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.

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/>.

One of my favorite scholars of religion, Craig Martin, commented to the contrary: “I’m unconvinced that paranormal phenomena (if they exist) have anything to do with what we call religion. It’s quite possible that psi phenomena are real, but I think those cultural traditions we call religious can be explained without any reference to psi phenomena whatsoever.”

In the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion’s September 2010 issue, Joseph Baker and Scott Draper studied the relationship between religiosity and paranormal beliefs.  What they found was that there is no simple correlation between religious and paranormal beliefs; rather, there is a correlation between particular types of religious beliefs and paranormal beliefs.

As a baseline, it should surprise no one that strict materialists are less religious and tend not to believe in paranormal phenomena.  Among those who believe in the supernatural/spiritual — but are open, tolerant, and nonexclusive about such matters — belief in the paranormal is quite high.  But among believers who adhere strictly to an organized and exclusive form of faith, belief in the paranormal is low.  Such matters are considered outside the ken of “normal” religion.

The authors’ findings are timely (in terms of my own questions) and make considerable sense.  It is nice to see them quantitatively confirmed.

Blom sets his book around the happenings of an exceptional Parisian salon — that of Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach — who hosted the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Denis Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophes – several of whom have largely been forgotten in the wake of what Blom considers to be the “sanitized” intellectual history of the period.

The true heavyweights of the salon, argues Blom, were far more mechanistic, godless, and atheistic than its better known members, several of whom have been appropriated and venerated by a metaphysically minded counter-Enlightenment.  It looks to be an informative and provocative read:

Even today, and even in secular western Europe, the bald and confident atheism and materialism of Diderot and Holbach seems mildly shocking. We still cling stubbornly to the idea of an animating soul, a spiritual ghost in the biological machine.

For Mr Blom, the modern, supposedly secular world has merely dressed up the “perverse” morality of Christianity in new and better camouflaged ways. We still hate our bodies, he says, still venerate suffering and distrust pleasure.

This is the message of Mr Blom’s book, hinted at but left unstated until the closing chapters. He believes the Enlightenment is incomplete, betrayed by its self-appointed guardians. Despite all the scientific advances of the past two centuries, magical thinking and the cultural inheritance of Christianity remain endemic.

Those are some fighting words and questionable ideas, but one thing is certain: humans will always cling to the idea of a soul and believe in magic.  Our brains naturally generate these ideas and religions run with them.

Artist's Impression of New Site

I have read most of the “woodhenge” articles posted on A&M’s site, and find it incredible that ninety percent of the area surrounding one of the most famous megalithic sites in the world has remained largely unexplored.  No wonder there are so many different theories and arguments about who built Stonehenge, why it was constructed, and how it was used.  If archaeologists have not even explored the immediately surrounding area, our lack of knowledge — and the proliferation of wild speculation — becomes more understandable.

Although Stonehenge was built over a considerable period of time and in phases, there is some consensus that it was largely in place by 2,500 BCE.  Who built it and why remain open research questions.  One thing is clear: Stonehenge is invested with heavy symbolism and may have variously served cosmological, ceremonial, and ritual purposes.  Whether these combined purposes amounted to a form of organized religion is another question altogether.  Contrary to popular belief, Stonehenge almost certainly was not associated with pagan Druids, who came much later and adopted the site.

What distinguishes Stonehenge from most other megalithic structures (aside from its distinctive architecture) is that it is not connected to any identifiable city-state or empire.  In most (if not all) other places where we find megalithic structures, they are associated with readily identifiable societies that are centralized, populous, agrarian, and stratified.  We know, for instance, that ziggurats were built by Sumerians and Babylonians, pyramids were built by Egyptians, temples were built by Mayans and Aztecs, etc.

Not so with Stonehenge, which adds immeasurably to its mystery.  Although there is evidence of medium-size settlements in the larger area surrounding Stonehenge during the time periods when it was constructed, these societies — which look more like autonomous villages that were usually stockaded for defense — seem quite unlike those societies that constructed other famous megalithic monuments.  Someone needs to organize, feed, and house the workers that build structures such as these, and in England the people responsible for the construction of Stonehenge remain unknown.

It has been suggested, however, that the medium-size settlements in the vicinity of Stonehenge were connected by chieftains and something like a royal family, perhaps related by blood and marriage.  This suggestion arises from the fact that Stonehenge and its surrounds served as a burial ground or “barrows” that apparently was limited to elites.  Over time, Stonehenge may have attracted other peoples for different reasons.

