Work in this field began with Aleksandr Oparin (1894-1980), a renowned Soviet biochemist who postulated that a young and cooling earth possessed a strongly reducing atmosphere containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor. Oparin asserted that these were the raw materials for the evolution of “life” (like many biochemists, Oparin rejected any strict separation between life and non-life). Over time, and with energy inputs from lightning, magma, and radiation, chemicals can combine in ways that led to colloidal enlargement, stability, and perhaps even replication.

Although Oparin never conducted experiments along the lines he suggested in Origin of Life (1938), his ideas were championed by Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize winning chemist at the University of Chicago. In 1952, Urey published “On the Early Chemical History of the Earth and the Origin of Life,” in which he offered explanations for the initial formation of organic compounds and suggested experiments involving methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water and an electrical charge (simulating lightning).

It was not long before one of Urey’s graduate students, Stanley Miller, conducted an experiment mimicking the hypothesized conditions of early earth. Miller built a laboratory apparatus containing a mixture of water, hydrogen, ammonia and methane, all of which were early earth ingredients. He then introduced electricity (“lightning”) in the form of 60,000 volt sparks, and trapped the resulting gases in a filter. When he analyzed the contents, Miller found that the molecules had combined into new and larger configurations. Four such configurations were amino acids, which are constituent components of proteins.  The Miller-Urey experiments were widely accepted as a model of prebiotic synthesis.

Subsequent electrical-discharge experiments by prebiotic researchers have produced additional amino acids, and remarkably, the constituent elements of both RNA and DNA. Oro and Kimball synthesized adenine from hydrogen cyanide and ammonia. Sanchez and colleagues synthesized cyanoacetylene, a source for the pyrimidine bases uracil and cytosine, from a mixture of methane and nitrogen. Research into prebiotic chemistry continues unabated, with an ever increasing variety of precursor organics being produced in the laboratory, and multiple pathways to the formation of RNA and DNA being suggested. The long and short of all this research is that there are many plausible chemical paths to the formation of things that contain RNA/DNA and which produce proteins.

Plausible is not, however, either probable or provable and the gap from there to here is, even today, immense. This gap is fraught with difficulty, perhaps none more so than the issue of replication. Two of the primary issues surrounding replication are metabolism and autcatalysis. Self-sustaining chemical reactions are unusual, requiring both energy sources and catalytic enzymes. When all prebiotic combinations and conditions are considered together, the emerging consensus revolves around three scenarios: (1) synthesis in a reducing atmosphere; (2) organic inputs from meteorites or comets; and (3) synthesis of metal sulfides in deep sea vents.

What all these hypotheses all have in common is a strictly material, physical and chemical cause resulting in a molecule that replicates itself. This replicating molecule,  composed of sugar, phosphate and five acid bases, is uniquely vital: “A fundamental property of living systems is that they have a chemical basis for storage of genetic information. RNA, DNA and other nucleic-acid-like compounds are informational macromolecules that have inherent template properties and so lend themselves in a straightforward way to both storing information and replicating it.”

Given the pace and innovation of research into origins, it seems just a matter of time before life is produced in a laboratory. When that happens, the Designer will be pushed back even further in time, with the Big Bang being the obvious point of retreat.

Reference:

Urey, Harold. (1952). On the Early Chemical History of the Earth and the Origin of Life Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 38 (4), 351-363 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.38.4.351

Peretó J (2005). Controversies on the origin of life. International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology, 8 (1), 23-31 PMID: 15906258

Joyce, G. (1989). RNA evolution and the origins of life Nature, 338 (6212), 217-224 DOI: 10.1038/338217a0

Orgel LE (1998). The origin of life–a review of facts and speculations. Trends in biochemical sciences, 23 (12), 491-5 PMID: 9868373

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.

