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.

This history is long, complicated, and fascinating. There are written records going back to the Shang Dynasty which began in 1766 BC. For Westerners accustomed to thinking that 2,000 years of Christian history is ancient and Americans who think that 1776 AD was a long time ago, the time depth of Chinese civilization and religion must be awe inspiring.

In a recent post, I touched on one of the more notable aspects of Chinese religiosity: ancestor worship. While this is a prominent aspect of Chinese religions (acknowledged in the Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions) another major theme is cosmological, involving what the Chinese call “Heaven.” There is a force or potency in the cosmos that gives rise to all things and which governs everything on earth. This potency is cyclic, and under ideal circumstances there is a balance or equilibrium that results in fertility and stability.

As Howard Smith observes in “Divine Kingship in Ancient China,” Chinese cosmological monism stands in sharp contrast to Western cosmological dualism:

The universe as a whole was referred to as “heaven and earth.” Man must assist, by means of religious ceremonies, the yang forces to overcome the yin forces in the spring and early summer, but he must help the yin to rise to ascendancy in autumn and winter.

These two forces, which permeated all natural phenomena, and by their constant interaction caused all things to subsist, arose out of a primaeval cosmic unity. Neither of these two forces were conceived of in China in personalized terms, as in Mesopotamia, and there did not develop in China the concept of a cosmic struggle between the powers of light and darkness, resulting in the final triumph of the forces of light.

Whatever dualism existed in Chinese thought was a dualism of complementary forces which worked to produce cosmic harmony, and not a dualism of antagonistic forces bent on each other’s destruction.

Although some scholars of ancient Chinese religion cite ancestor worship as being older than cosmological monism, I suspect the reverse is true. This way of conceptualizing the workings of the cosmos is quite characteristic of hunter-gatherers and shamanic naturalism; the idea is ancient and when it appears (however transformed) in post-Neolithic traditions, it is akin to a “survival.” We see examples of this in the North American Trickster traditions. The culture-hero or trickster, who is often considered to be the creator, embodies both good and bad; the two are inextricably intertwined and one cannot exist without the other.

As far as cosmologies go, dialectical monism strikes me as being more sophisticated — and consonant with evolutionary biology — than the reductive dualism which divides all things into binaries and assigns values to each. This kind of normative or Manichean dualism is of course most prominent in the monotheistic traditions.

Reference:

Smith, D. (1957). Divine Kingship in Ancient China Numen, 4 (3) DOI: 10.2307/3269343

These dark arts are tuned to aspects of human nature that many would like to forget, or at least ignore. Parker begins with a line from James Frazer, inscrutable author of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: “We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet.” Frazer’s insight reminds me of another by Somerset Maugham: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”

It is difficult to know what Frazer or Maugham might have thought about heavy metal, but Parker turns some beautiful phrases on his own thinking:

Since its invention, heavy metal has been the popular music most ardently devoted to Frazer’s underground magma pools, and most grandly expressive of their inevitable eruption. Metal’s commerce with the lower realm has been extravagant, ridiculous, and covered in glory.

This lower world cosmology traces its roots to the heavy metalists par excellence, Black Sabbath, a band whose aboriginal angst Parker covers with some gorgeous riffs of his own:

Black Sabbath, from Birmingham, England, was heavy metal. No joy here, nor any wisp of psychedelic whimsy. From the first note, this band sounded ancient, oppressed, as if shambling forward under supernatural burdens.

With his use of horror-movie atmospherics—the tension-building tritone or flatted fifth—and the leering majesty of his riffs, guitarist Tony Iommi redirected the spiritual drag of the blues into an uncharted world of bummers and black holes.

Bassist Geezer Butler, a mystical vegetarian, wrote the lyrics. Raised Catholic, Butler as a youngster had entertained thoughts of the priesthood, and for all the band’s occult trappings, his view of things was essentially orthodox, if a little on the medieval side: God over here, Satan over there, man flailing and biting his nails in the middle.

Vocally, [Ozzy Osbourne] filtered Butler’s Boschian sensibility through his own late-20th-century depression, in front of a band almost overloading with musical power: early live footage reveals the musicians “bobbing,” in the superb phrase of the metal historian Ian Christe, like “marionettes in the hands of God.”

