Society and the Death of God 2021001114, 2021001115, 9780367637675, 9780367637644, 9781003120605

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SOCIETY AND THE DEATH OF GOD

This book advances the “strong” programme that sociology and anthropology provide a scientific foundation for arguing that God and the gods are human creations. Contending that religion is one – but not the only – way to systematize and institutionalize the moral order of a society, the author argues that religion reflects the fundamental human need for belonging and the social function of compassion. As such, our transcendental and supernatural ideas are really concerned with our everyday lives in communities and, faced with the severity and immediacy of the global problems with which the world is confronted – existential threats – it is increasingly important to abandon delusions and correct our mistake in reference, not by eradicating religion, but by grounding it more explicitly in earthly matters of community, social solidarity, belonging, and compassion. A wide-ranging study of the roots, nature, and purpose of religion and theistic belief, Society and the Death of God will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, and philosophers with interests in the scientific study of religion and the role of religion in the life of humankind. Sal Restivo is former Professor of Sociology, Science Studies, and Information Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA; former Senior Fellow at the Center for Intercultural Communication and Interaction, University of Ghent, Belgium; and former Adjunct Professor of Technology, Culture, and Society, New York University, USA. A founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, he is the Editor of Science, Technology and Society: An Encyclopedia, the author of Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism; Science, Society and Values; and The Sociological Worldview, and co-author of Asphalt Children and City Streets and Worlds of ScienceCraft: New Horizons in Sociology, Philosophy, and Science Studies.

Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Religion

A platform for the latest scholarly research in the sociology of religion, this series welcomes both theoretical and empirical studies that pay close attention to religion in social context. It publishes work that explores the ways in which religions adapt or react to social change and how spirituality lends meaning to people’s lives and shapes individual, collective and national identities. Sacred Marriages A Discourse Analysis David F. Mullins A Visual Approach to the Study of Religious Orders Zooming in on Monasteries Edited by Marcin Jewdokimow and Thomas Quartier Bisexuality, Religion and Spirituality Critical Perspectives Edited by Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Alex Toft The Transformation of Religious Orders in Central and Eastern Europe Sociological Insights Edited by Stefania Palmisano, Isabelle Jonveaux and Marcin Jewdokimow Society and the Death of God Sal Restivo Polish Catholicism between Tradition and Migration Agency, Reflexivity and Transendence Wojciech Sadlon For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-the-Sociology-of-Religion/book-series/RRSR

SOCIETY AND THE DEATH OF GOD

Sal Restivo

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Sal Restivo The right of Sal Restivo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Restivo, Sal P., author. Title: Society and the death of God / Sal Restivo. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in the sociology of religion | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021001114 (print) | LCCN 2021001115 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367637675 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367637644 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003120605 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Religion and sociology. | God. Classification: LCC BL60 .R485 2021 (print) | LCC BL60 (ebook) | DDC 306.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001114 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001115 ISBN: 9780367637675 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367637644 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003120605 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments: Standing on the shoulders of social networks

vi

Introduction

1

1 Some initial provocations in words and numbers

10

2 Genesis: Introduction to the book of God

38

3 To tell the truth

53

4 Foundations for a critical sociology of religions and the Gods

79

5 Assume the position: God proofs

99

6 Evidence redux

113

7 The end of God and the beginning of inquiry

119

8 The last chapter of God

129

9 Personal quest redux, summary, and review

147

10 Reading Hans Küng: The last chapter of theology162 Bibliography179 Index189

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

God is indeed a jealous godHe cannot bear to see That we had rather not with Him But with each other play. Emily Dickenson (#1719) In concluding my studies of the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry I introduced the slogan: if you give me a genius I will give you a network. NonEuclidean mathematics did not emerge out of nothing, it was not created independently by three isolated geniuses on the periphery of the mathematical community as had been claimed by such illustrious students of mathematics as Carl Boyer and Dirk Struik. Later, in my study on Einstein’s Brain I refined this slogan to read: give me a genius and I will give you a social network. This was a reconstruction of the classic metaphor, standing on the shoulders of giants. I stand on the shoulders of a set of intersecting social networks representing various disciplines and traditions. I have not been an assertive networker but rather a lucky one. Thanks to being in the right places at the right times with the right people, and perhaps by way of good works, I met and became friends with some of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. I did not seek nor was I the recipient of the public accolades showered on them and on some of my colleagues. I often felt in talking with them and while reading their works and those of other scholars the way the great jazz pianist Oscar Petersen said he felt when he heard Art Tatum play: “Why should I bother?” He cried and stopped playing piano for a couple of weeks. Les Paul heard Tatum and stopped playing piano and turned to the guitar. I felt this way when I read the works of Michael Taussig and Terry Eagleton, for example. And I feel this way when I read my own book on The Social Relations of Physics,

Acknowledgments: Standing on the shoulders of social networks vii

Mysticism, and Mathematics (1983). I’m as intimidated by that book in reflexive retrospect as are some of my colleagues. Since I first discovered it, I have been fond of quoting the mathematician Simon Stevin’s (1548–1620) “Wonder en is Gheen Wonder,” magic (mystery, miracle) is no magic (no mystery, no miracle). My relation to my social network sometimes seems like a miracle to me. I have discussed quantum mechanics in my living room with my friend, David Bohm, and the history of Chinese science with my friend and longtime correspondent Joe Needham. I managed to become friendly with the “father” of the sociology of science, Bob Merton. I learned a lot about methodology and the design of experiments from my friends Donald Campbell, Milton Rokeach, and Sylvan Tomkins. I had the honor of knowing and learning from the late anthropologists Mary Douglas and Margaret Mead; communication theorist and sociologist Everett Rogers; sociologists Bernard Rosenberg, one of my college instructors, Bernard Barber, one of the founders of the sociology of science, and Hilary Rose, a comrade in the radical science movement along with my friends Jerry Ravetz, Les Levidow, and Rita Arditti, one of the founding members of Science for the People. I had enlightening conversations during the early years of the science studies movement with the irritatingly brilliant philosopher Joe Agassi. I learned valuable lessons in life and scholarship at City College of New York from historian Aaron Noland (“I am a Proudhon man”; he also taught me how to wear Brooks Brothers clothes in the interest of socialism), English professor and pillar of the Armenian community Leo Hamalian, and my mentor anthropologist Burt Aginsky (who studied under Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber). I had similar experiences with my graduate instructors in sociology, social psychology, and historiography at Michigan State University: Jim McKee, Jay Artis, Frank Camilleri, Bill Form, Vince Salvo, my mentors John and Ruth Hill Useem, and my tutor in historiography, Richard Sullivan. Herb Karp was my instructor, friend, and collaborator. He was a dialysis patient and died shortly after I left graduate school. Chris Vanderpool, whom I worked with on parallel dissertations under the direction of John Useem, died while still young professor teaching in the department he earned his PhD in, Michigan State. And my co-star as “best graduate student” was, for a brief moment until he transferred, Jaber Gubrium. Jaber went on to a successful career as a sociologist of health and aging and we are still in touch after all these years. The Marxist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematician Dirk Struik was one of my behind the scenes supporters. We met in person only once, at his 103rd birthday celebration. Dirk was born in 1894 and died in 2000. The philosopher of science Mario Bunge was also one of my early champions. There are several scholars’ scholars in my network: my friends Jens Hoyrup, a truly amazing historian of ancient mathematics and a wonderful host whether in his Copenhagen apartment or on the balcony of his apartment in Rome; Jean Paul Van Bendegem; and Lewis Pyenson, philosopher and historian of science extraordinaire, respectively. Lew and I have traveled paths in the academy that often ran in parallel and sometimes converged. Peter Denton,

viii  Acknowledgments: Standing on the shoulders of social networks

renaissance man, the smartest, funniest minister on the planet, has been a friend and collaborator since 1999 when we met at a Templeton Foundation workshop in Toronto. There are many others in my network who deserve the epithet “scholars’ scholar” but who were more localities than cosmopolitans. My closest friend while I was a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) was the philosopher John Schumacher, as brilliant as anyone in my network but a localite by temperament. Pancreatic cancer took his life too soon, too soon. I urged him to publish his ideas and was privileged to publish his Human Posture: The Nature of Inquiry in 1989 as editor of the SUNY Press series on science, technology, and society. I sent the manuscript to the Jesuit priest, physicist, and philosopher of science Patrick Heelan, then at SUNY Stony Brook, for review. His remarks appear on the back cover of John’s book. In his letter to me and the SUNY Press board, Heelan wrote that the book belonged on our bookshelves next to the works of Merleau-Ponty. But John’s fame as a scholar and above all as a great teacher would remain local. We were working on a sociological generalization of Einstein’s clock synchronization thought experiment when he died. Michael Zenzen was an equally brilliant RPI philosopher of science and was my co-author on one of the early contributions to the ethnography of science. Linnda Caporael, brilliant friend, RPI colleague, and dinner companion, actually taught me stuff! And I learned many things from my more psychologically and philosophically inclined friend, RPI colleague, and hang out partner Ellen Esrock. The philosopher of science Cliff Hooker, an occasional correspondent over the years, was a more public presence in the academy but not a fan of the academy or academics. His brilliance too shines brightly. Sociologist Julia Loughlin, my companion for some 20 years between 1980 and the early 2000s, a collaborator, interlocutor, and provocateur in my sociology of science, had a command of the sociological cogito to conjure with. Her sociological command of everyday social life far exceeded my own, and she was one of the pioneering feminist sociologists of science. I owe more than I can say or repay to Leslie Brothers. Leslie introduced the modern concept of the social brain into the core neuroscience literature in 1990 and tutored me on all things mind and brain for many years in Santa Monica and on email. I know of no one with a better mind and a greater capacity to focus on a problem than Leslie. These acknowledgements stand with those in my earlier books whose names and influence I do not rehearse here. And I wish Marie DeLio and Mr. Sanders (public school 162 in Brooklyn), and Mr. Quinn (my electrical engineering mentor at Brooklyn Technical High School) could see me now. I developed many friendships in the science studies movement. Many of those who were with me in the beginning are gone, notably Nick Mullins. I have maintained close friendships with Steve Woolgar who never quite got what I do (he was infected with ethnomethodology) and Karin Knorr who understood my goals and contributions better than most; and of course Daryl Chubin and Marcel LaFollett who were instrumental in getting the Society for Social Studies

Acknowledgments: Standing on the shoulders of social networks ix

of Science and its publications off the ground, and Wes Shrum, perennial secretary, who sustained the Society for many years. I rehearse these relationships to remind myself that I have been an amateur among professionals. Whatever professional success I have achieved, it has been by wearing out the path of least resistance. This was designed to ensure that I could follow my scholarly pursuits in line with the highest standards without being burdened by or distracted by the formalities of everyday and professional life. My ambitions have been modest to say the least. I have never had the least interest in climbing out of the professorial ranks into the black hole of administration. I have since childhood desired invisibility, to be left alone. I resisted being monitored, judged, evaluated, and assessed by others whether they were supervisors, colleagues, or physicians, I resisted being judged and judging others. I wanted nothing to do with the madding crowd, and if I was going to speak up my ideas were such that it was going to be as a voice in the wilderness. I recall an occasion early in my career when I was at dinner with one of my dearest friends in the science studies movement, Karin Knorr. I had earlier given one of my first talks on the sociology of mathematics in the department of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. Karin, already a stunning star in the field, pounded the table at one point and practically yelled at me, “You have to FIGHT!” Not my style. I didn’t enjoy the spotlight but I did derive some pleasure in being the center of attention. This just made it easier for me to negotiate social relationships but it also exposed me to criticisms by for the most part lesser minds. I have been accused of making claims, having fun, and not offering arguments And this may be true in the sense and to the extent that I considered my knowledge of things to be self-evident. I overheard a graduate student say to another graduate on seeing me from afar engaged in conversation with a third graduate that “arguing with Sal is like arguing with a brick wall.” To the extent that this is true it reflects the fact that the grounds of and the warrants for the things I know are in fact the thick and wide ranging brick walls of a recalcitrant reality. If I were speaking physics, I would not have been considered a brick wall. And I have also had fun, no apologies! Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play. Nietzsche (1989/1886: 83) And finally, there is Randall Collins. Randy and I have been friends for more than forty years. We have collaborated and exchanged hundreds of pages of notes and papers. His scholarly achievements rise like a Gibraltar above mine and I find it hard to imagine what it has been like to be Randy and to produce his body of work. I may complain about old age, but I am in good health for someone who will be approaching his 81st birthday by the time this book is published. However, I am clearly drifting further and further away from my “glory years.” I owe a very different network for nourishing and reinforcing my love of physical fitness. As a young man, I worked out with world and Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting champions including Gary Gubner and my friend, colleague and

x  Acknowledgments: Standing on the shoulders of social networks

occasional spotter at the Shelton Towers Hotel health club (now defunct, formerly at Lexington Avenue and 48th Street in Manhattan) Ike Berger. Walter Podolak, who wrestled under the name The Golden Superman, was a friend and I had the privilege of knowing speed bag champion Joe Pasco. I owe all of them some thanks for their roles in encouraging my fitness interests. My father, Phil, was an amateur boxer and he introduced me to fitness as a way of life, in addition to fostering my interrogative approach to life, the universe, and everything. I did not train and educate many graduate students during my career but the one’s I did choose to work with were all outstanding, each exceptional in his or her own way. I want to acknowledge them here, both those whose committees I served on and those who I served as major advisor. I collaborated with some of them-Jennifer Croissant, Wenda Bauchspies, Monica Mesquita, and Bart Van Kerkhove. They joined others who went on to careers in the academy: Rachel Dowty, Azita Hirsa, Zaheer Baber, Ayala Cnaan, and Jill Fisher for example; others went into the corporate world, notably Gil Peach, Colin Beech, and my brilliant Masters student Peter Bellomo. Sabrina Weiss was the last graduate student I trained. We collaborated on lectures and co-authored Worlds of ScienceCraft ( Restivo, Weiss & Stingl, 2016). We irritated each other as mutually admired embodiments of a biology-sociology dialectic. I retired before I could see her to the end of her PhD. The word “brilliant” comes to mind when I think of her. She left the academy and now educates young versions of her “genius” self. At a late stage in our collaboration on Worlds of ScienceCraft brought the young scholar Alex Stingl in as a co-author. Alex has bounced around the academic world without yet having found a place to settle, not the least in my view because he is one of the most intellectually gifted sociologists of his generation. I can’t remember all of those whose committees I sat on as a member but I want to thank you one and all for teaching me. I want to thank my partner (and wife by the time this is published) Wendy who came into my life while I was engaged in this project in earnest and before COVID-19 forced us to shelter-in. Trained as an electrical engineer in China, she wasn’t able to pursue a professional career in the United States. She has been an emotional rock in my life in ways no other woman has ever been. And I learned more than I thought was possible from my sons David and Daniel, and for all of the challenges in our marriage I learned a lot about life and culture from their deceased mother, Valerie. The light is still bright but clearly fading. There is something terribly symbolic and ironic about the fact that I am engaged in driving the last nails into the Old One’s coffin in this moment. It may be that the only way to truly kill God once and for all is to give up the ghost one’s self. I realize that this is a futile effort in the short run. Let’s be clear before we begin this journey in earnest. It is hard to kill God because society is threatened by his death. And where society has learned or is learning to live without Him, many individuals still require His glue to keep their selves from fragmenting. Spiritual lives for individuals have become the functional equivalent of religious lives for communities. Society may find its new God in the process of secularization. The individual requires greater

Acknowledgments: Standing on the shoulders of social networks xi

self-esteem, a stronger sense of self, a less fragile attitude in the face of the void, the abyss, nothingness, the infinite and the meaninglessness of it all in order to swim in the secular ocean. The bibliography includes starred items. These are books that have played a critical part in my education as a sociologist of religion. I urge the reader if possible to read these books before reading my book. My claims and arguments, my perspective, will then be less of a strain on the reader’s ability to understand the rationale behind my book and its claims. I thought I might write the word “God” with a small “g” throughout the text. In the end I decided to use the capital “G” and the small “g” based on context. I can’t promise that my usage in any given case will be transparent but I could not find a strong enough rationale to use “god” throughout. Finally, this book explains why I have concluded that it is certain that there is no God. For others, I hope this book will leave them at least with reasonable doubt.