Philosophy and cosmology have long been linked and in some ways are the same subject. Knowing this, it is slightly odd to see a piece over at the Atlantic subtitled “The New Philosophy of Cosmology.” Because philosophy has been doing cosmology for a long time, this implies that it is now doing it some new kind of way. Perhaps. It could be that theoretical physics has run up against a wall and philosophy is required to re-think foundations and ask fresh questions.

Several such questions were posed to NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, who had some interesting things to say. I encourage you to read the entire interview but want to extract these nuggets for brief comment:

You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn’t really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don’t change — which is perfectly true — and then you’re always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn’t change, because your representations of it don’t.

This has long been one of my pet peeves: just because mathematics can accurately describe and predict certain things, it doesn’t mean that the universe or reality is itself nothing more than the unfolding of some quantitative essence. In fact there many things that math can’t describe or predict. Math is an incredibly useful and revealing technique for describing certain aspects of the universe; it does not constitute reality. Math is not a metaphorical god, though the theologically inclined often fall into this kind of tautological thinking.

In another portion of the interview, Maudlin comments on evolutionary process:

When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you’ll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value.

We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

Here Maudlin describes another error often made by the theologically inclined. An anthropocentric view which places humans at the center of everything creates the illusion that evolution is directed toward some goal. It isn’t. Life began on earth some 3 billion years ago and after 3 billion years of evolution, the vast majority of life forms remains simple. We live in a microbial world, not an intelligent one.

If microbes could write evolutionary history, things would look much different. In the absence of such a history the next best thing is Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House (1997), which shatters the illusion that evolution is progressive. The greatest frequency of life on earth, in terms of biomass and diversity, remains firmly against the left wall of minimal complexity, close to where it began:

Graph Depicts Mode or Frequency of Both Past and Present Life Forms on Earth

The preceding post prompted this observation from my blogging friend Tom Rees: “The graph does show that evolution is directional. Complex brains have to build on less complex brains.” Without the accompanying text from Gould’s Full House, I see how it could be interpreted this way. So let me summarize and gloss the arguments which explain the graph:

Directional evolution is in the eye of the human (or primate or mammal) beholder. The mode of life — its greatest frequency, biomass, and diversity — is up against (or near) the left wall of non-complexity. It started there, and after evolving for over 3 billion years, it has remained there. This doesn’t look very directional.

Toward the left side of non-complexity and non-intelligence, we have microbes and, moving toward the right, we have insects. In terms of numbers, species, biomass, and diversity, these are the dominant forms of life on earth. These forms are still evolving, but they aren’t evolving towards complexity or intelligence.

Our multicellular prejudice — our love for big things that we can easily observe — causes us to focus on the right side of complexity and intelligence, and then claim that these relatively few and non-diverse species indicate evolution is directional. I don’t see how we can justify this argument.

Isolating a single and uncommon strand of evolution, such as the right tail of complexity or intelligence, doesn’t make evolution directional to the right. The fact remains that the isolated right tail of evolution is dwarfed by the diversity and mass of life to the left, which is non-complex and non-intelligent. This mass of life to the left has not been static either; it too has evolved — it just hasn’t evolved towards complexity or intelligence.

I’m not sure what the rationale or argument would be for mono-focusing on the right tail, which is an evolutionary outlier, and not considering everything to the left. If we look at the whole or entire picture of evolutionary life, it is non-directional. If evolution were directional, then all forms of life would show movement toward the right or towards multi-cellularity, complexity, sentience, and intelligence. That hasn’t happened and isn’t happening.

Have complexity and intelligence evolved? Yes. Does this mean evolution is directional? No.

Artist: Tim Mietty

Though there are undoubtedly other reasons, one of the most important surely is orientation. People need to situate themselves in both time and space. Creation myths serve this need: they provide a temporal and spatial anchor. This anchoring effect serves as a powerful reminder that views are never from nowhere. All views are situated. Though philosophers may aspire to the view from nowhere (which is the equivalent of the view from everywhere) this is beyond the capacity and interest of most. This aside, the idealistic and detached view from nowhere surely is an impossibility. All views are from somewhere and in many cases that somewhere is found in creation myths.

