I am attending a convention of distinguished atheists and agnostics. Some call themselves "secularists" or "sceptics", believing with Lawrence Krauss, one of the headliners here, that the term "atheist" has become uncomfortable to many people in the progressive, science-minded West. I can't sleep. I have not been this frightened since I was 13. Back then, in the middle of the scariest weeks of the Cold War, with no warning of any kind, the air raid siren on top of my junior high school in Edmonton started to wail. 

An air raid siren is very loud. Jet-plane-taking-off loud. In my classroom, we sat and stared at each other. No one seemed to grasp what this might mean. Mr. Chalmers, my teacher, called down to the office on the intercom and asked what was going on. "Mrs. Game," (that was the head secretary), "Is this a drill or what?" Her reply was terse. "We'll let you know. Please wait for instructions. Don't tie up the intercom." We sat and stared, Mr. Chalmers and all of us.

After about ten minutes, the siren just suddenly stopped. We never got any explanation. No one from the school or the surrounding area mentioned the incident again.  

Or let me put this in another metaphor. After the Titanic hit the iceberg, she took a bit over two hours to sink. For the first hour, the men in the boiler rooms were hard at work drawing the ship's fires. That mean's getting out all of the burning coal, dousing it, and then cooling down the boilers. Mr. Andrews had ordered this because he knew the ship was going to sink. Coal-fired boilers explode when hit by icy seawater. But the lads in the boiler rooms didn't know what he was up to. They had some water seeping in, but they did their duties and worked hard. Their pumps were humming efficiently, and they got the fires drawn. Unfortunately, on the Titanic, the watertight bulkheads did not extend up to the main deck. She was taking on water and settling steadily minute by minute. The ship settled a little more, changed her angle, and a wall of seawater a meter high came pouring over the bulkhead at the front of the middle boiler room. The lads had done their jobs. Suddenly, it was every man for himself. In a few more minutes, the ship sank. Over 1500 people died. Only 705 survived. Probably only Mr. Andrews knew what was coming right up until the ship went down.   

In the main conference room here last night, I felt a kind of complacency that I can only characterize using these two metaphors. No one knows what to do. I have put to three of the main guests and some of my fellow attendees questions about whether there are any grounds in material reality for a moral code. I'm getting back blank stares. Science, the study of material reality, remember, is what these people live by. These are the clear-eyed, objective thinkers of our times. Some of the best that we have in the world. They have no answers. They aren't even aware of the question. They are doing the rote familiar, relying on the moral sense and the habits that were programmed into them when they were children. 

Not good enough, my gentle readers. I have said so many times in these pages. 

Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Jerry Coyne ...are sitting in front of a room full of admirers and talking at length, earnestly, about multiple-worlds models in quantum theory. 

They're nice people, the speakers and attendees here. But they're staring. 

It's a little after 3 a.m. In my dimly lit hotel room, I'm staring. 

Down below in this ship of state, millions of decent people are just doing their duties.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBHoMvq_tmY