This passage is John 14:12-14. The context is Jesus speaking to the apostle Philip:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it."

Greater works than these shall he do. According to Jesus himself, as recorded by the divinely inspired and inerrant text of the Bible, any true Christian believer will be able not only to reproduce the miracles of Jesus, but to do better miracles.

Just to make absolutely sure we understand this, the text has Jesus promise that he will grant any miracle whatsoever which a believer prays for in his name. In fact, he promises it twice. There are no loopholes or qualifications to this pledge, none of the convenient apologetic excuses used by modern believers - "but only if your faith is great enough", "God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is no", "God only does miracles in front of the faithful", and so on. Jesus says plainly and clearly, "If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it."

Of course, these excuses have arisen because this promise is plainly false. Christians can not do miracles like those of Jesus, much less miracles which exceed those of Jesus. They cannot heal the paralyzed, they cannot still hurricanes, they cannot stroll across seas, they cannot raise the dead. Their prayers, like the prayers of all other believers of all other religions, are empty words and nothing more. However fervent they may be, however many times they invoke Jesus' name, they produce no tangible effect greater than slightly stirring the air. The only power that a Christian or any other person has to affect the course of events in the world is what they can achieve through their own, non-supernatural effort.

This verse is just one of many in the Bible which promise, repeatedly and without qualification, that God will grant any prayer prayed by a faithful believer (see "Nothing Fails Like Prayer" for a more complete list). In the superstitious and credulous times when this book was written, perhaps that false promise was not such a great impediment. Its very extravagance may even have been a help. But in this somewhat more skeptical era, it seems likely that many believers would be shocked and upset if they knew their own text made promises it could not deliver. How many Christians might become disgruntled and realize they have been taken advantage of if they knew about this Bible verse?

Other posts in this series:

• Little-Known Bible Verses

I have many objections to communism, not least of which is last year's news that, in Russia, the Communist party is now teaming up with the Russian Orthodox Church to outlaw homosexuality - a fitting illustration of the similar dogmatic, irrational attitudes that prevail in both ideologies. But my differences go deeper than that, and this post will outline three of the most serious.

Communism lacks a good mechanism to allocate resources to where they are most needed, resulting in waste, shortages and inefficiency. In a capitalist economy, price serves as both a vital signal of demand and also the means of meeting that demand. When a product or service is demanded in excess of current supply, the price rises, attracting people to produce that product or service in order to make a greater profit. Conversely, when supply outstrips demand, the price drops and people are naturally discouraged from producing more of the excess commodity until the imbalance resolves itself. This "invisible hand" of the market, an organizational force at the macro-level emerging from thousands of independent decisions, is often an extremely efficient way of balancing supply with demand and resulting in a society where there is neither wasteful excess nor shortage.

Communism, however, has no such balancing mechanism. In a communist society, the state sets the price of all commodities, and this decision can be completely arbitrary. In theory, if a shortage occurs, the state simply orders the appropriate entities to produce more, but this decision is insufficiently sensitive to price signals and has no necessary link to supply or demand. No group of centralized bureaucrats has the information or the intelligence to make such perfect decisions affecting the price of every transaction in society. This "top-down" approach will inevitably result in inefficiency and misallocation of resources, wasting commodities that are produced in excess of demand and causing shortages of commodities that are not produced in sufficient quantity to meet demand. The "bottom-up" approach of capitalism is a far superior means of dealing with this problem.

Communism discourages productive effort and innovation. In a communist society, no one is richer than anyone else; the state allocates goods to all people based only on need. This means that there are no material rewards for invention, innovation, or greater productivity. It also means that those who are less productive than the average have no incentive to work harder or increase their output.

What this inevitably leads to, in the real world, is a vicious spiral of decreased effort and decreased production, as people slacken their efforts so as to work no harder than the least hardworking member of society (whom they'll be paid the same as anyway, so why work any harder than them?). This is the classic Prisoner's Dilemma in action, and means that such a system cannot compete against a capitalist economy that tangibly rewards good ideas and hard work.

Communism necessarily denies the freedom of the individual. Of all the shortcomings of communism, I consider this one to be the most serious. A communist economy necessarily denies people the freedom to seek happiness in whatever career they choose. In such a system, decisions regarding what job a person will take must be made by the state. When the bureaucracy perceives a shortage, their only response is to order more people to join the effort of producing the desired commodity. Thus, a communist society is intrinsically a tyranny where people's lives must be controlled in minute and exacting detail by a faceless and distant central committee. This alone should make communism repugnant to all lovers of freedom and liberty, and bring us to the realization that no such system could ever succeed in reality without massive and widespread violations of the human right to choose our own destiny and pursue happiness as we see fit.

