Just last week, Richard Dawkins debated Cardinal George Pell in another installment of the interminable debates which convince atheists that atheism is best and theists that theism is best. Pell, on par for the theist course, argued that atheism leads to bad things like Hitler and the Nazis. Dawkins responded by observing that Hitler wasn’t an atheist.

This exchange, unenlightening though it was, at least generated useful commentary by an historian familiar with the debates about Nazis and religion. He notes that scholars are of three schools of thought: (1) the Nazis were neo-pagans, (2) Naziism was a political religion, or (3) Nazis were peculiar Christians. Based on everything I’ve read over the years, all three descriptions seem to be correct — they aren’t mutually exclusive. Hitler himself admired the Catholic Church and used it as a model for his own movement.

One thing is clear: Hitler wasn’t an atheist and almost no Nazis were. However idiosyncratic, Hitler clearly had creationist ideas:

Hitler argued for a critical review of the Bible, to discover what sections met an “Aryan” spirit. In these same notes, he took a “biogenetic” history as the main biblical emphasis, arguing that original sin was solely racial degeneration – sin against the blood. He also argued in favour of the notion of a creator, a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing. This again came back to race, and meant that he argued in Mein Kampf that one could not avoid the “commands” of “eternal nature” or the “Almighty Creator”: “in that I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

For theists this sort of thing is best ignored, as is the fact that 99% of Germans were avowed Christians during the Nazi era. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this debate is its relationship to evolution. Aside from mistakenly believing that Nazis were atheists, most theists assume that the Nazis were Darwinian evolutionists. They weren’t.

As Coel Hellier documents in this superb post, Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist, and opposed to evolution. After an extensive examination of Nazi ideas, Hellier concludes:

The main ideas of Darwinism are that natural selection, operating over lengthy time periods, can cause species to transform into other species, and that all modern mammals descend from a common ancestor. Both of these notions the Nazis explicitly rejected, finding them abhorrent, materialistic notions that would strip man of his soul and of his special status. The Nazis preferred, as do many other religious people, to see man as God’s special creation. It was seeing, in particular, the Aryan race as “God’s handiwork” that led the Nazis to consider it sinful to allow the destruction of the Aryan race by allowing racial inter-marriage, and hence the necessity for removing the possibility by finding a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

Thus nothing in Nazi ideology derives from Darwinism. The few aspects in common were pre-Darwinian; the ideas that originated with Darwin were anathema to and rejected by the Nazis. The widespread blaming of Darwinism as an inspiration for Nazi crimes has no support in historical evidence and instead derives purely from a desire on the part of the religious to smear Darwinism.

The labeling of the Nazis as “atheistic” is similarly motivated and is also the exact opposite of what the evidence says. The Nazi ideology was theistic and religious and an offshoot of Christianity, merging Christianity with Nazi racial theory. It is true that the Nazified Christianity was opposed to more mainstream Christian views, and thus that the Nazis wanted radical reform of the Christian religion, but in no sense was it “atheistic.”

It would be splendid if, before the next debate, the theist representative would read Hellier’s piece and leave the Hitler-Nazi-atheist canard out of it.

The take-downs have been occasioned by a peculiar kind of belief: the faith that science has explained everything, there are no mysteries, and there is nothing intractable left to ponder. While I greatly admire science and have few problems with what some derisively call scientism, I recognize there is much science hasn’t solved and may never solve.

This is not, of course, a warrant for the supernatural. As John Wilkins explained in this superb post, beliefs should be warranted. Science has provided us with a pretty good warrant to date and it’s only getting better. But as the Columbia philosophers recognize, a good warrant is different from an absolute or complete warrant.

Here is Philip Kitcher on Rosenberg’s book:

The evangelical scientism of “The Atheist’s Guide” rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is “the whole truth about reality”; we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable.” Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.

