The Humanist Association of Orange County ( HAOC) is a chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Please visit our website at http://www.ochumanists.org

HAOC Board
President: Pete Anderson
Vice President: Dave Silva
Treasurer:.Harry Becker
Secretary: Jerry Parks
Member at large: Carl Mariz
Member at large: Benito Franqui

NEXT MEETING - July 18, 1:30 P.M.

"Postmodernism and the Way We Perceive Knowledge"
Victor Tanious will run a DVD presentation, followed by a general discussion to highlight the effect of Postmodernism on the way we understand how knowledge is perceived and communicated in the modern world.

Also:
"Why Should We Be Environmental Activists?"
Benito Franqui will present some reasons why humanists should become actively involved.

HAOC JOINS HUMANISTS.NET
by Benito Franqui

HAOC is now officially a member of Humanists.net ( http://humanists.net/  ), which is sponsored by the Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS) .  By hosting our website, Humanists.net is providing us with a significant financial saving. Please find out about other Humanist organizations by visiting their website, and contribute your ideas by posting at the IHS  Discussion Boards  (  http://humaniststudies.org/phpBB2/  ) and chat room (  http://humanists.net/chat/Vchat.html  ) .

HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY ERNST MAYR!
by Michael Shermer ( from E-Skeptic )
  
credit: Ernst Mayr Library of Comparative
         Zoology, Harvard University

Today, July 5, 2004, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the most influential biologists in history, Harvard University's Ernst Mayr. Happy birthday Ernst. You have now outlived by almost a decade Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the other longest living influential biologists in history. Congratulations and thank you for your incomparable contributions to science and the scientistic worldview. Our intellectual lives have been greatly improved thanks to you.

As a tribute to Ernst on his birthday, for this edition of E-Skeptic we are re-running the interview conducted by myself and Frank Sulloway, published in the pages of Skeptic magazine, that reveal both personal and intellectual insights into the man, his upbringing, his science, and his philosophy. Since we ran this interview, Ernst has published another five books and several dozen peer-reviewed scientific articles, all in his 90s! He has more to come, including a book debunking Intelligent Design theory.

Michael Shermer

The Grand Old Man of Evolution
An Interview with Evolutionary Biologist Ernst Mayr
First Published in Skeptic Magazine, Vol. 8 No. 1, in 2000

By Michael Shermer and Frank J. Sulloway

Ernst Mayr was born in Kempten, Germany, on July 5, 1904, making him, at age 95, the grand old man of evolutionary biology, one of the primary architects of the modern synthesis of genetic and evolutionary theory, and arguably one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. His career interests have spanned a remarkable five different fields, including: (1) ornithology, (2) systematics, (3) zoogeography, (4) evolutionary theory, and (5) philosophy and history of science. Such broad research interests grew from his education at a German Gymnasium (the equivalent of American high school, but at that time considerably more demanding), followed by a Candidacy in Medicine at the University of Greifswald in 1925 and a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Berlin in 1926.

His lab training was quickly followed by three field expeditions: (1) the Rothschild Expedition to Dutch New Guinea in 1928, (2) the University of Berlin expedition to the Mandated Territory of New Guinea in 1929, and (3) the American Museum of Natural History Whitney Expedition to the Solomon Islands in 1930. Upon his return from the field, Mayr landed a position as Curator of the Whitney-Rothschild Collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1932-1953, after which he began his long tenure at Harvard University in zoology from 1953 to the present, where he continues to make the trip into work several days a week.

Although Mayr is less well-known to the general public than Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, or Stephen Jay Gould, his impact on his science has been both deep and far-reaching, and has been appropriately honored with membership in 45 scientific societies, 14 lectureships and visiting professorships, 16 honorary degrees, (including those from such prestigious institutions as the University of Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge Universities), and 20 special awards, including the Wallace Darwin Medal of the Linnean Society in 1958, the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society in 1984, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society in 1986, and the Barzan Prize, the Lewis Thomas Prize, and the Crawfoord Prize in 1999. He has authored a remarkable 21 books, 13 by himself, four co-authored, and four edited or co-edited, many of which have become classics in the field, including: Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), Animal Species and Evolution (1963), The Growth of Biological Thought (1982), Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988), and, his latest, This Is Biology (1997). He has published a staggering 704 scientific papers for an average of 9.3 papers per year since 1925, and he has three more books in the works and numerous papers in press.

