elections) wanted to weaken “safeguards against non-citizen voting”:

In March, Arizona’s Court of Appeals announced that the secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, did not “substantially comply” with the state’s proper rule making process when finalizing the 2023 Election Procedures Manual. The court’s ruling was the result of a February 2024 lawsuit filed by the GOP, which argued that Fontes’s Election Procedures Manual would weaken “safeguards against non-citizen voting,” “unlawfully limited the ability to challenge early ballots,” and “violate[d] numerous provisions of state law meant to protect election integrity,” a party official shared with the Caller.

You might remember that this Democrat also lost a case where he tried to cover up which voters were improperly registered to vote.

More from the original Daily Caller article, this time about Georgia:

Another significant win came in Georgia on March 7. The RNC intervened in a case in May 2024 after a local labor union sued trying to overturn the state’s absentee ballot rules. The state’s law sets the deadline to request absentee ballots at 11 days prior to election day, but the union wanted to extend the deadline.

Nearly a year later, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia threw out the union’s lawsuit, ultimately ruling in the RNC’s favor.

Why would Democrats and their union allies want to make it easier for people to vote absentee?

Here’s another one, from the state of Washington:

In Washington, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the RNC’s favor that the state’s signature verification law does not violate the state’s constitution. The RNC first got involved in that legal battle in 2023.

Why would Washington Democrats want to attack a signature verification law? What could their motive be?

Anyway, it’s good to see that Republicans are not floating blindly through their 4 years in power this time. Now is the time for them to strengthen election integrity, so that our elections are protected from mail-in ballot fraud and drop-box ballot fraud.

By the way, if you live in states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Georgia, Washington and Arizona, it might be a good idea for you to make sure that you vote for Republicans for Secretary of State. Because the Secretaries of State in many of these states are Democrats, and they certainly have an agenda.

Polemics

Mark D. Linville: does Darwinian evolution make morality rational?

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Have you ever heard an atheist tell you that naturalistic evolution is an answer to the moral argument? I have. And I found a good reply to this challenge in the book “Contending With Christianity’s Critics“. The chapter that responds to the challenge is authored by Dr. Mark D. Linville.

First, a bit about the author:

Blog: The Tavern at the End of the World
Current positions:

  • PhD Research Fellow
  • Tutoring Fellow in Philosophy

Education:

  • PhD in Philosophy with a minor in South Asian Studies and a specialization in Philosophy of Religion, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • MA in Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • MA in Philosophy of Religion, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
  • MA in Theology, Cincinnati Christian Seminary
  • BA in Biblical Studies, Florida Christian College

Here is his thesis of the essay:

Darwin’s account of the origins of human morality is at once elegant, ingenious, and, I shall argue, woefully inadequate. In particular, that account, on its standard interpretation, does not explain morality, but, rather, explains it away . We learn from Darwin not how there could be objective moral facts, but how we could have come to believe—perhaps erroneously—that there are.

Further, the naturalist, who does not believe that there is such a personal being as God, is in principle committed to Darwinism, including a Darwinian account of the basic contours of human moral psychology. I’ll use the term evolutionary naturalism to refer to this combination of naturalism and Darwinism. And so the naturalist is saddled with a view that explains morality away. Whatever reason we have for believing in moral facts is also a reason for thinking naturalism is false. I conclude the essay with a brief account of a theistic conception of morality, and argue that the theist is in a better position to affirm the objectivity of morality.

And here’s a sample to get your attention:

But even if we are assured that a “normal” person will be prompted by the social instincts and that those instincts are typically flanked and reinforced by a set of moral emotions, we still do not have a truly normative account of moral obligation. There is nothing in Darwin’s own account to indicate that the ensuing sense of guilt—a guilty feeling—is indicative of actual moral guilt resulting from the violation of an objective moral law. The revenge taken by one’s own conscience amounts to a sort of second-order propensity to feel a certain way given one’s past relation to conflicting first-order propensities (e.g., the father’s impulse to save his child versus his impulse to save himself). Unless we import normative considerations from some other source, it seems that, whether it is a first or second-order inclination,one’s being prompted by it is more readily understood as a descriptive feature of one’s own psychology than material for a normative assessment of one’s behavior or character. And, assuming that there is anything to this observation, an ascent into even higher levels of propensities (“I feel guilty for not having felt guilty for not being remorseful over not obeying my social instincts…”) introduces nothing of normative import. Suppose you encounter a man who neither feels the pull of social, paternal or familial instincts nor is in the least bit concerned over his apparent lack of conscience. What, from a strictly Darwinian perspective, can one say to him that is of any serious moral import? “You are not moved to action by the impulses that move most of us.” Right. So?

The problem afflicts contemporary construals of an evolutionary account of human morality. Consider Michael Shermer’s explanation for the evolution of a moral sense—the “science of good and evil.” He explains,

By a moral sense, I mean a moral feeling or emotion generated by actions. For example, positive emotions such as righteousness and pride are experienced as the psychological feeling of doing “good.” These moral emotions likely evolved out of behaviors that were reinforced as being good either for the individual or for the group.2

Shermer goes on to compare such moral emotions to other emotions and sensations that are universally experienced, such as hunger and the sexual urge. He then addresses the question of moral motivation.

