I bristled yesterday as I read yet another faux-controversy concocting article in my misguided home town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You see, Body Worlds is coming to my town and the morality “experts” are getting restless. The “concern” is that maybe we shouldn’t be staring at dead bodies. The morality experts quoted…
I have a friend who wrote a song to me. (Free mp3 download courtesy of Anderson Productions, Ltd.) “Dear Friend” appeared on Russ Anderson’s 2003 album, “Arsenal Street”. All his CD’s are Available here. I recommend listening to the song before proceeding.
This nice, eerie, and sometimes psychedelic song is a heartfelt plea for me to discard my narrow, science-informed view of the world and just try to accept the ultimate truth of his favorite, ancient, re-translated book.
When my very Christian 11 year old nephew heard the song, he worried that it would anger me. He is fond of both Russ and myself, and the song conveys a basic disconnect. Conversations I’ve had with other Absolute Biblically Literal Truth Christians indicate that these are common misperceptions of atheist ideology.
Let’s examine some of the contentions in the song:
“If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow.” Mario Andretti
Like most people I know, I try to keep quite a few balls in the air. Those balls represent things such as prosecuting lawsuits against large unscrupulous businesses.
Today, for instance, the two lawyers who constitute my firm’s consumer class action practice area (I’m one of the two) sued a large corporate dairy that has been distributing “organic milk” to large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target. The problem is that the milk was not organic. A federal investigation recently determined that the dairy engaged in willful violations of organic dairy farm standards. Our plaintiffs are asking that the customers who paid big premiums for the “organic” milk should be refunded their money, at least the difference in cost between the price of the organic milk and the plain milk. The plaintiffs in our suit are both mothers of small children. They both reached deep to pay the extra money so that their children would not be exposed to the hormones and antibiotics of conventional cow milk. One of the women is a chemist and the other is a biologist. They had detailed reasons for paying the extra money for the organic milk. Another reason is that they didn’t want cows to be mistreated in order to provide milk. These women (and the thousands or millions of other customers in this potential class) were cheated out of substantial sums of money. Just add up the cost of several gallons of …
Talk about strange bedfellows! You will never find any ideas supported by a more diverse following than “free will.” What is free will? Allegedly, it’s the ability to “freely” be in charge of one’s own thoughts and actions. It’s the ability to be “in control.” And as I pointed out here, there is almost nothing human beings fear more than being out of control.
It all gets very interesting, however, when you juxtapose the concept of “free will” with the concept of determinism, the belief “that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.” A few years ago, a friend of mine panicked when I started telling her of some of the recent findings of cognitive science. These were findings that substantiated that humans are animals that are subject to natural laws. She panicked because I was telling her more than she was able to consider (I wrote another post mentioning this episode). She wanted to believe in “free will,” but the incredible sameness and predictability of human cognition demonstrated by cognitive science caused her to fear that she might be a robot–a machine that utterly lacked freedom.
Admittedly, there is not yet any way for scientists to precisely predict human behavior in all situations. Nonetheless, my friend panicked because science appears to be headed in that direction. In fact, if the more people considered what cognitive scientists were up to more carefully, they …
According to National Geographic’s Genographic Project, we are all African. The DNA tests taken in many isolated native populations conclusively demonstrate that we are all no more than 2000 generations removed from Africa. If you’d like, sign up and learn the path of your own migration out of Africa for…