Because having a view requires a viewer or agent, the next reason which comes to mind is identity. As individuals, our identities are constructed through memory. This is the autobiographical self. As groups, our identities are likewise constructed through memories. This is the autobiographical culture. Whether dealing with individual memories or group histories, the things that are recalled need not traffic in truth. Indeed, much of what we recall is false. The stories we tell are part fact and part fiction, with varying amounts of each. The important thing is to construct a relatively stable identity. Creation myths serve this need.

While reading about creation myths and origins stories I recently came across this passage written by Roger Lewin:

Every society for which there are records has its version of the “origin myth,” where myth is used to mean allegory, not just fantasy. The product of the unique curiosity of the human mind, origin myths nevertheless tell more than how a particular people might have got here. They encompass a view of the world that tells people how they should behave now they are here. Origin myths are prescriptive, not just descriptive. They present a microcosm of society, of the way men relate with women, of the way “real people” relate with “foreigners,” and of the place of humans in the world of nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that ever since there evolved in the human mind that unique quality of conscious, of reflective self-awareness, origin myths have been central to the intellectual lives of Homo sapiens everywhere.

This is surely correct. It partially explains the incredible staying power of the Edenic myth and why it is defended with such vehemence. For believers, it’s not simply a matter of literalism and the interpretive license which flows from metaphorical readings.

The Edenic myth provides an orientation and identity which evolution apparently doesn’t. This is not to say that human evolution can’t provide orientation or identity, only that some find it profoundly unsettling and distasteful. It is one thing to be made in the image of God, quite another to be an evolving primate. The ontology and metaphysics which attach to Eden are perhaps more comfortable than those which come out of evolutionary Africa.

Reference:

Lewin, Roger (1988). Man’s Place in Nature The Missouri Review, 11 (3), 16-32

As the process of explication began to unfold, one of the more troubling issues revolved around the fact that Nazi Germany was a thoroughly Christian nation. When Hitler came to power in 1933, 54% of Germans identified as Christian Lutheran and 40% as Christian Catholic. These numbers were unchanged on the eve of World War II.

For some, this issue had to be explained or explained away. German Christianity had to be disassociated from German Nazism. One of the ways in which this was done was to argue that Nazism was the godless product of materialist Darwinism. Thus was born a veritable cottage industry of apologetics which associates Nazism with evolution and disassociates Nazism from Christianity.

Yet anyone who has studied Nazism and the Third Reich knows it was drenched in a metaphysics with which German Christians were quite comfortable. The Nazis did not repudiate German Christianity: they drew on its resources to advance their nationalist project. German Christianity was deeply imbricated with Nazism.

In one of the best treatments of this relationship I have seen, astrophysicist Coel Hellier recently posted a nine-part article titled Nazi Racial Ideology was Religious, Creationist and Opposed to Darwinism. In this richly sourced piece, Hellier debunks the apologist mythology which associates Nazism with Darwinism and disassociates Nazism from Christianity.

Here are some excerpts from the summary, but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

The Nazi doctrine of race was fundamentally opposed to and incompatible with Darwinism. Instead Nazi racial theory and their justification for extermination of the “sub-human” races was religious and creationist.

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.”

The labelling 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.”

As is evident from the piece, Hitler professed belief in a creator God to whom the Nation and Volk were indebted. He led by example:

Hitler Attending Church

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.

“Separation of church and state.”

It is revealing that this phrase, a shibboleth of sorts, means so many things to so many different people. In law, there are endless arguments over the extent to which government may entangle itself with religion or religious institutions. In politics, there are endless arguments over the extent to which these words should or should not be applied as a matter of policy.

As Craig Martin shows in Masking Hegemony, there is a sense in which all these arguments are beside the point or miss it entirely. While “separation of church and state” is a juridical and political construct that is constantly being negotiated, much of this negotiation is surface and ignores the reality that religious power, in the form of “private” socialization, circulates freely within and through “public” institutions. It is a kind of fiction that serves hidden interests.