This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.

The Learning Annex is a privately owned continuing-education school in New York. As a resident of New York City, I can testify to its success - its kiosks of free course catalogs are on nearly every street corner in Manhattan. It was founded in 1980 by Bill Zanker, who sold the company in 1991 and then repurchased it and resumed ownership in 2002. The 2007 Inc. 500, a list of the nation's fastest-growing private companies, ranked the Learning Annex at number 346 and said that it makes over $100 million in revenue in each year.

On my lunch break last week, I picked up a Learning Annex catalog and flipped through it. Some of its offered courses are about professional software, how to found a small business, how to interview for a job, or other serious topics. Others are about dating, diet, or other self-help topics. But a great many of them are straight-up pseudoscience. A large number of Learning Annex classes promise to teach students how to develop their psychic powers, how to get rich or find the perfect spouse using the "Law of Attraction" (the Law of Attraction is a very popular course topic), how to communicate with dead relatives, how to "reverse the aging process", how to heal using qi gong, how to improve your life with neurolinguistic programming (for the jaw-dropping price of $2500), and many more.

As a private business, the Learning Annex profits by people signing up to take its courses, so they have little reason to turn away anyone who offers to teach a class. This no doubt accounts for much of the bottom-feeding superstition in these pages. There are many self-deluded people who are eager to share their credulity with the world, and of course it's much easier to claim to be a teacher of psychic powers than to be a teacher of Photoshop. One requires actual skill and education, while the other thrives on a lack of any discernible qualifications or results. The mantle of "psychic teacher" can be worn by any charlatan; if they've published a book or run a website, so much the better.

But it goes far beyond that. The Learning Annex, far from passively putting up with these miracle-mongers, actively works to promote them and boasts about their presence. The first page of its catalogue, as well as a later full-page ad, prominently advertises a webcast by noted psychic failure and free-speech enemy Sylvia Browne. The Browne webcast is presented as a tie-in for the launch of their own new pseudoscience-themed site, SpiritNow.com, whose index page is a gleeful mishmash of astrology, angels, psychics and feng shui. The back page of the catalogue, meanwhile, advertises a course taught by TV psychic Char Margolis.

Purely on an economic level, it's hard to fault the Learning Annex. No doubt they, like much of the media, have found that peddling pseudoscience is a great way to rake in the bucks. Marketing to skeptics is an endeavor that some might say suffers from an intrinsic contradiction. But the credulous are huge in number and eager to be exploited.

But the problem with pandering to superstition is that, inevitably, it degrades one's seriousness and credibility. The more this nonsense infects its pages, the more the Learning Annex will lose what real educators it has. After all, if you're a genuine, credible expert on some important topic, why make yourself a laughingstock by sharing space with fly-by-night psychics, people who talk to angels, and hawkers of the latest get-rich-quick scams? Pseudoscience, like water, seeks its own level. Before long, if they continue at this pace, this is all the Learning Annex will have left - just one more outlet for every brand of nonsense our society has to offer.

Every educational institution has to confront the fact, at some point, that real teaching is a difficult, expensive business. It's certainly possible to succeed doing it legitimately, but the temptation will always be there to lower the standards, throw open the gates, and make the easy money from people who flock to have their superstitions catered to and their prejudices reinforced. "What's the harm?" is the usual rationalization - a rhetorical question which can be answered by noting that the harm, though subtle at first, is very real indeed. It consists in sending the message that pseudoscience is a legitimate area of study, worthy of being put on a par with genuine science. Inevitably, science suffers from that equation.

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it."

—Matthew 16:18 (RSV)

The biblical metaphor of the church built on rock is interwoven throughout Christianity, used as a metaphor for the presumed stability and eternality of the faith. The Catholic church points to two thousand years of continuous tradition as proof that they are the rock in question, while other denominations cite their alleged correct interpretation of scripture, the belief that God is on their side, their anticipation of end-times vindication, or other details.

I say, let them have their analogy. We have a better one.

