This paper was first published in Bulletin Ind. Institute of the History of Medicine 33, no. 2 (2003) and is published here with permission.

Abstract: We augment A. Singh’s Regulation of Human Sexual Behavior, Sex Revolution and Emergence of AIDS: A Historical Perspective (Singh 1997 pp. 63-74) by clarifying why medicine is ignored despite unprecedented pathogenic norms of Western society. While these societal norms are well correlated to etiological findings on divorce and extramarital sex, the norms cannot be rooted properly in our psycho- biological nature without committing a ‘naturalistic fallacy’.

Accepted axiomatically in the West, the fallacy specifies that what ought to be the case is not inferable from what is the case about our nature. Thus although natural norms implicit in medicine were implied historically by a natural theology shared by major religions, the latter are wrongly deemed unscientific and irrelevant by secular politics. Lying furtively behind political policies that induce psychosocial disorders and preventable disease, the fallacy’s exclusion is as relevant as medicine to averting disease.

A medical dilemma is that etiological descriptions, that specify causes of disease, tend to be issued with an assumption that it is unprofessional to prescribe value judgments. These bear on a public whose welfare physicians are uniquely poised to protect. Oddly, the neglected protection is rooted in the notion that descriptions of our physiological nature do not, due to a Naturalistic Fallacy,[1] permit inferences to prescriptions that fulfill our nature. This Fallacy does not hold if a cosmological proof of Nature’s God, as a First Cause, establishes that our nature is as it ought to be.[2] But the Cause is denied since it depends on a causal principle whose truth is not known. Why the knowledge was denied historically can be skipped, by those uninterested in technicalities, by viewing a schema below that summarizes details and deals more substantively with an ethics that is inferable from medicine in virtue of a true causal principle.

The principle implies a First Cause that was accepted historically by Islam and traditional religion in the West. And the West may not have fully understood Aristotle, who influenced Thomas Aquinas, for whom ‘intellect’ brings to mind India’s Upanishads: not just logical thinking but grasping truth immediately (buddhi) (Londhe 2004). The immediacy bears on the causal principle presupposed by science. Currently in the West, if science yields knowledge, it is undercut by the allegation that the principle is not known to be true. But its truth is patently clear by a revitalized ancient reasoning in which natural theology is related logically to science.

Accordingly, a Naturalistic Fallacy is avoided that ignores common sense about a moral import of medicine and its allied sciences.

A query into how science had been wedded logically to ethics, prior to modern secular philosophy, may start with Aquinas. His use of modalities, with modal terms such as ‘necessary’ and ‘impossible’, reveals a use of modal logic. Having been developed by Aristotle, the logic is only now being fully appreciated.[3] Essentially, it is more subtle than modern logic in terms of the latter’s restriction to a material conditional ‘If p, then q’, where it is logically possible that a proposition q is false when that of p is true.[4] For example, consider the sentence ‘If extramarital sex is condoned by society, then there will be an epidemic of various diseases’. While one can speak of statistics, health officials face a host of pedantic assumptions. These include that public policy on sexual behavior is a concern of society, not of medicine,[5] and a logical possibility that the diseases will not occur. But their non-occurrence can be understood modally as a virtual physical impossibility due to our psychobiological nature and natural behavior, from which one can infer also that the diseases are an evil which should be averted politically.

Having dealt with politics in the schema, let us clarify possibilities that are physical. A physical impossibility that q is false when p is true can, in modal logic, be recast as ‘It is necessarily the case that if p, then q’ – or ‘Necessarily if p, then q’.[6] Both modal and modern logic in the West would hold that it is not necessary, for example, for a person’s conception to be caused by the union of a man and woman since it is physically, and thus logically, possible that a person was conceived, say, in vitro. But modal logic alone captures the physical impossibility that a person was conceived when there were no prior biological processes.