The conclusions are premature. Although microphysics can help illuminate the chemical bond and the periodic table, very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles. Rosenberg’s cheerful Darwinizing is no more convincing than his imperialist physics, and his tales about the evolutionary origins of everything from our penchant for narratives to our supposed dispositions to be nice to one another are throwbacks to the sociobiology of an earlier era, unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned: much of Rosenberg’s book is evolutionary psychology on stilts. Similarly, the neuroscientific discussions serenely extrapolate from what has been carefully demonstrated for the sea slug to conclusions about Homo sapiens.

And here is David Albert on Krauss’ book:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.

Following Albert’s quick, crude, and concrete demonstration that Krauss hasn’t explained the origins of everything, he concludes with this:

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

Because the philosophers here have struck the right chords and are on key, it brings to mind a juxtaposition: I can’t help but think that evangelical atheists, for all their scientific learning, are tone-deaf and atonal. This seems to be what happens when humility and wonder aren’t taken seriously. Our approaches to the cosmos and life should be positivist (sensu lato) and polyvalent.

While Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne think the consequences are enormous, and the religionists who oppose them agree, it doesn’t really matter to those not locked into the polar and artificial world of their debates. When New Atheist scholars square off against Templeton Foundation scholars on free will, it amounts to a tempest in an uninteresting teapot. Neither side is very good at philosophy.

Despite these glum facts, their debate is getting lots of attention. When Coyne publishes an article denying free will in USA Today, you know the world is askew. For those who aren’t familiar with the issues and arguments, The Chronicle of Higher Ed is hosting a symposium — Is Free Will an Illusion? — with six posts by various scholars. The most sensible are from Owen Jones, who argues for a kind of Darwinian pragmatism, and Paul Bloom, who understands that nothing too serious flows from determinism.

From Jones:

The problem with free will is that we keep dwelling on it. Really, this has to stop. Free will is to human behavior what a perfect vacuum is to terrestrial physics—a largely abstract endpoint from which to begin thinking, before immediately moving on to consider and confront the practical frictions of daily existence.

I do get it. People don’t like to be caused. It conflicts with their preference to be fully self-actualized. So it is understandable that, at base, free-will discussions tend to center on whether people have the ability to make choices uncaused by anything other than themselves. But there’s a clear answer: They don’t. Will is as free as lunch. (If you doubt, just try willing yourself out of love, lust, anger, or jealousy.)

All animals are choice machines for two simple reasons. First, no organism can behave in all physically possible ways simultaneously. Second, alternative courses are not all equal. At any given moment, there are far more ways to behave disastrously than successfully (just as there are more ways to break a machine than to fix it). So persistence of existence consistently depends on one’s ability to choose nondisastrous courses of action.

Yet (indeed, fortunately) that choosing is channeled. Choices are initially constrained by the obvious—the time one has to decide, and the volume of brain tissue one can deploy to the task. Choices are also constrained by things we have long suspected but which science now increasingly clarifies.

From Bloom:

Common sense tells us that we exist outside of the material world—we are connected to our bodies and our brains, but we are not ourselves material beings, and so we can act in ways that are exempt from physical law. For every decision we make—from leaning over for a first kiss, to saying “no” when asked if we want fries with that—our actions are not determined and not random, but something else, something we describe as chosen.

This is what many call free will, and most scientists and philosophers agree that it is an illusion. Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.

I agree with the consensus, but it’s not the big news that many of my colleagues seem to think it is. For one thing, it isn’t news at all. Determinism has been part of Philosophy 101 for quite a while now, and arguments against free will were around centuries before we knew anything about genes or neurons. It’s long been a concern in theology; Moses Maimonides, in the 1100s, phrased the problem in terms of divine omniscience: If God already knows what you will do, how could you be free to choose?

More important, it’s not clear what difference it makes. Many scholars do draw profound implications from the rejection of free will.

It doesn’t make much difference except to those who believe it makes a big difference. We know who they are.

The history of ideas is also strange. Few modern materialists realize that the road from dualism to monism was paved primarily by Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a Viennese physician whose fame (or infamy) today is due mostly to his status as the founder of phrenology. Gall has gotten a bad rap and deserves rehabilitation. Phrenology, for all its popular quackery, contained key insights into localization of function — the idea that certain parts of the brain are dedicated to particular tasks. Another aspect of Gall’s phrenology, one for which he should be remembered, is that the brain alone gives rise to thinking and constitutes the self.

