It always surprises me when social scientific colleagues express the conviction that in principle, human behavior is predictable.  They seem to make two assumptions:  First, that all human behavior is causally determined, second, that in principle, whatever is causally determined can be predicted.

Brain researchers have found that if a certain part of a person’s brain is electrically stimulated, he may experience a strong feeling of the presence of God.

Therefore (some writers conclude), we don’t think God is present because God is really present, but merely because our brains our brains make us feel that He is.

This is like saying that since my brain can be manipulated to make me hallucinate an imaginary cat, there is no reason to think that I ever see a real cat.

Why do so many religious students lose faith in college?  Not because they are getting smarter.  In the first place, our schools are not doing very well at making them smarter.  In the second place, the phenomenon of loss of faith is peculiar to our own universities.  There is no evidence that it was widespread in, say, medieval universities, which were much more demanding intellectually.

Why should free exercise of religion be defended?  Not because people can make wrongs right just by thinking that they are right, or because religious folk would like indulgence for private eccentricities, or because they would like exemptions from reasonable demands grounded in the common good.

Something you will never see at a Catholic church:  A marquee urging passing motorists, “Come for the latte, stay for the worship.”

Something you will never see at a Protestant church:  A website at which the list of pastoral staff gives not the name of the current pastor, not the name of his predecessor, but the name of the one before that.

“‘There's a young student at this university,’ says [British neurologist John] Lorber, ‘who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal.  And yet the boy has virtually no brain.’  The student's physician at the university noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest.  ‘When we did a brain scan on him,’ Lorber recalls, ‘we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a

To continue yesterday’s discussion:  Are there in fact implicit norms to which the codes of particular cultures are better or worse approximations?  Judge Posner says “No.”  Let's consider his first example, murder.  Posner claims that the prohibition of murder is a mere tautology – that killing is wrong when killing is wrong – so that essentially it says nothing.  But is this correct?