Martin begins his analysis of this fiction or “rhetoric” by stating what everyone knows, even if most disagree about its meaning and application:

“Separation of church and state” – and its corollary: proper religion is a private, not a public matter – is one of the sacred cows of American discourse. The public/private and religion/state binaries are taken for granted by almost everyone, even by those who argue that there should not be a separation of church and state (7).

Martin’s thesis is that this rhetoric makes no sense and the sense it does make is superficial. It renders invisible or “masks” the very real ways in which supposedly private-sphere religion influences the public-sphere state. Martin’s goal is to unmask or render visible the genealogy of this rhetoric and explain where it “comes from, how it works, what it accomplishes, and what it obscures” (7). Because intellectual genealogies are a form of debunking, we can surmise that Martin’s project is to expose a fallacy or upset received wisdom. How does he do it?

Martin begins with a sophisticated analysis of the public-private binary which is integral to “separation of church and state.” This binary is rooted in history and can be traced to Luther and Locke. It was Martin Luther (1483-1546) who developed the Augustinian idea that there are two realms: one “spiritual” or religious and the other “temporal” or secular. Having posited the existence of two spheres, Luther argued that church authorities should regulate “private” matters of the (heavenly) soul, whereas governmental authorities should regulate “public” matters of the (earthly) body.

This two spheres doctrine was troubled from the start. It was an ideal prescription rather than actual description. Church authorities have always been convinced that the proper working and maintenance of the public-governmental sphere depended on the proper working and maintenance of the private-religious sphere. While religious leaders paid pragmatic lip service to “separation,” they did not believe that actual separation was workable or desirable. There might be a de jure distinction, but the de facto reality was that the polity rested on a religious foundation.

It was not, however, only church leaders or religious authorities who subscribed to these ideas. That great champion of liberalism, John Locke (1632-1704), did so as well. Like other political theorists of the time, Locke was embedded within the cultural matrix of Christianity and could not envision a political order which did not presuppose a Christianized “natural religion.” Martin dissects the “toleration” which Locke famously championed and concludes it is limited in scope: “In sum, for Locke the only way in which societies would be able to create the conditions for civil order or public welfare would be to habituate Christian moral norms into all citizens from childhood” (44). The lesson to be drawn from Christian-on-Christian violence engendered by the Reformation was not that the state and religion should be wholly separate; it was that the identity of the state should be separate from Christian factionalism and specific kinds of Christian institutions.

Translating this limited separation into liberal political theory required considerable discursive skill, which Locke certainly possessed. By closely attending to Locke’s maneuvers, Martin shows how Locke’s liberalism “contributed to making the invisible the continuing authority of Christian ideology for the state” and notes the effect: “Although it eventually came about that there occurred a separation of ‘religion’ from the ‘state’ at the top levels (insofar as ecclesiastical orders no longer had control of kings and vice versa), the ‘visible church’ was clearly active in socializing the bodies of citizens and magistrates with Christian ideology” (54).

So while the rhetorical relationship between the state and the visible church changed over time and due to Locke’s efforts, the underlying reality remained the same: “at no point did Christian ideology cease to be a foundation and justification for the shape of the public order” (55). This is not, however, to say there is no kind of separation: “My intention is not to argue that the discourse of separation does no work of any sort; I merely want to argue that there is not, in fact, a separation, and I want to explain precisely how channels of power reach from so-called ‘private’ institutions into ‘public’ ones” (55).

Although Martin’s arguments revolve around European political history and theory, American readers will immediately recognize their relevance to current debates. Liberals and progressives might feel more than a bit queasy to realize that a favorite argument made by some on the right – that the United States is a Christian nation – has more truth to it than might be admitted. This truth, however, is deeper and older than stale arguments about the Founders, whether they were Christians, and whether Christian ideas are embedded in the Constitution. The irony here is that those same people on the right – the ones who argue that “separation of church and state” is not found in the Constitution and therefore is illegitimate – fail to understand what they gain by it: “The separation of church and state discourse did not separate the state from churches, but assisted in making their imbrication largely invisible” (90).

