Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Back on Christmas Day, there was another airline crash, in this case, it was an Azerbaijan Airlines plane, and it went down in Kazakhstan. It went down with a loss, eventually it is believed 62 dead and many injured. It was an Embraer 190 airliner, a modern jet airliner that was considered to have a very strong safety record, and the crash coming on Christmas Day required some explanation. For one thing, the crash took place in Kazakhstan, but the plane was flying from Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, to Grozny in Russia. It had entered Russian airspace only to turn around and then eventually to crash in Kazakhstan.

Why did the plane crash? Almost immediately there were claims that the plane had gone down after hitting birds, but bird strikes at that particular altitude, under this particular set of conditions, that did not seem to answer the question. Furthermore, when a good bit of the plane was intact in terms of the fuselage and the tail section, it was discovered that there was a pattern consistent with, that’s the way military intelligence in the West put it, consistent with anti-aircraft weaponry, which is to say it was very, very clear from the beginning, just hours after the crash, that Russian air defenses had taken down the airliner.

Furthermore, it was clear that Russian air traffic control had basically told the plane to turn around, had jammed its electronics, and furthermore, even jammed its GPS system. A reminder of just how open much of this reporting is and why so many of these issues cannot stay silent or even denied for long. The truth is that the photographic images of the fuselage were enough for military observers around the world, and even some hobbyists, to say that this looked like shrapnel from a missile hit or from a missile that had exploded very near to the airliner.

Furthermore, even as this was an incident that took place in terms of the plane being told to turn around and evidently suffering what became this fatal attack, it was undertaken over a very difficult section for Russia in terms of its territory in Chechnya where a separatist movement has been basically warring against Russia for years. And of course, the war in Ukraine is very much a part of the background.

Within just a matter of days, a rather stunning announcement came from Russian president Vladimir Putin. It was an apology for the fact that there had been an incident with the airliner, but there was no admission that it was a direct action by Russian air defenses that almost surely took the plane down, that it was the Russian military itself that had caused the incident. There was the regret that such an incident had taken place over Russian territory with loss of life, but that’s a very different thing than stating clearly an admission that the Russian military had done this and that this had been undertaken in what can only amount to an act of military incompetence. Military incompetence is not something that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is likely to admit to.

Of course, those who follow such things will recall that Russia has had similar incidents in the past, and before Russia, the former Soviet Union of which Russia was the heart. For example, September the 1st 1983, Russian air defenses shot down Korean Airlines flight 007, a packed 747 that went down. It was not intended to be over Russian territory, but it did stray into Russian territory on a flight to Korea and it found itself over Sakhalin Island, Russian territory, no doubt. But Russian air defenses evidently misidentified the plane as military aircraft. In this case, two Sukhoi, that is Su-15 jets, shot the aircraft out of the sky leading to such loss of life.

It was an interesting news story for other reasons, and this led to at least some suspicions about the targeting of the aircraft. US Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia, a Republican, was on the flight and he was a noted critic of the Soviet Union. It’s unlikely, however, that that had anything to do with the incident. Once again, it appears to have been gross incompetence rather than a deliberate action. This wasn’t a competent evil act. It was an incompetent evil act. Reminding us that incompetent acts that lead to this kind of loss of life are themselves evil acts. There is moral responsibility. It’s a different responsibility than a deliberate strike, but the end result is the same. And incompetence can kill you as fast as malevolence.

But the two become mixed together when you go to July 17, 2014, when Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was shot out of the sky at cruising altitude, leading to the death of 283 passengers and 15 crew. The suspicions about Russian responsibility came almost immediately because this plane had been shot down over, now get this, territory in the eastern region of Ukraine that was claimed by Russia. Russian separatist forces had brought down the airliner using Russian military equipment. And so, Russia is complicit in this as well. And all of this comes into even clearer moral focus when, of course, that very territory right now is under Russian control because under Vladimir Putin, Russia invaded Ukraine and has seized that territory.

So, there’s a pattern here and it is a pattern that mixes malevolence, which is evil intent, and incompetence, but also revealed in this are a couple of big worldview issues. One is something that comes to light with Karl Popper’s famous work on the open society. And the distinction between open and closed societies is something that becomes very clear and at every level in this story, because one of the issues is just how much control Russian military leadership has over its own personnel on the ground, its own equipment. Some of it’s just incompetently kept, some of it is incompetently aimed, some of it’s just incompetently used, but it also points to the fact that in a closed society, there is no open and honest discussion that could lead to an understanding of the truth.