The processes can be construed as causes for the formulation: Necessarily if there are no causes, then persons are not conceived. Conceptions, as all other phenomena or events, presuppose causes. In this way the causes bear on both theology and science. Science begins with an experienced impossibility of there being an event when there is no cause. Reflecting a causal principle, this impossibility can be recast as the physical necessity: ‘Necessarily if there is no cause, there is no event’. There being no event follows validly and immediately, but without logical triviality, from there being no cause. But causes and events cannot proceed ad infinitum into the past since the series could have caused itself or come from nothing. In this case, the series (cosmos) would not be subject to inquiries of science and would be scientifically unlike all the phenomena that compose it. Thus with no fallacy of composition any more than inferring that something has mass when mass is a property of things that compose it, the series is a totality that begs for an uncaused First Cause:[7] That is, our being unable to experience the series when there is not this Cause results in a sound argument:

Necessarily if there is no First Cause, there is no series a part of which we experience. We experience the series. So, there is the Cause understood as God.[8]

The first premise ‘Necessarily if.’ is a modal conditional to which a stronger truth is ascribed than that of a material conditional. The latter admits of a logical and physical possibility that there is either the series or an event when there is no cause. Thus if the premise is expressed merely as ‘If.’, it would have a denial that is physically possible. But while the modal conditional permits the logical possibility, it specifies a physical impossibility – given a fundamental nature of phenomena admitted of, for example, by the laws of thermodynamics.[9] And more basic than thermodynamics, because its laws presuppose certain causes of phenomena, is a principle that a phenomenon of the causal series itself cannot exist when there is no cause. And given that this cause must be an uncaused First Cause, there is this Cause as Nature’s God that is both implied by a causal principle and presupposed by scientific inquiry.

The point is that scientific inquiry is related logically to a natural theology common to major religious traditions. Nature’s God is inferred from experience and is not merely a matter of faith. Apart from faith, health- inducing prescriptions undergird politics since its end is to institutionalize our psychobiological fulfillment. This fulfillment includes obtaining medical truth about our nature for nurturing healthful fulfilling lifestyles. An inference to the lifestyles from medicine, bearing on some of its most perennial but provocative studies such as marriage, is illustrated by the following schema that roots the inference in a relationship of theology to medicine.

A Historical Understanding of Medicine *

1. Medical practice presupposes a causal principle wherein it is physically impossible that a phenomenon has no cause: To say there is no cause of a disease is to exclude its treatment and to be more seriously mistaken than a factual error about a given cause. Thus to accept a causal account as factually true is to accept a truth of the principle that also implies a cause of any phenomenon, including Nature. A cause of Nature qua Nature’s God must be a First Cause since if it was caused and that cause was caused ad infinitum, Nature could have caused itself or come from nothing – an understanding that renders incoherent inquiries of medicine and any other science.

* Lengthy reference to medical findings are in footnotes to maintain a continuity of this schema.

Reasoning to the Normative Nature of Medicine

2. Given that science is related logically to a God of Nature, there is no Naturalistic Fallacy of inferring norms about how we ought to behave from our psychobiological nature. Since our nature is created as it ought to be, medical descriptions afford inferences to how it ought to be fulfilled. And thus its fulfillment by morally relevant medical prescriptions can be as true as the descriptions that inform them. Certifiably, there are vices that impede health and virtues that fulfill our nature.

3. In regard to our nature’s fulfillment, norms derived from psychology are rooted in biology. Biologically, organic functions of our bodies induce a conscious will to live that is psychologically natural in contrast to suicide that, all things equal, is unnatural. But the degree to which our nature is ignored by modern ethics may be revealed by how much our ethical sensibilities are provoked by other scientific findings. The findings back up a case for traditional families made by the architects of a naturalistic ethics. Whereas Aristotle held that families are established by nature for a natural affection of men and women as well as between generations for the stability of rearing children (Politics 1252), Thomas adds that society is perfected by matrimony since it nurtures not only self-sacrifice but sacrificial Love (Summa III 65, ed. Kreeft 1990). While they lived prior to modern science, it increasingly supports their ethics. But while the ethics applies to biological differences of men and women that make a difference in societal aspirations that ought to be encouraged, such as reasons for marriage, a discouragement that ignores the differences is now entrenched. The entrenched disregard of gender differences stems from radical feminist theories of truth, rather than objectively from science, in which truth about ‘gender’ is relative to different cultures and is a mere cultural construct.[10] These constructionist theories, emboldened by an ethics divorced from our nature due to a naturalistic fallacy, will disregard biological facts.