I wrote in "Belaboring the Obvious" that there are many pundits who confidently assert the futility of debating religion, claiming that no one ever changes their mind. I was very happy to see a substantial number of commenters step up to count themselves among that allegedly non-existent multitude. And, as I've pointed out, our numbers are growing generation by generation and even year by year. We're still nowhere near a majority, but our growth is ongoing.

If reason seems futile, that's only because it doesn't produce dramatic changes of opinion in every case, or even in most cases. Human psychology just isn't that malleable. The persuasive power of reason is less like a great torrent that sweeps away houses, more like the gentle dripping of water on stone. It may seem like a weak force, a tiny, imperceptible thing against the massed strength of rock. What could a few drips of water ever do to the hardness of stone?

But be not deceived: gentle as it may seem, weak as it may seem, water is the stronger of the two. It may work at a rate too slow for humans to perceive, but it has been one of the major forces shaping the surface of our planet. Given a million years, the soft, ceaseless pounding of waves can pulverize rock into soft sand. Given ten million years, it can erase impact craters or carve vast canyons through stone. Given a hundred million years, it can wear away mountains to nothing.

Over the span of a human lifetime, stone seems invulnerable. But if we could see with the eyes of geological time, it would be ephemeral as mist. We could see mountains upthrust, sharp and craggy, and then sink again as they were gentled by the scouring of erosion and carried piece by piece to the sea. We could see roots split stone, acid dissolve it, and lichen eat it away, transforming it into soil. We could see frost wedge itself into cracks and expand, pushing apart solid rock. We could see stone of all kinds crushed, metamorphosed, and ultimately subducted and melted.

The mightiest mountain is inevitably worn down to nothing by erosion, and in like manner, even the most powerful religion can be undercut by reason and fade away, brought low by forces it once scorned as beneath notice. So, let them have their rock - we are wind and water. We are a million falling drops, a million wind-blown particles, slowly wearing away at their supposedly solid foundation one grain at a time. And given enough time, we are the stronger. They may not notice the spreading cracks, but they are there nonetheless. We have seen what the future brings, and we know the trend is on our side.

You probably don't know me, but I'm writing to send you my thanks. I used to be a hardcore, evil, godless atheist, but after reading some of your wonderful Christian fundamentalist cartoon tracts, I've realized just how wrong I've been. Now I know that there is a God who loves me and who died for my sins, and that his name is Jesus Christ. I also now understand that playing Dungeons & Dragons too much will lead to you being initiated into a witches' coven and taught how to cast real spells; that Roman Catholicism is a Satanic cult and keeps its followers in line with demonic Egyptian death cookies; and that Jesus is the one who holds the protons together in atomic nuclei. (I always knew those godless physicists were just making it up when they talked about so-called "gluons"!)

Thanks to you, I'm ready to accept Jesus Christ's free gift of salvation and be washed clean by his precious blood. However, I can't do that just yet. There's one other thing I have to do first, but I'm having a problem. I thought I'd write to you in the hopes that you'd offer me some advice. Please allow me to explain.

One of your tracts which made the greatest impression on me was the one titled "The Contract". In this tract, an impoverished farmer makes a deal with the Devil to sell his soul in exchange for the money he needs to keep his farm. He receives the money, as promised, and uses it to do just that. Years later, he has a last-minute conversion to Christianity on his deathbed and goes to Heaven anyway.

I think this is a fantastic idea! Forget all those phony get-rich-quick schemes - here's one that really works. All I have to do is sign a contract with Satan, promising him my eternal soul in exchange for enormous worldly wealth and power, and then repent and turn to Jesus. That way, I can break the contract, get to enjoy eternal bliss when I die, and still get to keep all the cool stuff in the meantime! There's no downside! And I have you to thank for the inspiration. (That guy who told everyone not to "lay up treasures for yourselves upon the earth" was a real sucker! He went about this whole Christian thing all wrong. I guess he just wasn't as good at seeing these opportunities as us.)

Anyway, that's my foolproof plan - but it's hit just one snag. Namely, I can't get the Devil to show up and offer me the contract. I've tried everything I can think of to draw his attention - stamping my foot in public and audibly muttering, "I'd sell my soul for a billion dollars!"; listening to rock-and-roll music; reading demonic books like Harry Potter and The Origin of Species - but so far, I've had no luck.