INTRODUCTION

The problem of Socrates It is June 4, 2020 as I write this. I am living in interesting times. To live in interesting times is widely understood as a curse that originated in China. No one has been able to find just that quote in the Chinese literature. The closest expression in Chinese is “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.” This expression appears in Volume 3 of Feng Menglong’s Stories to Awaken a World, published in 1627. Whatever the phrase and whatever the source, I write this triply embedded in interesting times. First, I have been sheltered-in for months in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Venturing out for a walk or to shop in my low-density neighborhood in Queens, New York has involved putting on a mask, wearing safety gloves, and maintaining social distance. Second is the murder of George Floyd, an African American male, by a Minneapolis policeman, Derek Chauvin. Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground following a minor infraction by kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes, killing him. This was caught on video and viewed worldwide. It led to protests across the United States and around the world. Inevitably, peaceful protests drew in agents of violence, looting, setting fires, and provoking the police. Some of the violence has been caused by what we came to call “outside agitators” in the 1960s, some has been opportunistic. The protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. The third piece of my interesting times is the illiterate and illegal presidency of Donald J. Trump; illegal because he has openly violated or threatened to violate various provisions of the US. Constitution, most recently by threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and order the US armed forces to bring “law and order” to streets crowded with peaceful demonstrators exercising their first amendment rights. This was so outrageous that his own secretary of defense and several former secretaries of defense spoke publicly in opposition to his threat.

2  Introduction

In this moment, weeks before an election in which he trails his opponent by wide margins, he is threatening the democratic process itself by refusing to commit himself to a peaceful transition of power if he loses. This is to say nothing about his insane claims about COVID-19, a virus he himself has now contracted. Illiterate? Read my tweets! Given problems with mailed ballots, voter suppression, the fight over replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, and threats that Trump will resist leaving office if he loses, the looming November 3rd election promises to inaugurate a cultural revolution. And indeed as I correct these pages, the Biden/Harris ticket has won the election and Trump has refused to concede or engage in a traditional transition process. I am not out protesting, I am not out committing acts of violence, and I am more or less patiently waiting for an end to the Trump presidency. I have been sheltered-in and that might be said to be my default lifestyle. I have been a loner, a home body, and a horrified observer of the human condition from afar. Nonetheless, I have managed to walk on the Great Wall of China, drive on the Adriatic highway along the western border between Split and Dubrovnik and managed to avoid driving off the road in view of the many panoramic moments. This is a very dangerous two-lane highway with many blind curves and very few guard rails. The cliffs down to the Adriatic are littered with wrecks. I had this little adventure during the days when signs of civil war were already emerging. I’ve driven through a snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains, tornadoes in the Midwest, lectured in Norway during a 24-hour day some 220 miles south of the Arctic Circle, and have had various adventures across Europe, Canada, China, and Brazil. These pale by comparison with my colleagues’ and friends’ adventures; climbing the Himalayas, taking nine-hour train trips across India in pursuit of a dissertation, living among strangers in Africa and the Amazonian rain forest, or skiing down mountain slopes in Switzerland. My adventures are tame but stand out because of my tendency to shelter-in and avoid risks. If there were a risk gene (there isn’t!), I would be missing it. These adventures have added some substance to my cerebral voyeur’s perspective on the human condition and my experiencing life through books. Who I am matters for my understanding of God. My approach to life, the universe, and everything has been primarily cerebral in part because my class background didn’t encourage bodily engagements with the world or give me access to the resources for travel and study available to my more privileged peers. It’s no surprise that I took more readily to theory than to empirical studies. The journey I am about to take you on will imperfectly reproduce my journey to understand God. It will not follow a straight and narrow path; I am going to lead you through a jungle of ideas, concepts, and theories. This is the jungle I have lived in all my life. There will be rocky roads, rivers and oceans, deserts, we will climb up, we will climb down, we will get side-tracked and momentarily lost, we will back-track. We will encounter labyrinths. The nature of the narrative will shift. And whatever theories and methods may be guiding us they are rooted in the sociology of the street, the reality of crossing streets without

Introduction 3

getting hit by a car. The sociology of the street is the beginning of all necessity; we will be, to paraphrase Nietzsche, plumbing the depths of the surface. I will not be distracted by the mathematics of quantum mechanics and the complexities of causality at different levels of reality; I will not be stifled by the mathematics of multiple universes. Amidst all these complexities, often more mathematical than real, I want to know how to navigate my world of streets, cars, and pedestrians, buildings, weather, and everyday clocks. This in fact is where God lives, in the practices of everyday life. My earliest memories already put me in the company of the most skeptical and pessimistic philosophers. Life has at times terrified me. Fortunately, my reaction has been dictated by a stoic realism. I think, though, life terrifies everyone at some time in their lives, but they veil their terror in drugs, alcohol, and various obsessions from sex to money to various adrenaline provoking activities. I haven’t had to follow such a route, but I have lived Nietzsche’s (1889/1966: 29) “problem of Socrates:” In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life; it is worthless…Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound – a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life. Even Socrates said as he died: To live – that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to the savior Asclepius. Asclepius was the son of Apollo and, according to the earliest accounts, a mortal woman named Coronis. She was unfaithful with Ischys, a mortal. Apollo came to know this with his prophetic powers and killed Ischys. Plato tells us in Phaedo of the tradition of giving a cock to Asclepius upon recovering from an illness. Socrates’ life was an illness. Albert Camus (1913–1960) made the bold claim that there is no meaning to life, and we can’t even really make one up. Any effort to do so can only end in disaster. The problem of the fundamental absurdity of life will overwhelm any effort to find meaning in science, philosophy, art, society, or religion. The best we can do is to enjoy sunshine, women [or men], beaches, kissing, dancing, sports, and good food. Life is meaningless but it can be enjoyable. Meaninglessness is just part of the background of life, and like gravity must simply be reckoned with (Adorno, 2003: 284): The logical figure of the absurd, which presents as stringent the contradictory opposite of stringency, negates all the meaningfulness logic seems to provide in order to convict logic of its own absurdity: to convict it of using subject, predicate, and copula to lay out the nonidentical as though it were identical, as though it could be accommodated with forms. Very early in my life, I found myself without a rationale for following the rules of everyday life and patterns of “growing up.” The purpose of my life came down to avoiding pain and suffering as much as possible. This insured that for all my

4  Introduction

love of Nietzsche I could never be like him. The next step was to avoid any kind of labor I didn’t want to engage in. I would find my precocious philosophy of life mirrored later in life in Camus’ answer to the meaninglessness of life. In college I found reasons to keep the option of suicide in my back pocket. It was a logical conclusion of something I called “existential utilitarianism.” Later I found my thoughts echoed and reinforced by Zarathustra’s remarks on “voluntary death” and the thoughts of the “moral doctor” (Appendix A). They are included here as provocations not as unqualified endorsements. And now, on the threshold of my own expiration, and uncertain whether I will let it come “naturally” or by choice, I find what for the moment seems to be my last hurrah: a book about God in which I finally bury my nemesis. A wise friend once told me that I was obsessed with God because I couldn’t abide the idea of someone more powerful than me; or, more to the point, with power over me. Didn’t Nietzsche (1883–1885/1969: 110) say: “But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods.” It isn’t simply the resistance to a higher power I express; it is a resistance to masters who compel obedience and bended knee sometimes with their control of the most powerful means of violence. Neither masters nor gods, then (Guérin, 2005). Nor could I abide the cosmic indifference and unfathomableness of the universe. My thoughts were echoed in the following dialogue from Woody Allen’s movie, Annie Hall. A little boy, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen’s character as a child) is having an existential moment. His mother takes him to see Dr. Flicker, a psychiatrist. “Why are you depressed, Alvy?” Dr. Flicker asks. “The universe is expanding,” Alvy says. “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” “Why is that your business?” interrupts his mother. Turning to the psychiatrist, she announces, “He’s stopped doing his homework!” “What’s the point?” Alvy says. “What has the universe got to do with it!” his mother shouts. “You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” Dr. Flicker jumps in: “It won’t be expanding for billions of years, Alvy, and we’ve got to enjoy ourselves while we’re here, eh? Ha ha ha.” That’s why we have psychiatrists. They are here to distract us from a reality that can throw a wrench into the gears of life. What’s so great about life, about “civilization?” Those wisest of all ages have not denied the achievements signaled by “civilization” but have wondered if it has been worth the horrors and savagery it has been built upon. Was barbarism, was slavery, worth the blossoming of Greek culture, of the greatest achievements in the arts and sciences around the world? Marx was at best ambiguous; Nietzsche was sure it was worth it; so was John Stuart Mill. Auschwitz arose in the midst of a German culture many considered the acme of human achievement. Why should I bother doing my homework, Dr. Flicker? Why should I write this book? This book is less an argument that a review of matters of fact. One does not argue whether evolutionary theory is true or not; one does not argue about whether the earth is flat or an oblate spheroid wobbling in precession. One states

Introduction 5

the facts of the matter where they are known, granting that facts of the matter come with different warrants of certainty and degrees of closure; and the fact of the matter is that there is no God, there are no gods, there are no supernatural or transcendental beings, realms, or entities of any kind. It is also unlikely that there are aliens in this or some other universe. If there are, they have not yet announced themselves in unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings and abductions. These are human inventions designed to deal with abusive and traumatic events, especially sexual ones. And the nature of the encounters varies systematically with the times. The sightings in the 1950s are different from those of the 1980s and 1990s and the abductions are more frequent in relationship to the increasing visibility of and discussions of sexual abuse. In any case we know there is no God with the highest warrants of certainty. This is the goal of our journey. The end of the journey will not appear the same to all of my readers. What you see at the end of the journey will depend not on where you start the journey with me but on the world-view you bring to the starting point. Arguments for and against the existence of deities are as old as civilization. There are arguments against deities in the Vedas. The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism and are considered to be supernatural in origin (“not of man”). They were revealed as sounds and texts to meditating ancient sages. The Vedas have been passed down in oral traditions since the 2nd millennium BCE. The four Vedas are the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda. Each Veda has four subdivisions: Samhitas (mantras and benedictions), Aranyakas (rituals and ceremonies), Brahmanas (commentaries on the Aranyakas), and the Upanishads (meditation, philosophy, and spiritual knowledge). Some scholars add a fifth division, Upasanas (worship). Arguments for and against deities are found in all major civilizational tradition from the ancient Greeks to the medieval Japanese and Native Americans. Already in the most ancient traditions we find classic objections to deities such as the problem of evil and the “who designed the designer” gambit. Varieties of theists, atheists, and agnostics are scattered across the history of these arguments. One of the curious things about modern versions of these debates is that they take place in the shadow of Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) argued that a rational person should believe in God and live his/her life accordingly. If God doesn’t exist, your losses are finite (pleasures, luxuries, and so on). If God does exist your gains are infinite (life ever after in Heaven) and you avoid infinite losses (an eternity in Hell). This “wager” actually opened up new avenues of thought in probability theory and used primitive versions of decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism. It was an admission that we could not know with certainty whether there was a God or not. The curious result of this battle between certainty and uncertainty in the face of the implausibility of a deity is reflected in Richard Dawkins (2006) reluctance to claim straight out that there is no God. Indeed, he writes that the existence of God is highly unlikely. This is a recurring feature in the writings of God critics and theorists, thus leaving a sliver of hope for the believers.

6  Introduction

Let’s get some basic definitions out of the way here. Theists believe, atheists do not believe; gnostics know things, agnostics are not ready to take a position one way or the other; ignostics worry about the conceptual coherence of God; and apatheists worry about the practical significance of whether or not God exists. Dawkins distinguishes strong theists (know God exists); de facto theists (not absolutely certain but strongly believe God exists); theist leaners (very uncertain but inclined to believe); neither a theist or atheist (it is equally likely that God exists and that God doesn’t exist); atheist leaners (inclined to skepticism); de facto atheist (existence of God very unlikely but live as if He doesn’t exist); strong atheist (knows there is no God with the same certainty that Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung (1875–1961) knows there is a God). This variety frankly stuns me. It is as if there were seven positions on whether the Sun rises in the east; or on whether the earth is flat or an oblate spheroid wobbling in precession. This book reveals why I am stunned. My message does not have to penetrate to beliefs but to the practices of believers. I don’t have to get through theological arguments and logics nor step onto the soapboxes of militant secularists, atheists, and humanists to engage the general public; I just have to hold up a mirror to their practices so that perhaps they will start to think about why their practices do not match their professed beliefs.

Appendix A: Nietzsche on voluntary death and the moral doctor Voluntary Death Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: “Die at the right time!” Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra. To be sure, he who never liveth at the right time, how could he ever die at the right time? Would that he might never be born!–Thus do I advise the superfluous ones. But even the superfluous ones make much ado about their death, and even the hollowest nut wanteth to be cracked. Every one regardeth dying as a great matter: but as yet death is not a festival. Not yet have people learned to inaugurate the finest festivals. The consummating death I show unto you, which becometh a stimulus and promise to the living. His death, dieth the consummating one triumphantly, surrounded by hoping and promising ones. Thus should one learn to die; and there should be no festival at which such a dying one doth not consecrate the oaths of the living! Thus to die is best; the next best, however, is to die in battle, and sacrifice a great soul.

Introduction 7

But to the fighter equally hateful as to the victor, is your grinning death which stealeth nigh like a thief – and yet cometh as master. My death, praise I unto you, the voluntary death, which cometh unto me because I want it. And when shall I want it?—He that hath a goal and an heir, wanteth death at the right time for the goal and the heir. And out of reverence for the goal and the heir, he will hang up no more withered wreaths in the sanctuary of life. Verily, not the rope-makers will I resemble: they lengthen out their cord, and thereby go ever backward. Many a one, also, waxeth too old for his truths and triumphs; a toothless mouth hath no longer the right to every truth. And whoever wanteth to have fame, must take leave of honor betimes, and practise the difficult art of – going at the right time. One must discontinue being feasted upon when one tasteth best: that is known by those who want to be long loved. Sour apples are there, no doubt, whose lot is to wait until the last day of autumn: and at the same time they become ripe, yellow, and shriveled. In some ageth the heart first, and in others the spirit. And some are hoary in youth, but the late young keep long young. To many men life is a failure; a poison-worm gnaweth at their heart. Then let them see to it that their dying is all the more a success. Many never become sweet; they rot even in the summer. It is cowardice that holdeth them fast to their branches. Far too many live, and far too long hang they on their branches. Would that a storm came and shook all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree! Would that there came preachers of SPEEDY death! Those would be the appropriate storms and agitators of the trees of life! But I hear only slow death preached, and patience with all that is “earthly.” Ah! ye preach patience with what is earthly? This earthly is it that hath too much patience with you, ye blasphemers! Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honor: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early. As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just – the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death. Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth – and laughter also! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was he to disavow!

8  Introduction

But he was still immature. Immaturely loveth the youth, and immaturely also hateth he man and earth. Confined and awkward are still his soul and the wings of his spirit. But in man there is more of the child than in the youth, and less of melancholy: better understandeth he about life and death. Free for death, and free in death; a holy Naysayer, when there is no longer time for Yea: thus understandeth he about death and life. That your dying may not be a reproach to man and the earth, my friends: that do I solicit from the honey of your soul. In your dying shall your spirit and your virtue still shine like an evening after-glow around the earth: otherwise your dying hath been unsatisfactory. Thus will I die myself that ye friends may love the earth more for my sake; and earth will I again become, to have rest in her that bore me. Verily, a goal had Zarathustra; he threw his ball. Now be ye friends the heirs of my goal; to you throw I the golden ball. Best of all, do I see you, my friends, throw the golden ball! And so tarry I still a little while on the earth – pardon me for it! Excerpt from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche (orig. publ. 1883-85). Translator: Thomas Common Release Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #1998]

A moral for doctors The sick man is a parasite of society. In certain cases it is indecent to go on living. To continue to vegetate in a state of cowardly dependence upon doctors and special treatments, once the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, ought to be regarded with the greatest contempt by society. The doctors, for their part, should be the agents for imparting this contempt—they should no longer prepare prescriptions, but should every day administer a fresh dose of  disgust  to their patients. A new responsibility of ruthlessly suppressing and eliminating degenerate Life, in all cases in which the highest interests of life itself, of ascending life, demand such a course—for instance in favor of the right of procreation, in favor of the right of the right of being born, in favor of the right to live. One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death should be chosen freely,—death at the right time, faced clearly and joyfully and embraced while one is surrounded by one’s children and other witnesses. It should be affected in such a way that a proper farewell is still possible, that he who is about to take leave of us is still himself, and really capable not only of valuing what he has achieved and willed in life, but also of summing-up the value of life itself. Everything precisely the opposite of the ghastly comedy which Christianity has made of the hour of death. We should never forgive Christianity for having so

