Reuters is carrying an interesting story. Apparently, the British government paid a ‘psychic’ to rid a state home of a ‘poltergeist’. My knee-jerk reaction is outrage that the government of an ‘enlightened’ country would waste funds on charlatans but reading more about the story uncovered an interesting moral dilemma.

The poor family living in there were going to leave the house and never return unless the government did something about the ‘haunting’. This would leave the family homeless. So two things to note here. First, the government didn’t believe in the existence of the ghost, the family did. Second, procuring alternative housing for the family would cost more than the fraud ‘psychic’. So here’s the dilemma: Should the government let the family’s own superstition drive them from their subsidized housing and make it available to more rational, but still needy tenants or did the government do the right thing? I’m interested in your thoughts.

In the past, I have read that corn-based ethanol may have a net carbon-neutral effect at best. This was because the fossil fuel based fertilizers used to grown most all corn in the US offset any gains. Now, Scientific American has published an article about two new studies that show a major piece of the carbon equation has been neglected in previous research on biofuels. These show that the widespread use of all biofuels would definitely increase net carbon emissions.

It is true that when burned, biofuels represent a carbon-emissions savings over fossil fuels. So how is it that they increase overall carbon emissions? It is through plant-displacement. When an area is cleared to make way for growing biofuels, the plants that were being used are no longer sucking up and storing their share of carbon. In fact, they begin releasing their stored carbon as they decay.

This plant-displacement effect is amplified by free market forces. For the first time, space to grow fuel is competing with space to grow food. The upshot of this is that biofuels will increase food prices, especially soy bean prices. With high soy prices, people in places like Brazil start cutting down carbon-rich rain forest and planting lucrative soy. An acre of soy stores much less carbon than an acre of rain forest. As that rain forest foliage is burnt or left to decay, all their carbon is released into the atmosphere.

There are ways to make biofuels work, but none of them are economically efficient and thus won’t be pursued without government intervention. Combine this with the fact that “if we convert every corn kernel grown today in the U.S. to ethanol we offset just 12 percent of our gasoline use,” and one can see that biofuels are not a way out of the global warming problem.

A few months ago, I read my first Christian Apologetics book, Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton and hated it. When I discussed it with my friend Scott, he lent me Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I must admit, this Christian Apologetics book was much better, even insightful. It was logically written, with clear definitions and little appeal to emotion. Lewis’s approach to defending his religion is the polar opposite of Chesterton’s. It was a joy to read. Well at least the first half for reasons I will discuss later.

This short book is so dense with interesting thoughts and claims that I plan on limiting my discussion to what I consider the three most interesting topics. In the interest of brevity, I will also spread those topics over three separate posts. The three topics are the existence of God, The Case for Christ, and ethical insights. Here is the first:

Lewis starts the book by using a simplified version of the normative moral argument for the existence of god. That is, moral laws are ‘outside of’ ourselves. In other words, moral obligations are independent of one’s goals and universal.

1. It appears to human beings that moral normativity exists.
2. The best explanation of moral normativity is that it is grounded in God.
3. Therefore God exists.

The key word is in premise 1: “appears”. Morality only has the appearance of normativity but is in fact, not normative at all. Furthermore, this appearance has an explanation best grounded in nature. Consider the possibility that morality is an evolved, social instinct. This would then create instinctual moral obligations in almost all (not all, due to genetic variation and/or mental deficiencies) members of the species. i.e. our moral instincts would have the appearance of being universal. Secondly, such an instinct is social and acts on the group level. Thus the moral instinct would sometimes conflict with our one’s own goals. Thus the instinct would have all the appearance of normativity.

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Recently, Scott of Spiritual Tramp tagged me with with an astrology related game. Participation had the following rules:

1. Mention the person who tagged you and create a link back to them.
2. Copy-paste the traits for all the twelve months (see below).
3. Pick your month of birth.
4. Highlight the traits that apply to you.
5. Tag 12 people and let them know by visiting their blogs and leaving a comment for them.
6. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve done it!

Being the curmudgeon skeptic that I am, I can’t in good conscious spread this game, so I will not participate in step five. Also, instead of highlighting the traits that apply to me, I’m going to highlight the traits that do not apply to me. I’ll also offer commentary (of course). To be fair, Scott participated for the fun of it. As far as I know, he certainly doesn’t believe astrology in any form is legitimate.

My month is November. Here is a list of November’s traits with the ones that do not apply to me highlighted:

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