Mr. Chick, I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this idea. I bet a great Christian evangelist like yourself has already thought of it - heck, you wrote the tract! I'm thinking you must know how to get the Devil's attention, and I bet you've already tricked him into giving you all kinds of free stuff. (Don't worry, I won't horn in your racket. I know the whole international, multimillion-dollar comic strip ministry was your idea. I'll ask him for something else!) Can you give me any tips? Pointers? What am I doing wrong?

If you get this letter, please rush your reply. As you can imagine, time is critical here - if I sign the Devil's contract but then die before accepting Jesus as my personal savior, I'll be eternally damned, and I don't want that. But I also don't want to get saved before getting my hands on all the worldly goods Satan can give me. The way I see it, Satan is God's enemy and I'd be cheating him out of all that stuff, so it has to be okay. I know I can't take it all with me, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it while I'm here, right?

Thanks in advance for your anticipated assistance.

Sincerely,

Adam Lee
http://www.daylightatheism.org

When I say "zombie," I don't mean the shambling, flesh-eating undead of horror films. This thought experiment is about philosophical zombies, which are a different beast altogether. The philosophers' zombie is a hypothetical creature which, to all outward appearances, is indistinguishable from an ordinary human. The difference is that they lack phenomenal consciousness - they lack qualia.

Qualia are the subjective sensory perceptions of our inner mental life. We see colors: the redness of red, the greenness of green. We hear tones, sharp or high-pitched or dull or low. We taste flavors, salty or bitter or sweet. We feel emotions like joy, anger, or sadness. Zombies, by contrast, have none of these experiences. They are not truly conscious of anything, any more than a stone is conscious, but they act exactly as if they were. A zombie can duck a thrown baseball or write a restaurant review. Point a gun at one and it will flinch and act as if it were afraid.

What does such a bizarre idea have to do with atheism? The answer is that some prominent philosophers claim that zombies are a conclusive disproof of any strictly naturalistic theory of how the mind functions. The train of argument usually goes that zombies are not a metaphysically impossible notion; it involves no self-contradiction to imagine their existing. If they are not self-contradictory, then they are possible. If they are possible, then we could hypothetically build one - a sophisticated robot, let's say. Such a being would act with rationality and apparent intelligence, yet lack consciousness. But if it's possible to be an intelligent, rational being without consciousness, the question is, why aren't we zombies? What makes us different from the robot? The answer, they say, is that there must be a supernatural component to the mind, in other words, a soul. This supernatural component is what gives us our consciousness, our qualia, whereas a being lacking that component could never truly be conscious no matter how much mental processing power it might have.

The problem with zombies, as with many philosophical notions, is that they do not truly prove a point but simply play on people's differing intuitions about what is possible. No obvious self-contradiction arises when we imagine a zombie, I grant. It is logically possible for such a thing to exist. But that does not mean that zombies are possible in our world, under the laws of physics that hold sway here. Our ability to imagine them is no disproof of this. We, fallible humans, are not cognizant of all the laws of physics, much less their almost infinitely complex hierarchy of ramifications. An intelligence like Laplace's demon, with perfect knowledge of the universe, might well see some consequence of physical principles which we overlook, and which renders zombies impossible in our world.

Consider a similar example. Just as dualist philosophers claim they can imagine creating a zombie, I claim I can imagine creating a perpetual motion machine. I couldn't tell you exactly how to build it, just as no one can say exactly how to build a zombie, but I can readily imagine some marvelous machine - blinking lights, coils of wire conducting electric arcs, spinning flywheels, a big brass switch - that, once it's powered up, begins producing free energy out of nowhere. No self-contradiction arises when I imagine this. But does that mean we can actually build one? Have I just disproved the laws of thermodynamics without getting out of my armchair?

Obviously not. Though we may think we can imagine a working perpetual motion machine, reality is bound to disappoint. So far, every attempt to build one has ended in utter failure, stymied by some physical principle they failed to take into account. The laws of our universe, it appears, interlock in such a way as to perfectly rule out the possibility of perpetual motion machines. There is no loophole where an inventor, however clever, can slip through. It only seems possible because our imaginations do not take into account the critical details that any practical attempt cannot avoid.

The dualists, I believe, are in the same boat. They may think they can imagine zombies, but that doesn't mean they're actually possible. Indeed, I suspect the opposite is more likely true: any creature complex enough to behave with all the creativity and adaptability of a human being would have to have consciousness and qualia, or something very much like them.