Mayr married Margarete Simon in 1935 (deceased in 1990). He has two daughters, five grandchildren, and eight great grandchildren. One of us (FJS) studied under Mayr at Harvard. Sulloway first met Mayr in 1967, when, as a junior at Harvard College, Sulloway was organizing the Harvard-Darwin Expedition to South America in order to make a series of films about Darwin’s voyage. Mayr graciously agreed to chair the project’s advisory committee, and he was later one of the readers of Sulloway’s senior honor’s thesis on Darwin and the Beagle’s voyage. As a graduate student at Harvard, Sulloway took a seminar course in evolutionary theory taught by Mayr (together with Stephen Jay Gould), and he also served as Mayr’s teaching assistant in several other courses. Mayr became Sulloway’s closest and most influential mentor (Mayr privately told Shermer that Sulloway was the best student he ever had), and Sulloway’s first book, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979), was dedicated to Mayr.

We caught up with Mayr between work at Harvard and an evening lecture on evolution at his retirement community, on a beautiful fall New England day as he reflected on the great scientific issues of his long and esteemed career.

GREED, GOVERNMENTS and GOLD
( by Jerry Parks )

In the year 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor said something to the effect that:
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up to the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority [or those who can control the election outcome] always see to it that the candidates who promise them the most benefits from the public treasury get elected, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy.

Historically, the world¹s civilizations seem to last about 200 years on the average. It has been said that they go through a series of phases somewhat as follows:

From bondage to faith;
From faith to courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence to bondage.

It has recently been suggested that the USA is currently somewhere around apathy or complacency, but with our huge and fast growing national debt, combined with the lowest taxes in decades (at least for for the extremely wealthy and the large corporations, which exert great influence on government policies), and our willingness to shove the problem of paying for such debt onto the shoulders of future generations, it would appear that we are actually in the dependence phase of the civilization cycle, and may well be about to collapse as the result of a loose fiscal policy, if Alexander Tyler is right. After all, a recent article in Fortune magazine explains that our fiscal gap has risen to considerably more than the value of all the private assets in the entire country!

However, as long as the US dollar remains the dominant monetary measure for the world, we can somewhat maintain our position of control in the world economy in spite of the fact that we have become the world¹s largest debtor nation and are dependent upon the rest of the world to keep loaning us more money. But, if the rest of the world decided, for instance, to use the Euro as the basis for most exchanges, or to actually go to a gold based system, it could have a devastating effect on our economy. Just printing more dollar bills would no longer suffice to get us by. The dollar would lose value compared to most other world currencies.The cost of the oil that we need for our economy to survive would rise to values never before imagined. Another article in Fortune indicates that the Shell Oil Company, one of the big oil producers, will probably exhaust all of their oil supplies in a decade, while other oil companies have been overstating their reserves. Thus this black gold is destined to be in extremely short supply.

If we don¹t start paying down our national debt to give the dollar a bit of credibility, it is probably just a matter of time before the oil rich Islamic nations decide to sell their oil on something like a gold based (or other real value) money exchange. Thus Islam could win an economic war against us, no matter what happens militarily. The greater our debt becomes, the more vulnerable we are to such a fate, which would include a drastic reduction in our standard of living.

CELLULAR AUTOMATA THEORY AND FREE WILL

The following e-mail discussion between Peter Anderson, Paul Ricci, Juan Bernal, and Benito Franqui took place from 5/30/04 to 6/17/04:

Benito 5/30: From http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0464.html :

"Extending his discussion to philosophy, Wolfram "explains" the apparent phenomenon of free will as decisions that are determined but unpredictable. Since there is no way to predict the outcome of a cellular process without actually running the process, and since no simulator could possibly run faster than the Universe itself, there is, therefore, no way to reliably predict human decisions. So even though our decisions are determined, there is no way to predetermine what these decisions will be. However, this is not a fully satisfactory examination of the concept. This observation concerning the lack of predictability can be made for the outcome of most physical processes, e.g., where a piece of dust will fall onto the ground. This view thereby equates human free will with the random descent of a piece of dust. Indeed, that appears to be Wolfram's view when he states that the process in the human brain is "computationally equivalent" to those taking place in processes such as fluid turbulence."

Perhaps this is why Daniel Dennett referred to Cellular Automata Theory during his Caltech presentation on free will. Dennett seemed to agree with Wolfram, while Kurzweil has ( to put it mildly ) some reservations.