3a. The steroidal hormone C19H28O2 produced in the male’s testes bears biologically on a Physical Possibility Principle whereby it is immoral to demand that men ought to do what is contrary to their nature. Despite controversy over ‘nature vs. nurture’ – over whether morphometric analysis shows that homosexual behavior has genetic causes or that it causes structural changes in the brain, it would be as physically impossible for most men to not seek heterosexual unions as for them to be no more aggressive than women. Hormonal effects do not erase a man’s responsibility for his behavior. But the effects reveal that society is equally culpable for nurturing stable behavioral outlets such as marriage and workplace meritocracies to fulfill the male’s sexually active and competitive nature.[11] This natural fulfillment is as socially desirable for women as for men. In addition to marriage reducing ‘the risk of mental disorders for both men and women’ (De Vaus 2002), for example, both women and children are largely victims of the male’s DSM-IV Disorders. These disorders include pedophilic exploitations of children, are diagnosed more than twice as often in men (Blackshaw 2002 pp. 1-3) and are related to single-parent families in which male children have a fifty percent increase in risk of various psychosocial impairments (Jellinek et al 1999 p. 1). And the impairments and disorders do not include violent crimes such as rape that, while often interpreted ideologically as a mere exercise of male power or domination, cannot be disassociated from either biological urges of men or unmarried mothers who are three times more likely to be assaulted than mothers who are married (Fagin, Johnson 2002 p.1). Moreover, a sexual unresponsiveness of married women can be induced by political ideologies that undermine marriage as well as by biological dysfunctions (ed. Gyelvan 2001).[12] And thus in addition to the dysfunctions, political ideology can be a contributing cause of both extramarital sex and sexually transmitted diseases that infect not only wives but also unborn children.[13]

3b) Children and parents comprise a mutualistic symbiosis that, while not separated phylogenetically, is downplayed politically in the case of women.[14] A child-bearing age of women conflicts with political agendas that promote their careers, on the model of a traditional male norm, at a time prima facie when marriage is biologically preferable.[15] Bearing multiple children at an early age, breast-feeding, and remaining faithful in marriage strongly reduce a risk of breast and cervical cancers.[16] And women having children after their mid-thirties to establish careers, though careers do not exclude early marriage, is related to birth defects and to difficulties of conception (Waite, Gallagher 2000 pp. 56, 57).[17] Thus early conceptions in marriages, without divorces, which depress the immune functions of women as well as men, would be supported by this scientific ethics.[18] These points do not mean that women should avoid professional careers but that a societal dynamics should make their careers compatible with psychobiological realities. For example, rather than an indiscriminate encouragement of women to ‘break glass ceilings’, virtues of motherhood ought to be acknowledged publically as well as rendered consistent with transitions from a post-rearment of children to the workplace. Indeed, gender expectations in the workplace should be based on scientific analysis, and not on political ideals, to discover why more men than women choose to enter scientific professions (Murray 2001 p. 2).[19] Also, professional organizations, from medicine to psychology, should influence public and corporate policies to be attentive to families. Familial needs ought to be instituted in codes of ethics in deference to a classical dictum that as the family goes, so goes the state. What is good for ‘General Motors’ is not necessarily good for the country. That which is good for both is a productivity of citizens that depends on their health and happiness. These points illustrate the political as well as ethical significance of scientific findings that, while seemingly a matter of common sense, cannot be tenably articulated apart from a normative nature of scientific descriptions. The latter is rendered coherent by a God of Nature and has been impeded by a Naturalistic Fallacy.

4. This Fallacy has excluded attention to an ethical import of scientific findings. But our reasoning indicates that the findings of biology, medicine, and psychology should be exploited by philosophy as well as by the social and political sciences to determine what policies ought to be nurtured by society and how, theoretically, they may be implemented politically. In terms of the foregoing scientific information, it would follow in most societies that there ought to be a dependent allowance for children, marital tax penalties should be eliminated, and child-care benefits should be structured so that families are not punished economically. These are:

a few examples of how federal tax policy can support or undermine marriage… One way to ensure that more of our children are born inside marriage is to stop the tax raid on family income. (Waite, Gallagher 2000 p. 194)

