PZ Myers at Pharyngula posted a photograph yesterday depicting one of those signs with movable letters that churches love to put up. This one says:

Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has.

Yeah, probably. Myers calls that “an irreconcilable difference” between faith and reason. Lots of religious people seem to think that reason enriches faith, but after reading piles of books by religious people who adopt that position, I am not convinced. They refuse to let reason affect everything they do. But the Baptists who posted that sign know better: reason prevails when you give it free run of the premises.

Try it. Put your faith up against your reason and stop giving faith a free pass. Scrutinize it. If it’s worth anything, it will stand up to scrutiny. And if it doesn’t, why would you want a faith that can’t withstand reasoned criticism?

Why do cops fear cameras? Carlos Miller, a journalist who was arrested by Miami police for taking photographs of them against their wishes, and who is now appealing his conviction for resisting arrest without violence, has some thoughts: the cameras often lead to evidence of police misconduct, which results in charges against officers. He links to an article in the New York Times that describes several such incidents.

Stop by The Legal Satyricon, too, while you’re out following links—that’s where I found this post.*

* And by the way, I’ve been meaning to mention this for a long time: I don’t do that idiotic “hat tip” or “H/T” thing. People don’t actually tip their hats anymore. Talking about a “hat tip” to say where you found something in the blogosphere is like  telling people to go “spin” an MP3, or maybe suggesting that the internet is a series of tubes.

While getting ready for work this morning, we listened to a story on NPR about the psychotic Quiverfull movement. First we heard from Kelly and Jeff Swanson:

Kelly says that she and Jeff decided that God knew how many children they could handle.

“We just started thinking, ‘God is sovereign over life and death. God opens and closes the womb,’ ” Kelly says.

Then came “Nancy Campbell, a leader of the Quiverfull movement and author of Be Fruitful and Multiply“:

“The womb is such a powerful weapon; it’s a weapon against the enemy,” Campbell says.

Campbell has 35 grandchildren. She and her husband stopped at six kids, and it is her great regret.

“I think, help! Imagine if we had had more of these children!” Campbell says, adding, “My greatest impact is through my children. The more children I have, the more ability I have to impact the world for God.”

A Christian God, that is. Campbell says if believers don’t starting reproducing in large numbers, biblical Christianity will lose its voice.

“We look across the Islamic world and we see that they are outnumbering us in their family size, and they are in many places and many countries taking over those nations, without a jihad, just by multiplication,” Campbell says.

Okay, first there is the irritatingly de-humanizing fact that these people are admittedly having lots of children because they plan to indoctrinate them with their religion—essentially treating their children like carrier monkeys for an ideological virus. But then the Christian God treats people like pawns, too. (Oh, sure, he considers the sparrows, but only for their strategic purposes. You, too, pilgrim.)

But then there is the breathtaking stupidity that Mary caught even before I did. She said (I’m paraphrasing): “So God is sovereign enough to know how many kids they can have, but not sovereign enough to protect Christianity from Islam?”

The people who really need protecting here are all those kids being churned out with the express intention that they never have a critical thought about religion, or make their own decisions about what they believe, but simply carry the message of their parents’ religion to others. These lunatics treat their children’s minds like warheads and their children’s lives like missiles.

If you are one of those children, and you are lucky enough to be reading this, then I suggest that you pack your bags, run for your life, and stop at a bookstore along the way. Make your own decisions. If, after making your own independent inquiry into life, you decide that your parents’ religion is the one for you, then go back home. Otherwise, try to improve the world, instead of just spreading your parents’ religion.

Another cop acting like an inhuman thug. And being acquitted by a jury. Even after other cops broke their usual wall of silence and testified against him.

Today I’ll do that thing my brother does.

Here’s a letter that was printed the Fresno Bee this morning:

Phillip Traynor [letter March 18] speaks of leaving a church that considers gay marriage a sin, and going to one that is “in line with my spirituality” which does not think gay marriage is a sin.