From Cartesian Dualism to Gallian Monism

Alcmaeon of Croton, a Greek philosopher and physician who lived around 500 BC, is credited with being the first to assert that the brain was the seat of the mind. He also was one of the first to claim that humans possess a soul, and it was the soul that animated living things. In so doing, Alcmaeon set the stage for a dualism that would persist for nearly two millennia.

Plato preferred Alcmaeon the philosopher and greatly expanded on his ideas regarding the soul. Hippocrates preferred Alcmaeon the physician and derived his concept of the four “humours” (blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm) from Alcmaeon’s idea that an imbalance of “powers” (wet, dry, hot, cold) caused disease. While many would attempt to maintain a distinction between the physical (which was the province of medicine) and mental (which was the province of philosophy), the boundary was always fuzzy: ailments of the body could be afflictions of the soul.

While there was general agreement on the existence of a soul, there was no agreement as to its location and the mechanics whereby it interacted with the body. Some argued for the heart and others for the head. Everyone agreed, however, that the soul and mind were closely linked, if not identical. Human uniqueness was firmly based on the soul-mind, regardless of its physical location.

In 1641, Rene Descartes formalized nearly two thousand years of mind-body dualism with the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he unequivocally separated mind (soul) from matter (body). Metaphysical speculations about the mind did not begin to give way to material understandings until the 1660s, when Thomas Willis and his Oxford Circle colleagues established that the brain was closely linked to behavior. Although Willis’ explanations of the brain and its workings still bore the trappings of Hippocratic humours and Galenist spirits, they are nonetheless recognizable as the first mechanical account of the nervous system.

In 1664 Willis published Cerebri Anatome, a landmark work which effectively established neurology as a scientific discipline. For all his accomplishments, Willis remained a devout dualist who believed that the soul-mind was seated in the brain. Descartes, for his part, had no doubt that the soul was located in the brain; he placed it in the pineal gland. During the century after Willis, those interested in the nervous system spent most of their time dissecting and mapping. While they provided ever more refined anatomical descriptions of the brain, they did not attempt to explain how it related to mind or behavior. Because dualism was still dominant, most what was known about the mind continued to come from introspective philosophy.

This state of affairs changed dramatically in the early 1800s when Franz Joseph Gall began lecturing and publishing on cerebral anatomy and localized function. Although Gall is today known – and ridiculed – as the founder of phrenology, his reputation is largely undeserved. Because phrenology was but one part of Gall’s work that was popularized by others, primarily for profit, most treatments of Gall tend toward caricature.

Franz Joseph Gall -- Founder of Phrenology

Gall was, in some respects, the founder of modern neuroscience. He published his major work, Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, in four volumes between 1810-1819. In this work and others, Gall espoused many of the ideas that continue to guide the mind sciences, and which frame several current disputes within those sciences. Among these are: (1) the brain is the physical locus of the mind; (2) mind arises from physical matter; (3) the brain-mind is the basis for behavior; (4) the brain has separate and distinct regions or parts; (5) each region or part of the brain has a particular and specific function; and (6) these functions or “faculties” are innate. Collectively, these ideas establish Gall as the first mind-matter monist.

Gall’s monistic materialism was so threatening to religious dualists that the Austrian emperor proscribed his lectures and the Catholic church listed his books in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum. These were not, however, the ideas for which Gall was most famous. Fusing his empirical neurology with Johann Lavater’s physiognomy, Gall asserted that the various mental faculties corresponded to specific regions of the brain, and that the relative development of these faculties shaped the brain in ways that corresponded to bumps on the skull. Phrenology was thus born.