5. Bearing on income taxes, practical politics should institutionalize virtuous laws and traditions. These exclude a cost ineffective securitate of police states to enforce un-natural behavior. Though this behavior is normally abandoned in open societies, the West has adopted a political correctness enforced by legal activism, peer pressure, and disruptive demonstrations for molding our psychobiological nature. Whereas our nature is viewed therein as a mere social construct, morally relevant ideas about our behavior should be based scientifically on our nature.[20] This point is another matter of common sense even apart from theology. But the theologico-scientific articulation of our nature, in terms of a First Cause, explicitly fosters a renewed appreciation of natural norms. While corrigible, the norms are needed so citizens can get on with healthy, happy, and productive lives and not be disconcerted by politicized ‘gender identities’. For example, in an interview of social science professors in ‘New on Campus: Men’s Studies Programs’ an identity crisis is noted (Dobbin 1997 p.1). Men do not want to be traditional since ‘We’re up for murder, rape, drug abuse, violence, aggression. Obviously, we don’t know who we are since we’re having all these problems.’ But the problems are not avoided by less sexist roles, either, of ‘trying to raise a family, trying to get the job done, often with much fear and uncertainty.’ What ‘men’ means in such studies follows in the wake of a radical feminism, deconstructionism, and multiculturalism that originated in modern philosophy’s post-structuralism. The latter is rooted, in turn, in the notion of a structure of mind held by the eighteenth-century philosopher Kant:[21]

He influenced the notion that our mind has a structure which ‘interprets’ reality a prior so that facts, about how reality really is, play no role in what is objectively true. And although there ensued skepticism in modern Western culture and public policy, policy makers overlooked – with tragic consequences – that his notion was both metaphysical and not informed by medicine, biology, or psychology. Nonetheless, a priori interpretations of reality common to the human race were replaced surreptitiously by interpretations relative to different races, genders, and cultures (multiculturalism). There ensued a multicultural relativism for a politically ‘progressive’ health and happiness, but in which ‘truth’ was a mere cultural construct and the traditional contructs of medicine and science must be deconstructed. The effects of a deconstructionism in academia on the medical community are evident by that community’s reluctance to forthrightly seek to inform the public and influence public policy in regard to information that is empirically true but ‘incorrect’, politically. And the political correctness has found a metaphysical apologetics in a Naturalistic Fallacy that, like a socio-pathological accident waiting to happen, excludes reasoning from our real psychobiological nature to what fulfills it.

Reclaiming a Moral Significance of Medicine

A cosmological proof bears dramatically on medicine and its allied sciences. It renders irrelevant a Naturalistic Fallacy that, influencing general culture, excluded the applicability of medical findings to ethics. Finally, the proof permits inferences upward from ethics to politics. We are reminded that the essential mission of politics is to institutionalize ethics—an ethics that is certifiably true in virtue of truth in science. Indeed, an inability to even speak of scientific ‘truth’ from which truth in politics is inferable, led to a politicized relativism for ideological agenda. This agenda perverts politics by reasoning, in the reverse downward direction, to a politically correct ethics and science. In terms of science it is patently clear that diseases and psychosocial impairments have ensued which should alarm any medical community that professes the Hippocratic vision.

The vision of Hippocrates has been blurred by the political agenda. In addition to an aftermath of disease, a wake of social pathologies pursuant to the agenda can be assessed. Since the 1960s in America, which has been the international gold standard, the divorce rate exploded by over 200 per cent,[22] teen suicide by 300 per cent, out-of-wedlock births by 500 per cent, violent crime by 500 per cent, and SAT scores plunged dramatically from 975 to 897.[23] Given that these statistics stem notably from ideological influences on Western society, it is clear that this society has not been served well by ideologies with roots in its modern secular philosophy. The heart of the problem is that this philosophy has led to skepticism because it has not tenably articulated ‘truth’ – let alone truths of medicine that imply a true ethics. But ethics is a field, of vital interest internationally, relevant to a common nature of the human race to which physicians can uniquely contribute. While a natural theology shared surreptitiously and traditionally by major religions may seem arcane to physicians and makes no immediate reference to medicine, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by at least reconsidering how the theology may reclaim a normative import of the medical profession.

Footnotes

1. Arising from the empiricism of David Hume, the naturalistic fallacy specifies inter alia that what ought to be the case is not inferable from what is the case about human nature if there is not Nature’s God.