Introduction 9

abused the weakness of the dying man as to do violence to his conscience, or for having used his manner of dying as a means of valuing both man and his past!–In spite of all cowardly prejudices, it is our duty, in this respect, above all to reinstate the proper – that is to say, the physiological, aspect of so-called Natural death, which after all is perfectly “unnatural” and nothing else than suicide. One never perishes through anybody’s fault but one’s own. The only thing is that the death which takes place in the most contemptible circumstances, the death that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong time, is the death of a coward. Out of the very love one bears to life, one should wish death to be different from this—that is to say, free, deliberate, and neither a matter of chance nor of surprise. Finally let me whisper a word of advice to our friends the pessimists and all other decadents. We have not the power to prevent ourselves from being born: but this error – for sometimes it is an error – can be rectified if we choose. The man who does away with himself, performs the most estimable of deeds: he almost deserves to live for having done so. Society – nay, life itself, derives more profit from such a deed than from any sort of life spent in renunciation, anemia and other virtues, – at least the suicide frees others from the sight of him, at least he removes one objection against life. Pessimism pur et vert, can be proved only  by the self-refutation of the pessimists themselves: one should go a step further in one’s consistency; one should not merely deny life with “The World as Will and Idea,” as Schopenhauer did; one should in the first place deny Schopenhauer…. Incidentally, Pessimism, however infectious it may be, does not increase the morbidness of an age or of a whole species; it is rather the expression of that morbidness. One falls a victim to it in the same way as one falls a victim to cholera; one must already be predisposed to the disease. Pessimism in itself does not increase the number of the world’s decadents by a single unit. Let me remind you of the statistical fact that in those years in which cholera rages, the total number of deaths does not exceed that of other years. Excerpt from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche (orig. publ. 1883-85). Translator: Thomas Common Release Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #1998]

1 SOME INITIAL PROVOCATIONS IN WORDS AND NUMBERS

Existential angst: Terror incarnate If the very fact of your existence and the fact that you will cease to exist doesn’t terrify you, or hasn’t terrified you at some point in your life, you’re not paying attention. If the very fact that there is anything at all doesn’t terrify you, or hasn’t terrified you, you are not paying attention. I don’t think this is just a reflection of my personal experiences. We see evidence all around us of humankind’s silence in the face of death’s stare, self-destructive acts that keep death’s stare in the blind spots of everyday life or challenge death as if it is our equal; and levels of grief that contradict the belief that the dead are in a “better place.” Karl Marx paid attention and he had much more profound things to say about the results of paying attention than the abused slogan “Religion is the opium of the people” (see INTERVENTION, further on). Appendix B provides the reader with a macroscopic view of the global demography of religion. The death of God, the very critique of God, let alone the sociological discovery of God, are surely momentous events in our history. Why are people going on with their lives as if these momentous events hadn’t happened or as if they have no consequences? Could it be because we’ve all known all along at some level – at least we moderns – that there is no God? We all confront the terror of existing, existing at all, and disintegrating into the void forever. We do so in some way at different levels of self-awareness and consciousness. And we arrange our lives – not any way we please but within the constraints at the nexus of our biographies, cultures, and particular historical moments – to defend against this terror. Religion is one of the major ways humans have defended themselves. Some, like me, have defended themselves by cloaking themselves in the armor of knowledge. It is nonetheless possible – always corrigibly, tentatively, and progressively; never absolutely – to know things and to separate things that are true from things that are false. I do not

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 11

pretend that this is easy or transparent. But it is true that if you walk blindly into traffic as you cross New York’s Fifth Avenue at rush hour, your chances of being hit by a car, hit and injured or hit and killed, are one hundred percent. If, on the other hand, you look both ways and only cross when no traffic is in sight, all other things being equal, it is true that you will cross the street safely. This won’t work the same way in London where you had best look down at the instructions painted at the curb to determine which way to look. Crossing the street safely involves probabilities that range from 0–1. If we set the right conditions, we can make the probability that you will be hit by a car. That’s the truth we can achieve in the science of the street. We can collapse the probability of being killed to 1 by jumping off a skyscraper. This is the recalcitrance of reality that governs everyday life. Of course, the other reason the discovery of God has gone unnoticed and unremarked in the general population is that we have not found ways or contexts for delivering this message universally. Even the most scientifically robust findings of physics, chemistry, and biology cannot achieve universal communication, let alone understanding and acceptance. And the idea that God can’t be proved or disproved is baked into our cultural mythology pretty solidly. There are recalcitrant features of the world that show up in such mundane instances as crossing the street. Those features ensure that our efforts to survive and to inquire will reveal patterns, structures, and regularities that embody truths. This book is conceived, in this moment at least, as my last hurrah. To paraphrase Willie Nelson, I have one more song to write, bridge to burn, hill to climb, horse to ride, one more secret to divulge. This chapter previews ideas, concepts, and theoretical propositions that I will fill in with more detail in the chapters that follow. Diogenes Laertius (180–240CE; 1966, v.1: 333) wrote that “Plato has employed a variety of terms in order to make his system less intelligible to the ignorant.” This is one of the earliest acknowledgements of the practice of veiled writing. I discuss this millennia old practice further on. I will not use this strategy in this book. My narrative is not deliberately designed to speak to an audience of initiates and simultaneously to hide my meaning from the uninitiated. It does, however, speak in an educated language and often enough in a scholarly language. It is not my intention to resuscitate God, nor to clear a path for a new Supreme Being to ground our morality and provide a meaningful life for us. I am engaged in something like an Enlightenment of the Enlightenment project. My goal is not to end priesthoods, not to oppose the ecclesial powers that sustained the ancien régime. Enlightenment Reason has not been able to safely nail down God in His coffin, secularization has not suffocated Him; rather it has kept “Him” on life-support. Religious faith was certainly not absent in Enlightenment reasoners. Consider, for example, Newton and Voltaire, and deists like Paine and Jefferson. Even atheism and agnosticism have pumped oxygen into the Old One’s failing lungs. A true Enlightenment, a true mobilization of science and reason, must have as its objective the death of God, the destruction of the Supreme Being deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and the unequivocal rejection of

12  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

transcendentalism, immanentism, and the myths of the individual and free will. While secularists, atheists, and humanists were busy burying the old God, He outflanked them and returned on three fronts: the war on terror, the culture wars, and fundamentalism. And let me be clear about what this book is. I don’t intend it to be an argument per se; I don’t intend to insure its logical unfolding. I offer a journey. I echo Luther in a post-Marxian post-Durkheimian context. Commanded to renounce his writings by the Diet of Worms in 1521, he denied the authority of popes and councils and announced that his conscience was captive to the Word of God. His closing words, adapted from statements to the Diet, are widely known: “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.” I, standing on the shoulders of social networks and acting as a voice box for the accumulated wisdom and experience of those networks can only say: Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me networks of science and reason.

Intervention: Karl Marx (1818–1883) For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism. The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the altars and hearths,” i.e., for God and country] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man  [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality. The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.  Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But  man  is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is  the world of man  – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the  fantastic realization  of the human essence since the  human essence  has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their  real  happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 13

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun that revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the  criticism of religion  into the  criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics (Written: December 1843– January 1844. First published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 & 10 February, 1844 in Paris. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of RightIntroduction [Cambridge: 1970]).

Overture I am a sociological theorist with broad interdisciplinary training and interests. This book is a record of sociological and anthropological reflections on religions, gods, belief, and faith. I will not lead you on a straight path across a simple terrain. Rather, we’ll trek across a variety of landscapes, backtrack, follow distracting side trails but all with one goal in mind. That goal is to show why it is time to give up beliefs about and faith in transcendental, supernatural, spiritual realms, entities, and beings. I will be guided by a theoretical handbook. Theory is only theory if it is grounded in facts and warranted truths. If it isn’t grounded in facts and truths we are not dealing with theory but with unbridled speculation, philosophy without stop signs, or metaphysics and theology. The theories I advocate are grounded primarily in sociologically inflected historical facts and truths. I do not claim that these are incontrovertible or absolute. I do claim that the ones I rely on are sufficiently established and more closed than open to deeper inquiry. We can step on them with confidence that they will hold as we move to the next rung on the ladder of inquiry. I write with full awareness that practices are more important in the everyday lives of believers than beliefs. Beliefs and faith still provide support for practices as well as philosophical, theological, and metaphysical narratives and communications about religions and the gods. They also serve as final arguments in the face of scientific challenges: “It’s a question of faith, not science” is considered to be an unerring way to block scientific intruders. But belief and faith are behaviors and thus subject to sociological analysis. Sociologists of religions and the gods are faced with the enormous complexity of the world’s cultural and religious systems, a pluralism that seems to defy all efforts of the general theorist. I am faced by a Gibraltar of deities upon deities, cosmologies upon cosmologies, and cultures upon cultures. This is a perennial

14  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

dilemma in the encounter between the sociologist and history. The historian Alan Nevins (1962: 333) put it dramatically: “History stands in grimly majestic contrast to the puny weapons of the sociologist for measuring and classifying these facts; a Himalaya of iron and granite defying a few feeble pick-axes.” If we take into account Collins (1986), Nevins’ metaphor might have to be reversed – Collins brings a Himalaya of iron and granite sociological pick-axes to carve out a prediction of the future decline of the Russian empire. The actual prediction was constructed many years before it was published. What Voltaire said about love, that it names a thousand chimeras, is equally true of God, gods, and religion. Speaking anthropologically, religion is an “awkward and imprecise cross-cultural category” (Fowles, 2013: x), and “impossible to usefully and convincingly isolate or define” (Bloch, 2008: 2055). Trevelyan (1913: vi) cautioned that historians should of course generalize about causes and effects; but we are not physicists and should do our generalizing modestly. Raymond Aron (1961: 233) went so far as to describe history as the study of facts “foreign to any rule.” The historian Fritz Wagner described this approach as the application of “the axiom of uniqueness” (Anderle, 1964: 36; Koselleck, 2002: 57). If the axiom of uniqueness is accepted, generalizations will not be anticipated; methods, concepts, and theories will not be designed to reveal patterns and regularities, and historians will not be primed to generalize. Neither uniqueness nor randomness preclude order. Theory is the craft of interpreting the apparent chaos and diversity of our experiences and coordinating them with an explanatory structure (see Einstein, 1940: 488). That explanatory framework encompasses chaos and diversity as natural phenomena with rational profiles. The axiom of uniqueness is driven by and supports the myths of an individual self and an individual consciousness. Modesty in inquiry readily degenerates into a defense of unsystematic interpretation and reliance on rule-of-thumb and “common sense” methods. Indeed, even rules-of-thumb and common sense must be based on the assumption of an underlying and discoverable order in nature (Barnes, 1963: 361). I do not want to transform historians into sociological theorists. I do want to engage their research findings. If one is guided by the axiom of uniqueness one will not look for and one will not find patterns and structures. I am going to approach the history of religions and the gods as a resource pool of facts of the matter. I am not expecting absolute facts of the matter; I am expecting facts of the matter that are more and less transparently true, variously grounded, and variously warranted. If we consider the traditional role of the historian as the narrator of our human past, it is clear that his/her narration does not reconstruct history wie es ergentlich gewesen [ist] (von Ranke, 1956: 57; and see Collingwood, 1956: 130–131). Let’s examine the German phrase in context: Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukuenftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen: so hoher Aemter unterwindet sich gegenwaertiger Versuch nicht: er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 15

The role, commonly attributed to History, is to judge the Past, to instruct the Present, for the benefit of the Future: such a high (noble) role is not claimed for this essay: It aims simply to show how it really was. (trans. Knowles, 2005) Let’s be clear. There is no “thing in itself ” (ding an sich, Kant). There is a reality that exists outside of us but we can only access mediated accounts. What we experience through our senses is mediated by our cultures and the nature and limits of our sensory apparatuses. We can access truths in practice, or truths in use, reflections of reality that work for us in practice. The world we can access is closely coupled to the world we can’t access. We don’t have to have access to the cliff in itself to negotiate the cliff as we experience it so we don’t fall over the edge. But we do have to negotiate. We can’t behave any way we please without regard to consequences. The recalcitrance of the world in itself is the ultimate arbiter of the recalcitrance of the world we experience. “Imaginative reconstruction” is a “re-creative or interpretive art” (Gottschalk, 1963: vi). Croce (Peters, 2013: 25ff.; Croce, 2017) argued that history is not a science but at once an art and more than art. The historian must state what he/ she sees as the artist does. Indeed, Croce understood history as autobiography. Collingwood (1956: 190–194), on the other hand, insisted that the historian, unlike the artist, must assure himself that what he sees is truth. Art and science are not “two separate and logically incompatible paths to understanding” (Hughes, 1960: 20). Art in inquiry refers to the intuitive and imaginative aspects of (1) selecting and formulating problems, and (2) organizing categories and classifications. What Kaplan (1964: 3–11) referred to as logics-in-use are kin to tacit and implicit knowledge. Realistically, science – inquiry – proceeds in the “wildness of logic” where reason is the handmaiden and not the master (Morse, 1959: 58). These are some of the historians I relied on in my early efforts to link my work to history and sociology in the classic tradition. Postmodern sociology of science has reinforced the work of classic historians who promoted a diverse and complex view of the historian’s craft and subject matter. That complexity and diversity was incorporated in the works of the founding sociologists, notably by Max Weber. My training and education as a sociologist was deeply rooted in the classical concern among the founding sociologists (notably Marx, Weber, and Durkheim) for historical social structures. Later, in graduate school, their perspectives were strongly reinforced in me through the works of C. Wright Mills. Their vision is an important driving force motivating my study of religions and the gods.

A dangerous profession Writing about religions and gods can be a dangerous occupation whether you write scholarly treatises or novels. Salman Rushdie was subjected to death threats

16  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

in the wake of the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses (1988). In 1989 Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. The result was numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings due to what Muslim’s viewed as Rushdie’s blashphemy. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) provoked a lot of controversy but he did not have to go into hiding or assume a new identity to protect himself from assassins. However, the author and activist Kathleen McGowan received death threats in the wake of defending Ron Howard and the production of the film version of Brown’s Angels and Demons. Most authors in the contemporary Christian world are generally able to write critically about religion without worrying about death threats. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t issued from time to time as real or intimidating threats. Authors of monographs on Islam, on the other hand, seem more inclined to adopt pseudonyms to avoid threats of violence (Christoph Luxenberg and Ibn Warraq, for example). In any case, historically, dangers have lurked for critics of religious traditions. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Inquisitors not for criticizing the Catholic canon per se but for defending an alternative paradigm. We can ourselves still hear the echoes of the headlines announcing the assassinations at Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015. The members of the thinking classes have always worked in the shadow of the barbarians at the gates. As a writer, as a scientist, as a thinker, I have been haunted by the image (considered apocryphal by historians) of the first emperor of a unified China (221 BCE) burying as many as seven hundred scholars alive. These scholars are sometimes referred to as Confucians but that school had not yet emerged; those killed would have been alchemists. It doesn’t matter whether this is apocryphal because the emperor, like future rulers local, regional, national, and international, certainly engaged in book burning and the suppression of free speech, activities endemic to governments. A more potent image is that of Socrates, put on trial and sentenced to death in 399 BCE for corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and for disbelieving in the state gods. Bruno and Socrates are carved into the Mt. Rushmore of thinkers. With our very lives at stake, why do we write, why do we think? Thomas Wolfe and Nietzsche are two of the authors who have inspired me to write, write, and write no matter what, and to think, think, and think no matter what. This is what we do because this is who we are. We are not working or following a professional career; we are drawn to a calling. There are many prejudices and uncritical assumptions we need to eliminate in order to grasp the nature of religion and the gods. One of the most serious of these is that the alternative to miracles is a physical or natural science explanation. This approach assumes that a reported miracle is about some event that actually happened. So, for example, if a text narrates the parting of the Red Sea, the physical or natural scientist assumes that this was an historical event that was reported accurately but that exceeded the powers of explanation in the observers. As scientists, the explainers automatically eliminate a miraculous cause. In its place

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they put a known physical or natural process that could explain the reported event – in this case, for example, an earthquake. When Jesus walks on water, the “scientific explanation” (assuming the event was an historical reality) is that the water was frozen or that he walked on a levee. Once we have social science, we can see that miracle narratives are allegorical and symbolic, not objectively historical. The social science explanation would be that the allegory, the symbolic narrative, is about Jesus, indeed, walking on a levee in order to reach a baptismal boat and to claim for himself the traditionally hereditary role of the priest. Notice that the physical and natural scientists never question whether Jesus was real or not and whether or not there was a real “walk on water” event. They are not prepared to understand the narrative as an allegorical way of criticizing the traditional role of the priesthood.

Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon: Case studies in reading religion – Jesus, Muhammad, Joseph Smith: Case studies in reading prophets The major world religions have ancient origins. One of the youngest modern religions is Mormonism. Its origins and the facts of the matter about its history are much clearer than they are for Christianity, or Buddhism, or any of the other world religions. Mormonism is as much a construction of personal, political, and manipulative agendas as any other religion only more open to scrutiny given its more recent origins. It is as much a fantasy of illusionary bricks and mortar as any religion but its canon lacks the sophistication of the classical scriptures. It is parasitic and derivative, nourished by the historical power of Christianity. Mormonism ( Jacobson, Hoffman, and Heaton, 2008) emerged in the United States in the 1820s. When it comes to the history of Mormonism we do not have to depend on archeology, reconstructing, interpreting, and interpolating missing texts, partial texts, and multiple translations of key texts. It has never been more clear that the Emperor has no clothes. Mormonism emerged during America’s Second Great Awakening, reaching its peak between 1800 and 1820. This Protestant revivalist movement began to decline in the 1840s. The movement is generally thought to be a reaction to the emergence of religious skepticism, deism, and rational Christianity. It was in the midst of this period of millennialism and evangelical exuberance that Joseph Smith, Jr. moved from his birthplace in Sharon, Vermont to western New York, an area of great religious enthusiasm. His father was an unsuccessful merchant and farmer. His mother and father disagreed about religion but both had visions or dreams of communications with God. Smith was already interested in religion by the age of 12 but worried about the state of his soul in the midst of the competing religious claims by various denominations. In this environment it was almost inevitable that Smith would be visited by visions. In 1820, he had the “First Vision” of God and Jesus as two separate individuals. This helped resolve his confusion and established one of the key differences between Mormonism

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and traditional Christianity. Guided by the voice of God, Smith set about establishing the “true” Christianity, codified in the Book of Mormon. The Church of Christ (later the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) was formally established in 1830. Visions of God or Jesus or the Buddha or the Virgin Mary are no more indications of a real entity than my four- or five-year-old self “seeing” Santa Claus meant that there was a real Santa Claus (my experience was purely imaginary since I was in bed with both parents during this event and what I saw could not have been my father or mother, or anyone else dressed up as Santa Claus). Understanding what is possible or probable should be the starting point for an assessment of any event or process. If someone claims to have seen Elvis eating at McDonald’s yesterday, you should know that this is transparently impossible insofar as it involves a real Elvis returned from the dead. This is a prejudice of the educated. There are two processes at work in Smith’s case, viewed from the perspective of rational science or critical rationality. One is a generalized tendency to seek cognitive consistency in one’s experiences. The other is the failure to understand that the realities of hallucinations, visions, and dreams are not external signals or communications from our or other worlds but the result of internal neurophysiological phenomena (which of course can be triggered by external events). The “voice of God” instructed Smith in the translation of records written in an ancient language on golden plates that Smith claimed he had discovered. When I was 14 years old, the voice of God informed me that there was a God and there was a life after death. I woke up in the morning and was frightened to see that I couldn’t move. I heard the voice and then was able to move. I didn’t understand what was going on immediately since I’d never heard of aural hallucinations or the association of hallucinations with temporary paralysis. God also instructed Smith that True Christianity was to find itself in the Church of Christ. In the wake of these developments Smith and his followers were driven out of New York to Ohio and Missouri. In Missouri, following various conflicts, the governor issued an “extermination order” The Mormons fled to Illinois where they lived peacefully until conflicts with non-Mormons escalated once again. In 1844, Smith was killed by a mob. Brigham Young succeeded Smith as the new leader of the largest group of Mormons, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and settled in the future Utah territory. Early Mormons understood the Book of Mormon as the religious history of the indigenous peoples of the America’s. Nothing could be clearer to the historian, psychologist, and sociologist of this period than Smith’s mobilization of local resources in a context of religious exuberance and conflict to resolve his confusing experiences. The forces behind his visions were cognitive and status consistency. His cognitive state mirrored the state of the union. At the same time, we are dealing with a clever, criminal con man suffering from schizophrenia. The psychiatrist R.D. Anderson (1999) argues that Smith suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. He describes the Book of Mormon

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as literally an autobiography produced in a rapid process of spontaneous free association. The details of Mormonism pale in the light of Smith’s biography. His reports of visions and golden plates are the ramblings of a person consumed by schizophrenia and manifested in the practices of a con man. But mad or sane, consciously or not, Smith draws on, manifests, and exploits the cultural resources of the world around him. He embodied a national search for consistency in the promise of America, her standing in the world, her destiny. Belief in God and Jesus Christ drove a sense of promise and freedom that was fed by and fed in turn the emergence of the idea of American exceptionalism. In the hands of Smith, and through the actions of his fantastic creation, the Lamanites, America was transformed from the “howling wilderness” of the Puritans to the promised land. The westward movement of the Mormons, fueled by injustice, criminal behavior, and incompetence, was justified in an ideology of reclamation. As a sociological materialist and critical realist I deny that Smith (or anyone else) could have been a prophet guided by God. There is no need to deny that Smith experienced things that way. But we are obliged as social scientists to identify the origins and doctrines of Mormonism as pure fantasies. The nourishment for these fantasies came from the cultural resources of American myths and ideologies, their crucible the personality of a schizophrenic. The lesson of the success of Mormonism is that belief is the riskiest form of reasoning. It is immune to the fundamental power of matters of fact. The answer to the questions of why Jesus is still worshipped today and why we take Mormons seriously must come from sober minds not driven by wishes and hopes, not driven by fear and terror. It should be clear from my brief description and the mountain of evidence that can be consulted on the case that Mormonism is all fantasy, delusion, and illusion. And yet when a US senator and presidential candidate openly proclaims his Mormon faith no one bats an eye, no reporter questions him. Religion, no matter how fantastic, is protected by an iron cage of authority, tradition, and extreme tolerance. Scientology is an exception due to its visibility as a contemporary cult indulged in by some famous entertainers. The emperor of Mormonism stands naked to the eye, barely two hundred years removed from us. Speak up! Jesus requires more than a sober mind and a child’s honesty. To understand Jesus requires serious archeological, historical, and sociological knowledge of human cultural forms, symbols, and the features that accompany the creation of communities and nation states. Once we eliminate the idea that Jesus was the son of God, an idea even modern theologians find hard to defend, we are left with four possibilities. Jesus was either one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of mythical solar messiahs (see the Epilogue to this chapter); or the solar messiah mythology was socially tattooed onto the life of an historical fully human Jesus; or he was a composite character, a fictional person based on the lives of two or more historical and/or mythical figures. Jesus might be a completely fictional symbolic construction built on the template of earlier fictional heroes and gods.

20  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

The argument that there was during the reign of Pontius Pilate an individual known as Jesus the Christ who was crucified is barely supported by the fact that he is mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c.100CE) and the Roman historian Tacitus (d. c.120CE). Seutonius (Roman historian, c.69–122CE), Pliny the Younger (Roman lawyer and magistrate, 61–113CE), Celsus (Greek philosopher, 25BCE-50CE) and a few others in this era in a position to know do not have much to say about an extraordinary person founding a new religion. There are vague references from their period to a group known as Crestiani led by one Crestos. Philo of Alexandria (30BCE-54CE) and Justice of Tiberius (second half of the first century CE) wrote widely during and about the period in which Jesus is supposed to have lived yet they have nothing to say about Jesus, his followers, or his persecution. Two passages mentioning Jesus appear in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (93–94CE) and have been the subject of great controversy. The options are (1) the textual references originate with Josephus and are entirely authentic; (2) the passages are a Christian forgery; or (3) the passages contain Christian interpolations in what was Josephus’s authentic material. The general scholarly consensus favors partial authenticity. Geza Vermes (1924–2013), arguably the greatest Jesus scholar of the twentieth century, as well as other Jesus scholars, argued that Josephus’s portrait of Jesus is consistent with his style and approach as an historian. We are not, in any case, dealing with firsthand accounts. Tacitus refers to Christ and his execution by Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, as well as the existence of Christians in Rome (Annals, c.116CE). There is less controversy about the authenticity of Tacitus’ account than is the case with Josephus. From a sociology of religions and the god’s perspective, it does not matter whether Jesus was a real person or not. The issue is not his humanity but his divinity. And for the latter there is not, and cannot be, any definitive proof. We can, on the other hand, as we will see, prove that his divinity was a fabrication. Jesus and early Christianity are also discussed in the writing of the second century Greek opponent of Christianity, Celsus. His On the True Doctrine (c. 175–177CE) is lost but referred to in Origen’s Contra Celsum (248CE). Celsus describes Jesus as the “son of a soldier named Panthera and a peasant woman married to a carpenter…” and referred to his “miracles” as sorcery (Smith, 1978: 67). Scholars and lay students alike can, on the one hand, assume that the Biblical stories are intended to be true to some facts. The goal is then to set out to prove or otherwise theorize the facts. The other major strategy is to assume the good intentions of the Biblical writers as objective reporters and then to pull apart their stories. These are both empty exercises given what we know sociologically, anthropologically, archeologically, and historically about the Bible and Christianity (and all other religions and religious texts). We are dealing with deliberately designed allegories, not literal reporting. The process of canonization in the case of the Bible took centuries. The book we know as The Bible was written over a period of a thousand years between

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 21

1200BCE and the first century CE. The process of editing the various books that were candidates for inclusion in a Bible was basically completed in the late 300s but the debate about the canon continued into the sixteenth century and beyond. The criteria that went into the choices included authorship, antiquity, and orthodoxy. Concerning authorship, the criterion was whether a book was believed to have been written by one of the apostles (e.g., Paul) or someone close to an apostle (e.g., Mark, an interpreter for Peter). The older texts had priority over newer ones and those that conformed with contemporary Christian teaching were preferred over those which were less orthodox. The current canon varies across Christian denominations. Most Protestant Bibles contain 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. The Roman Catholic Bible has 73 books including seven considered part of the Apocrypha. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church Bible includes 81 books including 1Enoch and Jubilees (part of the pseudepigrapha). The New Testament Apocrypha includes hundreds of texts written in the second century CE and later relating to Jesus and the apostles. The seven Old Testament books included in the Roman Catholic Bible and inserted between the Old and New Testaments (the Apocrypha) are Baruch, Judith, 1 and Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and Wisdom. The pseudepigrapha include more the fifty texts written between 200BCE and 200CE by Jewish and Christian writers expounding on stories and characters in the Old Testament. There are other texts at issue here and a larger debate on canonicity, a topic I cannot pursue further here (Combs, 2019; Roos, 2020). Muhammad is just as elusive as Jesus. He is just like Jesus a fabrication based on a historical figure, a fictional symbolic construction, or some combination of history and myth. And the Koran, like the Bible, is not a once and only text. There are fewer versions of the Koran than there are of the Bible and they are by comparison more consistent. But deletions and distortions are ubiquitous. The composer(s) of the Koran were not as skilled as the ancient scribes. In the period of its construction the teachers and rulers in the emerging Islamic world had not yet developed a systematic prose style that could be mobilized by trained scribes. Aside from and independent of the problems of reference that arise in this sort of text, arguments are repetitive and not developed within a well-developed paradigm of logic. The Koran has none of the literary qualities of the Bible. Edward Gibbon, the historian of the fall of the Roman Empire, described the Koran as “incoherent” and “rambling.” Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher, described it as “wearing” and “incondite.” If Muhammad was the author of this text, the writings suggest that he might have been mad. Sigmund Freud famously claimed that belief in a single God is delusional. Considered from the perspective of sociology, faith and belief are community constructs and not necessarily signs of madness. But institutions can nourish madness. Religious exuberance in combination with a weak intelligence can be conducive to delusional individual experiences. The history of the Koran is a history of replacing, losing, revising, and omitting passages. The Koran as we know it is the product of a survey carried out

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during the reign of the first Caliph Abu Bakr (573–634 CE), Muhammad’s father-in-law. The first Koran was collected in one volume by a freed slave, Salim, one of four men Muhammad anointed as a teacher of the Koran. That volume was lost when Salim died during the Battle of Yamama. To make the disaster even worse, Muslims who had memorized various parts of the Koran were also killed in that battle. In the face of these potentially disastrous losses, Abu Bakr named Zaid bin Thabit to collect the Koran into one volume. Uthman, Muhammad’s son-in-law and third of the “rightly guided Caliphs” (579–656CE) sent copies of Zaid’s Koran throughout the lands of Muhammad and ordered all other versions burned. In 1972, the Islamic “equivalent” of the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered by construction workers restoring the Great Mosque of San’a in Yemen. The ancient cache contained Koran pages from the seventh and eighth centuries. The point here is that the difference among the texts and manuscripts are minimal, but they demonstrate that there was no perfect, no Ur-Koran sent from Allah. Even Aisha, “Mother of Believers,” Muhammad’s favorite wife, asked a copier to change a section based on what she had heard from Muhammad himself. Abdullah ibn Salam, a convert from Judaism and one of Muhammad’s companions, had compiled his own Koran and there was an early compilation by another of Muhammad’s companions, Ubayy bin Ka’b. Just as ancient Palestine hosted a multiplicity of Christian, Jewish, and pagan movements, along with believers and skeptics, so early Islam was an arena of contesting spiritual and intellectual movements. We can ask about the Koran what we ask about the Bible: Which Bible? Which Koran? What was behind the selection and editing of these texts over the centuries? And what was the Greek bishop (St.) Irenaeus’ (130-c.202CE) rationale for creating a Bible out of four books and Abu Bakr’s rationale for constructing the first tangible Koran? Irenaeus’ choices were intuitively symbolic – there are four gospels just as there are four points of the compass and four winds. I’m not aware of any such rationale for the final compilation of the Koran. Just as we can’t be certain that there was a real historical Jesus we can’t be certain there was a real historical Muhammad. It is important to stress based on the sociological imagination that even if there was a Jesus he could not have been the son of God and Muhammad could not have been visited by an angel or otherwise had contact with Allah. I do not accept the claim that Allah coming to Muhammad through the agency of the angel Gabriel is a matter of faith whereas Muhammad’s existence is a matter of history. Sociologically and anthropologically we can say unequivocally that there was no Allah and no Gabriel to reveal texts to Muhammad, even if he did exist. This should be as clear as the fact that Joseph Smith could not have been in contact with an actual God. The crystallization of political units, the creation of new nations, requires the construction of a moral order that lays out rules and laws of conduct and the justification for the new regime. Muhammad’s life comes into focus long after he is supposed to have lived in the context of a dynamic political era. The Koran too did not exist until long after it was supposed to have been revealed to

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 23

Muhammad. So Islam comes into existence in the context of the crystallization of the Arab expansion. As the Arab regime got settled, Islam was pieced together to form the glue of the new state, its political theology. Muhammad and the Koran were created to cement the power of the Umayyad caliphate and then that of the Abbasid caliphate. Until this political construction by the political regime there was simply no written evidence for Muhammad and the Koran. Even the chronicles of non-Muslims do not mention or allude to a new prophet, a new holy book, or a new religion. In general, new religions are associated with the consolidation of new societies. The oldest stories about Muhammad do not reflect the Islamic view of who he was and what he did. The nineteenth-century German universities were the earliest sites at which critical research was undertaken on the Abrahamic or Mediterranean religions. Gustav Weil pioneered research on the origins of Islam. His access to sources was limited but he pointed out the vulnerabilities of oral traditions to fabrication and distortion. Ernest Renan, although convinced that Muhammad was a real historical figure, nonetheless was suspicious of the integrity of the Koran, which was transmitted over a long period of time by way of an oral tradition. Various degrees of skepticism about Muhammad and the Koran are expressed in the works of Muir (1819–1905), Wellhausen (1844–1918), Sprenger (1813–1893), and others. There is virtually no information about Muhammad in the Koran. “He” is mentioned only a handful of times and usually in ambiguous phrases such as “the praised one” or “the chosen one.” There are no contemporary accounts of Jesus either other than the controversial mentions in Josephus, Tacitus, Celsus and a few others discussed earlier.

Reflections on Jefferson, Jesus, and Jehovah It is quite possible that Jesus was a completely symbolic, allegorical, mythical creation. And even if he was a real person he certainly wasn’t the son of God. And yet this ephemera has had a choke hold on the critical faculties of many great thinkers. Even Nietzsche referred to him as the one true Christian. And Thomas Jefferson found him to be the only sensible thing about a notoriously flawed Bible. Jefferson read the Bible first as a literary critic, then as an advocate of a naturalized religion. He came to believe that Jesus intended to lay a foundation for nourishing humanity’s natural state of liberty and equality. At the end of the day, Jefferson’s efforts were for his own private contemplations and to signal his view of himself as a sect of one. But the 1804 version of his “Bible” was described as “…an Abridgment of the New Testament for the Use of the Indians, Unembarrassed with Matters of Fact or Faith beyond the Level of their Comprehensions.” His method was to literally cut and paste selected verses drawn from the text of the 1794 version of the Plantin Polyglot Bible (prepared by Christopher Plantin, Antwerp, 1568–1573), a French Geneva Bible, and the King James New Testament. Jefferson erases all references to “vulgar ignorance, of things

24  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications”; he includes “sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed” (Holowchak, 2019: 97–101). Holowchak identifies the principles of selection and deselection that Jefferson used in piecing together this Jesus narrative: Sublimity Thesis (ST): All passages sublimely expressive of a Supreme Being are to be selected. An illustration is Luke 10: 27: “And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself.” Purity Thesis (PT): All aphorisms and precepts of pure morality and benevolence are to be selected. Consider Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Jesus (Matthew 5: 3–11) preaches: “(3) Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; (4) Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted; (5) Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth; (6) Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled; (7) Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy…(8) Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God; (9) Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God; (10) Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; (11) Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.” Guilelessness Thesis (GT): All passages describing Jesus as humble, innocent, simple, and ambition-free are to be selected. A fine example is Mark 2: 16–17, where Jesus eats with publicans and sinners in an effort to heal them: “(16) And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? (17) When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Concerning deselection, there are: Unnaturalness Thesis (UT): All passages at variance with the laws of physical nature are to be deselected. An example is Matthew 17: 5. “While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.” That a voice should come from the clouds is a contravention of the laws of nature.