Whatever proves to be the case, which may be a long time coming or something that we never fully understand, this kind of anomaly complicates any scenario which posits that religion evolved in unilineal fashion in accord with underlying economic factors or social organization.

Although I had known that Lucretius advanced an atomic theory of matter that was remarkably similar to modern atomic theory, I did not know that he was a skeptical naturalist who provided a non-theistic account of prehistory that was astonishingly accurate.  Here is how David Sedley (writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) describes Book V of Lucretius’ work — this is simply amazing:

Lucretius envisages how life first emerged from the earth, and (an especially admired and influential reconstruction) 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?

There have been times in the past when I have thought that classical scholars need to look beyond the Greco-Roman world and cease their ancestor worship.  This is not such a case.  Here, we have a Greco-Roman philosopher whose work surely influenced many modern theorists (including Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Charles Darwin), but we seem to have forgotten him.

This forgetting was not accidental.  The conjoined weight of Platonic philosophy and Christian religion won out over Lucretius, and he was vilified by the early Christian church.  On the Nature of Things was lost — or deliberately hidden, until 1417 when an Italian scholar fortuitously discovered a complete ninth century manuscript of his work.  Much to the displeasure of ecclesiastical authorities, the manuscript was published in 1563.  We know that Hobbes and Hume read it, and I would not be surprised to learn that Darwin and Nietzsche also read it.

One correction needs to be made to Sedley’s interpretation of Lucretius: Darwin was not the originator of the phrase “survival of the fittest.”  That honor belongs to Herbert Spencer.

With the latter Hitchens in mind, I have not yet been able to bring myself to read his jeremiad, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  I read a fair amount of history, so don’t need Hitchens twisting the knife or re-stating the obvious.  Secular preaching to the atheist choir is not my cup of tea.

Hitchens’ latest object of scorn is a much more delicious target:  Prince Charles, whom Hitchens hilariously calls the “prince of piffle.”  You can find Hitchens’ broadside over at Slate, and here are some choice excerpts:

So the speech made by Prince Charles at Oxford last week might bear a little scrutiny. Discussing one of his favorite topics, the “environment,” he announced that the main problem arose from a “deep, inner crisis of the soul” and that the “de-souling” of humanity probably went back as far as Galileo. In his view, materialism and consumerism represented an imbalance, “where mechanistic thinking is so predominant,” and which “goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion.” He described the scientific worldview as an affront to all the world’s “sacred traditions.” Then for the climax:

“As a result, Nature has been completely objectified—She has become an it—and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.”

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant.  He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post.

The last sentence caught my attention, so I hit the hyperlink to read about this anthropologist whose name I have never once encountered after years of studying anthropology.  Van der Post sold millions of books and apparently was a charlatan.  When the mystic mixes with the anthropologist, it is the kind of thing that attracts a certain kind of crowd:

Van der Post was a Jungian mystic and a spiritual adviser to Prince Charles; according to British newspapers, he taught the prince to talk to his plants. In 1982 Charles made him godfather to his heir, Prince William. Van der Post was also a close friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, exerting an influence on her policy in South Africa.

He had a following in the United States as well. For several years, he gave the Advent sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The year he died, he attended a celebration of his work in Boulder, Colo., and 4,000 people came.

Four thousand credulous and worshipful souls in Boulder!  Unsurprising.  There is an ethereal, uncritical vibe in Boulder and the palpable feeling, easily discovered in any coffee shop or marijuana dispensary, that everything is alive and vaguely connected as universal soul.  I have nothing against such harmless harmony, but Hitchens sternly warns against the consequences of such peaceful and complacent love-think:

[As Prince Charles] paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of sharia, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. “The primary work” in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”

So this is where all the vapid talk about the “soul” of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The “vacuum” will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.

It is a long way from vapid talk of the soul to the establishment of a radical Islamic world empire, and one can reasonably disagree.  But the image Hitchens conjures with this line – credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran — is one for the ages.

Bell’s lecture (which I cannot believe he actually delivered; it would have taken hours) is a literary and intellectual tour de force, even if he gets many things wrong and his forecasts have missed the mark.  It is a perfect example of the kind of thing that happens when you combine an obviously brilliant mind with too much time in elite New York City intellectual circles and a long stint at Harvard.  This is an insular (and in some ways artificial) environment, where books and theory rule, and those immersed in it vastly overestimate the power of high culture and influence of the intellect.

