I'm exhausted this morning. I stayed up until 3AM arguing about the origins of the torah, the role of God in the world, the political side of Moses', Jesus', and Muhammed's lives, and of course, evolution (I then stayed up until 4AM reading Cicero, but that's a separate issue). It never ceases to amaze me how quick people with no formal instruction in biology are to dismiss something they don't fully comprehend. Somehow the discussion degenerated into interpretation of prophets, particularly Isaiah, and how a vague enough prophecy can be taken as a predictor of anything. My position is that the vast majority of prophecies (if not all) have been ex post facto and when you take a body of text as large as the bible and a sample of events as large as recorded history, you can of course draw any parallels you want, there's just too much material to be wrong. I attempted to prove this by showing how random passages from shakespeare could be seen as just as prophetically valid as Isaiah (though this presumes you don't believe Shakespeare was a prophet). I think it very telling that the criterion for recognizing true prophets from false ones is whether their prophecies come true. This is completely useless obviously. Every year the "psychics", "prophets", and other rif raf of America make predictions and are ranked against each other by who was right that year. I find it illuminative that every year a few are right, but they never are consistently right. With enough people prognosticating, random chance dictates a few will be close to the truth by accident. Anyway, since I seem to be having religious discussions a lot lately, and it's eating into my study time (read online spades), I recommend anyone with serious concerns read two books. The first is "Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge" by E.O. Wilson, a former chair of biology at Harvard and in my humble opinion one of the foremost sociobiologists in the country. It lays out how physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains neuroscience, neuroscience explains behavior, on up through economics, religion and even art/aesthetics. Essentially everything that happens in the universe is due to fundamental particle interactions at the subatomic level; cosmic billiards if you will. I think it lays to rest the question of souls and non-physical entities. The book is completely accessible to non-science people, so long as they are interested and willing to work at it a bit in places. The second book I recommend is "Who Wrote the Bible" by Richard E. Friedman. It eliminated (nearly) any doubt in my mind that the bible was written by humans and essentially modern fundamentalist religions feed us a pack of lies. Not that they may not be useful or beneficial lies, but that is more of an evolutionary argument and I am concerned only with truth, not utility. I'll throw out my two most convincing counter arguments here too just for fun. The first is anthropological. Most miracle type stories involve something witnessed by only a few people. For instance the resurection of Jesus, the binding of Isaac, or the incineration of Aaron's sons. These stories can easily be faked of course. The miracles that supposedly occurred at Sinai were allegedly witnessed by the entire nation. This sort of account is very rare (or so I'm told by anthropologists who study the legends passed down by different peoples) and it's hard to imagine how such a large lie could be perpetuated if in fact it was a lie. That said, there is a PHD at Berkeley who has pretty good evidence the exodus occurred in the time of King Solomon, was from Israel to Jordan and back rather than Egypt to Israel, and was covered up in a legend to prevent political unrest. Not to say that I swallow his story hook, line, and sinker, just that a healthy dose of skepticism about religion is refreshing these days and he made a lot of sense. Ockam's Razor makes me lean towards the simpler explanation in the case. It's a simpler explanation to attribute an event to political struggle than to supernatural occurence. But I won't go into that in depth here. Anyway, the second argument I've actually related in a previous post. It's an ontological argument reasoning that since the universe is not just space but space/time, whatever created it is outside of time as well as physical matter, assuming there was a creator at all. I won't go into this in any depth here because I'm tired but it is accessible somewhere in the archives. I think I'll end with a quote from Cicero just for the hell of it. I'm a big fan of him, he has a great essay on the value of friendship where he discusses Scipio Africanus (who I'm also a fan of, though to a much lesser degree). But first another asside, in perspectives this morning, professor Fergusson gave some words of wisdom that bear repetition. "Stop measuring yourself by the standards other people apply to you. Stop collecting merit badges." His point was that law school isn't about the grades, nor is it (or life) about trying to conform to other people's expectations. It's about pursuing your own interests. I don't take this in a selfish sense, more in a chase your dream or passion sense. Yeah, so that happened to resonate on a Monday morning. As promised, words of Cicero from "De Officiis": Est autem in hoc genere molestum quod in maximis animis splendidissimisque ingeniis plerumque existunt honoris, imperii, potentiae, gloriae cupiditates. Quo magis cavendum est, ne quid in eo genere peccetur. For those who haven't brushed up on their Latin lately, this roughly translates to: it is in the greatest souls and most brilliant geniuses that ambitions for civil and military authority, for power, and for glory are usually found and therefore we must be the more heedful of erring in that direction. Cicero was a smart guy. Something to think about.

  ¶ 6:40 AM