It is difficult to understate the social and cultural impact that phrenology had in Europe and America between 1815 and 1845: “For the early Victorian generation, phrenology represented a widespread movement affecting science, philosophy, religion, and education” (McLaren 1974:87; McLaren 1981). By 1836, there were more than thirty phrenological societies in Europe and nearly as many in the United States; many members were physicians and professionals. That same year, interest was so intense that Hewett Watson (1836) published Statistics on Phrenology, in which he meticulously noted that 64,000 works on phrenology had been sold and more than 15,000 plaster heads molded. George Combe’s hugely popular Elements of Phrenology was first published in 1824, went through several additions, and sold more than 100,000 copies.

Phrenological Materialism and Monism

Regardless of its scientific validity, phrenology was a naturalistic and secular doctrine that had a corrosive impact on dualism and religion. Commenting on this fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “Gall and Spurzheim’s Phrenology laid a rough hand on the mystery of animal and spiritual nature, dragging down every sacred secret to a street show. The attempt was coarse and odious to scientific men, but had a certain truth in it; it felt connection where the professors denied it, and was leading to a truth which had not yet been announced.”

The truth not yet announced was, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Since Darwin’s time, most scientists have come to accept that material matter is solely responsible for immaterial thought. While Darwin deservedly gets much credit for this development, some of the debt is owed to Gall, the original mind-matter monist.

References:

McLaren, Angus. (1974). Phrenology: Medium and Message. The Journal of Modern History, 46 (1) DOI: 10.1086/241166

Castro-Caldas, A., & Grafman, J. (2000). Those Were the (Phrenological) Days The Neuroscientist, 6 (4), 297-302 DOI: 10.1177/107385840000600412

McLaren Angus. (1981). A prehistory of the social sciences: phrenology in France. Comparative studies in society and history, 23 (1), 3-22 PMID: 11614370

My suggestion is this: Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. There’s no way to develop an ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system without doing serious violence to common sense somewhere. It’s just impossible. Since common sense is an inconsistent system, you can’t respect it all. Every metaphysician will have to violate it somewhere.

Common sense, as Schwitzgebel frames it, has “everyday practical interactions with the world.” In broad evolutionary terms, this is the sense formed over millions of years in mostly African environments. The brain-mind which gives rise to “common sense” evolved to handle all sorts of practical and social problems, none of which have anything to do with metaphysics. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a mismatch between the commonsense mind and the metaphysical mind.

Left Fork: Ancestral Mind/ Right Fork: Metaphysical Mind

Knowing that the mind which evolved in ancestral environments is capable of metaphysics doesn’t mean it is good at metaphysics. And if we take the history of metaphysics as a guide or proof, it doesn’t appear we have made much progress or come into closer contact with the singular “Truth” which seems to be its goal.

For me the more fundamental question revolves around what Schwitzgebel calls an “ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system.” Why is this desirable? Why is it needed? What would it do?

The quest for a single consistent system seems to be a psychological need which finds its greatest expression among metaphysicians and religionists. I’m not sure why such a system is good or needed for the rest of us.

Why not have one “system” for one class of problems and another “system” for another class of problems? There are different approaches to different problems.  What causes the impulse towards unification, systematization, and consistency? Like Nietzsche and Emerson, I’m suspicious of systematizers and consistency.

Although systematizers are often associated with metaphysics-religion, they also appear in science-atheism. The latter, with whom I often sympathize, have an unfortunate tendency to overstate the case and overestimate what is known. For them, Schwitzgebel has this crazy advice:

You can’t do an empirical study, for example, to determine whether there really is a material world out there or whether everything is instead just ideas in our minds coordinated by god. You can’t do an empirical study to determine whether there really exist an infinite number of universes with different laws of physics, entirely out of causal contact with our own. We’re stuck with common sense, plausibility arguments, and theoretical elegance – and none of these should rightly be regarded as decisive on such matters, whenever there are several very different and yet attractive contender positions, as there always are.

I conclude that regarding the fundamental structure of the universe in general and the mind-body relation in particular something that seems crazy must be true, but we have no way to know what the truth is among a variety of crazy possibilities. I call this position “crazyism.”

Crazyism appears to have great promise; I predict that positivism writ large will eventually prove it true.