After all, how could a zombie dodge a thrown baseball, unless its eyes (or cameras) conveyed images of nearby objects; unless those images were in some way converted into an internal model of the world; and unless that model contained some data stream or symbol which represented a small, round, rapidly approaching object? How could a zombie write a restaurant review unless its chemical sensors were linked to a sophisticated mapping of what readings correspond to what flavors and the many subtle ways in which various combinations could interact with each other? How could a zombie convincingly simulate fear unless it had a wide-ranging ability to keep track of events in the external world and infer which ones could pose a threat to its continued existence?

It is not at all obvious to me that a being with such a sophisticated repertoire of memory, understanding and perception could fail to be conscious. In fact, I strongly suspect the opposite: any being with this capability would have to be conscious, given the physical laws that hold in our world. Consciousness is not an optional add-on, but an inevitable product of a certain degree of cognitive sophistication. In particular, I believe the ability to explicitly represent one's own self in one's mental catalog of objects, and to introspect one's own internal information processing - which, again, a zombie can do - is a vital building block of true consciousness as humans possess it, if it is not consciousness itself.

The dualists assume that an intelligent being could fail to possess qualia, and therefore conclude that intelligence and consciousness are separable. But this claim is an example of the fallacy of circular argument. If you assert that it's possible to hold everything else about the world constant, but subtract consciousness, then you're not arguing for dualism, you're assuming dualism! The conclusion which you wish to reach is already contained in the starting assumptions you feed into your argument. Whether consciousness is an inevitable outcome of the working-out of physical laws inside intelligent brains, or whether it's an unnecessary epiphenomenal accompaniment, is the very thing at issue. I argue that, contrary to some people's intuition, consciousness and intelligence are in fact not separable. I can't prove it; but neither can the dualists prove that they are.

The only remaining question, which I admit is a vexing one, is: why qualia? Why does consciousness have any subjective character at all? The way in which our minds represent characteristics of the external world as ineffable interior perceptions does seem strange, and not like most other phenomena we encounter. It does indeed seem difficult to imagine that any science, however advanced, could explain precisely how such subjective experiences arise from the collisions of atoms inside the brain.

But our inability to imagine it, at this point in time, is no proof that it's impossible. The existence of life was also once considered to be an impenetrable mystery, inexplicable except by postulating a supernatural "vital force". Yet life has since been shown to have an explanation comprehensible in terms of physical laws. (Overcoming Bias writes about "encapsulating the mystery as a substance" - an apt description of the situation.) I see no reason to believe that qualia will prove to be any different. Though they may seem to be a fundamentally different kind of thing, that's just an artifact of our present ignorance. Most likely, qualia arise from the physical laws of the cosmos no less than any other natural phenomenon. We don't understand precisely how - and maybe the mysterians are right, and we never will - but still, that is no proof that it is impossible.

He called my poem "hopeful," which was an honor to me, but there was one other thing he said which I've been dwelling on - that he was pleased because hopefulness, these days, is a rare virtue. And, I have to say, I understand very well what he meant.

I've been reading more science fiction this past year or two, and one major theme I've noticed is that we have so many dystopias. I've lost count of how many fictions I've read where things fail, where everything goes disastrously wrong, where humanity shatters itself or dwindles away. Why, I wonder, are we so obsessed with our own destruction? Why is it that we seem to delight in imagining the most horrendous fates possible? Writing like this can serve as a warning, I know. But shouldn't we also want something to inspire us, to give us hope? Shouldn't we want to set a goal we can aspire to?

Part of it may be a contingent fact, a sign of the times. Every time there is war, disaster, uncertainty, people feel more pessimistic about the future, and a spasm of despair passes through humanity's literary output. And so far, the first decade of the twenty-first century has given the world a great deal to be anxious about - the resurgent threat of terrorism, the growing danger of global climate change, rising energy prices and food instability, and increased tension in many historic trouble spots. Perhaps the pessimism of our creations is just a symbol of what's on everyone's mind?