2. ‘Astonishingly’, notes Anthony Kenny, proofs of God are ‘redeployed to effect on the contemporary battlefield of philosophical theology’. Having viewed theology as a metaphysical jumble, philosophers in the tradition of Hume and Kant mistook medieval modalities for metaphysical sentences. Some sentences, such as those bearing on God as a first cause and the causal principle, may have an unusually strong sense of truth. (Kenny 2000 p. 368)

3. Aristotle’s writings were revered more in the Middle East, if not the East itself, than in the West until their impact on Aquinas. His modalities, that can be true, were confused with a truthless meta- physics. Yale Professor Ruth Barcan Marcus, after whom modal logic’s Barcan Formula is named, states: ‘No metaphysical mysteries’. (Marcus 1993 pp. 67, 68)

4. While symbolism is avoided in the text, a material conditonal ‘If p then q’ can be expressed p -> q, where -> reads ‘If…then’ and it is logically possible that q is in fact false (~q) when p (p is true).

5. Society should determine the ‘ethical consequences of scientific endeavors’, states Alfred Levinson, as if medicine does not imply norms of desirable behavior regardless of what society determines. Indeed, a reliance on its determination invites a relativism in which behavioral norms are relative to different societies at the same time or the same society at different times. Interestingly, he infers society’s sole authority after relegating belief in a First Cause to an ‘untestable metaphysics’. (Levinson 2003 p. 170)

6. ‘Necessarily if p, then q’ can be expressed as N(p -> q) or o(p -> q) where o(p -> q) =df (p => q). This symbolism means that while it is logically possible that ~q when p, it is physically impossible.

7. In not being revealed to have made the world ‘good’, one may object that a First Cause qua God of Nature did not create Nature as it ought to be. Thus descriptions of our nature bear only on what is the case and there is a naturalistic fallacy. But besides identifications of this God and the revealed one of Scripture (e.g. Genesis and Job), persons engage in corrigible creations of desirable artifacts. And if this dependent creativity is natural and begs for Nature’s God, then God’s creativity and creations must be analogous – if not incorrigibly incorrupt – on pain of the unscientific assumption that we caused our own nature.

8. This summarizes Thomas’ Second Way Proof: Necessarily if there is no First Cause (rvF), there is no series a part of which is experienced (rvS); It is experienced (S); Therefore, there is a First Cause (F). The latter yields the modus tollens sequence rvF => rvS, S F, where reads ‘therefore’. For a more rigorous elaboration of its soundness and a reply to skeptics, see Robert Trundle’s ‘A First Cause and the Causal Principle’ (Trundle 2003 pp. 107-135). For Thomas’ proof per se, see his Summa Theologica, I, 2, 3, in A Summa of the Summa, (ed. Kreeft 1990 pp. 66, 67).

9. For example, the law ‘It is not possible to change heat completely into work.’ refers to a physical, not logical, impossibility. Otherwise, this second law of thermodynamics would be trivially true. (Halliday, Resnick 1988 p. 510).

10. Cf. Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Education & Indoctrination in Women’s Studies (Patai, Koertge 2003 p. 138) Dr. Patai is Professor of Literature at the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Koertge is Professor Emerita of the History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University as well as Chief Editor of Philosophy of Science, the official journal for the Philosophy of Science Association. Both women were professors of Women’s Studies for decades.

11. Michael Vossmeyer, M.D., adds a possible caveat without disputing male physiology: Fulfilling our biological nature might be viewed more universally as protecting, preserving and propagating a gene pool wherein stable sexual relationships are needed that (a) promote genetic diversity, (b) minimize inbreeding, and (c) provide a stable environment for offspring. In a culture with an approximately equal number of males and females, marriage may fulfill these criteria. But there could be more of one gender in terms of which monogamous relations might decrease the genetic variation of the gene pool and sustenance of the population. One fact that bears on this caveat is that the imbalances have been typically caused, not by Nature, but, by political or cultural decisions such as war and abortion. In India, for example, female fetuses are systematically aborted going into the twenty-first century. See D. Rohde’s “India Attempting to Halt Aborting of Female Fetuses: Cultural Preference [is] Behind Decline in Number of Girls,” The New York Times (26 Oct. 2003) via the Cin. Enq., p. A17. See also Mudur’s article: ‘The Indian Medical Association and the Medical Council of India have asked doctors to stop providing sex determination services and participating in selective abortion of female fetuses’ (Mudur 1999).