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Inconsistency Thesis (IT): All passages inconsistent with a historical character, here Jesus, based on satisfactory testimony, are to be deselected. For example: Matthew 10: 34–35: “(34) Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword; (35) For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.” Jefferson omits these, as they depict Jesus in a rather unbenevolent manner. The underlying assumption in this process of constructing a Jesus narrative is that the Jesus of the New Testament is a better representation of the moral life than the God of the Old Testament. That God is described by Dan Barker (2016) as “the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” He takes this line from the first sentence of Chapter 2 in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006: 31): The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, bully. Bracketing the fact that Dawkins, like the new atheists he represents (Dennett, 2006; Hitchens, 2007; and Harris,2004) doesn’t understand religion and fails the “religious sentiment” test for critics and theorists of religion, it is an easy matter to collect quotations from the Old Testament that support his assessment of God. Barker, in an effort to offer sustained support for Dawkin’s controversial portrait, does the collecting and in addition to amassing quotations to support each of the features of Dawkins’ God (he devotes a chapter to each one from “jealousy” to “bully”), he adds some unpleasant features of his own: pyromaniacal, angry, merciless, curse hurling, vaccicidal, aborticidal, cannibalistic, and slavemonger. Barker’s last chapter is titled “What About Jesus?” If the first word that comes to mind when you think of Jehovah would more likely than not be “jealous,” the first word that comes to mind when you think of Jesus would inevitably be “love.” This Jesus is the Jesus of the Jefferson Bible. Christians might grant that the God of the Old Testament was “unpleasant” but claim that Jesus changed all that. Barker argues that Jesus was in fact the God of the Old Testament, something Jesus himself asserts in various ways and contexts: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” ( John: 14.9); in John 8. 54–55 Jesus tells the Jews, “It is my Father who glorifies me, he of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’” Barker, in brief, claims that Jesus is the Old Testament God. He then proceeds to offer evidence for this claim. In Matthew 22: 37–38, Jesus tells a lawyer that God’s greatest commandment was: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” These “loving words” are from the jealous God’s commandments delivered by Moses in the 6th chapter of Deuteronomy.

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They come immediately after “Hear, O Isreal: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” A few lines later, we read: “The Lord your God you shall fear.” And so on. Jesus is forever quoting the Old Testament God. In his Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere he offers words that Jefferson finds uplifting and supportive of liberty and equality. Barker claims that where we do find such words they are words that one might find in the writings of any ethical philosopher, the “golden rule” for example. But the contexts of the ethical principles that Jefferson picked out of the New Testament reveal the same old “Lord Jealous.” In Matthew 22.39 and Mark 12.31 Jesus gives the second commandment as “love your neighbor as yourself.” The Old Testament source gives the meaning of “neighbor” as “your kin,” “any of your people.” Loving “your neighbor” did not extend to non-believers and competing tribes and nations. All of this is fodder for “new atheist” types. It breaks out of the wider contexts of religions and gods as creations that symbolize the creation not of “the universe” but of particular societies and nations. There is no sociological rationale for trying to extract universal principles of liberty and equality from documents designed to nourish centripetal rules of compassion. I will discuss compassion as a centripetal force that operates inwardly to strengthen a group’s boundaries and social solidarity in a later chapter. Jefferson’s Jesus is as much a fiction as the New Testament Jesus and the Old Testament God. We can only find universal principles of love and compassion in such texts if we ignore their nation building functions.

Contemporary religion in journalism: A case study New York Times journalist and author Nicholas Wade has published his views on religion and the social order in his book, The Faith Instinct (2009). The subtitle is ambitious: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures. One is hard pressed not to praise this book for its scholarship and lucid writing. From the point of view of the sociological community there is something positive about someone like Wade bringing Durkheim to the New York Times best seller reading audience. But Wade at the end of the day doesn’t get Durkheim and doesn’t get the relationship between religion and society. Wade is a product of Eton and Cambridge and a natural science education. He has a feel for science writing but not for sociology. And it is a little annoying to see him get credit for startling news that has been around for more than a century and then not getting the news right. Contrary to what Wade believes, religion and the social/moral order are not separate units of evolutionary natural selection, and there is no God gene. Society precedes the individual; the individual is a social unit, a social fact. Humans come onto the evolutionary scene not as individuals who then at some Hobbesian point choose to come together socially by way, for example, of a social contract. Rather, humans emerge everywhere, always, and already social. And these humans emerge everywhere, always, and already religious. That is,

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 27

where we have societies, we have moral orders systematized as more or less distinct activities and institutions generally denominated as “religious.” We cannot argue as Wade does that the earliest societies vary according to whether they have religion or not and that natural selection selects for religion. Natural selection does operate on the level of culture and social organization, but cannot select for religion per se because religion is one with social order. The anthropologist Maurice Leehhardt was told by his father, a pastor and a geologist, that facts are the word of God. Durkheim taught us that God is society. We could then say that facts are the word of society. For a less mythological way of putting this, we can turn to Nietzsche: We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. (1887/1974: Aphorism 3) If we combine this observation with Marx’s insights on the social nature of thinking and consciousness, of science and religion, and of the self itself, and with Durkheim’s ideas on religion as an eminently social thing, we come up with most of the ingredients of what we can call the social constructionist paradigm for understanding religions, God, and gods. Let’s pause a moment to examine the term, “social construction.” This term has been mauled by scientists, philosophers, and other observers of science and social science. It has been mistakenly associated with relativism and other excesses of postmodernism. It is in fact, the fundamental theorem of sociology. The word “social” in social construction is not a synonym for political, religious, economic or ideological. It does not denote or connote “false,” or “arbitrary.” To say that facts (scientific or otherwise) are socially constructed is not to say that they are false, arbitrary, fabricated out of thin air, or the direct causal products of external political, religious, economic, or ideological forces. The social construction of science or religion refers to the moment-to-moment, day-to-day, night-to-night minutiae of social interactions that make up the social processes, organizations, and institutions of invention and discovery. The “social” is not only in the external social and cultural milieu and contexts of science and religion but in the social organization of science and religion, indeed in scientists and theologians themselves. The social in this sense is pervasive, and no more transparent than quantum or gravitational forces. The only way humans can invent and discover is by interacting and communicating with each other in social settings; that is what social construction refers to. Randall Collins (1998: 858ff.) formalizes this idea as the sociological cogito: “…social constructivism [I prefer “constructionism”] leads to sociological realism.” The “cogito” passes statements through “the acid bath of doubt” to seek irrefutable truths: the existence of the self, time, and thinking; thinking takes place in language as a form

28  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

of conversation; the existence of language implies that other people exist; the existence of words implies universals; the existence of universals implies the existence of society; he existence of other people who exist outside one another implies that space exists; the existence of the space-time world implies a material world of obdurate objects. All of this points us in the direction of the classical discoveries by Marx and Durkheim: selves, minds, consciousness, and thinking “are products of and sustained by the sheer ecology of face-to-face interactions… organized around interaction rituals into interaction ritual chains.” The process of unfolding the cogito through the strategy of doubting is different for Collins (1998: 861) than it was for Descartes: I have not crawled into a stove, like Descartes, suddenly and inexplicably resolving to doubt everything, then spontaneously discovering that I cannot doubt that I am thinking in a social language. I have constructed this argument by assimilating the arguments of intellectual networks whose history stretches back for generations…I must agree that I am thinking an internal conversation which attempts to construct a coalition of intellectual audiences, and that the emotional energies which animate my writing come from my own experiences in intellectual networks. The immediate reality of my own activity Implies the reality of a larger world of discourse, society, And bodily existence. Collins here embodies the slogan from my book, Einstein’s Brain (2020): Give me a genius (a creative individual) and I will give you a social network. The sociological cogito is as concise a statement of the perspective guiding my sociology of religions and the gods as you will find anywhere in this book. My students often asked me: “If sociologists have discovered God, why isn’t this more widely known and taught?” My colleagues themselves are very tentative, ambivalent, and uncertain about this issue. Some say: “I agree with you that we have discovered God, but I don’t think you should be revealing that sociological truth in your lectures or writings.” Some of them write textbooks that demonstrate this discovery, but in the interest of a kind of misguided tolerance often start or end with the caveat that their findings should not disrupt anyone’s beliefs. These sociologists are practicing an undisciplined version of veiled writing. I discuss veiled writing and double truths further on. Science – systematic inquiry – is nothing if not a continuing process of upsetting and resetting our beliefs and transforming them into tentative corrigible grounded knowledge. At some point, those of us who are in a position to communicate mundane and revolutionary findings to our students, our colleagues, and the general public need to reveal the nature of our discoveries and convictions. When physicists discover new particles or astronomers discover new celestial bodies, they announce them publicly and produce front page stories in the leading newspapers, TV, and online media. When biologists discover new features of DNA, the same thing happens. Sociological discoveries on the grand

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 29

scale cannot yet be reported because the groundwork for validating such discoveries in the scientific and public arenas has not yet been established. There are other factors that make grand discoveries such as the societal referent for God difficult to communicate. But the media in recent years has brought to the public’s attention many theological and scientific ideas that bear on the reality of the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and the validity of religious beliefs around the world. Imagine how true believers feel when they see the cover of a national magazine, TIME (December, 1995) ask on their cover in bold yellow letters: “IS THE BIBLE FACT OR FICTION?” By relying on the findings of archaeology, the story brings into doubt the historical reality of Abraham, Moses, and the Exodus. Can the question of the reality of God be far behind? Indeed, TIME’s April 8, 1966 cover had already asked: “Is God Dead?” At the very least, stories like this in the public arena may raise doubts in populations that have long taken for granted the truth of the Bible. The “Is God Dead?” issue arose in a period when 97% of Americans said they believed in God. By 2014, that figure had dipped to 63% and continues to drop. At the same time, a large majority of Americans (as high as 90% in some surveys) believe in some kind of higher spiritual power. This is consistent with the decline of institutionally based beliefs and the fragmentation of communities. This leaves the individual isolated and dependent on non-institutional, individualistic based beliefs that can take the place of institutionally based beliefs. Thus, “higher spiritual powers,” are associated with the individual as a church unto him- or herself. Self-solidarity in the absence of social solidarity is the root of the spiritual movement. We can say that we need to be more systematic and assertive about teaching and publicizing findings in the sociology, anthropology, archaeology, and history of religions and the gods without any intention of imposing our views on others, or with the goal of forcing others to take up our intellectual causes. Keep in mind, though, that education is nothing if it is not about imposing viewpoints. Tolerance and open-mindedness are as much impositions as “facts of the matter.” We do, however, have an obligation as educators, scholars and intellectuals to let people know what we are up to. Education is a dangerous enterprise because it propagates new ideas that may take hold in the future. This book is about the “new idea” that the gods are dead. Secularization is just one sign that the old religions are dead or dying. I considered my students too young to have such ideas imposed on them. My strategy was to tell them I was opening a window that would allow them to look out upon the kind of work that was going on in this area of research. They were not obligated to believe what I told them or what I showed them. This didn’t change the authority of my presentation as representative of the learned class and my authority as someone with a certain amount of charismatic authority. The web of doubt that spread among nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers was an early sign of the end of God, the gods, and traditional religion – the novelist Thomas Hardy writing a poem titled “God’s Funeral”; Nietzsche infamously proclaiming “the death of God”; H.L. Mencken listing the names of

30  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

immortal gods who have died; the disappearance of colleges with religious affiliations; and the very disappearance of God. God progressively disappears in the Bible itself as we move from Genesis to Revelation; God becomes more distant from His creations, more “abstract.” All of this was foreshadowed by the Enlightenment, and Hobbes’ defense of The Great Separation. Hobbes argued that no just and reasonable political life could be based on a Christian political theology. The modern romantics, following Rousseau rather than Hobbes, sought to implement a political theology grounded in human experience. They did not want to jettison the divine and religious sentiments but wanted instead to purify them in a rational way. In spite of their differences, Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s followers agreed that the Biblical God could no longer be taken seriously. Friedrich Schleiermacher tried to span this difference by claiming that we should refer to our human awareness of our dependence on “something” as God and let this replace the notion of divine revelation. It took someone with a highly developed sociological imagination combined with a refined religious sentiment, Emile Durkheim, to finally see that that “something” was in fact society, the social group. Let us step back for a moment and recall the great controversy stirred up in ancient Greece when Protagoras (ca.490–420 BCE), a pre-Socratic Sophist, proclaimed that “man is the measure of all things.” This violated the prevailing idea that the universe was based on something beyond human influence. Schleiermacher takes the same Protagorean step by making man the measure of theological truth in the midst of a world ruled by gods beyond humanity and human influence, gods we could only know through revelation. The revolutionary but unstated assumption in Schleiermacher’s position was that God would be revealed as we came closer to finding ourselves. When Durkheim and the sociologists decentered the self and put society and the group at the center of the human universe, Schleiermacher’s implicit assumption was refined into the scientific proposition that we can discover God by finding ourselves in society and the group. Durkheim and the sociologists benefitted from the development of modern critical Biblical studies pioneered in the German universities in the wake of the wars of liberation (War of the Sixth Coalition, 1812–1814) that sent Napoleon Bonaparte into exile. We can no more declare the death of secularization because there are still vibrant signs of belief, faith, and religious practice any more than we can announce the death of evolution because there is resistance from creationists and intelligent design advocates. The debate between creationists/intelligent design advocates and evolutionary scientists shows up in an altered form as a debate between religion and education. For an example of that particular conflict see Appendix C. What would happen if I as a provost included in my message to the college community that students whose religion was Atheism would not be penalized for missing classes on May 18 (Bertrand Russell Day), or January 29 (Thomas Paine Day), or February 12 (Charles Darwin Day)? Should Martin Luther King Day be a “religious holiday”? What about Sojourner Truth Day? Consider that one of the problems with the First Amendment is that it fails to provide means for

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 31

preventing chaplains and prayers in government, the use of the Bible in swearing in officials, or the invocation of God on our money and in our pledge of allegiance. As a footnote to Appendix C, consider Stanley Fish’s remarks on the First Amendment in his book, The First (2019). He argues that the First Amendment does not offer consistent, unified, and coherent principles on free speech or hate speech. The Religion Clause is out of synch with a Constitution that “insists on the equality of all forms of speech”; there is no formula that distinguishes fake news from real news. Any concerns we may have about living in a post-truth era ignores the fact that we have “always been living in a post-truth era”; and we might as well forget about delegitimating the Trump presidency. He urges us, as did Derrida (1990), to exercise progressive and emancipatory action “not despite the absence of a firm ground for its achievement but because of the absence of that ground.” The paradox is that the prerequisite for persevering in our quest for truth, justice, transparency, fact, real news, and the perfect form of democracy is to acknowledge, without flinching, that none of these is available to us this side of eternity, except in the shapes we imperfectly—that is, humanly—come to know through our incessant labors. We require “elementary confidences” and “cemented routes of inferences” (Blackburn, 2018: 127). We cement these routes, not God or Nature. He quotes my colleague in science studies, the historian and sociologist Steven Shapin to demonstrate that what he, Derrida, and Blackburn assert is true of science itself (Fish, 2019: 196–97; see Shapin, 1995): Shapin explains that this is true even of science. No one, he points out, does experiments from scratch; one must proceed down the paths laid out by others and trust in what they have established: “[W]henever experiments are performed and the results of empirical engagement with the world are reported and assessed, this is done within some system in which trust has been reposed and background knowledge taken for granted.” Distrust does occur, but, says Shapin, it is “something which takes place on the margins of trusting systems.” If we allowed distrust to enter into the core of those systems we would be overcome and defeated epistemologically by an unrelenting skepticism. I am reminded here of Donald Campbell’s perspective that the idea of pure science is a myth but we must act as if it is true. I discuss the concepts of precontractual solidarity and the non-rational foundations of rationality in relation to trust in Chapter 10. The lessons of the last four years in the United States demonstrate that our Constitution needs to be updated. We have learned that it cannot protect us from actions that undermine the rule of law. It cannot in its present form protect us from demagoguery and authoritarianism in the Oval Office itself. We should consider an amendment that sends bills that come out of the House directly to the Senate without a McConnell-like gatekeeper. If there is a rationale for gatekeeping, the gatekeeper should be a small rotating