But if that's the explanation, we have to face the fact that the world has always been a troubled place. There was never a time in human history when the globe was universally peaceful and life was everywhere good. On the contrary, there have always been wars, famines and disasters; there has always been corruption, greed and poverty; and people have always been lazy, ignorant, corruptible, selfish and credulous. In fact, one might argue that war and violence has taken a greater toll on humanity in every era, culminating in the world wars of the twentieth century, the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts humanity has yet witnessed. Is this a trend which we can expect to continue? As the twenty-first century proceeds, we've seen the rise of several new nuclear powers, the spread of virulent religious fascism, a swelling human population testing the limits of what the planet can sustain, and the natural resources upon which we all depend growing increasingly stretched and thin. It's entirely possible that this century may witness truly apocalyptic wars, with the most awful loss of life ever. And it's not inconceivable that, if such wars happen, even the survivors may be left so bloodied and fragmented as to herald the beginning of a long, slow fall back into darkness - the dystopia of our grimmest fantasies, this time enacted in reality.

Even beside these nightmare scenarios, the more mundane, chronic problems of our planet can still seem overwhelming. Every day, millions of people around the world languish in poverty, feel the bite of hunger, and suffer from entirely curable epidemics. Millions more live in fear under totalitarian governments or in war-torn failed states. Even where life is relatively peaceful, sometimes it seems as if the masses are content to live in stupor, willing to march to war at the command of jingoistic politicians or trade precious, hard-won liberties in exchange for pop-culture anesthesia. Granted, there are brave souls who labor their lives to improve the situation; but against the pervasive backdrop of human misery, and the widespread apathy and self-interest that permits it to continue, their efforts sometimes seem futile. The problems that face us have their own inertia, and some days it seems towering, far too massive to shift. Are there really enough people who care to make a difference?

Then again, perhaps I judge humanity too harshly. I have to admit that I understand why so many people don't choose the course of activism. When you see a problem in the world, or something that disturbs your conscience, you have three options. You can take action to make it better, but that requires time and effort. If you believe it can be fixed but don't take action to do so, this causes uncomfortable moral dissonance. By far the easiest course of action is to persuade yourself that it's a bad situation, but there's really nothing that can be done, or that it doesn't involve you. The course of apathy is soothing and keeps people's consciences intact in the face of evils they can do nothing about. Once again, it's a Prisoner's Dilemma: the more who opt out of action, the greater the pressure becomes on everyone else to do the same.

I am an optimist by nature and temperament, but even I keep being pulled back by the realities of our world. There are days when the effort of caring seems futile, pointless, and the temptation to write it all off and let humanity build its own pyre is strong. I haven't yielded to it so far, but how can I justify being hopeful? Is there any justification for an informed optimism that confronts the daily reality of suffering and is not bowed under?

I believe that there is. Optimism can be and often is caricatured as a starry-eyed, head-in-the-clouds naivete about "the way things really are", as opposed to unflinching, clear-thinking cynicism. But I much prefer a tough, informed optimism, one that takes in all that is wrong with the world and accepts things as they are, yet does not proclaim that losing hope is the appropriate response.

Pessimism is too easy. In a way, it's cowardly. As I said, the pessimist's choice can be a soothing one, a position which reassures its holder that apathy and inactivity are morally acceptable. After all, if you believe that failure is inevitable, it relieves you of the responsibility to have to do anything. To be frank, it's easy to believe the worst of everyone and everything. Even a foolish optimist risks disappointment; the hardcore pessimist never does.

In that sense, pessimism is a self-fulfilling guarantee of failure. True pessimists believe that failure in a worthy endeavor is impossible, so they don't participate; and if that endeavor should fail because of their lack of participation, that becomes a self-justifying excuse not to participate in the future. By contrast, even an optimist will fail on occasion, but optimism, unlike pessimism, does not cause its own downfall.

The usual solution to a Prisoner's Dilemma is regulation by a higher authority, but there is none in this case. We can't force people to be dedicated to worthy causes or to care about the welfare of others. The only other solution is for individuals to freely step up and answer the call of need, and trust that their actions can inspire others to do the same. That's the goal I try to strive for. My optimism is not the sort that says success is inevitable, but merely that it's possible - and that this possibility is reason enough to try.

I don't deny the badness in humanity, but we possess many good and noble qualities as well. The naive optimists and the embittered cynics, both of whom deny one of these aspects completely in favor of the other, are both equally in error. The exact balance between our light and dark sides is a matter of dispute, but I'm inclined to say that the goodness of humanity must outweigh the evil. We couldn't have come as far as we have, built as much as we have, if that were not the case. We would never have risen above a state of anarchy. The goodness of people consists in many small, quiet acts, often overlooked against the backdrop of thunderous strokes of evil - but they are there, nonetheless.