Paul 5/31: To agree with Wolfram, since our own actions are determined but unpredictable to each of us, our free-will can ONLY be the ignorance in this unpredictability. Given who we are, we deliberate to maximize our good (and that of society) knowing full-well that our actions, ultimately, are unavoidable in the strictest sense of the term. If it were not for our ignorance of how we will be determined to act, there would be no free-will at all. (My last word on all of this; at least for now!)

Pete 5/31: ( referring to Benito 5/30 ) Was this from Kurzweil's review of "New Kind of Science"? Kurzweil gave a largely favorable review of the book, even though the book was mostly "panned" by other reviewers, including the one in Science magazine.

Wolfram doesn't really say too much about free will in his book, but I think he's on the right track. And, I mostly agree also with what Kurzweil has to say. We all need to do a bit more thinking about this.

Benito 5/31-1: The quoted text is part of Kurzweil's own review. Here's the beginning of the review:

"Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science'
by Ray Kurzweil

In his remarkable new book, Stephen Wolfram asserts that cellular automata operations underlie much of the real world. He even asserts that the entire Universe itself is a big cellular-automaton computer. But Ray Kurzweil challenges the ability of these ideas to fully explain the complexities of life, intelligence, and physical phenomena.

Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science is an unusually wide-ranging book covering issues basic to biology, physics, perception, computation, and philosophy. It is also a remarkably narrow book in that its 1,200 pages discuss a singular subject, that of cellular automata. Actually, the book is even narrower than that. It is principally about cellular automata rule 110 (and three other rules which are equivalent to rule 110), and its implications."

Ray Kurzweil is editor-in-chief and ceo of www.KurzweilAI.net , the website where the review appears. So it should reflect Kurzweil's own views as accurately as anything available on the Net.

Juan 5/31-1: It may be that Paul wants this to be his last word (for the time being) on the issue, but it certainly should not be the last word that we should hear;
for it is an erroneous word, in my humble estimation.

Paul says without any argument to support it that act " knowing full-well that our actions, ultimately, are unavoidable in the strictest sense of the term." I deny that this is so. It is false that we act knowing this and false also that everything we do is unavoidable "in the strictest sense of the term." We often avoid things. Had our anscestors not managed to avoid predators, we would not even be here to debate this issue. So in what sense does someone claim that we can avoid nothing?

The answer probably is that everythiing is inevitable in a 'metaphysical sense.' As Paul has told me, if we see from a God's-point-of-view we would see that everything we do is inevitable. My reply to this: who knows what we would see from that strange, exotic, metaphysical perspective. You cannot simply infer that what you would see would be a fully deterministic world.

Cheers and good will to all!

Juan 5/31-2: I'm sure that Dennett can speak for himself, but I will note that Benito's interpretation that Dennett would agree with Wolfram's view of "free will" and against Kurzweil's critique of Wolfram is probably erroneous. Dennett is explicit in both his books (Elbow Room and Free Will Evolves) in expressing skepticism about the approach that equates free will with those events that are random and cannot be predicted.

A side remark: I suppose that the free-will philosophical problem is pretty much harmless. It should be clarified, though, that what is at issue is something we could call 'metaphysical freedom,' and not at all the ordinary freedom that most of us worry about. As John Dewey reportedly said, no one ever died fighting for metaphysical freedom, but plenty people die and sacrifice fighting for freedom from oppression. It is not at all clear what connection there can be between philosophical debates regarding metaphysical freedom and real world problems of political and economic freedom.

At best, any "conclusions" which come out of the philosophical problem of free will likely will have only a peripheral affect on our ordinary concerns regarding freedom and the lack of it. (Although some defense attorneys certainly make use of confusion regarding the extent to which criminal defendants were determined by past conditions to commit the criminal acts that they committed. This area of legal practice is probably one of the main benefactors of confused phiolsophical debates about 'free will'.)

Peace and good will to all!

Benito 5/31-2: ( quoting Juan 5/31-2) "Dennett is explicit in both his books (Elbow Room and Free Will Evolves) in expressing skepticism about the approach that equates free will with those events that are random and cannot be predicted."

If so, then in my opinion Dennett failed to make that point sufficiently clear during his Caltech presentation. I interpreted his examples based on cell automata theory as an indication of his full endorsement of Wolfram's position. Non-trivial cell automata events, of course, are neither random nor predictable.

I find it regrettable that Dennett has chosen ( or has been predetermined??? ) not to post at his website ( http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/~ddennett.htm ) some articles which would unambiguosly state his position on the issue of free will and its possible conection with cellular automata theory. I prefer Wurzeil's choice ( or predetermination??? ) to do so at his site. Of course, this opinion of mine might be the only one which predetermination allows me to express!