32  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

bi-partisan committee. We also need clearer guidelines for invoking the 25th amendment, a stronger means of insuring that violations of the Constitution do not go unremarked and unenforced. Perhaps we need an ombudsperson with serious powers one step removed from the Supreme Court. Executive orders must be approved by a majority of the House of Representatives. Emergency executive orders must not stay in force beyond the time of the emergency except by a majority vote in the House of Representatives. But these recommendations ignore the basic problem that a great many of our lawmakers and especially those in the Republican party are averse to a politics of compassion. They believe the individual should bear the burdens of social structural outcomes that interfere with the quality of life. The lack of a politics of compassion means that universal health care, social security, and other parts of the social safety net are always at risk. We may have to test the capacity of the law to institute compassion in the short run and hope that in the long run it will become a norm of our culture. We have seen this achieved in practical not utopian terms in other nations. We can do better. These issues bear on my critique of traditional religion and proposals regarding establishing a secular moral order as the foundation for community and self-solidarity, compassion, and empathy. We should be aware of social factors that can obstruct scientific progress. Scientists are not immune to the halo effect or to confirmation bias. A study reported many years ago in Scientific American (I was not able to track down the citation) sought to explain why the values for fundamental constants would hold steady for many years and then change in new experiments by a factor of four or more. The researchers, physicists themselves, not social scientists, determined that if a measurement was made by an elite scientist, future experimenters would design experiments that would reach confirming measurements. Eventually, someone would come along who would design an experiment independent of the. Influence of the original experiment. It is an example of the “halo effect,” a cognitive bias that lets people value the qualities and achievements of people they like or otherwise admire. It’s related to confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998: 175), “seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand.” Before we begin our journey in earnest, let’s consider what sociology tells us about our quest. The power of social structures can seem to the untutored to be as mysterious as the force of gravity. They contain the hidden aspects of social life (Lemert, 2012: 129ff.). They are hidden because the powers-that-be want them hidden, they are threatening to those in power and are felt as threats to our sensibilities (in this sense, they are like veiled writings, inaccessible to the uninitiated). Their invisibility nourishes illusions about society, gives social arrangements a taken-for-granted aura, grounds ideological distinctions in social positions, makes it difficult for us to detach from “the evaluative stance,” feeds the repression of things and paints them in guilt and shame, and facilitates our attachment to the fallacy of psychological reductionism (Collins and Makowsky, 2010: 1–14). The other fallacy that gets in our way here is the fallacy of physicalist universalism, that is, that the only causes are physical, that these are embodied in

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 33

the laws of physics, and that these laws apply universally to all aspects, levels, and dimensions of our experience, including society and culture. To put these hidden aspects, this hidden power, into words, requires theorizing. Social theory is a basic survival skill. Theory is often criticized by antiintellectuals for being impractical or insubstantial. But theory, which unlike speculation is by definition constructed on the foundation of scientific findings, is a subversive activity-and then, the most subversive activity (because it is always threatening to reveal the hidden aspects of social life). I call this the Giordano Principle (after Giordano Bruno, 1548–1600): Thinking, more than doing is the most significant threat to any on-going established social order. The objective of social theory is to construct explanations that further our understanding of the nature of the social. Social theory is not a simple cerebral eruption; it comes from the fault lines that mark the coming together of different social worlds that grind against each other and cause mutual strains and stresses. These are the places that shake up what we take for granted.

Epilogue: The social messiah paradigm According to the solar messiah concept, the Jesus narrative is astrological and represents events in the night sky from the perspective of the northern hemisphere. On December 25th, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, the star in the east, is aligned with the three brightest stars in Orion’s belt, known today as in ancient times as the three kings. These stars and Sirius point to the sunrise on December 25th. So: three kings follow the star in the east to locate the sunrise, the “birth of the sun/son.” The constellation Virgo the Virgin represents the virgin mother. This also symbolizes the House of Breads, a reference to Bethlehem. Virgo rises in the east, and Bethlehem literally refers to a position in the constellation. Thus, we have the star in the east leading the three kings to Bethlehem where a virgin is giving birth to a son. The winter solstice occurs on December 22nd and marks the day the sun, which has been moving south since around June 20 and causing the number of daylight hours to become shorter and shorter, reaches its lowest position on the horizon. It then appears to stop in its movement for three days (December 22–24) and on the 25th begins it northward journey, making the days longer. The sun’s position during the three day period is close to the Southern Cross, the “crux.” Translated into the Jesus narrative, we get: the sun/son died at/on the cross, was buried for three days and then came the resurrection. We are thus on our way to spring and “salvation.” The twelve disciples represent the constellations of the zodiac which the sun – God/Jesus – travels with. The number 12 is common in mythology; in the Bible we have the 12 sons of Jacob, the 12 Judges of Israel, the 12 princes of Israel, the 12 patriarchs, and of course the 12 tribes of Israel. The cross of the zodiac was the referent for the pagan cross, a spiritual symbol. Jesus was early on depicted with his head on the cross; he was the Sun, the Son of God. In the ancient world that gave birth to Christianity, and in the East as well as the West, various versions of “son of god” were used to refer to rulers

34  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

and emperors. The crown of thorns Jesus wears symbolizes the rays of the sun. The symbol of the fish throughout the New Testament reflects the astrological fact that Jesus is associated with the constellation Pisces, the fishes. Due to the precession of the equinoxes, the age of Pisces is followed by the age of Aquarius, the water bearer. In Luke 22.10, Jesus directs his disciples to the last Passover, telling them to follow the man bearing a pitcher of water into the house he will enter. Symbolically, the reference here is to the coming of the Age of Aquarius. Due to various mistranslations, the untutored readers of the Bible have been led to believe that this was a reference to the end times. Nowhere is the character of Jesus more explicitly built on Egypt’s Horus than in this symbolism. Horus was born of a virgin (Isis) on December 25th, his birth was announced by a star in the east, he was adored by three kings, was a prodigal teacher at 12, baptized at 30, travelled with twelve disciples, performed healing and other miracles including walking on water, was known as “the Light,” “the lamb of god,” etc. was crucified, buried for three days, and rose from the dead. The same mythological structure characterizes the stories of Attis (Greece, 1200 BCE), Krishna (India, 900 BCE), Dionysus (Greece, 500 BCE), Mithra (Persia, 1200 BCE), Buddha Salivahan (Bermuda), Odin (Norse), Crite (Chaldea), Baal and Taut (Phoenecia), Indra (Tibet/India), Bali (Afghanistan), Jao (Nepal), Wittoba (Bilingonese), Thammuz (Syria), Atys (Phrygia), Xamolxis (Thrace), Adad (Assyria), Beddru ( Japan), Thor (Gaul), Adonis (Greece), and many others. The solar messiah narrative has an anthropological logic about it that overshadows the nature and quality of the evidence for its relevance in every “Sun God” case. One can think of the solar messiah mythological structure as a Weberian ideal type. An ideal type is constructed from the elements of a given phenomenon and stresses those elements common to most cases. “Ideal” does not mean “perfect,” but rather refers to Gedankenbilder, mental constructs. According to Weber, “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct…” (Weber, 1903–17/1997: 90).

Appendix B: General overview of religion by the numbers The following numbers, which unless otherwise noted, refer to the United States, like the populations they represent, are in constant flux. I have not tried to continually update them during the writing and publication process. I do not expect them to vary significantly from those in place by the time this book is published. Readers can easily get the most recent figures online. I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations II. Statistical profile for Americans: A total of 96% profess a belief in God. 1 in 3 claims to be a born again Christian.

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 35

1 in 3 believes the Bible is the actual word of God and must be taken literally. A total of 68% believe in the Devil. About 80% believe in life after death. 2 of 3 expect to exist in some positive form after death. A total of 86% believe in Heaven, 71% believe in Hell. 1 in 4 believe in reincarnation. A total of 82% sometimes very conscious of the presence of God. A total of 58% think regularly about their relationship with God. 1 in 3 teens claim to have personally experienced God’s presence. A total of 90% pray. 3 in 4 pray daily. A total of 58% pray weekly. A total of 97% believe their prayers are heard, 98% say their prayers have been answered. A total of 25% have heard a voice or seen a vision while praying. Jews are perhaps the least religious “religious group” in the world. If you look at a world map showing the distribution of the world’s religions you can see the geo-political shape of an East-West conflict. The Western hemisphere is less than 10% Muslim. Muslim populations are very prominent in the Eastern hemisphere. Africa north of the equator and coast to coast is above 50% Muslim; below the equator, Africa is 10–50% Muslim with most of the Muslim population concentrated in the northern half of that part of the country. Muslim populations show up across most of the eastern hemisphere excepting Australia. So looking at this map we see a clear East-West divide weighted heavily in the areas of north Africa, the middle east, and eastern Europe. Hinduism cannot form the pole of a global dichotomy for potential conflict. It is restricted to the Indian subcontinent and the island of Madagascar off the east coast of southern Africa. Buddhism is a strictly far east phenomenon. A total of 10–50% of India, China, and southeast Asia are Buddhist. The Buddhist population is above 50% in Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Christianity has dominance (above 50%) globally except in northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. The highest rates of atheism today are found in Europe (20% in the European Union [EU]) and East Asia (61% in China). The highest rates of atheism in Europe are recorded for France (40%) and Sweden (34%). American atheists tend overwhelmingly to reject the God of the Bible, but one-in-five believe in a “higher power.” Atheists tend to be college educated white men with a median age of 34 and aligned with the Democratic Party and liberal politics. American atheists are more likely than Christians to report a sense of wonder about the universe, less likely to find meaning in spirituality, far more likely than Christians to find meaning in hobbies as well as, like most Americans, the family. Atheists have unfavorable views about the role of religion in society; a majority believe religious institutions do more harm than

36  Some initial provocations in words and numbers

good, and more than 90% believe such institutions exert too much political influence. It is also notable that atheists tend to be more informed about religion than believers. They are twice as likely as Americans in general to know that the Constitution prohibits a religious test as a condition for holding public office. Nearly 60% of American say belief in God is not necessary for a moral life, a little over 40% believe that believing in God is necessary for good values. Large percentages of people in Indonesia, Ghana, Pakistan and many other parts of the world believe God and morals are connected. The figures are much lower in the wealthier countries ( just 15% in France, for example). Rated on the Pew surveys “feeling thermometer” (0 is coldest and most negative, 100 is warmest and most positive), Americans rate atheists 49 (alongside ratings of 49 for Muslims, 63 for Jews, 60 for Catholics, and 56 for evangelical Christians. There are contrasting simultaneous movements in the contemporary world. Some research points to a resurgence in religion that is surprising given the general unfolding of secularization over the last two hundred years. However, religious practice has been on the decline in Europe for several decades. Belief in God is down as is church attendance according to the European Union’s Eurostat surveys. France, the Czech Republic, and Sweden top the list of countries with the fewest people reporting a belief in a spirit, god, of life force. Romania and Malta are the most religious countries in the EU. Belief in the EU is more common among the elderly, women, those with only a basic education, and those who label themselves conservative. In four global polls conducted by the Worldwide Independent Network/Gallup International Association between 2005 and 2017, the number of religious persons showed a decline and the number of persons who were non-believers or atheists rose. According to sociologist Phil Zuckerman (2006), broad estimates of those who have an absence of belief in a god range from 500 to 750 million people worldwide. According to sociologists Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera’s (2017) review of numerous global studies on atheism, there are 450–500 million positive atheists and agnostics worldwide (7% of the world’s population), with China having the most atheists in the world (200 million convinced atheists).

Appendix C: An immodest proposal Before the start of the academic term, professors at most if not all secular universities receive the following type of message from a high-ranking official in the administration, normally the provost. Underscoring the fact that the university is nonsectarian and inclusive, the provost lays out the policy that permits members of any religious group to absent themselves from classes without penalty when required for compliance with their religious obligations. This comes with a thank you to professors for their continued cooperation in creating an atmosphere of understanding and accommodation in response to students’ commitments to religious observation.

Some initial provocations in words and numbers 37

How is it that we shouldn’t be asking students for their understanding and accommodation to the institutions of higher learning which indeed have uncovered the referential errors of religious institutions and beliefs? Every rationale for religious tolerance in universities undermines the very idea of the university and the value of education (see Appendix C). The “respect for religion” paradigm infects the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” We are not living in 1791 and even then the authors of the First Amendment were not well-informed about the nature and history of the relations between religion and governments, relying primarily on an exaggerated view of the correctness of their naively empirical reading of that history. Even Jefferson, while recognizing the limitations of the Bible as history stood firm on the religious teachings of Jesus. A 2021 First Amendment should read something like this: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise of thoughts, science, and research; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the professoriate and teaching professions; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

2 GENESIS Introduction to the book of God

My personal quest begins Everybody wants to own the end of the world. When I came across those words in Don DeLillo’s novel Zero K, they immediately resonated for me. I doubt that “everybody” wants this. But for as long as I can remember I wanted something like that; I wanted to know my world in the way that scientists know the world. But I wanted to know the whole story – how did it begin, and if and how would it end. I even constructed a diagram of the universe from beginning to end from a sociological cosmologist’s perspective. I added a culture cone to the cosmologist’s light cone, changed the values of fundamental constants over the history of the universe, and added other features reflecting what I knew about cosmology and what I could imagine about it. And I imagined that one day I would transform that diagram into a novel. In my desperate effort to figure out what the world was about, how it worked, what it all meant, I became not merely curious but opposed to any and all secrets. My approach has always been in part defensive; knowledge, I thought, was my defense against ignorance, fear, terror, and anxiety, and yes poverty. What was under the socks in my father’s bureau drawer; what was underneath the skirts of the women who visited my mother; what did Helen Cleary in my fifth grade class know that I didn’t know (one thing she knew that I didn’t know was the state flower of New Mexico!). What was going on inside the houses across on the other side of my yard? These were the childhood precursors to my interest in exposing the secrets that are endemic to our core institutions, especially government, religion, sex, and education. This obsession with knowing things and even believing that if necessary devious, deviant, and criminal means were appropriate in the pursuit of knowledge led me into every nook and cranny of the house of the secrets of life, the universe, and everything. My pursuits, of course, were undertaken under the everyday constraints of my access to the relevant resources and my natural energies. It fueled and

Genesis: Introduction to the book of God 39

nourished my development as an interdisciplinary scholar with formal and informal training and education in the sciences, humanities, and arts. In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42. This answer was arrived at by a God-sized supercomputer, Deep Thought. It took Deep Thought 7.5 million years to calculate this answer. No one, however, knew what the question was. So a special computer was built, the planet Earth, to discover the question. The ultimate question was discovered by Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect in Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The ultimate question was: “What do you get when you multiply six by nine?” That may have satisfied Adams and his characters but it didn’t satisfy me. 42 does in reality have some curious properties that make it more than a simple fictional construction (Siegel, 2020): From mathematics to physics, five vital questions emerge that legitimately have 42 as their answer: • • • • •

Rainbows always emerge offset at an angle of 42° relative to the light source that creates them. The number ten can be mathematically partitioned exactly 42 different ways. 42 is the largest number whose reciprocal, added with three other unique positive integers, sums to exactly one. 42 is the number of galactic years that the Sun-Earth system will survive before it’s destroyed. And 42 is the expansion rate of the entire Universe, in milesper-second-per-megaparsec.

It really could be the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything. Now, we just have to figure out what that question actually is! That is just a mild entertainment before I turn to the biggest question of all for me, the God question. It was the biggest question because it was connected to the question of my being and becoming – to that sickness unto death, to that dying of the light. It took years before I could appreciate Hemingway’s (1926/2007: 111) perspective on life, the universe, and everything: “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in … ” It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had. Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about. Maybe.