12. Ideological attacks on marriage found paradigm expression in feminist Jessie Bernard’s The Future of Marriage (1972), which fueled the false belief that it psychologically oppressed women, and in films such as The Stepford Wives (1975). This film invited a feminist rebellion of women against their conditioned robotic roles as sexually submissive self-sacrificing wives. Besides the fact that this view is seen as patronizing by many women, it brings to mind Aristotle’s notion that wives are by nature – though not necessarily by nurture – respectful of sexual differences from their husbands. The feminist ideology was poignantly at odds, for example, with the well educated and gregarious Ethel Kennedy for whom “ministering to her husband [Robert Kennedy] was not self-sacrifice or self-betrayal but self-fulfillment. It did not result in any manifest repression of an irrepressible personality.” These counterpoints may seem quaint. But the point is that theories of psychology, much more ideology, beg for the test of lived experience. (See also Schlesinger 1996 pp. 96, 97).

13. The CDC National Prevention Information Network (3 October 2002), bears on Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs): *In the U.S. alone, 15.3 million new cases of STDs are reported each year; *more than 65 million people are currently living with an incurable STD; *two-thirds of STDs occur in people 25 years of age or younger; and *one in five Americans has genital herpes, yet at least 80 percent of those are unaware they have it.” The most reliable way to avoid STDs is by a “monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner.” STDs add billions of dollars to healthcare costs, but most people know only of “the most prominent STD… HIV.”

14. Cf. the paper of Gregory Dimijian, MD in ‘Evolving where a neglect of separated phylogenetic symbioses would suggest an even greater need for research into ones unseparated and more culturally visible (Dimijian 2000 pp. 217-226).

15. What is preferable biologically may be politicized by medical journals themselves. See the criticisms of Michael Glueck, M.D., and Robert Cihak, M.D., who note that these journals face ‘the dreadful problem of conflating objective science with political advocacy.’ In particular, ‘peer review’ is suborned to non-scientific agendas in terms of Political Correctness. ‘We’ve been writing for years that peer review as practiced by the editors of the NEJM [New England Journal of Medicine] often includes an ideological review to be certain that the manuscript agrees with its worldview or agenda.’ And although public news media have similar policies, ‘they don’t do science.’ They add that ‘Politicized peer review is as wrong here and now as it was in Russia when Stalinist lackeys trashed Soviet genetics in favor of Lysenko’s Good-Marxist notion that acquired traits can be inherited. More wrong. Lysenkoism failed as junk science. Nor is medical PC any new thing. For decades, elite medical journals have published articles perceived as favorable to one side in public issues….’ (Glueck, Cihak 2003 pp. 1, 2).

16. Risk of breast cancer drops 7% per child and 4% more for each year of breastfeeding, explaining its low incidence in countries where the average woman has multiple breastfed children. (Collaborative Group 2002 p. 187, Hankinson 2002 p. 95) Dr. Hankinson admits of well established connections of marital postponements to breast cancer despite her sympathy with unmarried working women. And Dr. Patricia Novak notes that central causes of cervical cancer are ‘many sexual partners’ and the ‘genital herpes virus’ which are linked mainly to extramarital relationships (Novak 2002 p. 328).

17. Marital post-ponements are now a subject of alarm in the news media. In Claudia Kalb’s interview of medical doctors, Nancy Weil states: ‘ “I thought, Hey, I can do my career and have children later”… At 42, Weil met her soulmate and decided it was time. For two years, they’ve been trying, first naturally, now with fertility drugs. A year ago she conceived, then miscarried. Last month alone, she spent $3,300 on injections. “If you ever told me I’d be having this kind of difficulty, I would have laughed in your face… I exercise, I eat well, I keep better work hours, but I’m really not in control of what’s happening with my little eggs. It’s devastating. It’s a terrible sense of failure”.’ (Kalb 2001 p.40)

18. The case for early conceptions in marriage is augmented by a reasonable supposition that marital postponements will proceed pari passu with increases in abortion, out-of-wedlock birth, and sexual diseases already of epidemic proportion. And in reply to a no-fault divorce prescribed by feminists, social scientists Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher note scientific facts that counter that prescription: A goodness of “marriage is visible even on the biological level,” and Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues found that marriage “improves immune function” and divorce “depressed it, even years after the divorce occurred.” Finally, their research shows that cases made for extending domestic benefits to cohabitating couples “are based on a myth.” The benefits send a message to young persons that ‘social scientists now know to be dangerously false… On average, cohabiting couples are less sexually faithful, lead less settled lives, are less likely to have children, are more likely to be violent, make less money, and are less happy – and less committed – than married couples.’ (Waite, Gallagher 2000 pp. 56, 57, 668-678).