A site which may throw some light on this issue is http://reason.com/0305/fe.rb.pulling.shtml ( will comment on it later ).

(quoting Juan 5/31-2) "It is not at all clear what connection there can be between philosophical debates regarding metaphysical freedom and real world problems of political and economic freedom."

Well, at least these debates help us to take our minds away from the "real world" problems - which, I hope we agree, can at times seem to be utterly depressing...

Juan 6/1:  I'm not sure what Wolfram's position is'; but your quoted excerpt suggests the following definition of free will: "Free will results from decisions
that are determined but unpredictable."
The quotation follows with:
[...Since there is no way to predict the outcome of a cellular process without actually running the process, and since no simulator could possibly run faster than the Universe itself, there is, therefore, no way to reliably predict human decisions. So even though our decisions are determined, there is no way to predetermine what these decisions will be.]

This may be Wolfram's view of 'free will'; but Dennett does not define 'free will' as based on the putative unpredictability of human behavior. I'm sorry that he does not state a "nutshell" definition of 'free will' in his web site, but maybe part of the philosophical point is that definitions of free will are either pointless or misleading.

Dennett certainly goes a long way in clarifying philosophical issues related to "free will" and determinism in his books on the subject. That's where you have to go if you want to get straight on what he has to offer regarding free will.

What Dennet does is two-fold:
1. Defuse the Philosophica issue of free-will/determinism, mostly done in his short paperback entitled: Elbow Room. (My opinion is that the goes a long way toward showing that, by and large, the philosophical problem of free-will is a pseudo problem.)
2. Show how the behavior that we ordinarily refer to as free action or free-will behavior came about with the evolution of the type of creatures that we are. In short, free will evolves.

Of course none of this will satisfy the individual who is focused on the metaphysical problem of 'metaphysical freedom' and 'metaphysical and absolute determinism'; but then again I'm not sure anything will ever satisfy such a metaphysically-oriented individual.

Paul 6/12-1:  Given all the conditions under which events--including human actions-- occur, including the known and unknown laws and principles of Nature, whatever happens was inevitable. Another way of saying this is, given those same conditions and laws of Nature, the same events would occur exactly as they did the previous time. This is just the causal principle, the basis of determinism. To avoid some event from happening (whether it's to avoid predators in our early evolution, or whatever) just means that given the laws of Nature, this is what would have to happen. To deny any of the above is just to deny determinism. Juan, and those who might agreewith him, are simply going to have to make up their minds about whether they are determinists-- at least at the level at which we live and play-- or not. Let's not play tricks with words. We say things are "evitable" or avoidable ONLY because we don't know ahead of time what the results will be. A perfectly good pair of words for our lack of knowledge of the happenings in and around the world. No one would say the transit of the planet Venus, June 8th, was avoidable would they? Such a locution has no meaning because we knew it would occur. The only difference between the above and the Bush Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq is that no one knew precisely what Bush would do before he did it. If anyone did know, then the war was unavoidable. I really can't understand what your problem is in this regard, Juan. You do have to make up your mind as to whether or not you are a determinist which, simply, is the view that all events at the macrocosmic level, have causes, howver complex, known and unknown.

As far as not knowing what the world would look like from God's point of view sounds like a legitimate criticism until one realizes it's just a thought problem assuming some being knows all. Clearly all would be inevitable from such a position,no proof or argument is needed; it follows from what the terms in the claim mean, simply put. Philosophers--and scintists as well-- use such thought problems quite often in explaining their positions.

Paul 6/12-2:  I couldn't disagree more with Juan's position on the practical results that might stem from the free-will issue. Of the three general solutions to the problem (libertarianism, compatibilism or hard determinism) only the first keeps the staus quo, the other two would have remarkable consequences for our judicial system. It's not just a play with words with no consequences any more than those who believe in a metaphysical God would have no effect on those who believe! Their world view is entirely differnt from mine (and, I hope yours as well). So, metaphysiacl beliefs DO matter (contra John Dewey or anyone else who makes such an inexcusable claim!). We all have certain metaphysical beliefs not just about God or free-will but about countless other matters including the basis for our ethical beliefs. The Sophists argued--2500 years ago-- just as Juan is now arguing. History has proved them wrong; people do die (or at least suffer) for certain metaphysical beliefs. I envision an altogether differt kind of judicial system, for example, if certain forms of compatibilism were instituited in our society. Clearly the emphasis would be on rehabilitation rather than punishment for the sake of punishment (retributive punishment). Under hard deternminism (no free-will at all) the practical consequences would be evn more extreme I would think.