Bell is clearly exorcised by an impressive host of thinkers, writers, poets, and philosophers, the majority of whom most people have never heard of let alone read.  Bell thinks he is diagnosing all of Western culture and civilization, when in fact he is diagnosing the concerns and preoccupations of a few, as if they somehow reflected the entirety of Western societies and cultures over the past 300 years.

Throughout the essay, Bell talks casually about “human universals” and “human nature,” though he seems to be ethnographically and evolutionarily illiterate.  He also seems to be infected with a sort of intellectual Janus disease, given his penchant for characterizing everything on his mind or which he discerns as “dual” and “double.”

Contrary to Bell’s guiding assumption, Western culture and history is not world culture and history.  Bell’s concept of traditional religion — which in typical (and wrong) Durkheimian fashion — holds society together, is a thinly veiled fantasy about how Christianity supposedly held the West together for thousands of years before the perilous and immoral onslaught of modernity and science.

In the end, I found myself agreeing with Bell only on a single point which he presents as a forecast — “the return of the sacred” and resurgence of religion:

If there are to new religions — and I think they will arise — they will, contrary to previous experience, return to the past, to seek for tradition . . . I do not know how these will arise, but I have some dim perception of the forms they may take.  The first [possible form] I would call moralizing religion.  Its roots and strength are in a Fundamentalist faith, evangelical and scourging, emphasizing sin and the turn away from the Whore of Babylon.

As is evident, Bell correctly predicted the resurgence of fundamentalism not only in United States, but elsewhere in the world — especially some Islamic parts of it.   This is what happens in the cultures of late capitalism, where mindless materialism and empty consumption rule, and when those cultures reach out to touch — and affect — other parts of the world, which must be integrated into the system.

But what of this “past” that Bell provincially speaks?  There is much more to history, culture, and humanity than the West.  History, thinking, and religion did not begin with the Greeks, as so many Western intellectuals mistakenly assume.

World cultures have a much deeper history and broader scope — as anthropology continuously attests.  A year or two of reading in ethnography, evolution, and archaeology would have done Bell much good (and resulted in a different lecture on religion, which is more than moralizing monotheism).  Isn’t it time to look beyond the parochial canon of classicism and shackles of sociological theory?

In the end, Bell seems to sense that he is operating in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere that may be — and in fact is — out of touch with “ordinary” people or what he calls “a large substratum of society” consisting traditionally of “farmers, lower-middle class, small town artisans, and the like.”

Yes, Daniel, there is life outside of New York, Harvard, Christianity, and the intelligentsia — all of which have far less influence, and importance, than you think.

This irony, or paradox if you will, is the legacy of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.  William Bouwsma, Professor of History at UC-Berkeley, has written perhaps the best account of these intellectual developments in his splendid book, The Waning of the Renaissance: 1550-1640.   As Bouswma notes (pp. 87-88), Renaissance skepticism and science had a particularly corrosive effect on religious belief:

In fact, much in the society and culture of the period was being, in various senses, “secularized.”  Increasing numbers of people now lived compartmentalized lives, ruled by religion in fewer and fewer aspects of their experience: by reason in science; by worldly calculation in economics; and by common sense in daily life.

Not much has changed in 400 years, except for the fact that the backlash against secularization — in the form of religious fundamentalism — has become particularly paranoid and hateful.  I was reminded of this while reading Nina Burleigh’s recent article “Science and Belief in Turin“:

What some people call the clash of civilizations is not a fight between Islam and the West but between science and faith. The religious rightists in America may want us to believe that they are different from the theocrats of Iran and the fundamentalists of Al Qaeda who teach their suicide bombers that they are targeting “infidel” Christians or Jews, but in fact, the dogmatically religious have more in common with each other than with non-believers.

We live in an age of intense materialism in which scientists are on the verge of understanding how the universe was formed, but we also live at a time of resurgent faith that remains as hostile to science as when Galileo was locked up for observing the centrality of the sun.

The context for Burleigh’s article is her research into the commerce of sacred relics and holy objects, “which have enormous meaning for believers around the world.”  Much of this meaning arises from the need of believers living in an empirical world to see or touch something which affirms the spiritual.  They need, in other words, material affirmations of their faith.

Burleigh’s article is worth reading, as is her book on this subject, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land.  Given the lucrative nature of this trade, potential buyers should heed the old adage: caveat emptor.