In this evolutionary theory of morality, asking “Why should we be moral?” is like asking “Why should we be hungry?” or “Why should we be horny?” For that matter, we could ask, “Why should we be jealous?” or “Why should we fall in love?” The answer is that it is as much a part of human nature to be moral as it is to be hungry, horny, jealous, and in love.3

Thus, according to Shermer, given an evolutionary account, such a question is simply a non-starter. Moral motivation is a given as it is wired in as one of our basic drives. Of course, one might point out that Shermer’s “moral emotions” often do need encouragement in a way that, say, “horniness,” does not. More importantly, Shermer apparently fails to notice that if asking “Why should I be moral?” is like asking, “Why should I be horny?” then asserting, “You ought to be moral” is like asserting, “You ought to be horny.” As goes the interrogative, so goes the imperative. But if the latter seems out of place, then, on Shermer’s view, so is the former.

One might thus observe that if morality is anything at all, it is irreducibly normative in nature. But the Darwinian account winds up reducing morality to descriptive features of human psychology. Like the libido, either the moral sense is present and active or it is not. If it is, then we might expect one to behave accordingly. If not, why, then, as a famous blues man once put it, “the boogie woogie just ain’t in me.” And so the resulting “morality” is that in name only.

In light of such considerations, it is tempting to conclude with C. S. Lewis that, if the naturalist remembered his philosophy out of school, he would recognize that any claim to the effect that “I ought” is on a par with “I itch,” in that it is nothing more than a descriptive piece of autobiography with no essential reference to any actual obligations.

When it comes to morality, we are not interested in mere descriptions of behavior. We want to know about prescriptions of behavior, and whether why we should care about following those prescriptions. We are interested in what grounds our sense of moral obligation in reality. What underwrites our sense of moral obligation? If it is just rooted in feelings, then why should we obey our moral sense when obeying it goes against out self-interest? Feelings are subjective things, and doing the right thing in a real objective state of affairs requires more than just feelings. There has to be a real objective state of affairs that makes it rational for us to do the right thing, even when the right thing is against our own self-interest. That’s what morality is – objective moral obligations overriding subjective feelings. I wouldn’t trust someone to be moral if it were just based on their feelings.

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What’s in an apologetics book? A review of “God’s Crime Scene” by J. Warner Wallace

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One of the best introductory books on the existence of God is Detective J. Warner Wallace’s “God’s Crime Scene”. The book provides a good overview of all of the areas that suggest an intelligent agent at work in the natural world. I found a good review of the book over at Luke Nix’s “Faithful Thinkers” blog.

The book begins with an introductory chapter explaining what’s in the book, then an opening statement explaining (without taking sides) how we can investigate whether or not there is a Creator and Designer of the universe. The next 8 chapters talk about 8 areas where we can investigate:

  1. the origin of the universe
  2. evidence for design in the universe
  3. the origin of life
  4. the presence of information in the cell
  5. our awareness of consciousness
  6. our experience of free will
  7. objective human value and objective moral duties
  8. the reality of evil in the world

I’ll just grab a couple of paragraphs on a couple of those points from Luke’s review:

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Wallace’s first piece of evidence that appears to not have an explanation inside the universe is the universe’s beginning. He presents a diverse set of arguments for the beginning of the universe. These include the philosophical evidence of the impossibility of infinite regresses, theoretical evidence of mathematics and physics, observational evidence from astronomy, thermal evidence provided by the second law of thermodynamics, quantitative evidence in the abundance of helium, and evidence of the cosmic background radiation. All these used together provide powerful evidence of the beginning of the universe, and since everything that begins to exist, must have a cause, the universe must have had a cause outside itself too.

Chapter 2: Tampering with the Evidence

The foundational conditions of the universe that allow for life’s existence include the physical laws governing the atom, the matter of the universe, and the creation of chemicals. The next layer (regional) moves closer to home: our galaxy and solar system. The shape, position, and size of our galaxy make it habitable for life; while our sun’s position, age, mass, and composition allow it to to host a planet fit for life. The third layer is the planet, itself. The earth’s relationship to the sun, atmosphere, terrestrial nature, and moon all play a role in making a place that is fit for life.

Chapter 5: Our Experience of Consciousness

In naturalistic worldviews it is common to believe that the brain and the mind are the same thing. Wallace explains that the only way that two things are the same is if they share all their attributes with no differences. He describes six attributes of the brain that are not shared by the mind. All of these distinctions build a powerful case for the two being completely different. He concludes that the brain is physical while the mind is non-physical and that the mind’s existence can only be explained “outside the room” of the universe being the product of another mind. He examines several attempts by naturalistic philosophers to explain the mind “inside the room” of the universe, but he shows how each of them fail to offer an adequate explanation.