The sound itself dramatized a violent, existential bottoming-out, Iommi’s guitar lines rearing and plunging across the awesomely delayed crashes of drummer Bill Ward, percussions so far behind the beat that their impact was interior, nearly glandular, like the drench of adrenaline after hearing bad news.

Although I have my doubts about heavy metal keeping us sane, I have no doubt that Parker’s pen is dripping with the blood of tormented saints. It almost makes me want to put on some Sabbath for a voyage to the netherworlds of Sturm und Drang.

After dismissing James Joyce as a writer who lacked ideas and could not carry a story (an appraisal many would-be readers of the insufferable Ulysses will appreciate), Bradbury commented on his approach:

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel.

People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story.

Although there is much more to modern world religions than metaphor, Bradbury’s comment is well taken. These religions were built on earlier storytelling traditions that attempted to make sense of the world — or construct a cosmology — through metaphor. There is a sense in which the sound of thunder is at the heart of all religions.

While reading an article on Inuit shamanism yesterday, this passage offered confirmation:

Shamanic traditions were embedded in a wider cosmological framework that still operates. This cosmological framework concerns a wide range of features such as respect for animals, the beliefs in tarniit (shades, souls), tuurngait, nonhuman beings (such as ijirait [caribou-people] and tuniit [people who inhabited the land before the Inuit]), the Inuit naming system, the sharing of country food, the need to communicate or confess transgressions or exceptional experiences, tirigusuusiit (the following of old rules and taboos), ritual injunctions, and many other features, all of which play a part in modern Inuit society. Thus the notion that animals will only offer themselves to human beings if they are treated with respect and not abused is recurrent in Inuit discourse.

As is evident, foraging and social knowledge is inextricably linked to Inuit oral traditions.

In a recent study of mortuary practices at Chaco Canyon that appears in PNAS, Stephen Plog and Carrie Heitman find that social inequality arose earlier than had previously been suggested:

Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico has been the focus of much recent archaeological research on Pueblo groups who lived during the 9th through 12th centuries in the American Southwest. Here, we examine variation in mortuary patterns in the canyon, focusing in particular on one mortuary crypt, to address questions of social differentiation and the chronology of important sociopolitical processes.

Based on new radiocarbon dates as well as reanalysis of the stratigraphy and spatial distribution of materials in the mortuary crypt, we conclude that significant social differentiation began in Chaco ca. 150–200 y earlier than suggested by previous research. We argue that social inequality was sanctified and legitimized by linking people to founders, ancestors, and cosmological forces.

This ritually sanctified stratification has remarkable staying power and has persisted for nearly 1,000 years.  Jake Page, longtime editor of Natural History magazine and author of several important books on Amerindians (including his masterful synthesis, In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000 Year History of the American Indians) contends that the Pueblos can be characterized as “theocracies.”

As Karl Giberson explains in Christianity and Extraterrestrial Life, there are more than a few literalist Christians who believe that the eating of an apple by two people on earth some 7,000 years ago altered the workings of the entire universe and impacted whatever life exists within it:

In the Creationist worldview on display in the Creation Museum, sin inaugurated sickness, disease, and the decay associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Prior to Adam’s sin, the laws of physics were different, since there could be no decay. So, according to the Answers in Genesis website, “another compensating restorative process may have prevented any net decay of the universe.” This restorative process ended with Adam’s sin, and now the Second Law of Thermodynamics was unbalanced, and the entire universe began to run down.

The creative interpretative scheme used by the Young Earth Creationists leads them to find biblical support for claims about laws that science discovered centuries later. Other Young Earth Creationists suggest that the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually appeared for the first time as the scientific consequence of sin.

In this view, the sin of the first human affected everything, even stars trillions of miles away.

This is not simply geocentrism — it is Homocentrism writ universally large.  Talk about presumptuous.   It reminds me, however, of the reaction many Native Americans had to missionary teachings about Christianity.

Aside from having difficulties understanding what they considered to be the dubious magic of the faith, they were most shocked by the claim that two white people eating a perfectly natural and nutritious piece of fruit — provided for humans by bounteous Mother Earth — brought wholesale condemnation on humanity.