As Philip Kitcher reminds us, people can be ethical and moral without religion. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Most primates, humans included, are intensely social. It’s impossible to be social without simultaneously behaving in ways that are considered “moral” or “ethical.” This aside, there is little to no evidence that religious people in modern societies are more ethical-moral than non-religious people. Moreover, there is little to no evidence that Axial or “ethical” religions have made people or societies more ethical-moral than previous peoples. Our hunting and gathering ancestors were no more or less ethical-moral than “modern” people who have lived in settled societies during the past 10,000 years.

If Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks knew anything about evolutionary ethics and the ethnohistoric record, he wouldn’t be writing silly articles arguing that modern religions are the existential glue that hold societies together. This sort of argument is typical of apologists who believe that history and civilization essentially began with the movement toward angry gods and moralistic religions.

Elsewhere, Juliane von Mittelstaedt reports on ultra-orthodox Jewish women in Israel who cover themselves from head to toe in up to 27 layers of clothes. It is part of a larger story on the fractures these fundamentalists are creating within Israeli society, which is something that caught my attention previously in Ultra-Orthodox Slackers.

Several aspects of the Mittelstaedt story intrigue. First, it appears that most of the women wearing all these clothes have suffered serious abuse; the covering up thus seems linked to shame. Second, ultra-orthodox Jewish men in Israel routinely harangue female soldiers. This is unreal, coming from losers who are exempt from military service. This is a good time to compare and contrast.

Someone in the story astutely observes that if some of these zealots didn’t have religion as cover for their obvious madness, they would probably be institutionalized. While witnessing the antics and ideas of American evangelicals, I’ve had occasion to observe the same sort of thing.

In this mordant piece on the future of funerary, Max Rivlin-Nadler begins with the premise that the industry is in crisis because Americans are becoming more secular and fewer people are willing to pay for the bells and whistles of religious funerals. As evidence of increasing secularism, he notes that some 25% of Americans no longer claim affiliation with a church. As Rodney Stark has been saying forever, just because people don’t go to church or identify with organized religion, this doesn’t mean they are becoming secular. Most are not atheists or non-believers; they simply have alternative “spiritual” beliefs and don’t identify with institutional religion. When funeral directors realize this and begin offering non-traditional “spiritual” funerals, they will be able to tap what Rivlin-Nadlin characterizes as the “secular” market.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead.

Later in the parable the madman realizes that he has come too soon, his message has fallen on deaf ears and those who hear don’t understand. Rarely has a parable, including its infamous assertion that Gott ist tot, been so misunderstood.

This misunderstanding has often scaled to Nietzsche’s work as a whole. When I wrote a thesis on Nietzsche’s “Madman” parable in the late 80s, Nietzsche studies were entering a newly mature phase. Over the last few decades, few thinkers have received more serious and well-deserved attention. This attenti0n has been sustained, as is apparent from two recent pieces on Nietzsche.

In the first Ross Posnock deftly reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s new book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. Special attention is given to Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who warned: “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.”

For those who have yet to discover this thinker, Brian Leiter provides an introduction and recommends five books to get started; one is a biography, two are interpretive, and two are by Nietzsche. While I like the list, I would add The Gay Science and recommend reading the Safranski biography in conjunction with the three Nietzsche books. After you have gotten your own feel for Nietzsche, Leiter’s two interpretive recommendations would come next.

If we could get the self assured new atheists to read these books, things would be different: more serious, intense, productive, and lasting.

While it would be tempting to date the first skeptical interrogation of — and explanation for –- religion to the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776 CE), we can trace it further back in time to Epicurus (340-270 BCE) and Lucretius (circa 50 BCE). Presaging Hume, Epicurus developed an empirical theory of knowledge based on the senses; he “believed that, on the basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms, he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife” (Konstan 2009). Although Epicurus did not flatly dispute the existence of the Greek gods, he suggested they were chimerical thought-constructs that served a moral purpose.