In a closed society, there is simply the conspiracy of a lie, and that lie can often just be covering incompetence, as I say, rather than intentional evil, but in itself it just compounds the immorality of the situation. In an open society, it is not assured that the truth will eventually be known. It is just by a quantum factor, far more likely that in an open society the truth is going to be known.

But the second thing for us to think about is this, even a society like Russia, which is under the autocracy, that is to say, at least the attempted totalitarianism of Vladimir Putin. Russia is a far more open society than Vladimir Putin almost assuredly wants it to be. And one of the reasons it is more open is because with the advent of say, cameras in almost every pocket, virtually everywhere in the world, we’re in an open society simply because faster than any government can shut it down, an incident like this can happen and images almost immediately after the incident, maybe sometimes even of the incident itself as it’s happening, can be sent all over the world. And once they’re out, they are out.

And so, Russia, well, I think Vladimir Putin almost assuredly does not want Russia to be an open society. And in a very real sense, it’s not. You’re not going to have an open debate inside Russia on an issue like this, and Vladimir Putin is not subject to democratic scrutiny, constitutional scrutiny. That’s not possible, but it is now impossible as well for Vladimir Putin to prevent images like those of this downed airliner showing up on the internet and basically leading not only military experts but people who are just able to do photographic identification, notice this looks suspiciously like a missile strike.

Furthermore, to state the matter bluntly, it is extremely unlikely that birds will hit the side of an airliner in flight. It is almost aerodynamically impossible. Indeed, by some arguments, it’s absolutely impossible. Those birds are more likely to strike the wing surfaces, including the control surfaces, or be ingested into the engines. That’s not what happened. The injury to this airliner came from the side, it came towards the tail section, and birds do not fly sideways into moving airliners at altitude.

By the way, Russian military authorities had already acknowledged before the downing of the plane that Russian ground-to-air defenses were active in the region trying to strike down drones sent from Ukraine. Once again, you can’t take that back once it’s out.

But there is another very interesting twist to this tale. As I said, this was an Azerbaijan’s Airline flight, and Azerbaijan is a breakaway republic. It’s one of the republics that declared its independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and it was a part of the Soviet Union and under direct Soviet control until it declared its independence. But frankly, Azerbaijan has been allied almost in everything but an official sense, with Russia. And it is also in its own way, an attempted closed society because as you’re looking at say, the totalitarian ambitions of Vladimir Putin, the same is true of the president of Azerbaijan, that’s President Ilham Aliyev. He would be just like Vladimir Putin, and they had been more or less operating in concert certainly as allies.

And by the way, Azerbaijan has an unusually rich energy deposit. That’s also something that has been important to Russia and its allies. But Russia’s shooting down of this airplane and then, frankly, its refusal to take direct responsibility, this has led to, let’s just say, increased tension between Azerbaijan and Russia. For instance, you have The New York Times reporting just in recent days that President Aliyev has, “excoriated Russia for trying to duck responsibility in the downing of an Azerbaijani passenger jet last month. Doubling down on a rare confrontation with the Kremlin that has highlighted Russia’s loss of influence in much of the former Soviet Union.”

History comes with consequences. Actions like this come with consequences that can’t be understood apart from the history. And a part of that history is also this, and this is really not acknowledged in much of the press conversation. The Soviet Union was what basically amounts to a post-czarist attempt to create a new Russian Empire, in this case, a Soviet empire with Russia at its heart. And you had all of these different nations as they are now, but you had these different territories that became sections within Russia. They became not only Russian-dominated, they became a part of the Soviet Union itself during the existence of the USSR.

But when you had people from those regions, it was clear that the Russians looked down on them. And this was true even though one Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, was from Soviet Georgia, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was Ukrainian, and yet, both of them felt looked down upon by the Russians, and now you see that very historical pattern coming to the fore. And by the way, the Azerbaijan government indicates that 38 persons were killed in the crash. The president said, “I can say with confidence that the blame for the fact that Azerbaijani citizens died in this disaster lies with representatives of the Russian Federation. We demand justice. We demand the punishment of the guilty. We demand complete transparency and decent behavior.” Well, at this point, you can simply say as an observer that the president of Azerbaijan can demand these things. It is very unlikely he will get them.

