I guess it behooves me to comment on Apollo 11's 35th anniversary. I've noted people's sharing memories online, of course, so here's mine: Outlasting Walter Cronkite while viewing coverage of the landing and, later, first moonwalk on a black-&-white set in the same corner of the same house where I now live, and where a TV still resides--only now it's high-definition with surround-sound--and it belongs to someone else. That was before CBS became the Evil Eye Network and W.C. revealed himself as a superfluous lefty. (Maybe I watched too long, since I recall getting a headache.)

I was twelve, and naturally much enthused about space exploration. Within two months I would be trying to cope with the scary environment of junior high school. FWIW, this year most of the building making up the scene of that crime was reduced to rubble; aside from the P-E facilities no one wanted it. My brother the TV master says that place looks better every time he sees the remains.

In retrospect one of the most amazing facts about Apollo 11 is its position on the historical timeline. Only 30 years separate Hitler's storming into Poland from Armstrong's boot on the Sea of Tranquillity--less time than has passed since the last men left the Moon. Yikes.

I don't even want to start on the subject of what we haven't accomplished in space since then.

Well, Blogger betrayed me last night.

I worked a good while on what was to be my next post. Then, somewhere along the line, I lost cursor function--and it got worse after that. The text execrably disappeared. I'd thought our newer, more improved Blogger was better than that! Rather than attempt to recreate my lost text, I'll try summarizing it before completing this entry.

I'd recently run across some online info about Mr. Sureman's book, The Science of Good and Evil. My suspicions about it were correct, and in order to recognize his apparent eagerness to subsume ethics under the philosophy of materialism, I decided to rename him Cocksure.

Mr. Cocksure's major points reportedly are that morality can be seen as derived from evolutionary biology, that it doesn't require religion, and that we can subscribe to a jury-rigged system of ethics such as he supplies. I haven't seen it and so won't evaluate his code, but I still don't view science as a source of moral authority. This isn't to deny that the discipline maintains its own ethics: Basically, good science requires honesty. The amoral universe the scientific establishment describes, however, cannot replace the Transcendent, however we may conceive of the idea.

It's like this: Years ago I came up with this--satirical--commandment:

Thou shalt not believe in any purpose, for purpose is an abomination unto EVOLUTION thy God. Thou shalt acknowledge chance, and chance alone.

If this "principle" applies to one's outlook on the world, then I'm not interested in the "morals" that might result.

Here's a sort of counterexample I'd originally intended to give. An old acquaintance, professor emeritus of biology here, has on occasion publicly defended evolutionary biology itself--but he's also gone on record proclaiming his belief that his studies have given him insight into the mind of God.

As a postscript, this subject matter tends to provoke the question: What kind of person might I be if I shared the materialist view? On the other hand, it may be too difficult to separate me from my tenets.