Lastly, we don't want to confuse political freedom (freedom from oppression) which is an altogether different kind of freedom. We can still exercise free-will even though we may be repressed though, perhaps, to a lesser extent.

Juan 6/13-1: Ricci, tell me of one case (just one case) in which 'metaphysical freedom' was an important enough issue that people have been willing to fight and die? Just one. If you can, then you're free to ridicule the likes of John Dewey and others who have seen through general insignificance of the "philosophers game" of trying to figure how 'metaphysical freedom' might be possible given a peculiar understanding of 'determinism.'

Juan 6/13-2: I have been carrying on this debate with Paul Ricci now for several months, and obviously we're not getting any closer to a meeting of minds. The way 'determinism' is spelled out is not, as Ricci, would have it, a simple and obvious matter. Philosophers disagree on this and have debated it for decades, if not longer. Philosophers as respectable as Daniel Dennett, for example, surely disagrees with what Ricci seems to think is the obvious way to conceive of 'determinism'; as do I.

I certainly do not find the route that Paul would take on the free will issue to be very helpful or to help clarify the issue. And as Paul well knows, I'm prepared to continue this debate with him or with anyone who takes what I consider to be a very unpromising way of dealing with the issue.

Juan 6/15: (A false or empty proposition: 'N' = 'Everthing that happens (at the macro-level) is inevitable.') If N is a significant claim, N is false. Many things that happen are not inevitable or unavoidable. Surely many things that happen (or that we do) are preventable and could have been otherwise.

When N is assumed to be true, (in some metaphysical sense of 'inevitable') N is a trivial, empty proposition. To claim that everything that happens is inevitable reduces to the empty, trivial claim that whatever happens, happens. [So what else is new?]

Imagine a children's game of Dodge Ball. Jaime is the thrower. Enrique is his target. Jaime throws the ball attempting to hit Enrique. Enrique either manages to dodge the ball or is hit by the ball. Suppose that Jaime is a strong, accurate thrower and Enrique is a quick dodger. We could say that chances are 50/50 that Jaime can hit Enrique and 50/50 that Enrique can dodge the ball. As a significant claim, consider the claim that 'it is inevitable that Jaime will hit Enrique.' Call this 'N1'. N1 is false because in 50% of his throws at Enrique Jaime misses his target. Similarly with the claim that it is inevitable that Enrique will dodge the ball. Call this 'N2.' N2 is false because 50% of the time Enrique does not manage to dodge the ball. That N1 and N2 can be false, demonstrates that the general proposition 'N' = 'Everything that happens is inevitable,' is false, when understood as a significant claim.Here the philosopher would insist that the proposition 'N' is true, when it is understood in another sense. He would avow that, for each individual case of Jaime throwing ball at Enrique, regardless of what happens, the outcome is inevitable, i.e. that whatever happens (Jaime hitting his target or Enrique avoiding being hit) was unavoidable. Whether Jaime hits Enrique or Enrique avoids being hit doesn't matter. What matters is that it happens one way or the other, and the way it happens is inevitable. Understood this way, 'N' expresses an empty, trivial claim. 'N' does not state any significant information. When we analyze the proposition, we see that it says nothing but 'whatever happens ('hit target' or 'avoiding hit') happens.' Adding that it was inevitable does not give us any useful information, although it may state a philosopher's metaphysical sense of 'inevitability.' But a philosopher's metaphysical sense of inevitable, while relevant to whatever 'philosophical' issue which may occupy him, is not relevant to our ordinary, correct sense of evitability and inevitability, as shown by the example of the children's game of Dodge Ball.
.*************
[When I was a kid back in Colorado, the neighborhood boys and I preferred to organize and play our own brand of baseball, free from adult supervision.
Later when we participated in "official," little league baseball, organized and supervised by adults, we felt we had lost a particular form of valued freedom, the freedom to organize and play our own games as we preferred. And surely we had.But the professor of philosophy now tells us that we never had any freedom at all; for everything that happens and everything that we do are inevitable. He contends that we were never free in the important and ultimate sense of the word "freedom." (Sometimes referred to as "metaphysical freedom.")As little kids we would have laughed at such adult "nuttiness"; and similarly as adults we should laugh at such "academic" nonsense.]