Two centuries later, Lucretius advanced these arguments in his poem On the Nature of Things. While Lucretius is little remembered today, his thinking was far ahead of its time:

Lucretius envisages how life first emerged from the earth, and how humans developed from nomadic hunters to city-dwellers with language, law and the arts. In this prehistory the exclusion of divine intervention, while rarely foregrounded, is plainly the underlying motivation. The fertile young earth naturally sprouted with life forms, and the organisms thus generated were innumerable random formations. Of these, most perished, but a minority proved capable of surviving – thanks to strength, cunning, or utility to man – and of reproducing their kind. This account, which has won admiration for its partial anticipation of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, is plainly using a kind of natural selection to account non-teleologically for the apparent presence of design in the animal kingdom.

Much the same anti-teleological program underlies the ensuing prehistory of civilization. Each cultural advance was prompted by nature, and only subsequently taken up and developed by human beings. Hence, it is implied, no divine intervention need be postulated as an explanatory tool. No Prometheus was needed to introduce fire, which rather was first brought to human attention by naturally kindled forest fires. Language emerged because people started to notice how their instinctive vocal responses to things, comparable to animal noises, could be put at the service of their intuitive desire to communicate (for which infants’ pre-linguistic pointing is cited as evidence). The [book] is rich in other cultural reconstructions, including the origin of friendship and justice in a primitive social contract, and of conventional religion in early mankind’s misguided tendency to link visions of the gods, above all in dreams, to their desire to explain cosmic phenomena.

[In conclusion], Lucretius works through a range of the phenomena that physical theorists were standardly called upon to account for: storms, waterspouts, earthquakes, plagues and the like. Once more the exclusion of divine causation undoubtedly motivates the account, the phenomena in question being nearly all ones popularly regarded as manifestations of divine intervention. Lucretius not only explains them naturalistically, but is ready to mock the rival, theological explanations: for example, if thunderbolts are weapons hurled by Zeus at human miscreants, why does he waste so much of his ammunition on uninhabited regions, or, when he does score a hit, sometimes strike his own temple? (Sedley 2008).

The skeptical naturalism of Epicurus and Lucretius was soon forgotten, and completely submerged under the conjoined weight of Platonic philosophy and Christian religion for nearly 1500 years. Although an Italian scholar discovered two complete copies of Lucretius’ work in 1417, On the Nature of Things was not made publicly available until 1563. After its publication, Lucretius’ work contributed to the general ferment – and questioning – that characterized the Renaissance. Ecclesiastical authorities were not pleased with this fact, and duly condemned both Epicurus and Lucretius as atheists.

Greenblatt and I clearly got the same memo on Lucretius and I look forward to reading his book.

References:

Konstan, David.  2009 (Spring).  “Epicurus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/epicurus/>.

Sedley, David.  2008 (Fall).  “Lucretius,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/lucretius/>.

First, it is extremely discouraging that 150 years after Darwin there appears to be a need to continue publishing books explaining evolution and debunking creationism. As Ronald Numbers’ shows in his masterful history The Creationists, wishful thinking has incredible staying power. Second, did Dawkins really need to publish another book of this kind? It seems as if you have read any of Dawkins’ recent books (excepting his three best, The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and The Ancestor’s Tale), you have read them all. Given Dawkins’ considerable scientific skills and abilities as a writer, I wish he would cover some different ground.

I am not sure what it is about Spiegel reporters, but they are some of the best in the business. They seem always to know much about their topic and ask great questions. The interview with Dawkins is no exception. It touches on some key issues that deserve further comment.

Spiegel: The American geneticist Dean Hamer postulated the God Gene hypothesis, proposing that humans are genetically hardwired for religious faith.

Dawkins: I’d prefer to say that we have a lot of genetic predispositions for a lot of psychological attributes, which can under the right circumstances add up to religion. But I’m also thinking of things like a predisposition to be obedient towards authority, which might even be useful under certain circumstances. Or a predisposition to be afraid of death or, when frightened, to run to a parental figure. These are all separate psychological predispositions which under the right cultural circumstances end up pushing one into a religion, whichever the religion of one’s cultural upbringing. I wouldn’t call it a God Gene.