Chapter 6: Free Will or Full Wiring

From a naturalistic perspective (one that holds there is no distinction between the mind and the brain) free will does not exist; it is an illusion much like the mind. If free will does actually exist, it points even more powerfully towards the existence of the mind, which must derive its origin from the supernatural, since it is supernatural itself. Wallace uses the concept of responsibility and the ability to choose other than we do to build his case for free will’s actual existence. Without the ability to chose something other than what we do, we cannot be held responsible, thus no one would be worthy of punishment (in the case of wrong-doing) or praise (in the case of doing right).

A while back I finished reading “God’s Crime Scene”, and I found something interesting in Chapter 6, on free will on p. 256:

In 2008, researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of British Columbia conducted experiments highlighting the relationship between a belief in determinism and immoral behavior. They found students who were exposed to deterministic literature prior to taking a test were more likely to cheat on the test than students who were not exposed to literature advocating determinism. The researchers concluded those who deny free will are more inclined to believe their efforts to act morally are futile and are, therefore, less likely to do so.

In addition, a study conducted by researchers from Florida State University and the University of Kentucky found participants who were exposed to deterministic literature were more likely to act aggressively and less likely to be helpful toward others.” Even determinist Michael Gazzaniga conceded: “It seems that not only do we believe we control our actions, but it is good for everyone to believe it.”” The existence of free will is a common characteristic of our experience, and when we deny we have this sort of free agency, there are detrimental consequences.

I decided to look up these studies.

Here’s the abstract for first study: (2008)

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.

And the abstract for the second study: (2009)

Laypersons’ belief in free will may foster a sense of thoughtful reflection and willingness to exert energy, thereby promoting helpfulness and reducing aggression, and so disbelief in free will may make behavior more reliant on selfish, automatic impulses and therefore less socially desirable. Three studies tested the hypothesis that disbelief in free will would be linked with decreased helping and increased aggression. In Experiment 1, induced disbelief in free will reduced willingness to help others. Experiment 2 showed that chronic disbelief in free will was associated with reduced helping behavior. In Experiment 3, participants induced disbelief in free will caused participants to act more aggressively than others. Although the findings do not speak to the existence of free will, the current results suggest that disbelief in free will reduces helping and increases aggression.

So what to make of this?

If you’re an atheist, then you are a physical object. And like every other physical object in the universe, your behavior is determined by genetic programming (if you’re alive) and external inputs. Material objects do not have the ability to make free choices, including moral choices.

Here’s prominent atheist Jerry Coyne’s editorial in USA Today to explain why atheists can’t ground free will.

Excerpt:

And that’s what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. (These studies use crude imaging techniques based on blood flow, and I suspect that future understanding of the brain will allow us to predict many of our decisions far earlier than seven seconds in advance.) “Decisions” made like that aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense.

Atheist William Provine says atheists have no free will, no moral accountability and no moral significance:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.

(Source)

If you don’t have free will, then you can’t make moral choices, and you can’t be held morally responsible. No free will means no morality. Can you imagine trying to get into any sort of enterprise with someone who has this view of moral choices? A marriage, or a business arrangement, etc? It would be crazy to expect them to behave morally, when they don’t even think that moral choices is possible. It just excuses all sorts of bad behavior, because no one is responsible for choosing to do the right thing.

Believers in materialism are going to struggle with prescriptive morality, including self-sacrificial care and concern for others. Their worldview undermines the rationality of the moral point of view. You might find atheists acting morally for their own purposes, but their worldview doesn’t rationally ground it. This is a big problem for people who can see objective morality woven into the universe – and themselves – because they have the awareness of objective right and wrong.

Choosing to do the right thing

I think what atheists like to say is “I can be moral, too”. That’s not interesting. What is interesting is whether it is rational for you to be moral when doing the right thing sets you back. When I look at the adultery of Dawkins, the polyamory of Carrier, the divorces of Shermer and Atkins, etc. I am not seeing anything that really wows me about their ability to do the right thing when it was hard for them to do it. They all deny free will of course, and think that trying to resist temptation is a waste of time.

Wallace explains how the awareness of free will and moral choices caused him to turn away from atheism, in this blog post.

He writes:

As an atheist, I chose to cling to naturalism, in spite of the fact that I lived each day as though I was capable of using my mind to make moral choices based on more than my own opinion. In addition, I sought meaning and purpose beyond my own hedonistic preferences, as though meaning was to be discovered, rather than created. I called myself a naturalist while embracing three characteristics of reality that simply cannot be explained by naturalism. As a Christian, I’m now able to acknowledge the “grounding” for these features of reality. My philosophical worldview is consistent with my practical experience of the world.

I think atheists who want to be honest about their own experience of first-person consciousness, free will, moral realism, etc. will do well to just accept that theism rationally grounds all of these things, and so you should accept theism. Theism is real. If you like morality, and want to be a virtuous person, then you should accept theism.