In the native view, people were naturally inclined to right living and only things that people learned or did during their lives could divert them from this path.  It was a naturally optimistic view of human nature as opposed to the pessimistic and sinful view that is characteristic of Christianity.

That pessimism is on full display in Giberson’s article, in which he quotes Ken Ham — mastermind of the (would be funny were it not so harmful) Creation Museum — who without compassion asserts that alien life cannot have salvation:

“The Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe,” says Ham. “This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin.”

And, adding insult to injury, even though human sin on a distant Earth wrecked their planet, [aliens] “can’t have salvation,” says Ham. “Only descendants of Adam can be saved.” To even “suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong,” he says.

Ham apparently reads Romans differently than I do:

I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God. – Romans 8:38-39

I sense neither exclusion nor entropy in this verse.

Given that Native Americans were renowned for their knowledge of animal behaviors, one thing is certain: there is something about coyotes that fired the indigenous metaphysical imagination.  In some traditions, the coyote not only played the pervasive and all important role of Trickster, but also of Creator.

Insofar as I know, the book on this subject has yet to be written; in the meantime, we can learn something of coyotes and their remarkable repertoire from Carol Yoon’s recent article in the New York Times, Mysteries that Howl and Hunt.  Although her article covers several areas of coyote behavior and adaptations, she correctly notes the link to native traditions:

With a chorus of howls and yips wild enough to fill a vast night sky, the coyote has ignited the imagination of one culture after another. In many American Indian mythologies, it is celebrated as the Trickster, a figure by turns godlike, idiotic and astoundingly sexually perverse. In the Navajo tradition the coyote is revered as God’s dog.

Dr. DeStefano writes in his book [Coyote at the Kitchen Door] of the legends that coyotes are talking to us, that they can tell us things like where to find water, whether danger is approaching and whether today is the day that death will come, that the coyote has learned Comanche, Apache and many other languages, but not English.

Last week I was camping at Ft. Robinson State Park in Nebraska — site of Crazy Horse’s murder in 1877 and the Cheyenne imprisonment and massacre in 1879, and the coyotes in the area were singing and talking throughout the night.  It was simultaneously beautiful and tragic.

It has always seemed a bit odd that the primary authority in this vast and understudied field should be from outside the Americas, but in some ways it makes sense — Europeans have always been fascinated by the First Americans.  It may have helped that Hultkrantz hailed from a non-colonial, non-imperial nation and thus was able to approach the ethnohistoric record on its own terms rather than ideological ones.

As noted in this biographical sketch that accompanied his delivery of the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, Hultkrantz lived a rich and productive life:

Already as a graduate student, Hultkrantz began making contacts with indigenous peoples: he carried out fieldwork among the Saami in 1944 and 1946. His great love proved to be Native Americans. From 1948 to 1990, he repeatedly lived and conducted research among the Shoshone of Wyoming and Idaho, the Arapaho of the Northern Plains and the Native American tribes of California. He was adopted by the Shoshone in 1948.

Hultkrantz’s corpus includes the publication of some four hundred papers and twenty-five books in ethnology, comparative religion and folklore. He was the editor of numerous works and co-editor of many Scandinavian and American journals. Along with his interest in the religions of Native Americans and circumpolar religions in general, Hultkrantz’s specialty was also his methodology.

Not all of this work is in English, though several of his major monographs and syntheses were either written in English or have been translated.  For those who want a general introduction and survey, I recommend The Religions of the American Indians.  In the preface, Hultkrantz makes this daunting observation regarding the ethnohistoric record: “The material accessible in print is already overwhelming enough, and could not be surveyed by any single scholar.”

Much of this material never made into print, and languishes in university archives and libraries around the country, thus offering prime research opportunities for those interested in reconstructing the record.

In the first, reported by Sean Coughlan of the BBC, archaeologists have discovered the oldest house in Britain.  Dated at 8,500 BCE (10,500 years ago for those who are counting), this is a spectacular and highly informative find.  At this time, the ice age had just ended and Britain was still attached to mainland Europe; there was no agriculture — everyone was hunting and gathering.  Foragers are of course nearly always associated with nomadic lifeways, which can make them hard to detect and often renders them archaeologically invisible.

