The revealing science of God?

(With apologies for the title, taken from a particularly ugly bit of Yes bloat-o-rama from the 1970’s.)

Chris has posted an entry regarding Antony Flew’s change of heart regarding a/theism. I found this incredibly interesting, especially given my own philosophical musings of late. Particularly fascinating, perhaps even eerily familiar, given a debate I had with my wife recently:

It seems to me that for a strong moral argument, you’ve got to have God as the justification of morality. To do this makes doing the morally good a purely prudential matter rather than, as the moral philosophers of my youth used to call it, a good in itself. (Compare the classic discussion in Plato’s Euthyphro.)

[Hyperlink added.]

This is a book I plan to seek out. Chris recently lent me a couple of books by Chrsitian apologist Peter Kreeft, which I have to admit I have only read in part thus far. Nevertheless, it is hard to be energized enough to complete the task, since I have not been tremendously impressed with Kreeft’s arguments, although it is possible—but very unlikely, especially given the quality of other, shorter works of his which I’ve read—that he has abridged his philosophical reasoning in these particular books, in order to appeal to a wider audience averse to philosophy texts. In that case perhaps I need to revisit the works of a more sophisticated apologist, since I have no such compunctions. (In fact, I had enough Philosophy credits at college to take a minor from the department, but kept my Physics minor instead. Score: Practical 1, Theoretical 0.)

I am most interested in Flew’s analysis of his beliefs as being Deist, in that, while he acknowledges the possibility of the existence of God, he does not find arguments for revelatory interaction with such a being (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism) very moving. Thomas Jefferson, of whom I have become a great admirer—oddly enough, more so since I left the academic institution whose founding he considered one of the three great achievements of his life—was also a Deist.

So Chris, is this a general-interest story, or a tip of the hat to your readership?

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, writes about the effects of recent US Customs policy change. Although I’m not sure how contributing to EPIC really helps this case, seeing as how they are regularly dismissed by government security bureaucrats as paranoiacs and assorted nutballs, it’s obvious that this policy is asinine (as would also be expected from government security bureaucrats).

U.S. law doesn’t apply to overseas vendors, but how is it “in the spirit” of U.S. law to require these vendors to do things that would be illegal here?