And if you look at human history, we do see a trend of increasing moral knowledge and progress. It's not a steady climb, rather a zigzag rise with many backward steps and local reversions, but it is there. Our wisdom still lags our technological prowess, but that is growing as well. It's by no means guaranteed that the one will overtake the other in time. But neither is it guaranteed that this will not happen. The future is open, and we can write the outcome through our efforts. That knowledge - the knowledge that the story is not yet over, that we have the power to control our own destiny, and that we can still choose a good one - is what informs my optimism, and what gives me the continued motivation for hope.

Pared down to its essence, the moral question posed by abortion is a simple one: is an unborn fetus a human being, with all the moral rights and protections that pertain thereunto; or is it a non-human, an assemblage of cells, the existence of which may be terminated without wrongdoing?

The answer to this question, of course, depends critically on how you define a human being. Is a fetus a human being if it has a face, or arms and legs, or a beating heart? None of these criteria seem to me to be definitive. Being a human is far more than a matter of superficial physical appearance - we do not grant humanity to department-store mannequins, after all. Nor is humanity the mere arrangement of internal organs. If a person's heart or lungs are failing and they need to be kept alive by machinery, does that deprive them of their moral personhood? Obviously not.

What if we were to define a human being as a living organism which possesses a certain, characteristic set of genes? This definition seems somewhat closer, but again, I think it misses the mark. If humanity consists of being a living organism which possesses human DNA, then we would also have to grant personhood rights to HeLa cell colonies, or to fetuses with anencephaly (warning: disturbing image). More to the point, if a living thing with human DNA is human, then every single one of our cells should be considered to be a human in its own right, and the millions of them that are naturally sloughed off our bodies each day would constitute a holocaust of unthinkable proportions. Obviously, this is absurd.

I submit that there is one and only one defining characteristic of a person, one thing which sets us apart and gives us our unique moral worth. That thing is consciousness - the facility for self-aware thought. That is what most clearly differentiates us from all other species on this planet, and it is also what gives us the uniqueness and individuality that is rightly viewed as a key component of moral worth.

Taking consciousness to be the defining characteristic of humanity gives us a clear dividing line to use in deciding whether abortion is immoral. Ending the existence of something which does not possess the ability for conscious thought - whatever else it may be - is not the destruction of a human being. Ending the existence of something which does possess that ability is the destruction of a person. This is a solid, rational standard. It's a good sign that this position also neatly mirrors the common position on end-of-life care and euthanasia: once a human being has suffered brain death, or any other injury that results in the irreversible cessation of consciousness, they no longer possess moral personhood and we are under no obligation to ensure their physical continuance.

So, when does consciousness begin? This is a question which has an empirical answer. As Carl Sagan wrote on the topic:

Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy—near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this—however alive and active they may be—lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

This boundary line - which is the same boundary line the U.S. Supreme Court drew in Roe v. Wade, although for different reasons - is a feasible and defensible standard. It safeguards the autonomy of the woman, and her moral right to exercise control over her own body and not be forcibly subjected to the risks and burdens of pregnancy, without compromising the important principle that every human life should be protected. If a woman wishes to obtain an abortion, it seems to me that half a year is more than adequate time for her to become aware of her pregnancy, make the decision to abort, and obtain access to medical services.

As Sagan points out, six months is actually a conservative boundary, since regular brain waves are often absent in fetuses. Also, it's conceivable that a fetus could possess them and still lack the ability for conscious thought. Nevertheless, it's still a good standard and not one we should seek to push. When we know, based on our physiological understanding of how the brain functions, that consciousness cannot exist, then no person is present and we are under no corresponding ethical obligation. However, if there's a rational possibility that consciousness may exist, then we should err on the side of caution and defend that life, just as it would be immoral to shoot into a closed box without knowing if there's a person inside. Of course, if continued pregnancy would pose a threat to the life or health of the mother, then terminating the pregnancy is an unambiguous matter of self-defense.

Until the capability for conscious thought exists, a fetus cannot have the same moral status as a person. Doubtless, the fetus is a potential person. But potentiality is not the same as actuality, and a person who only potentially exists cannot claim moral rights which match or supercede the rights of an actual, living, conscious person. (The language is imprecise here; in truth, a person who only potentially exists does not exist, and a non-existent person cannot claim anything. There is no one to make the claim.) Therefore, no harm is done when a woman aborts a pregnancy before this point. There is no person for harm to be done to.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...