But now I want to shift to a very different kind of story, and this one comes not from overseas. It comes from right here in the United States. Religion News Services Yonat Shimron reports, here’s the headline, Freedom From Religion Foundation dissolves honorary board in spat over trans issues. It’s not a very elegant headline, but it does capture the attention, especially when you know the players in this case.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is an organization that is basically for atheist activism. It’s an organization that challenges in court such things as religious activities in public schools, et cetera. It is an activist organization that contends for a completely secular public square. And it has attracted the attention of and the membership of many atheists around the world or unbelievers around the world committed to a secular ideology. And it has also drawn the attention of some celebrity atheists such as evolutionary biologists, Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, also another famous atheist, psychologist, and linguist, Steven Pinker.

It created an honorary board. Now, this kind of council of reference or an honorary board is often like an endorsement committee. It exists to lend credibility to the organization. And when you’re talking about the new atheists, Richard Dawkins has to be at the very top of the list. The former Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago, also a very well-known unbeliever. And Steven Pinker. Again, these are three big ones, but you’ll notice that the RNS article tells us that Coyne and Dawkins and Pinker resigned at the same time. Then we are told that the organization decided to dissolve the honorary board.

Okay, this I promise you is very interesting, because as it turns out, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker resigned from the board basically in protest to an article that had been put up and then withdrawn by the third, that is, Jerry Coyne, retired of the University of Chicago. All three of them are basically very well-known unbelievers, non-believers, very known activists in terms of the atheist community, the unbelieving community.

We are told, “The three resigned after the foundation published and then removed an article by Coyne in which he argued that sex is mostly binary, either male or female, and that transgender women are more likely to be sexual predators than other women.” Okay. Religion News Service is, as it implies by name, it’s a news organization that directs major attention to religious developments, and religious developments in this sense also means the religion of secularism, the atheist movement. And this is really interesting because here you have the secularist organization and a fracas that led to the dissolution of an honorary board, and it’s a fracas, a controversy over an article in response to another article, when the article responding to the other article was taken down.

And so, if you think it’s convoluted, let me tell you, buckle your seatbelts because in worldview significance, this is really, really rich. Yonat Shimron, the reporter, tells us, “The flap offers a peek at a roiling controversy among a select group of new atheists who have expressed views that are anti-transgender and more generally anti-woke. It is a position taken by another atheist group, the Center for Inquiry, but it is also highly contested by most in the non-believer community. In 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew its Humanist of the Year Award from Richard Dawkins over his anti-trans comments.”

Okay. So, now you have a secularist organization which is largely dominated by people who claim that their scientific expertise is what sets them at odds with theistic belief. And so, you have someone like Richard Dawkins, you have Jerry Coyne, you have Steven Pinker, and they are upset about the modern movement that is summarized as transgender, or at least to one degree. It is unclear in this article whether at least two of them, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, are more angry about the article being published or the article being taken down. It really doesn’t matter.

The point is Richard Dawkins himself was stripped of the Humanist of the Year Award because he’s out of step on the transgender issue. Why is he out of step? Because he’s a scientist. He’s a biological scientist who happens to believe in, now, wait for it, biology. As in, there is an objective reality to male and female.

Jerry Coyne, like Richard Dawkins, is a very prominent evolutionary biologist, and by the way, you don’t get evolution without reproduction. You don’t get reproduction without, oh, let’s just say, male and female. Now, remember evolutionary scientist, Jerry Coyne, is the one who wrote the article that was taken down in response to the other article, we’ll get to that in a minute. But Religion News Service tells us that in 2011, Jerry Coyne had received the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s award known as the Emperor Has No Clothes Award, “given to public figures who call out religion in a way reminiscent of the little child in the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale who is not afraid to admit the truth. Coyne was an ally of the foundation.”

Well, indeed he was, and by the way, he is willing to call out the truth against the modern religion of the sexual revolution and the gender revolutionaries. He’s willing to say, “Look, a man cannot be a woman.” But the response to his article making that point was enough for the Freedom From Religion Foundation to lose its entire honorary board. And that’s because this foundation is not about to be found on the wrong side of the LGBTQ activist community, even if that requires them to be on the wrong side of biology, and biology is supposedly one of the reasons the organization came into being in the first place. The sexual revolution, the gender ideologies, they’re even more powerful than the biological scientism that gave birth to the movement. You find out what the true religion is here.