19. Dr. Murray, an official with the AWM, is critical of claims about why more women are not entering scientific professions when, despite more women than men graduating from college, even the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) relies ‘on anecdotal evidence and hearsay’ and offers ‘few, if any, references to specific research findings… a startling omission, given the historical commitment of NAS to rigorous scientific research [emphasis added].’ (Murray 2001 p. 2)

20. In ignoring our nature as understood medically, modern ethics in the West prescribes either rational principles (deontology) or rules that yield desirable consequences (consequentialism). But conesquences of what are in fact desired beg the question of what is morally desirable and reasons of deontology are deniable with no self-contradiction. Neither ethics affords certifiably true claims and the claims are made apart from our psychobiological nature to avoid a naturalistic fallacy.

21. (Trundle 2002 pp. 93, 94) Neo-Kantian ‘interpretations’ were expressed in the Weltanschaaung (worldview) Analyses of “physicists Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. [who] provided an irrational apologetics for radical feminism, e.g. a gender one. infused with a Nietzschean-Marxist relativism. In Kathryn Parsons’ pioneering ‘Nietzsche and Moral Change’ (Parsons 1980), for example, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Engles’ Marxism are enlisted to support a worldview of ‘women for the women’s liberation movement.’ This movement denied male dominated medical ‘interpretations’ of women by ignoring biology (biodenial). Philosopher Larry Lauden states: ‘if the radical feminists, counterculturalists, and others were to acknowledge. their theoretical convictions,’ they would ‘lose any public following’ since any statement or its denial reflect ‘nothing about the facts.’ (Lauden 1990 p. 163)

22. In addition to divorce allegedly liberating women, is marriage bad because promiscuity is good? Gratitude is expressed to Dr. Terry Pence who noted Sally Lehrman’s “The Virtues of Promiscuity” (alternet.org, July 22, 2002). Her case for promiscuity seems to threaten our ethics because it appeals to research in which sperm evolved to attack other sperm, and this would not occur “if we were [naturally] monogamous.” But to say monogamy is unnatural, since otherwise there would be no reason for sperm to attack other sperm, is as silly as saying there would be no reason for cavities if dental hygiene were natural. Recent medical studies establish that, besides weakening the institution of marriage with an ensuing host of social pathologies, sexual promiscuity has (a) prepared the ground for a return of syphilis as an important cause of neurological and psychiatric syndromes, (b) been correlated strongly to anal cancer in both men and women, and (c) revealed an unprecedented role of culture, influenced by modern western liberalism, in spreading disease. Those who appeal to disingenuous examples of the ‘natural’ miss the point of a naturalistic ethics: To fulfill our psychobiolgical nature by, among other things, marriage, hygiene, and sheer physical survival. Indeed, their own survival is threatened unless they avoid the behavior they avow. But their avowal is now politically institutionalized by those with vested interests in tolerating the pathologies – from lawyers to social workers to child support agents. (Hankovic 2003 pp. 135-8, Frisch 1997 pp.1350 – 1358, Singh 1997 pp. 63-74

23. Violent crime up 16.1 to 75.8 per 10,000 citizens; teen suicide up 3.6 to 11.3 per 10,000 teenagers; SAT scores down 975 to 897; divorce up 9.2 to 20.9 per 10,000 marriages; and out-of- wedlock childbirths up 5.3 to 28 per 10,000 women. See the PBS McLaughlin Group Report, 26 March 1995, Washington 20036.

References

Blackshaw, S, Charney, D, Russell, R, Moscarello, R, Myers, D 2002, ‘Teaching on gender issues.’ Canadian Psychiatric Association Press Release, 24 Sep 2002.

Center for Disease Control (CDC) National Prevention Information Network (NPIN). (3 October 2002). STDs. www.cdcnpin.org/scripts/std/std.asp.

Collaborative Group 2002 ‘Breast cancer & breastfeeding: Collaborative reanalysis of individual data from 47 epidemiological studies in 30 countries, including 50,302 women with breast cancer and 96,973 women without the disease’ The Lancet, vol. 360 (9328).