He then says that “religious tenets” should not become law. If the tenets of his new church say gay marriage is OK, and gay marriage becomes law, isn’t that putting the “religious tenets” of his church as law? Of course it is. It is the same thing as churches that say gay marriage is not OK.

We are all guided by our belief system. All of us. It is just a matter of whose belief system will prevail. God bless America.

Tim Spangler

Maple Ridge

Spangler is not thinking clearly. He writes about being “guided by our belief system” and—I infer from the phrase “a matter of whose belief system will prevail”—the process of making law in a society where people with different beliefs can compete to create laws that require others to engage in the conduct that they say is compelled by their beliefs. But he ignores the bridge between these two things: law itself.

We can debate for a long time looking for a satisfactory, universally applicable definition of “law,” but there’s a common sense of how law works in a democratic republic, and it appears between the lines of Spangler’s letter: law is a set of obligations imposed on individuals by society, and the substance of those obligations are defined by the individuals who “prevail,” through the political process, in the goal of imposing their “belief system” on everyone else.

The “belief system” component is the most objectionable part of Spangler’s view, first because he clearly uses “belief system” to mean an ideological set that competes with other ideologies, and second because there is much in law that bears little or no relation to any ideological foundation. For example, prohibitions against killing or the commission violent acts against other members of society are hardly ideological in nature, but almost certainly arise from the basic requirements of what it takes to keep a mutually beneficial society knitted together. Tax laws may give rise to fierce ideological battles among the adherents of different economic theories, but the basic problem of governments needing revenue is not really an ideological issue so much as a practical one.

We do better by paring down the common sense view: law is a set of obligations imposed on individuals by society. Whether those obligations are the expression of authority or a means of oppression is probably a secondary question that may or may not always be answered affirmatively, depending on the circumstances in a given society.

But here is an interesting related point: Religion is a set of obligations, too. In our society, however, it has been supplanted by law as a set of obligations. One interesting consequence has been that, instead of trying to overthrow law as the governing principle of society and replace it with religious belief, most religious people have recast themselves as political activists who want to establish their religious obligations as legal obligations. They do that, in part, by pretending that the rule of law is really just a reformation of religion (and no one would have thought to rule societies by law if religious people had not invented the idea, or received it from a deity) and by asserting that religious obligations (arising from, e.g., revelation and theology) are no different than legal obligations (which arise from necessity and human creativity—the secular analogues of revelation and theology) because they also arise from necessity. So they make arguments against same-sex marriage, for example, by claiming that marriage between a man and a woman is the foundation of human society and that unless we define marriage that way and only that way, human society will crumble into anarchy. (But I would be very surprised to discover that anyone other than people who have already decided, for religious and ideological reasons, that same-sex marriage is wrong are ever convinced by the society-will-fall-apart argument against same-sex marriage. In other words, the “necessity” argument is completely disingenuous.)

Spangler is trying to combat the criticism that people who oppose same-sex marriage on religious and ideological grounds are no different than people who support it, that everyone is “guided by [his or her] belief system”: we are in an ideological free-for-all, and only one view can prevail. He does not say so in the letter, but I strongly suspect that Spangler believes his view will prevail, probably because he believes his view is the one commanded by God. Maybe I’m inferring too much, but I doubt it.

His argument is what I call “the false equal-footing argument” (there’s probably a technical name, but I don’t care—I like my name for it), which generally leads to a claim or implication of hypocrisy. Here, Spangler claims that supporters of same-sex marriage are “guided by [their] belief system” just like opponents (so they’re on an equal footing), but while opponents of same-sex marriage are honest that they are trying to impose their beliefs on others, proponents of same-sex marriage are hypocritically dishonest by failing to admit that they are doing the same thing.

The problem is that to bring proponents of same-sex marriage onto the same ideological footing as opponents, as Spangler tries to do, he needs to make the big assumption that obligations will be imposed either way. Obviously, making same-sex marriage illegal imposes obligations on same-sex couples by refusing to allow them the benefits that married couples receive under our laws. From the other direction, opponents of same-sex marriage frequently assert that allowing same-sex couples to get married will create obligations for people who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. For example, if a Christian owns a business and employs someone whose spouse is a member of the same sex, then if the Christian business owner has a policy of extending health benefits to spouses, then he or she will have to extend health benefits to that same-sex spouse. This, says the Christian, is a new obligation—not because benefits must be paid to a non-employee spouse, but because paying those benefits requires the Christian to “recognize” the same-sex marriage.