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Doubters and knowers & cultures of reasoning In my immediate environs growing up doubters were rare. Fortunately for me my father was one of them. As I roamed more widely through time, space, and culture – as I took a wider look around, as Wittgenstein advised – believers prevailed but non-believers were everywhere. And the evidence that favored the doubters grew more and more and increasingly invited conviction. Eventually I became not merely a doubter but I joined a collection of men and women dead and alive who knew. There is no God. None of the variety of transhuman, supernatural deities. entities, and beings across time, space, and cultures are real in any sense accessible to the five senses. They are real symbolically. The basis for a proof that there is no God rests on the sociology and anthropology of human symbolic life and rituals. To pit believers against non-believers in terms of reasoning cannot resolve the issue. The very idea of “reason” is not understood in the same way by the two camps. They also diverge in their appreciation for and understanding of “evidence.” Let us look at an example of the reasoning process among believers. One reason, they say, for believing in God is that millions of people across time, space, and cultures have believed and do believe in God or gods. This is the fallacy of large numbers. Whether by the hundreds, thousands, millions, or billions, people throughout history have been convinced the world was one way when it was in reality another way. As a matter of fact, belief in a God or gods has not been a feature of every culture; the gods people believed in have varied considerably across history and culture; and immortal gods have died along with the cultures that supported them. Next consider the issue of complexity which contrary to what believers claim is not a reason to believe in God. Natural processes can adequately explain complexity without any need for divine intervention. Here we are faced with the opposition between the reason of science and reasoned inquiry on the one hand and on the other the reason of ignorance and unexamined faith and belief. Another way for believers to argue their case is to claim that “mere” chance cannot adequately explain creation. If we erase the term “mere,” chance becomes a scientifically viable way to engage creation. Next the claim is made that biology cannot explain humankind’s “inherent” sense of right and wrong. This is true; but the alternative to God as an explanation is culture. The ultimate demonstration for believers in the West is that God shows Himself in the Bible and in particular through the life of Jesus. This “argument” is ethnocentric and depends on the most naïve understanding of the Bible as the literal word of God. In brief, every argument for the existence of God in the Naïve Reason paradigm depends on a failure to understand the nature of science and the more significant failure to take into account the social sciences. A relatively well-educated child of ten or twelve could offer grounded reasons for resisting most if not all of these naïve reasons. Let’s raise the bar a little. To do this we need to introduce some new terms, terms that play key roles in arguments for the existence of God proposed not by

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Naïve Reasoners but by sophisticated theologians and philosophers (a distinction that can often collapse into itself ). Ontology is generally thought of as a philosophical way of approaching the basic question of whether “Xs” exist or not. I want to consider ontology as the science of the way in which a given “X” is real, that is, real in what sense. From a scientific materialism perspective everything is real; “X” can be real materially in ways that physical and natural scientists can detect and maybe measure; or it can be real materially in ways that social scientists can detect and maybe measure. Symbols are an important example of a material thing that is cultural and not accessible to the tools, methods, and theories of physics, chemistry, and biology. Let’s put one more idea on the table before we proceed: teleology explains things, events, and processes in terms of the end states to which they point; put simply, this is an argument that X occurs for the future sake of Y. For a review of the varieties of the teleological argument and criticisms, notably the classic refutation by Hume, see Ratzsch and Koperski (2020). The basic problem for efforts to prove God by design arguments is that they often rely on indefensible analogies between local earth bound experiences and cosmic ones. Cosmology is on the one hand the science of the origins, nature and fate of the universe; on the other hand it gives us the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Something must have started the universe; it cannot have got going on its own. We can accept as fact that we exist and that the universe exists. What is the best explanation for these facts? Here are some cosmology of God questions: What is “bigger than we individual human beings,” is “outside of us,” and lasts “forever?” What is the source of the voices within us, our moral senses? In answer to such questions we must ask ourselves what counts as “evidence,” and as anthropologists we are obliged to ask further what counts as evidence for us? We are not naïve reasoners; therefore we must hold that experience and degree of belief have no relationship to truth. The materialist answer to such questions is that society is bigger than the individual, outside of us, and lasts “forever” relative to our life spans. Consider what we are up against when we knowers, we scientists, come face to face with naïve reasoners. Consider this variation of Woodie Guthrie’s question “What did you learn in school today?” Mom or dad, the family that is bent on protecting its narrow culturally derived worldview, ask their child “What did you learn in school today that we’d object to?” This is the grand conflict between the scientific reasoning of the school and the naïve reasoning of the home. This exaggerates an ideal distinction but helps focus the issue. In a civil society we are urged to be tolerant of others. This makes some sense in a Big World; it does not make sense in a Small World. In a Small World, in our interconnected world, our big village, we cannot allow without limit, we cannot be prevented from prohibiting and opposing. We cannot put up with or otherwise endure naïve reasoners. In a Big World we can tolerate the beliefs, practices, and traits of others without limits (excepting Nazism and various forms of fascism and totalitarianism but even then perhaps with some degrees of freedom).

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In a Small World, there must be limits to tolerance for ideas and practices that are obstacles to solving problems of basic survival, individual, collective, and planetary. Wait! Who is the “we” here? The “we” could be the human being who embodies all of the best qualities of the ideal teacher, educator, or scientist. The qualities usually associated with being an ideal teacher include excellence in the following areas: communication skills, listening skills; a “feeling for teaching,” a passion for one’s subjects; an orientation to caring relationships, friendliness, approachability; preparation and organizational skills; work ethic; high expectations for all one’s students; community building skills; a sense of humor, perhaps something like Nietzsche’s idea of the seriousness of the child at play. One characteristic often left out of such lists is truth-telling. Know the facts of the matter, know their various degrees of openness and closure, know the degree to which they are warranted, and communicate them to your students along with the fundamental value of truthtelling. In a sense, “we” are those humans who want to be given the best chance of surviving with the highest possible quality of life. The ideal teacher is a burning lamp lighting the way to knowledge. Perhaps the “we” could be an Übermensch collective. Nietzsche introduced this term as an alternative to the other-worldliness of Christianity, but the alternative in my worldview to other-worldliness is simply “this-worldliness,” the world of the “overhuman,” the self-actualized human. This “overhuman” evolves with a sense of the meaning of life on earth, to find whatever meaning can be found here and not to look forward to it in the delusion of an after-life. This overhuman must have the qualities of the ideal teacher, must understand our radically social nature, and oppose Nietzsche’s prototype boasts on extreme individualism. The model for “we” I want to defend starts with Peter Berger’s notion of the sociologist as a condottiere. The condottiere is a leader of a band of mercenaries so we find some condottieri who fight for the oppressors of their fellow humans and some who fight for their liberation. This is an appropriate metaphor for this book but it should apply to the ideal teacher, the ideal educator, the ideal scientist, the ideal thinker. I will have more to say about Berger’s view of the sociologist further on. If this sounds “elitist” I will defend an elite defined by its ability to report that the Emperor has no clothes and dedicated to sharing this ability and the insights it supports with the audience of humanity. If there is a last chapter in the God story, there must be a first chapter and some chapters that follow. Indeed there are such chapters and there is an important prologue. The prologue explores the precursors to religion and the gods in human cultures and among our primate ancestors. The prologue goes further back than the primates to the very invention of “the social” in the unfolding of the evolution of life. That story unfolds from the invention of multi-cellular animals to grouping behavior, sociation, social organization among the vertebrates, and the complex social networks of the primates to the emergence of the always, already and everywhere social human beings. The precursors of religion and the gods are rooted in belongingness and compassion found among the primates

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(King, 2007). These qualities are radically enhanced in the rituals, emotional contagion, and collective effervescence among humans. Among the earliest humans, learning to make appropriate causal links was an adaptive strategy. In this primordial period, trial and error and an intuitive sense of causality readily led to mistakes. One of the most significant of such mistakes is the mistake in reference. A “mistake in reference” is a category mistake. In such a case the same terms are used to describe properties of two distinct logical types or natural kinds. In his classical discussion of this mistake, Gilbert Ryle (1949) argued that it was a mistake to treat mind and body as two distinct kinds of things: the mind at work is the body at work. In the case of God the category mistake is to treat the word or symbol for God as a different kind of thing than the entity God. The term “God” is assumed to refer, and God is assumed to be a “thing in the world” (in the “other world”). They are in fact the same thing. God is real as a symbol not as an actual entity or being of any kind.

Sacred and profane Collective effervescence is a key concept in Emile Durkheim’s theory of religion. Rituals of solidarity are a normal part of the cycles of social life already in the earliest human societies. Simply put, and as a first approximation, the everyday tasks of survival give rise to the world of the profane. A sacred realm arises in the rituals which bring individuals together to re-affirm their group membership in the wake of various profane activities. They also give some shape to a still fragile and easily disrupted sense of self. These rituals, accompanied by rhythmic chants, singing, dancing, drumming, music, and sometimes drugs enhance the highenergy levels these events create. Collective effervescence refers to the sense of a shared physical and emotional experience enhanced by the various rhythmic ingredients of the ritual. Later, I will discuss how this experience generates the Ur-religious experience and leads to concepts of trans-social entities such as gods. Rhythm is a key feature of social and individual life. Our bodies literally vibrate with innate rhythms. These rhythms generate fields that connect humans to humans and serve as vehicles for communication and consciousness links. It is easier to see the human construction of the gods with the coming of Christianity and a God with clearly human though supernatural characteristics including emotions and a personality. The most distinct gods in the preChristian period were constructed in the form of animals. In the centuries preceding the crystallization of early Western societies, animals and human-like creatures began to coalesce into hybrid gods. By the time of the early Greeks and Romans, Dionysius came in the form of a bull or bull horns; Demeter came as the mane of a horse; and Pan was a faun The earliest religious feelings were stimulated by the objects and forces of the natural world. The sun, moon, stars, and planets were the earliest natural objects that proto-religious feelings were attached to. Then came (perhaps more or less simultaneously) objects in the natural world such as animals and fire. Agni, one of India’s principal deities,

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refers to the natural phenomenon of fire. Agni appears in Latin as Ignis or Jovis, and in Sanskrit as Dyaus, in Greek as Zeus Admiring or coming into contact with an object or force in the everyday course of events is not enough to generate religious feelings or the sense of contacting a supernatural world. Animists locate the origin of religious feelings in dreams; naturists find them in certain cosmic manifestations. Sociologically, the concept of the sacred that is at one with religious feeling shows up not in humans or nature per se but in the concept of the totem. Let’s be clear that the concept of religion is broader than the idea of God or gods. And the idea of God or gods may fall outside of the spiritual arena. I am interested in the idea of God or of gods as entities that people believe have some form of supernatural ontological status. All such beliefs, regardless of their variations across time, space, and cultures have in common the fact that they are mistakes in reference. Quite simply, there are no such entities. The error is in assigning a non-earthly ontological status to symbols, and reifying them. This is over-simplifying a complex set of circumstances in which humans try to connect mysterious emotional experiences to causes outside of themselves. Broadly conceived symbols have an ontological status; but at this point we need to reconstitute ontology to embrace the realm of culture. We need to distinguish the ontological realms that are the province of the physical and natural sciences and the ontological realms that are the province of the social sciences. The ontological realm of the social sciences overlaps with those of the physical and natural sciences; it includes, following Bidney (1953) technofacts (technologies and technical artifacts that are in the realm of the physical and chemical sciences), mentifacts (realm of the cognitive and neurosciences), and socifacts. Socifacts include human beings who belong at bottom to the physical and natural sciences; but the social sciences treat them only as relational beings, beings in interaction with others and as social facts themselves (the self as a social structure). Socifacts also encompass the realm of culture – the realm of norms, values, beliefs, and symbols. These are real, they have ontological status; but they do not exist in the sense of having life, vitality, or substance. God and the gods belong to this ontological realm; they are symbolically real but they do not have life, vitality, or substance in any natural or supernatural sense. I am not arguing for a world of material and immaterial things but a world of things that come to us as different forms of materiality. I want to add two additional “-facts” to those identified by Bidney: emotifacts, referring to emotions; and biofacts, referring to those aspects of humans treated by the biological sciences.

After God: Some initial thoughts Those philosophers, post-religious theologians, and ethicists who take on the roles of “death of God” prophets find, like almost anyone who travels this path, that it is difficult to escape the shadow of God. Every proposal for a world without a God seems to introduce some sort of God surrogate. The reason for this is

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that ripping God out of the tapestry of society shreds the glues of belongingness and compassion that hold societies together and form the foundations for morals, ethics, and values. There are many ways to support social solidarity but we have been blinded to this elementary sociological fact because the evolution of social life draws initially on the easiest and simplest glue, religion and God, gods, or god surrogates. In this respect, the ethical religions of the East may be considered more advanced ways of gluing societies together than the Western religions. So “After God” will always have to lead to a glue that resurrects the dead God, creates a surrogate, or gives us a glue that is independent of classical religion and the Western God. From one perspective, the power of God and the light of the soul seem to be evolving through secularization into machines that are God-like in their powers and already showing signs of the light of consciousness, of mind, of a soulless soul. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (2020) undertakes a theological enlightenment of theology. The problem at hand is that the twilight of the gods has been accompanied by the twilight of the soul. Ours is an age in need of a Newer Testament. Immersed in the postmodern world of plurals, the end of God arrives in an era of the end of dualisms. Sloterdijk resists the tendency evident in so many death of God commentaries to posit the coming of a new god or a new version, an evolved version, of God. His form of Enlightenment theology is a theology mechanized, a technological theology in which the ashes of God are spirited into our artificial intelligences. This will not play well or at all to what we might call the instinct for religion. In other words, Sloterdijk, if he is a prophet, is a prophet who goes rushing past the dying conventions of religion, God, and soul without trying to save their societal essences. This doesn’t mean he might not be right in some way. Religion professor Mark C.Taylor (2007: xiii) begins his “after God” story by claiming that today’s world cannot be understood without understanding religion: “Never before has religion been so powerful and so dangerous.” On his first page, he introduces three ideas that seem provocative but that are sociological truisms: secularization is a religious process; religion is pervasive across culture; and religion has manifest and latent functions. Provocative or not these sound provincial in a world of post-colonial scholarship. But Western ideas and movements in religion and secularity throw their shadows across the entire world, transported by imperialism, colonialism, and militarism. Given what I have said about the sociology of religion, it is no great feat to find, as Taylor does, the traces of religion everywhere. Taylor is also right to point out that supporters and opponents of religion don’t really know what it is. The question is: does Taylor? Taylor (2007: 12–13) defines religion as follows: Religion is an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feelings, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose, and on the other,

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disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure [he refers here to a “dialectical rhythm”]. Consider, for contrast, Durkheim’s classically sociological definition of religion. On the one hand, he noted that one of the characteristics of religion is that in its association with the supernatural it has been assumed to surpasses the limits of our knowledge (1912/1995: 22, 44). But he reined it in: religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Durkheim stresses religion as a stabilizing force. To find a sociologist who might agree with Taylor that religion has a destabilizing function, we could consider Max Weber’s (1905/2002) thoughts on religion and social change. The sociologist is generally more focused on the social solidarity functions of religion as an integral part of social life. It is no more or less complex and adaptive than the society it integrates. And while the sacred/profane distinction has its problems when we start taking it across history and culture, the sacred can be thought of as the energy that locks the iron cage of certainty, tradition, and authority that protects religion and the gods from critical scrutiny. This iron cage is materialized, for example, in the sanctuaries of the Egyptian temples. The temples were the sites of rituals and offerings to the gods necessary for maintaining the divine order of the universe; that is, the power of the pharaohs. They delegated these activities to a priestly class. The masses were not allowed into these areas, which throbbed with a palpable power for them, an invisible power that revealed through its very mystery the reality of the gods. Like Sloterdijk and other contemporary thinkers, Taylor views religion through the modern lens of postmodernisms that have shown us the limits of dualisms, singulars, absolutes, foundations, and essentialisms. At their best, postmodern movements have helped us to unveil the complexities and limitations of our classical ways of categorizing and classifying the world. At their worst, these movements have nourished radical relativisms, and the notion that we can no longer tell the truth or be objective. Taylor is not radical in this respect, but he tends to see religion in contemporary terms. I deal with the very real issue of whether we can support a claim that religion is universal in various places in this volume. For now let me focus on where Taylor (2007: 377) leaves us after God. If we eliminate the concept of the divine as neither an “underlying One, which dissolves differences,” nor a “transcendent Other, which divides more than unites” we rid ourselves of the apocalyptic vision of a kingdom of God that cannot arrive until this earthly one passes away. In its place Taylor gives us a divine that “is incarnate in the eternal restlessness of becoming.” This makes life “infinitely valuable:” The figure of this infinite life is water – not water that represents chaos and disorder, which must be destroyed for the cosmos and order to be created, but water whose fluid dynamics figure the virtuality in and through which everything is figured, disfigured, and refigured.