But wait, there’s more. I told you this was really interesting, and it gets just more interesting. Jerry Coyne’s article that was taken down leading to the resignations was an answer to another article that was published by Freethought Now. The article was by an individual known as Kat Grant, and the title of the article was What is a Woman? And Kat Grant, who is not adequately identified in this particular source, goes on to ask the question, “What is a woman?” And Kat Grant acknowledges that the traditional answer to the woman has to do with biology, and that has to do not only with say, the organs of reproduction, but with human gametes, reproductive cells. And yet, Kat Grant says that holding on to that kind of biological definition is oppressive, it is restrictive, and furthermore, it is based in Christian patriarchy. In other words, it’s a really bad idea, Kat Grant argues.

And then Grant asked the question again, “What is a woman?” And here comes the answer: “A woman is whoever she says she is.” Listen to that again, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” That wasn’t satisfactory to Jerry Coyne, the evolutionary biologist. He responded with the article that was posted at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, only to be taken down once it angered the activists and the leftists. And it was Jerry Coyne’s article that was entitled Biology Is Not Bigotry.

And you’ll notice that Jerry Coyne goes right at the argument offered by Kat Grant, “It isn’t bigotry,” he says, “to underline the objective reality of biology. In fact, it is insanity,” he implies, “to do the opposite.” He says that some binary people, “are men who identify as women, trans women,” feel that their identity is not adequately recognized by biology, and so he says, “they choose to impose ideology onto biology and concoct a new definition of woman.”

Later in the article, Jerry Coyne speaks of Kat Grant saying that Grant acknowledges, “I play with gender expression in ways that vary throughout the day.” Those are actual words. Coyne responds, “Fine, but that does not mean that Grant changes sex from hour to hour.” You might think, just upon reflection, that throughout the history of human experience, only very recently has a statement like that been necessary, not to mention, made sense in itself.

By the way, the leader of the Freedom From Religion Foundation showed her own fanaticism when she fell all over herself, arguing that the article was rightly taken down, never should have been posted in the first place. The organization under her leadership is not going to go into conflict with the LGBTQ activist community. And she went on to say, “97% of the foundation’s members support LGBTQ+ rights, and 13% of the group’s members are themselves LGBTQ+.”

By the way, there’s one other angle here. One of the complaints made against Jerry Coyne’s article is his argument that trans women, and remember, that is biological men, are more likely to commit sexual assault than biological women, which is to say, normal women. That statement was considered to be absolutely outrageous even though it was not countered with any evidence or even argument whatsoever. It turns out that it is almost assuredly true.

This brings to mind in conclusion, a news story that came earlier this year. The headline in the Huffington Pos: “Washington State Prison takes unprecedented action.” What was the unprecedented action? Taking a biological man claiming to be a woman out of a woman’s prison and putting the biological man in a men’s prison. The state of Washington, a very liberal state on so many of these issues, had fallen over itself trying to prove how open-minded and progressive it was by putting this very well-known, quote, “transgender woman in a woman’s prison.” But guess what? In terms of sexual relations, that didn’t exactly work out because after all, we are talking about a biological man, and so, the liberal experiment came to an embarrassing conclusion and he, the biological man posing as a woman, claiming to be a transgender woman, having been the focus of an incredible amount of press coverage, celebrating the fact that now you had trans women or at least a trans woman in a women’s prison.

It turns out that was an experiment that didn’t last. To which we can only respond with a question, “You think?” You have to love this section from the Huffington Post article mentioning the individual prisoner whose name is Kim: “Kim was previously the subject of a Huff Post story about,” the pronoun her is used in the news article here, “her 15-year fight for gender-affirming healthcare and housing in prison, an environment in which the state exercises near total control over the people in its custody.” That’s actually pretty much the definition of what it means to be sent to prison.

The article continues, “The story documented Kim’s struggle to access the legal name change, hormone therapy, and finally a housing placement among other women.” That’s the way it’s written. Then, “after multiple denials, some of which relied on transphobic rationale, Washington’s Department of Corrections allowed Kim to move to a woman’s prison in 2021.” Again, it didn’t work, it didn’t last, and as Jerry Coyne would point out, biology is going to win over ideology eventually.

In the great, big worldview issues, I, as a Christian theist, don’t share much in common with evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, but in his argument that biology is not bigotry, guess what? You have an atheist, evolutionist, and conservative evangelical Christians who stand absolutely in agreement. We come at it from two very different directions, but we come to the same conclusion. He’s right in the title of his article, Biology is Not Bigotry. To that, we can only say, amen.