There are other situations with these alleged obligations, but they all just come down to “recognizing” same-sex marriage. In other words, “Don’t make us confront the reality that not everyone is heterosexual!” There is no other “obligation” in legalizing same-sex marriage. No one will be required to marry another member of the same sex. No one will be required to promote marriage to someone of the same sex. No one will be required to make friends with same-sex couples. The matter is simply one of recognition, and only for legal purposes: If a man chooses to make a woman his spouse, you recognize his choice and treat her as his spouse for the purpose of legal benefits bestowed on spouses, but if a man chooses to make another man his spouse, you refuse to recognize his choice for the purpose of legal benefits bestowed on spouses. But does prohibiting that distinction create a legal obligation? Does it cause a legally or constitutionally cognizable injury?

In other words: Does requiring people to confront the reality that not everyone is heterosexual violate the free exercise of their religious belief that any intimate relationship other than one between a man and a woman is wrong?

That is the real question here, the one that Spangler ignores, because in some ways it is a difficult question. He and other opponents of same-sex marriage do not want that question brought out into the light of day and examined by the rest of society, probably because they know that, despite its philosophical difficulty, the most reasonable practical answer is clear: Are you out of your minds?

Requiring people to afford the same rights to non-whites, women, and disabled people that they traditionally afforded to able-bodied white males did not require anyone to change their own identity, to make friends with non-whites, women, or disabled people, or even to like them. It simply meant, “You can’t pretend any longer that these people are so different from you that they should have fewer legal rights than you do.” Was that, in itself, a new legal obligation or a constitutionally cognizable injury? No! (Note, however, that requiring buildings and new construction to include accessibility features for people with physical disabilities was a new obligation. But despite lots of complaining, no one has managed to get that overturned, probably because the practical answer was clear there, too: Open your eyes and just be a decent person already!)

People like Spangler, in that letter above, want to keep the public misdirected. They want us to believe that this is an ideological battle between good and evil, only one of which can “prevail.” They want us to believe that proponents of same-sex marriage are sneaky ideologues who refuse to admit their true nature. The last thing they want is for the question to be turned back, so that they have to explain why requiring them to confront reality would do such damage that we should accommodate their beliefs and, as a consequence, require a different class of people to have diminished legal rights.

They want to protect the status of “belief systems” and “religion” as fonts of unassailable ideas, privileged more strongly than every other source of human thought—so they never have to explain the injury they claim to suffer, except to say that the law conflicts with their religious beliefs. But no one should accept that answer anymore because it is not an explanation. It is a conclusion, based on premises to which we cannot all agree. And unless we can build a society based on premises to which we can all agree, even if they are only a few, then there is little to protect us from falling into irreconcilable discord.

What makes a “human being,” and can science prove it?

I’m not talking about which organisms are members of the species Homo sapiens, but which entities should be treated like people for the purposes of ethical decisions. If you’re making an ethical claim, like “Innocent human beings should not be killed,” then what are you talking about? Who are the “human beings” in that claim? Can science tell you?

But let’s be more specific: Can science tell you whether an embryo is a “human being” for the purpose of ethics?

And let’s also remember what science can do: it’s a really good method for determining the characteristics of phenomena (e.g., when stem cells arise in embryogenesis), or testing explanatory possibilities (e.g., how stem cells work). Science can also be used to establish whether a given organism is a member of a particular species—for example, whether your canine is a wolf or a coyote. But science cannot tell you the ethical standard that ought to guide your interactions with your canine. That’s a matter of prevailing social standards, your personal level of empathy with the canine, and probably the level of anthropomorphism you perceive in the canine. Psychologists may determine, by a method that may be scientific, that when people in our society commit acts of “cruelty” (as defined for the purpose) against canines, it is an indication of how that person perceives the world and relates with other human beings. But that determination will only tell us about how a person gets along in our society, which means that any ethical conclusions are dependent on a pre-existing social context. Some societies may differ. So in that example, science cannot take us to a compelling universal conclusion that affects everyone, and should be used to condemn their conduct or create penalties for it, probably because there isn’t one.