It is, according to Martin, naïve to think that people who are socialized as Christians by families and churches in the private sphere somehow shed this socialization when they participate in the public sphere. Christian ideas cultivated in private have profound impacts on ideas espoused in public. The difference is that “private” Christian ideas can be explicitly stated, whereas “public” Christian ideas are – out of respect for the separation shibboleth – implicitly acknowledged as being the natural order of things. Separation rhetoric thus masks the hegemony of Christian socialization and the effects wrought by this dominance:

Groups that achieve a hegemonic status are more capable of serving their desires and interests than other groups, often because they are capable of presenting their identity markers, behaviors, and discourses or ideologies as ‘normal,’ thereby instituting a regime of privileges that benefits their own group over others (161).

The strength of Martin’s book is to show how this hegemony arose (as a matter of history) and how it works (as a matter of rhetoric and theory). By the end, we are left with the distinct impression that Martin is right – on historical, rhetorical, and theoretical grounds – but are left wondering how all this plays out in the real world. Americans will of course sense that it does. Those of us who live in a highly religious and staunchly Christian culture are continuously aware of the ways in which that worldview shapes the parameters of public debate and understanding, even if we haven’t given much thought to how separation rhetoric and law conceal the true power of these ideas.

If there is a weakness to Masking Hegemony, it is that it ends. In another or ideal next book, we would be treated to an empirical exploration of the “private” institutions responsible for hegemonic or Christian socialization. We would then look at the specific ways in which ostensibly private religious socialization plays itself out in public or “secular” arenas. We would find (by examining a series of debates on education, taxes, abortion, euthanasia, marriage, etc.) that despite all the legal and rhetorical lip service paid to separation of church and state, there is much less separation than supposed. For conservatives this will be good news but for progressives the tidings are less glad.

Masking Hegemony cuts across several disciplines and should appeal to a wide audience, including those studying religion, political philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology. One audience, in particular, should read it: those who study and practice law. Perhaps no group would benefit more from arriving at a deeper understanding of the ways in which “separation of church and state” masks an underlying reality that is constituted and negotiated to serve certain interests.

Despite what law students are taught or attorneys and judges may believe, Establishment Clause jurisprudence is not played out in a pristine legal vacuum; it takes place within a loaded cultural matrix. Frankly acknowledging this rather than pretending otherwise is an essential first step toward intellectual honesty and integrity.

It is a thoughtful exchange but contains nothing new. Similar debates have been ongoing for well over a century without advance or resolution. Science and religion debates which take “God” as a starting point are myopic. They begin with the false assumption that humans throughout history have been preoccupied with the idea of God, and that the monotheistic concept of God is the starting point for this kind of inquiry. Such assumptions are usually embedded in a Whiggish or progressive religious history with “God” being the apotheosis of supernatural thinking.

The kind of “God” that Lightman discusses is a relatively recent idea, limited in time and space, that ignores religious history and diversity. We can see this in the definitions Lightman proposes:

For the purposes of this discussion, and in agreement with almost all religions, God is a being not restricted by the laws that govern matter and energy in the physical universe. In other words, God exists outside matter and energy. In most religions, this Being acts with purpose and will, sometimes violating existing physical laws (i.e., performing miracles), and has additional qualities such as intelligence, compassion and omniscience.

We can categorize religious beliefs according to the degree to which God acts in the world….Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, subscribe to an interventionist view of God.

This is just wrong. It is not true that “almost all religions” have this particular conception of “God.” Nor is it true that “most religions” subscribe to an interventionist view of “God.”

Humans have believed in the supernatural for at least 45,000 years and perhaps longer. The anthropomorphic and interventionist kind of God to which Lightman refers is perhaps 3,000 years old. This particular conception of God is limited in time and space. It is a modern God that derives primarily from the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). It is not a majority God and never has been.

