Today's musing minute, What does religion have to do with it?

 Listening just now to Dennis Prager, I was struck by what may be an *essential* difference between the religious and the secular approaches to morality.

For the secular, Hume's fork applies, the one that fundamentally distinguishes between facts and values. Facts are matters of objective reality, not always knowable, and often incompletely knowable, but always objectively given to us, outside of our perception of them. So, facts and values (what we regard as good and bad) are distinctive, completely unrelated categories. One concerns objective reality, the other concerns subjective belief (not amenable to scientific investigation and refutation.)

For the firm religious believer, Hume's fork does not apply, or, at least it does not apply in the same way. Both the laws of morality and the laws of nature are revealed to us (insofar as they are revealed) by God.; and they share the same ontological status. Good and bad are matters of objective fact as determined by God, in the same way as heavy and light, high and low, far and near, etc. are. It may be that the ways in which we comprehend and discover these God-given laws are different, thus demarcating scientific from religious/moral inquiry, but both are matters of trying to learn more about God's laws. As I say, scientific and moral laws are ontologically equivalent.

One does not go far along this route before encountering perceived contradictions, the most well known being, the problem of squaring God's omnisience and omnipotence with individual responsibility (and also the problem of the existence of evil given God's omnibenevolence) - a matter, I have learned, that my religious friends prefer to leave unresolved as one of God's mysteries. [footnote: For me it is like saying that, if he wants to, God can make it so that 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 as well .]

So what? So, ok. As a practical matter, this very fundamental difference, matters most when the religiously zealous have political power, and matters least when they don't, because in the latter case they lack the power to compel belief and behavior according to their perception of God's law. Regardless of how we perceived their ontological status, religious laws must be held separate from civil laws, secular laws. In many respects, that move, the move towards "religious freedom" and the secularization of religious identity, that move allowed for the development of the modern world and the great enrichment. Theocracy is incompatible with the freedom of choice that we now take for granted and that made us rich.

It is fortunatethen, that for the most part, even the religiously inclined enthusiastically accept the separation of religion and state as necessary, and forsware the right to compel others according to their beliefs. But, we also know there still exists too many who have not made this move. The future of Western Civilization depends on its continued existence.

Today's musing minute. Will there be enough childern?

Other than family and friends, my greatest passion is economics. Studying, teaching and discussing economics is, for me, an endless pursuit of fascinating social phenomena, a window into the mysteries of the challenges and achievements (and failures) of the human race.

All the moreso since I have lived through numerous momentous changes that have brought us to the remarkable global economy we now inhabit. To say that the modern and post-modern ages are unprecedented is a massive understatement. We are, indeed, living in a brave new world, but not in the sense that Huxley thought. It is full of contrasts, but it is not as a whole dystopia, though some parts and some episodes may be and may have been. Instead, it is full of promise for the creation of ever-increasing human capabilities.

Much of this is a hyped-up version of economic development as usual, much faster and much more transformative; but following the expected pattern of value creation through expanding trade, production, investment, migration, and, most important, innovation.

But one thing is completely new. For the first time ever, human societies are facing a transformative decline in fertility as a result of enrichment, not of starvation or catastrophe, but as a result of choice, of the rising value of human time. And this implies declining and aging populations, with rising degrees of dependency of the old on the young, and worker shortages, etc.

Clearly it is a transition period. If we are to survive as a species, the population must stabilize, or rebound to increase, at some point, and it is easy to imagine various economic models depicting this. But in the meantime, a long meantime, there will be challenges. I believe strongly that, if we let it, the market economy will adapt spontaneously, in ways that we might not yet imagine, but we will feel changes.

One of the challenges is to our perception of children and of families in general. There is enormous evidence showing the economic (and psychological) benefits of strong functional families and the bad effects of their absence. The decision not to have children implies, at the society level, a society not invested in the future.

We are biologically wired to want to produce children. Especially women (in general). The popularity of family TV shows endures. And shows like Call the Midwife - a remarkable, enduring success about pregnancy and babies - suggests as much. So, it is my hope that some incarnation of "family values" will characterize currently emerging generations as they enter this new bewildering world.