Paul,

I'm also a computer guy (wrote my first program in 1967), over 65 but for family and financial reasons I doubt I'll be able to retire before my age hits 3 digits...

Your comments on each of the "sources of authority" are interesting and thought-provoking, and I can't honestly say I disagree with any of it.

But I do have a couple of caveats:

First, and perhaps most importantly, looking down your list I find that in contemporary American culture, political ideology (as promoted by the media-political complex) has corrupted nearly all of these authorities to the point that close to 100% of our public discourse is baseless nonsense:

Parents & Teachers -- children are now being taught that the elite values presented by their teachers are more enlightened that the values and beliefs of their parents, while at the same time the teaching of actual skills and knowledge is being deemphasized in favor of inculcating these "enlightened" values. So the authority of parents is being undermined, while the authority of teachers is rendered useless in terms of actual knowledge.

Preachers & Scripture -- Whatever one may think of the authority of preachers, one should at least expect them to pay attention to their own scripture, whether it's the Torah, the Bible, or the Book of Mormon.

But look at what "liberal" theology is doing to American protestantism (and Reformed Judaism): clearly there is a powerful movement to replace actual biblical teaching with the Political Correctness of the moment. (And the argument that Scripture is unclear on the relevant moral issues simply will not withstand any sort of rigorous scrutiny.) This may be regarded as a good thing or bad, but it is clearly intellectually dishonest.

Science -- The public understanding of the whole nature of the scientific undertaking has been corrupted. As you mention in your continental drift anecdote, a scientific consensus at any given moment does not guarantee that the theory is true -- yet that's what the public is repeatedly being told, ad nauseam.

The most egregious -- and disastrous -- example is the whole Global Warming/CO2 business. Consider that about twenty years ago an ambitious astronomer, most of whose studies had been of Venus, propounded the hypothesis that carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels would have a catastrophic effect on Earth's climate. This assertion would have appeared ludicrous on its face to any moderately-bright 13-year-old who had been paying attention in his Earth Science class, and indeed it did appear ludicrous at the time to the vast body of climatologists and meteorologists in the country.

BUT the hypothesis, for which there was at the time no actual evidence whatever, appealed to a political class always eager for some crisis to serve as a pretext for accumulating more power. The Green Left eagerly embraced it, carrying along liberal politicians and of course the scientifically-illiterate media. One result was more than $50 billion in academic grants, serving to ensure that any scientist wanting funds for his research becomes part of the "consensus". Another result was absurd terms like "carbon footprint" becoming part of the vernacular.

A third result -- the most catastrophic -- was the politically-correct quest for "renewable energy", which had gullible state governments (heavily lobbied by both greens and power utilities) offer incredibly lucrative subsidies for impossibly stupid and ineffective ways of generating electrical power, most notably wind and biomass. So we are now permanently and horribly disfiguring wilderness and rural countryside with industrial wind turbines -- each the size of the Statue of Liberty with a Boeing 747 pinned to her nose -- while hacking down forests in the Northwest for firewood to feed industrial-size boilers.

And while we are utterly destroying the environment in the name -- for Heaven's sake -- of environmentalism, every piece of actual scientific evidence that has appeared recently, from ocean temperatures to upper-troposphere humidity, has clearly and unambiguously demonstrated that the CO2-driven warming theory is completely wrong, as silly and misguided as it first seemed. But that information never appears in the media, or in our political discourse; it's available mostly via the internet.

Which brings us to two more of your authorities, the Web and Me. It's really not the case that web sites are "all produced by people who are either preachers, teachers, advertisers, journalists, scientists or other authority figures" -- yours isn't, for example, though of course many are. The ultimate credibility of a web site rests on the persuasive power of its content, and for clear-thinking people (who seem to be more and more rare, unfortunately) this will rest on the logic of its argument. Most fields of knowledge have criteria for evidence and rules of inference -- science has repeatability and statistics, theology has scriptural hermeneutic (which differ from one denomination to another), and so on. Much of this logic may reflect innate thought processes, and indeed anyone who has carefully studied a pet cat or dog is aware that they are capable of certain kinds of inference. So the egalitarian character of the web ("On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.") offers scope for a much wider range of ideas than traditional media, and at the same time places much more responsibility on the reader to independently evaluate the content. This is a Good Thing, even though at the moment it would appear that the advertisers, politicians, and other mountebanks have the upper hand.

As to Spiritual, my only observation is that I found "Mere Christianity" (which you mention elsewhere) a convincing and wonderfully well-written (like all of CS Lewis) apologetic, though basing its argument upon instinctive sense of right and wrong may prove less persuasive in an age of sociopathic urban youth gangs. One is left to wonder just how much of the home environment and community culture during early life passes for "instinctive" -- and, by the way, "community culture" is a source of authority not directly addressed in your essay.

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Many thanks for a wonderful web site. I came to it initially during a search for log cabin information and got sucked in...

Best wishes,

Craig Goodrich
Las Vegas and (temporarily) Indianapolis