The Ethics of Morality

     A few months ago I stumbled on a preacher on television.  The reason I stopped to listen was that on the screen he was scrolling through a litany of famous scientists, their fields and contributions, and noting that each was a Great Christian.  Then the preacher–I don’t know who he was, sorry–ended his litany by making the claim that science and religion are inextricably linked, that they must have each other to work, that there is no dispute between them–
     –and that evolution is wrong.
     This was a week after I listened to an NPR interview with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in which he made the claim that it is vital to settle this question of where “we” (meaning humans) came from because if evolution is true, then we would have no basis for morality.
     This is one of the most perverse false syllogisms I have ever heard, and it baffles me no end.  Underlying it is the assumption that morality only ever comes from a supernatural source, that without a deity we are too dumb, puerile, self-serving, and just plain hopeless to ever do anything right–for ourselves on anyone else. (The Erik Von Danniken theory of moral provenance.) That atheists are a priori immoral and that evolutionists, who reject special creation, are necessarily atheists, and therefore, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, likewise immoral.  They can’t help it.  They have no god giving them direction.
     A minute of clear thought shows how this is substantively untrue.  …

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Pro Life Churches fighting for blastocyst rights in Missouri

I just had a (loud) discussion with a pro-life friend who told me what his church is telling people about this amendment. Now, this guy is intelligent and literate, but has fully bought into the Bible-as-inerrant-literal-truth philosophy. Maybe you've read Erich's Missouri Amendment 2 entry from April. Maybe not. Here…

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Heavenly Bodies

For a short time, I watched a few of the “forensic science” shows like CSI, mostly for a laugh at the junk science.  I was particularly amused at the tool used to analyze metal.  The actor put a hub cap in a plexiglass box, the box was filled with smoke or mist, and the printer spewed out paper.  On that paper were the exact components of the metal, so much of this, so much of that.  Then the formulation was compared to their list of hub cap manufacturers, and lo and behold, there were two retail distributors of that brand hub cap in the city.  It was hilarious, like Lucy stuffing her shirt with chocolates from the speeding assembly line and about as likely.

I’ve stopped watching those shows, partly because they can only create so many magic plexiglass boxes, and because they’re so gory (regurgitated by a large snake was the end for me).  I also read a (true) story of a lawsuit involving lost ashes of a loved one (cremains) and the two got me thinking about our funeral customs.

There are really some odd customs, and chief among them for me, since I have to face them repeatedly (one bad thing about getting old is that your friends and family are old, too, and you lose a lot of them), is our ‘dress up’ custom.  That is where we take a body, dress it up in special clothes (sometimes bought new for the occasion, sometimes picked out …

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Will money make you happy? Beware the focusing effect!

Erika’s post regarding Psychology’s Top Blunders brought to mind another pitfall to those who do psychology. One aspect of Erika is post is that priming can corrupt the results of projection testing. This reminded me of an article I recently read regarding attempts to measure how “happy” people are. The article is “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.”  I found the article in the June 30, 2006 edition of Science (http://www.sciencemag.com/ -available only to subscribers online).

Experimenters have often tried to find how satisfied someone is with his or her life, but such questions elicit a global evaluation. People tend to exaggerate the importance of a single factor on their overall well-being. The authors refer to this as the “focusing illusion.” This illusion can be the source of error in personal decision-making. 

Here’s an example. First, assume the experimenter asks these two questions in this order: 1) “How happy are you with your life in general?” and 2) “How many dates did you have last month?” In this case, there is no statistical correlation between the two questions. When you reverse the order of this questioning, however, the correlation becomes highly significant. “The dating question evidently caused that aspect of life to become salient and its importance to be exaggerated when the respondents encountered the more general question about their happiness.” The authors indicate that these focusing effects have also been observed when the respondent’s attention is first directed to their marriage or health.…

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Publishers decide that there IS a market for books that naturalize religion

At the home page of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, Dawkins explains that he wanted to write his most recent book, The God Delusion six years ago but his literary agent was horrified. He was told “don’t even think about it.”  But that was then and now is…

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