Benito 6/15: Yup - seems to me that to have good will is the really important thing - whether we attribute it to free will or not!

Paul 6/17: Having re-read much of what Dennett has to say about determinism (FREEDOM EVOLVES), especially pps.84-89, one easily comes to the conclusion that Dennett is simply not a determinist. He uses the term to include the claim that some events have no cause at all. This is contrary to the common, traditional meaning of the term held by the majority of philosophers and scientists over many millenia. He gives three examples to illustrate how some events may have no cause at all to my dismay. Though I don't want to detail this since most of you are not interested in philosophical discussion, at least allow me to mentioin just one example of what Dennett considers to be an event with no cause and then judge for yourself on the adequacy of his claim. This is the case of throwing dice and observing the outcome. He claims:"We set in motion a sequence that practically guarantees that nothing will be the cause of its landing heads or tails." In the paragraph above he points out, clearly, some of the factors determining the outcome of the toss: "the speed and direction of the release that imparts the spin, the density and humidity of the air, the effect of gravity, the distance to the ground, . . ." etc. . (I would add friction as well!) Yet he concludes there is no cause because these causes (many of course) cannot be predicted. But determinism doesn't insist that prediction is necessary in order to have a cause (or causes). There is no ONE cause of course, but that certainly doesn't lead to indeterminism. I suspect where Dennett has gone astray is to assume that causes are only necessary conditions. But that is the most unpopular view of the way the word "cause" is usually designated. More commonly it is a sufficient or both necessary and sufficient condition, but there is much debate on this amongst scientists and philosophers alike.

Because of this mistake of Dennett's, his whole theory of incompatibilism is suspect and it shows up in his belief that not all events are inevitable. So to say "All events have a cause (or causes)" is the same as saying that events are inevitable; this is hardly a trivial claim since many who believe in free-will deny this. It is trivial only if one says "All causes have effects" since causes have to have effects (otherwise they are not causes!) but not the same as "All events have causes." Perhaps saying that Jaime's throw of the ball at Enrique was inevitable (whether he hits or misses) is not very useful, may be true but saying it was not inevitable (that is, uncaused), is even more useless as well as mysterious. If Jaime continues to miss hitting Enrique in the same manner, determinism implies that perhaps he may learn from his mistake and correct one of the causes for his missing! Saying that his hitting (or missing) his target has no cause is surely useless to Jaime! Dennett, clearly, has taken a wrong turn in his analysis of the free-will issue. I rest my case.

More importantly, one of the main tenets of Humanistic belief is the belief in determinism (at the macrocosmic level) and its use in science. How would science be possible if some events in the universe were indeterministic to the extent that they couldn't be investigated? We would be reliant entirely on statistical averages or some form of indetermined events which leads us back to the realm of the supernatural. I, for one, will have nothing to do with such claims.  

ON THE LIGHT SIDE
( contributed by Dave Silva )

 CHRIST RETURNS
 
 A 23-year-old man in Hartland, Maine, was hospitalized in March  after apparently attempting to commit suicide by crucifying  himself. According to an account in the Portland Press Herald,  he built a wooden cross, placed it on the floor, and nailed one hand to it. According to the officer, "When he realized that he  was unable to nail his other hand to the board, he called 911,"  although the officer said he wasn't sure if the call was for an  ambulance or for someone to come help him nail the other hand.

CARTOON OF THE MONTH

HAOC APPLICATION FORM

NAME______________________________________________________________DATE______________

ADDRESS_____________________________________________________________________________

PHONE________________________ E-MAIL_________________________________________________

To receive three free issues of the HAOC monthly newsletter, please check here: ______
To join HAOC or renew your membership, please attach a check ( payable to HAOC ) for the proper yearly dues:
Regular = $15 Couple = $20 Student = $10 Sustaining = $35 Sponsor = $100
Please hand this application to an HAOC board member, or mail to:
   Harry Becker
   420 Sonoma Aisle
   Irvine, CA 92618

NEXT MEETING:
On Sunday, July 18, at 1:30 P.M., at the Irvine Ranch Water District building located at 15600 Sand Canyon Ave. in Irvine.

NOTICE :
The Irvine Ranch Water District neither supports nor endorses the causes and activities or organizations which use the District’s meeting rooms, which are made available as a public service.

HAOC
2609 Fernside St.
Orange, CA 92865
Your membership expiration date is shown in your address label.