Because Lightman frames his entire science/religion discussion around the God debates that take place within his own high culture salon, his definitions are not a problem so long as they are limited to that tiny arena. But they are not generalizable.

While Western intellectuals may arrive at resolutions or accommodations they find satisfying, these say little or nothing about debates that haven’t existed throughout most of human history and which huge numbers of modern people without God would never even consider.

Tossing around the word “cult” advances these issues not a whit. It signifies nothing other than one’s opposition to other or outsider beliefs. But what about Fallow’s assertion of bigotry? Casting aspersions of this sort requires substantial justification. If someone wouldn’t vote for Romney because he is Mormon, is that person a bigot?

Merriam-Webster defines a bigot as: “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.”

Fallows justifies his claim that being against Romney because of his religion is bigotry by asserting, as if it were self evident, that it also would be bigoted “to oppose Barack Obama because of his race or Joe Lieberman because of his faith or Hillary Clinton or Michele Bachmann because of their gender or Mario Rubio or Nikki Haley because of their ethnicity.”

For Fallows’ bigotry conclusion to follow from his premise, race, gender and ethnicity must occupy the same conceptual space as religion. They must be the same or roughly equivalent. They aren’t.

What is called “race” is a social construction; it is not a biological classification. This social construction is built around variation in skin color. People are born with more or less pigmentation in their skin. Being prejudiced against someone because of skin pigmentation is irrational and bigoted. Skin pigmentation says nothing about a person’s thinking.

Likewise, people are born gendered. Being prejudiced against someone because they are male or female is irrational and bigoted. Gender says nothing about a person’s thinking.

Though less clear (because “ethnicity” is often jumbled and socially constructed), people are perceived as being ethnic simply by being born in a particular place. Being prejudiced against someone because of “ethnicity” is irrational and bigoted. Ethnicity says nothing about a person’s thinking.

But what about religion? People aren’t born religious. Religion is a choice (even if that choice is never exercised). Because religion can be chosen, it can be changed. Religion says something about a person’s thinking.

Religion is not like “race” or gender or “ethnicity”: none of these are matters of choice. They can’t be changed in the way that religion can be changed. Another way of saying this is that “race,” gender, and “ethnicity” are (largely) immutable characteristics; religion is a mutable choice.

With these distinctions in mind, we can ask whether it is bigoted to be against Romney (or any other political candidate) because of his or her religion. I suppose if the answer comes from inside religion — you wouldn’t vote for Romney because you have particular religious beliefs and Romney has different beliefs — a case for bigotry can be made. But if the answer comes from outside religion — you wouldn’t vote for Romney because he believes in the fantastic and absurd — it isn’t bigotry.

In 2006, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg laid out the non-bigoted case for refusing to vote for Romney (or any other candidate) because of religion:

Not applying a religious test for public office, means that people of all faiths are allowed to run—not that views about God, creation, and the moral order are inadmissible for political debate. In George W. Bush’s case, the public paid far too little attention to the role of religion in his thinking. Many voters failed to appreciate that while Bush’s religious beliefs may be moderate Methodist ones, he was someone who relied on his faith immoderately, as an alternative to rational understanding of complex issues. Nor is it chauvinistic to say that certain religious views should be deal breakers in and of themselves.

There are millions of religious Americans who would never vote for an atheist for president, because they believe that faith is necessary to lead the country. Others, myself included, would not, under most imaginable circumstances, vote for a fanatic or fundamentalist—a Hassidic Jew who regards Rabbi Menachem Schneerson as the Messiah, a Christian literalist who thinks that the Earth is less than 7,000 years old, or a Scientologist who thinks it is haunted by the souls of space aliens sent by the evil lord Xenu.

Such views are disqualifying because they’re dogmatic, irrational, and absurd. By holding them, someone indicates a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.

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/>.