Dawkins is spot on with this answer. There are numerous attributes of the human brain-mind that, when combined in consciousness, inevitably give rise to belief in the supernatural. These attributes include, but are not limited to: causal attribution, pattern imposition, agency detection, theory of mind, and commonsense dualism. We have evolved a brain-mind that naturally and spontaneously constructs experience using these attributes, with the result being belief in the supernatural. When you add emotions such as fear, attachment, attraction, and sorrow to the mix, you have an organism that is perfectly primed and highly receptive to certain kinds of cultural patterning or inputs. All religions are built on this biological-neurological substrate.

The next question and answer are less auspicious:

Spiegel: Has religion not been very successful in an evolutionary sense?

Dawkins: The thought that human societies gained strength from religious memes in their competition with others is true to a certain extent. But it is more like an ecological struggle: It reminds me of the replacement of the red by the gray squirrel in Britain. That is not a natural selection process at all, it is an ecological succession. So when a tribe has a war-like god, when the young men are brought up with the thought that their destiny is to go out and fight as warriors and that a martyr’s death brings you straight to heaven, you see a set of powerful, mutually reinforcing memes at work. If the rival tribe has a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek, that might not prevail.

Dawkins loses his bearings with this answer. Societies and cultures are not organisms; thus, biological evolutionary processes cannot be used to explain their origins and development or histories — fundamentally different processes are at work. The whole meme thing needs to be junked; it was a bad analogy to begin with and has not gotten any better over time. Ideas are not the same as genes. Dawkins is not getting any closer to the mark by arguing that cultural history is akin to ecological succession.

It is this category mistake — conflating biological evolution with cultural history — that afflicts the large and growing literature purporting to explain the “evolution of religion” by appealing to group level selection. Because societies are not organisms, the transitive property does not apply and we should stop talking about “cultural evolution.” There is no such thing.

Because Dawkins erroneously conflates biological evolution with cultural history, the interviewers are justifiably skeptical:

Spiegel: But following a religion that does not promote the chances for survival seems to contradict evolutionary logic.

Dawkins: Oh yes, clearly there is a conflict between meme and gene survival. We are familiar with such conflicts. They sometimes work out one way, sometimes the other.

Terrible. Humans follow what we today call “religions” for reasons having little or nothing to do with ongoing biological evolution. There are more powerful processes at work and much simpler explanations. These processes and explanations are grounded in economy and politics, not in biology. Modern “religions” — i.e., those which appeared in conjunction with the Neolithic Revolution — have a logic all their own and this logic is not evolutionary.

In this post, I will focus on “predisposition for religion,” which Rowthorn admits is not likely to be governed by a single gene, but is instead “a complex phenomenon likely to be influenced by many genes.” Complex indeed. I think everyone would agree that religion is more complex than diabetes. When scientists search for genes that cause diabetes, they look for thousands of genes or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), not just one or a few. This issue aside, Rowthorn’s assumption that religion is genetic ignores a massively confounding variable — one which cannot be isolated or controlled: culture.

Regardless of when or where a child is born — and irrespective of whatever genes a child inherits — there is a 99% chance that the child will be born and raised in what we can call a “religious” environment. While the details of the religious milieu differ from place to place and time to time, there is almost no place in the world where a child can raised in a non-religious environment.

And even atheists, a tiny minority living mostly in the West, cannot insulate their children from the nearly universal religiosity of the surrounding culture. There is little that a Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris could do, assuming they had children, to prevent them from being exposed to pervasive religiosity or spirituality in the wider British or American culture. It is doubtful that such children would have “atheism genes” that would immunize them from religion.

What would have an effect on their propensity toward atheism would be the things these children had been taught from an early age and the cultural environment in which they live. The same is true of all other children — the vast majority of whom are socialized into religion. Given these facts, why are we even discussing a non-existent “religion gene” or genes?

Rowthorn, R. (2011). Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance model Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2504