De Vaus, D 2002, ‘Marriage and mental health’, Family Matters 62, AIFS abstract. Dimijian, GG 2000, ‘Evolving together, the biology of symbiosis’, Baylor University Medical

Center (BUMC) Proceedings vol. 13 (3).

Dobbin, B 1997, ‘New on campus: Men’s studies programs.’ Associated Press, July 20 1997.

Fagin, P, Johnson, K 2002, ‘Marriage: The safest place for women and children’, Policy, Research & Analysis-Heritage Foundation, #1535. Washington DC 20002.

Frisch, M, Glimelius, B, van den Brule, AJ, et al 1997, ‘Sexually transmitted infection as a cause of anal cancer’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 337.

Glueck, MA, Cihak, RJ 2003, ‘Medical journal suffers times syndrome’ NewsMax.com,

August 19 2003.

Gyelvan M (ed.) 2001, Professional guide to diseases, Reed Elsevier plc group, Springhouse, PA.

Halliday, D, Resnick, R 1988, Fundamentals of physics, 3rd Ed., JWS, New York. Hankinson, S, Colditz, A, Manson, J, Speizer, F, & Manson, J 2002, Healthy women,

healthy lives: A Harvard Medical School book, Simon & Schuster, NY.

Hankovic, N, Ivkovic, M, Sokie, D, et al 2003, ‘Dementia Paralytica (neurosyphilis): A clinical case study’, World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, vol. 4 (3).

Jellinek, M, Murphy, M, Little, M. Pagano, M, Comer, D, Kelleher,K 1999, ‘Use of the pediatric symptom checklist to screen for psychosocial problems in pediatric primary care’, Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine vol. 153 (3).

Kalb, C 2001, ‘Should you have your baby now? Interview of medical researchers’,

Newsweek 88, August 13 2001.

Kenny, A (ed.) 2000, The Oxford history of Western Philosophy Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Kreeft, P (ed.) 1990, A summa of the summa, Ignatius Press, San Francisco. Londhe, S 2004, ‘Tribute to Hinduism’, www.atributetohinduism.com/India_and_

Greece.htm

Lauden, L 1990, Science and relativism: Some key controversies in the Philosophy of Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Levinson, A 2003, ‘Philosophical aspects of the controversy surrounding evolutionary theory’, Philosophy in Science X, Stoeger WR (ed.), Astrophysics, Cambridge University. Krakow: Papal Academy of Theology, the Vatican Astronomical Observatory & University of Arizona.

Marcus, RB, 2003, Modalities, Oxford University Press, New York.

Mudur, G 1999, ‘Indian Medical Authorities Act on antenatal sex selection’ British Medical Journal vol. 319 (14), www.bmj.com

Murray, M 2001, ‘Who will do the Science of the future?’ Association for women in Mathematics Newsletter, 12 August 2001.

Novak, P (ed.) 2002, Mosby’s Medical, Nursing, & Allied Health Dictionary, Elsevier Science Publishers, St. Louis, Missouri.

Patai, D, Koertge, N 2003, Professing Feminism: education and indoctrination in Women’s Studies Lexington books, New York.

Parsons K 1990 “Nietzsche and moral change’ in Solomon R (ed.) Nietzsche, Anchor Press, New York.

Schlesinger, A 1996, Robert Kennedy & his times, Ballantine Books, New York.

Singh, A 1997, ‘Regulation of human sexual behavior, sex revolution and emergence of AIDS: A historical perspective’, Bulletin of Indian Institute of the History of Medicine, Osmania Medical College, Hyderabad 27.

Trundle, R 2003, ‘A first cause & Causal Principle’, Philosophy in Science X, Stoeger WR (ed.) Astrophysics, Cambridge University. Krakow: Papal Academy of Theology, the Vatican Astronomical Observatory & University of Arizona.

Trundle, R 2002, From Physics to Politics: The metaphysical foundations of modern Philosophy, 2nd Ed., Transaction Publishers, Rutgers-The State University, New Jersey.

Udupa, KN, Singh, RH 2001, Science & Philosophy of Indian Medicine, Lotuspress, Twin Lakes, WI.

Waite, L, Gallagher, M 2000, The case for marriage: Why married people are happier, healthier, & better off financially, Doubleday, New York.