Scientific methods can probably help us investigate whether measurable circumstances give rise to certain results that could be characterized as ethical. And scientific methods can help us obtain lots of information to inform our ethical assertions. But science cannot give us “right” and “wrong” because those are not scientific concepts, but social ones.

The other day I had the displeasure of engaging in a lengthy argument with someone who insisted, in a thoroughly unconvincing way, that science can tell you whether an embryo is a “human being” for the purpose of ethics. Not surprisingly, he concluded that an embryo is a human being for the purpose of ethics. (I say “not surprisingly” because it seems that most people who even bother to raise the possibility that an embryo is a “human being” are the people who have already decided that things like embryonic stem cell research are unethical, or at least ethically questionable.)

I’m not saying you can’t assert that an embryo is a human being for ethical purposes, and then conform your conduct to that assertion. Go right ahead. But that’s not a scientific assertion because the scientific method does not yield ethical propositions. So don’t go trying to put the imprimatur of “science” on your assertion so that you can come to the policy table and pretend there’s more heft in demand that everyone conform their conduct to your belief that an embryo is a human being for ethical purposes.

But what can science do here?

After the displeasurable argument mentioned above, I posed the question to someone who identifies as conservative, Christian, Republican, and pro-life. Interestingly, the response was immediate and emphatic: “What? Science doesn’t do that. Science can tell you that after so many days development is at this stage, and after so many days it’s at another stage, but it doesn’t tell you when you have a ‘human being’!” Which is exactly right.

Science can tell you about the stages of embryonic development. Science can yield explanations for how some of it happens. Science can tell you that you’re looking at human development rather than canine development. But science cannot tell you that, for the purposes of ethics, the little group of cells without a nervous system is a “human being.”

If science could do that, how would it get there? First, you would need a testable hypothesis. A hypothesis like “this object is a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes” would not do the trick because there’s no way to test that. You need something more specific, which would probably be the criteria that would always be used to establish “a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes.” Let’s call them criteria A, B, and C. With all those variables, you would probably need a series of carefully controlled experiments, so maybe we can imagine that there is just one criterion: A. So your hypothesis might be: “this object is a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes because A is one of its characteristics.”

The wag who argued with me the other day insisted that A could be something like genetic material. In other words, “this object is a ‘human being’ for ethical purposes because it has the same genetic material as a human being would have.” The facial circularity of that hypothesis should be immediately apparent, but the bigger problem is that a “human being” is generally recognized as requiring something substantially more than just its genetic material. For example, at the biological level, there are environmental effects on the genetic material, and at a higher level there is a sense of inclusion and participation in a social group.

But assuming the existence of some characteristic A that definitively identifies an entity as a “human being” for ethical purposes, then we are left to conclude that determining whether one is a “human being” for ethical purposes can only be established scientifically through some method akin to a DNA test. Take a sample, send it to the lab, get your results: “Congrats! You’re a human being entitled to inclusion in the ethical community.” But we all know that anybody who waited for those results would be an idiot. If you need a scientific test to tell you whether you’re a human being, then you’re obviously not paying attention. Why? Because the criteria are not susceptible to testing via the methods of the biological (or any other) sciences: You recognize human beings not for something that needs to be determined in a lab, but for other reasons.

Those reasons might be articulated and tested by a method that’s vaguely, but not truly, scientific—e.g., through something like a Turing test—but they could never be tested against an embryo because our sense of what makes a human being does not reach to that type of entity. Presented with a human embryo and a canine embryo, and left to determine in the ways that we ordinarily do whether one of them is a “human being,” we would find ourselves at a loss. “Scientific” testing—which would almost certainly destroy both embryos, if I understand the available procedures correctly—would tell us which biological species each embryo hails from. But by then, I suspect, there would be nothing left to treat ethically like a human being.