Finding a home-base or house occupied by hunter-gatherers is therefore unusual, and it may tell us something about the transition from foraging to agriculture.  Alternatively, it could indicate that the area was especially rich in resources, at least on a seasonal basis, and this resulted in the construction of more permanent dwellings.

Either way, this is good stuff and several items have been found that speak to ritual activities over a long period of time:

The Star Carr site, inhabited after the last ice age, is believed to have been in use for between 200 and 500 years.  It has been the subject of extensive research and excavation since its discovery in the 1940s – and has yielded items such as the paddle of a boat, arrow tips and masks made from red deer skulls.  There are also antler head-dresses, which could have been used in rituals.

If we were talking simply about nomadic hunter-gatherers, we would usually associate them with shamanist beliefs and activities; in this case however, the semi-sedentary lifestyle may have led to a more elaborate cosmology and ritualism.  The masks made from red deer skulls certainly suggest this and remind one of the sedentary, complex hunter-gatherers (such as the Kwakiutl) who occupied America’s Northwest coast.  As for the antler head-dresses, these were commonly worn by shamans in many parts of the world, including Siberia and the Americas.

In the second study, reported by Kate Ravilious for National Geographic, stone-age celts or axes have repeatedly been found in Viking graves or barrows.

These are Iron Age graves that date from 800 to 1050 CE, but the flint celts — which the archaeologists call “thunderstones” — are much older.  This indicates that Vikings were aware of Stone Age artifacts and collected them.  These stones were curated and transported over long distances, which suggests they were highly valued and symbolically important.

The archaeologists studying these grave goods (which sometimes include smaller flint pebbles that were unworked and could not be used either as tools or for fire starting) characterize the finds with some rather curious language:

Long dismissed as accidental additions to Viking graves, prehistoric “thunderstones” — fist-size stone tools resembling the Norse god Thor’s hammerhead — were actually purposely placed as good-luck talismans, archaeologists say.  “It shows that these stones had very special significance and suggests that these people were highly superstitious.”

The prehistoric stones’ “special significance” to Vikings may have derived from legends of Thor, the Norse thunder god said to create lightning with his battle hammer, Mjöllnir.  “Thor’s mission was to protect gods and people against evil and chaos,” he said in a statement. “It was therefore believed that Thor’s rocks protected houses and people.”

Now the new grave survey suggests the rocks were believed to protect souls too, the archaeologists say.  Similar discoveries in United Kingdom graves suggest that Vikings weren’t the only ancient Europeans who saw millennia-old tools as accoutrements for the afterlife.  “I suspect that these people were not so very different from us, and they would have had superstitious folk beliefs.”

There is a weird double standard at work here.  I fail to understand why the archaeologists would refer to these ritually charged grave goods as “good luck talismans” and the Vikings as “superstitious” people who harbored mere “folk beliefs.”

As is well known, the Vikings were supernaturalists with a richly developed pantheon of gods and religious stories known as “myths.”  I have always disliked the term “myth” because it is normative and suggests these were mere stories told for entertainment or learning.  In fact, what we popularly call “myths” constitute the religious beliefs of others.  The same is true of the normative term “pagan,” which was used by Jews and Christians to describe and denigrate the religious beliefs of everyone who did not believe in their particular God.

Norse “mythology” was a full-blown supernatural belief system that constituted what we today call religion.  The Vikings were not “pagan” but believers in the supernatural power of Thor and other deities.

To see how this double standard works, let us suppose that archaeologists working in the Levant reported on the burials and grave goods of early Christians and these goods included ritual items such as crosses.  We would not say the crosses were “talismans” or these people were “superstitious.”  Nor would we characterize the ideas surrounding these symbols as “folk beliefs” or the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection as a mere “legend.”

We would say the crosses were ritual objects buried with people whose religion was Christianity.  We should characterize these thunderstones and the Vikings’ beliefs in the same way.

All this aside, these kinds of burials — clearly deliberate and including symbolic grave goods — amount to something like an archaeological gold standard for identifying mortuary practices connected to belief in spirits and souls.  This is an important issue for the Middle and Upper Paleolithic burials that many interpret as a sign of proto-religious beliefs.