The simpler and more obvious approach is to recognize that whether an entity is a “human being” for the purpose of defining ethical behavior in relation to that entity is a question that must be answered by non-scientific methods. Science can help us determine lots of information about the characteristics of the entity we’re talking about, but it cannot bring us all the way to our goal, which is to answer the question, “Should this entity be treated like a ‘human being’ for the purpose of my ethical decisions?” For that, you need a different method, other than science.

Science neither compels us to treat embryos like human beings for ethical purposes nor prevents us from doing so. But it can inform our decisions. There is no intellectually honest way to come to the policy-making table and demand, for example, that science compels us to treat embryos with the same ethics we use for human beings and to bar embryonic stem cell research. You can make the same ethical assertion and policy demand, but you cannot try to piggyback on the sense that science is an unquestionable authority, that your position has been “proven,” or can be “proved” by the scientific method.

More cops acting like jackasses. Idiots like Chief Wiggum aren’t just cartoons, I guess. “Lookin’ good, boys.”

In case you haven’t already seen enough evidence that Republicans are bankrupt as a party and as people, check out what Congressman Patrick McHenry said the other day:

“We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., an outspoken conservative who has participated on the GOP message teams. “Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

People of the Tenth District of North Carolina: Dump this loser! Do you want an elected representative who works to govern, or an elected ideological thug who works to play power games in Congress?

The first commenter at the link above had it right:

Wasn’t it Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s notorious Propaganda Minister, who famously said (paraphrasing here) that a lie repeated often enough will eventually become “truth” in the minds of simpletons, the ignorant, the pre-prejudiced and the ill-informed? Great comeback strategery there, Mr. McHenry. You’re a gentleman and a scholar.

At least the dead hands of that other ideological game, after long afflicting our collective ability to reason, are loosening. Maybe soon humanity will finally wake up from its ideological dream-state and start thinking about reasoned solutions for actually living with each other, within the means provided by our resources.

SCOTUSblog links to some remarks by Michael S. Greve, “a noted advocate of conservative constitutional causes.” I haven’t had time to read all of his remarks yet, but they’re both interesting and accessible, probably because they’re a lecture and not a scholarly article, so not burdened with excessive footnotes and such.

My initial position is in disagreement with his, but I’m always open to persuasion.

Would things be better in California if more state legislators were lawyers? A recent article in The Bar Journal seems to suggest that they would be.

“I think it definitely matters if there are lawyers in the legislature,” concurs State Bar President Holly Fujie. “Lawyers understand how laws are interpreted by the courts and by lawyers and how a single word in a statute can make an enormous difference in the way that it is interpreted. Lawyers can anticipate problems with statutory language and help to avoid them. When lawyers draft statutory language, they are aware of terms of art and of usage and can make the language clearer.”

. . .

Assembly Judiciary Committee Chairman Mike Feuer agrees that the “paucity of lawyers in the legislature has some important consequences.” A number of lawmakers, he says, voted against bonds for court construction because of the Supreme Court’s decision supporting gay marriage. “In general, that approach reflects a lack of understanding about how important the independence of the judiciary is,” Feuer says. 

Despite the widespread derision we receive, most lawyers genuinely believe they are uniquely positioned to improve the way our society works, and we do what we can to help achieve that end. And, having seen directly the kinds of problems that the Legislature can cause for the citizens who have to follow their statutes, I have to agree that having more lawyers in the Legislature is probably a good thing.

A lot of people seem to think of lawyers as mercenaries, but I think the lawyerly arts are best and most efficiently deployed as preventive measures. Legislation is essentially a letter in a bottle, written by the legislators of today for the citizens of tomorrow. A law that might seem clear today might find itself beset with troublesome vagueness tomorrow, when somebody has to interpret the message and figure out how it applies to a situation that the Legislature may not have anticipated. But lawyers are often professional writers of letters in bottles, in the form of contracts, wills, court orders, and any documents that must be interpreted later.