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This does not seem to be an adequate path to a new way of fashioning the social cohesion traditional religion was designed to nourish. But Taylor and Sloterdijk are experimenting with the new ways required by the breakdown of the capacity of traditional institutions, norms, values, and beliefs to provide adaptive sustenance for our species. God rests uneasy and always at the ready to break out of his sick bed or coffin and sneak into our lives in new ways. H.T. Engelhardt, Jr. (2017: 11) leads us through the complexities of the modern life that he shares with Taylor and Sloterdijk. But he takes a different path after God that leads to God. He starts where most contemporary students of religion are obliged to start: “We are after God. That is, the dominant secular culture is deaf and blind to God’s existence.” Whereas Sloterdijk, Taylor and others address the death of God by trying to construct a meaningful life for us, Engelhardt is worried that by taking the death of God literally and scientifically we have lost the necessary “God’s-eye perspective on morality, bioethics, the state and the meaning of life.” The result is we are left faced by a reality in which everything appears to have come from nowhere, is going nowhere, and is going with no “enduring and ultimate purpose.” One can hear Taylor exclaiming at this point, “Water, water!” We can now begin to see why secularism has had such an unexpectedly difficult time burying religion and God; it is itself a manifestation of the social forces that generated religion, just as they generated atheism and agnosticism. What is at the root of religion is at the root of all cohesive systems of morals, values, ethics, and belief. Cohesion, consensus, and cooperation are the conditions for, they “go with,” societies that are self-perpetuating functioning social systems. There are, of course, no societies that are in perfect motion. This gives rise to the ancient idea that Taylor resurrects as the dialectic of religion as a stabilizing and destabilizing system. Society, like the self, is a dance between order and chaos. At any moment, and for any form of life, for any institution, for any organization, for any society we must investigate its balance between order and chaos and not take it for granted. This is why Walby (2007) urges us to think in terms of societalization and not society. It’s an idea that is generalizable across the full spectrum of living systems. “After God” cannot simply be understood as predicting a society without religion or God. It can only mean the transition to a new order with new principles of solidarity. Historically, this has meant one society after another giving rise to one God or pantheon of gods after another or god equivalents like the strong man leader, the emperor, and the king. We finally have the understanding, the cultural maturity, to recognize that it is the dialectics of moral orders we are witnessing. This puts us in position to self-consciously construct moral orders that do not need to be grounded in Other-worldly realms. Engelhardt finds himself at sea without a God to anchor the moral order. And so he ends his search for an anchor in the ancient ultimate Other. He believes with the Southern writer Walter Percy

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that traditional beliefs still live with us. “Even in the face of secularization,” Engelhardt (2017: 458) concludes, “committed true belief will not evanesce, because God is on our side.” The “after God” movement demonstrates that whether one ends up with Taylor’s “negative God” or Engelhardt’s resurrected God, contemporary philosophers, theologians, and ethicists are being forced to address ancient issues and problems through a lens that reveals a complex world of networks of networks. This is a world of fractals, non-linearity, complex adaptive systems, uncertainty, chaos, and catastrophe piled on catastrophe looming over the horizon. Without a sociological understanding of religion and the gods this can lead to the kind of theoretical jungle Taylor guides us through, a jungle with no clear pathways. He is led to postulate two reasons for the disappearance of God – God can become so transcendent that “He” no longer functions on our behalf; or “He” can become so immanent that God and the world merge and become one. The situation from street level is much simpler: Here I echo in a way Nietzsche’s notion of the profundity of the surface. Gods disappear because the societies that created them as representations disappear; Gods change because the societies that created them as representations change. We are becoming the kind of world that Marx foresaw, simply a world that does not need religion and God in their classical garb. To reiterate, societies are one with moral order and thus one with religion and God and one with any future manifestation of moral order. We don’t need to reinvent God, we don’t need Gods who leave their transcendental homes and come to be immanent within us, we don’t need powerless Gods (see Kearney, 2010). We don’t need Gods any more than children aged seven or eight (or younger) need Santa Claus. I do not intend to add my voice to those who have sought to champion a stand in for God, a God surrogate, to replace the dead God. Among the stand ins that have been proposed we can count Reason, Nature, Spirit, Culture, the Nation State, Science, Logic Sport, Humanity, and Society. God has existed for us for thousands of years and it is hard not to approach his death without sneaking Him or the very idea of divinity into our lives in clandestine ways. Giles Deleuze (1968/2014: 73) argues that “God is retained so long as the Self is preserved.” This Nietzschean proposition is overly dramatic. We already understand that the relation between God and Self changes when society changes; neither a certain form of God and a certain form of Self can survive such changes. The Self does not have to disappear with the death of God but it does have to be transformed. Morality, goodness, justice and wisdom are not chimeras just because God is a chimera (Feuerbach, 1841/1957: 21). At the same time, as Nietzsche proposes, this does not mean that we can dispose of divinity and not suffer consequences. For this reason modern men and women who no longer believe in God are compelled to behave as if He exists. The reason for this is rooted in the God=Society equation. The “after God” movement is closely associated with the “after the death of God” movement. John Caputo and Gianni

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Vattimo (2007) are two of the leading postmodern students of the “recovery of God.” Vattimo defends a form of “weak” thinking derived from his Christian faith. Freed from literalism, the interpretation of the Bible becomes the root of freedom and anti-authoritarianism. Following Nietzsche and Gadamer, Vattimo understands the history of Christianity as the destiny of the West. The practical consequence of this movement is an emphasis on charity which displaces the search for truths. Caputo is an advocate of “Spectral Hermeneutics.” Inspired by Derrida, his deconstruction of the parables of the kingdom and of prayer have led him to espouse a “weak theology.” The “death of God” appears in his framework as an on-going project of deconstructing the onto-theological God. Caputo and Vattimo have engaged in a dialogue of mutual appreciation and critique. Caputo sees a meta-narrative in Vattimo’s idea that the destiny of the West is tied to Christianity, a meta-narrative that is not consistent with his “weak thinking” program. Vattimo defends his Christian standpoint and argues that it is the grounds for his “weak thinking” program. That program, in turn, grounds his critique of the use of religious language to facilitate ecclesiastical power. This critique converges with Caputo’s views; both agree that the Vatican is the center of the abuse of religious language and power. As two of the leading postmodern hermeneutical philosophers of our time, Caputo and Vattimo have been in the vanguard of addressing the failure of the equation “more modern equals less religious”. The twentieth century witnessed in their views a transition from secularism to post-secularism. The death of God movement has its modern origins in the hermeneutics of suspicion, critique of and hostility to religion found in the theological works of Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard, and the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These ideas were part of a larger scale movement that crystallized in the nineteenth century, a movement that nourished the idea that God was a human projection. Uncertainties were beginning to accumulate in the wake of the certainties promised by the scientific revolution. Religion too was caught up in this development as traditional religious certainties and assurances were overturned. But the rise of defenders of secularism, death of God theologians, and deconstruction philosophers surprisingly in some eyes would as the second millennium dawned give way to a return to religion: “Religion is making a comeback,” declared the New York Times in 1997 (Miles, 1997). It looked for a while as if Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment project was going to prevail; the emergence of an autonomous individual immune to the political and religious authorities and dogmatists who had obstructed critical thinking and science. In fact, according to thinkers like Caputo and Vattimo, modern secularist assumptions increasingly came into question as the twentieth century unfolded. Caputo, Vattimo, and their fellow deconstructionists were asking how the radical, secular, death of God theologies of the 1960s had become the postmodern return to religion. And how did it happen that the connection between the death of God and deconstruction was coming to us not through theological discourse per se but through the voices of philosophers and cultural theorists? At the end of the day, we have Caputo and Vattimo agreeing to reinscribe, reinvent,

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and reaffirm their Christian origins in compatible images of the weakness of the New Testament and the crucifixion, respectively, weak theology and weak thought, voiced by their own admission, in an Italian dialect. The “after God” and “after the death of God” movements do not have a lot to offer those outside of philosophy and theology. Many of the participants in these movements appear to be intent on recapturing something sacred and certain in a world that seems to be measured by centers that will not hold. The Biblical God does not survive their efforts. Caputo and Vattimo bring a Christian exclusivity into a world situation that requires progressive new theologies and I would argue anti-theologies. We are left with a new reformation, not one that places the burden of interpretation on the individual but one that places the burden of the cross on them. The so-called “turn to religion” is better defined as a turn to spiritualism and has not really interfered with the momentum of secularism. The West is not going to revert to Christendom, the East is not going to revert to a Caliphate, and the Middle East is not going to become a New Jerusalem.

Tolerance and truth The philosopher Brian Leiter (2014) has offered a well-conceived, sophisticated, and literate argument for tolerating religion even taking into account wrong beliefs. My argument against tolerance for wrong beliefs in general is that nature abhors a truth vacuum and that there is a science of survival ultimately grounded in the planet earth’s eco-biospherical values and our human biophysical and biosocial values. Unlike some observers of the human condition I claim that there are values implicit in the requirements for a healthy planet, a healthy body, and a healthy society. Physicists, philosophers, astronomers, cosmologists, and mathematicians have had a lot to say about reality over the centuries. They have provided religious leaders with “reasonable and responsible” evidence, according to the Jesuit Robert Spitzer (2010), for the existence of God. Bracketing philosophers, what would have to be true about God for “Him” to be a proper object of study for physical scientists? God would have to be an entity capable of being identified by one of the five senses. If for some reason this were true but God had placed a barrier between “Himself ” and our five senses, then the physical scientists (and now we can bring back the philosophers) would have to reason their way to confirming “His” reality. The route some have taken is to use the technology of proofs. Proofs for the existence of God take as their starting point certain physical events related to the creation of the universe. Some of the events important to grounding proofs of God constructed by physical scientists and philosophers are (1) the concept of an initial singularity; (2) the assumption that an anthropic universe is highly improbable; (3) causation and simplicity in quantum theory and cosmology which, it is argued, supports the “is caused cause argument”;

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(4) an ontological foundation for the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan’s proof for the existence of God: If all reality is completely intelligible, then God exists. But all reality is completely intelligible [?]. Therefore, God exists. Historically, God as the Alpha and Omega has not been easily reached through everyday reason; He has only been accessible by means of dialectical thought (Hegel), everyday practice (Fichte), intuition (Schelling), or revelation (many prophets). Our logics are assaulted by the idea that our very failure to discover God is in fact an argument for His existence. The very discipline that I call on to demonstrate that there is no God began as a secularized religion, a new Christianity, in the works of Comte and Saint Simon. The everyday world is hardly ready to turn away from their traditional God and religion in order to embrace Comte in place of the Pope or the Dalai Lama. Proofs are logical machines. So in addition to the requirement that God must be a physical entity in order for physical science proofs to apply, God must be a logical entity in order for the general application of a proof procedure to make sense. There is indeed something transparently satisfying about logical and mathematical proofs in general. For persons who have an unguarded, untutored, or non-reflexive understanding of proofs, “QED God exists” at the end of a proof can carry powerful conviction. The road to the final chapter of God has to go through the proofs. We’ll come to them in Chapter 5 by way of the roads of truth (Chapter 3) and critical sociological reasoning (Chapter 4). So let’s take the road of truth next. But first, allow me a preview of one of my conclusions which will come to the fore in Chapter 10 on theologian Hans Küng’s narrative proof that there is a God. Humans have a need for certainty in a reality that we discovered in the twentieth century is ruled by uncertainty, chaos, and chance. Of course, there is a measure of certainty to be found in the simple causes and effects of everyday life. Put a pot of water on the stove, turn on the heat, wait a few minutes, and the water will boil. Push your car over the edge of a cliff and it will fall and be destroyed. Bounce a ball and it will come back to you. We can depend on certain natural phenomena; the cycle of days and nights, the phases of the moon, and so on. This is reasonable for humans as practitioners of everyday life even if some philosophers would like to destroy their confidence in inductive and deductive reasoning. But believers and theologians yearn for a different level of certainty, they seek Absolute Certainty about life, the universe, and everything. God promises that, absolute certainty that there is more to life than this vale of tears, this life that is (recalling Socrates) a long time being sick; absolute certainty that there are morals, and ethics, and values that He has commanded and that make life worth living in an orderly fashion; absolute certainty that our good lives will be rewarded in another eternal life of happiness in Heaven. Go back

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over my own story and you will see that I wanted absolute certainty about what was going on here; what’s it all about? I sought the answers in an impossible effort to learn everything about life, the universe, and everything. But I grew up. I left childish things behind. There are minor certainties that are the conditions for life. But there are no Absolute certainties, and the search for them can only lead to belief in realms of illusions and delusions, worlds of gods and spirits and angels and lives everlasting. The search for Absolute certainties is, let’s say it clearly and without flinching, an illness.

3 TO TELL THE TRUTH

It is crucial for human survival that we get certain things about how our world works right. Contrary to many of the conclusions reached by scholars and intellectuals in the postmodern world, it is still possible to tell the truth, it is still possible to distinguish what is real from what is not real, it is still possible to make a distinction between right and wrong facts of the matter. Hallucinations are real enough experientially, but one cannot feed them or get their help in crossing the street; they are not real in that sense. All of this has admittedly become more complicated, more subtle, more inspired sociologically. But truth telling has not become impossible. Historically, our collective capacity to solve problems of survival has depended on leaving childish things behind, on reasoning our way past the old myths and mysteries cognitively and experientially, individually and collectively. Traditional beliefs about religions and the gods have survived the virtual onslaught against traditional beliefs in general by science and technology, but not without giving some ground. In the wake of several episodes of enlightenment throughout history, the first modern civilizational setback for religious beliefs came in the loss of faith that spread like a wildfire across the industrializing world in the nineteenth century. This was primarily a movement within the West, but it held lessons for all the world’s religions. Historical studies of the religions of the East emerged alongside a virtual avalanche of studies of Christianity. Of course, religious beliefs have been the object of criticism, skepticism, and theorizing from ancient times to the present. What was unusual about the nineteenth century was that assumed matters of fact started to wither in the face of new archaeological, historical, sociological, and anthropological evidence about religions and gods. What are the consequences of viewing the history of the idea of God (and of gods in general) and religion in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and intersecting this view with advances in the social and cultural sciences over

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the last two hundred years? More specifically, what are the consequences for the view of history as the divine unfolding of God’s plan and God’s voice if we adopt a view of history as a human narrative and moreover as a social and cultural narrative? What is the significance of death of God narratives in theology and philosophy for our understanding of history and time? Physical and natural scientists have had a great deal to say about such issues in dialogue with theologians and believers. On the one hand they have been participants in conflictful dialogues (notably though the efforts of aggressive opponents such as Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens using a logic of anger). On the other hand, they have engaged in dialogues of harmony, convergence, and détente (most notably and visibly with Karen Armstrong and Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama). The logics of anger, mystery, and uncritical, cynical skepticism have dominated debates and discussions about God, religion, and society for thousands of years. The emergence and development of the social and cultural sciences have changed the grounds and terms of heavenly discourses, but this change has not penetrated the centers of contemporary or even more broadly modern intellectual and lay circles of inquiry. What is more sinister is that where it has penetrated – and it has penetrated quite widely – it has been sucked into an informational black hole. The public has been left in the dark even as the theologians themselves have increasingly become students of the sociology and anthropology of religions and the gods. There are numerous indications that the continuing tolerance for religious ideas, which even atheistic and post-atheism intellectuals and laypeople support, is threatening our survival. Creationist museums in Ohio and Kentucky opened in this century and one in Texas founded in 1984 flaunt a level of ignorance that is equivalent to putting astrology on a par with astronomy or numerology on a par with mathematics. A plague of ignorance has led to the development of other Creationism museums in Alberta, Canada; Hong Kong; Portsmouth, Hampshire and Wraxall, Somerset in the United Kingdom; California; Florida; Idaho; Montana; New York; North Carolina; South Dakota; Tennessee; and Washington. The problems being generated in the context of contemporary global society will not yield to solutions contaminated by illusory and delusionary belief systems. I don’t know of any social surveys that can give us a reasonably good estimate of how many priests, imams, rabbis, and religious leaders and theologians of all faiths believe in God or gods, or in the literal interpretation of their sacred texts. However, there is some journalistic and anecdotal evidence that suggests cracks in the armor of traditional beliefs among those who possess the keys to the underlying truths transmitted to congregations. And this is something we should expect in an era with widely dispersed and distinct pockets of secularism and humanism and the increasing introduction of the sociology and anthropology of religion into seminary curricula. A poll of Anglican clergy found that as many as sixteen percent are not clear about God and two percent believe God is a human construct.

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A generation ago David Jenkins, then Bishop of Durham, notoriously cast doubt on the resurrection; now unorthodox views like this appear to be spreading among Britain’s priests. Clergy are significantly more likely to hold unorthodox beliefs the older they are and the longer they had been in the ministry. Nearly 90% of those ordained since 2011 believe in God compared with only 72% of those who became priests in the 1960s. An organization representing dozens of vicars known as the Sea of Faith rejects the traditional belief in one personal God. The Rev. David Paterson, a retired Church of England priest, would tell his congregation that how they felt about God had nothing to do with whether they believed in God or not. His views were reported in the University Times, Trinity College Dublin’s newspaper. Religion, he told the reporter who interviewed him, is a human creation like art and literature (Wynne-Jones, 2014). These are all valuable ways to understand yourself. The YouGov survey interviewed more than 1500 Anglican clergy from the Church of England, Church in Wales, and Scottish Episcopal Church. It was commissioned by the Westminster Faith Debates. Redemptorist priest Tony Flannery told the Irish Times (McGarry, 2017) that traditional Catholic Church teachings on God, Mary, and the Trinity “no longer make sense to the modern mind, and are being quietly rejected even by people who still attend church.” In a story published in the Irish Mirror (Irishmirror.ie, 2013), Joe Armstrong, who left the seminary six months prior to his ordination as a Catholic priest, told the Mirror that some Catholic priests don’t believe in God or the virgin birth. I myself have a friend who is a former seminarian now in his seventies who told me that no one in his class believed in God. Recently, Reuters reported a surge in demand for humanism ceremonies in Ireland, which are about “compassion and reason,” according to Mr. Armstrong. The most publicly notorious example of this “movement” was Rev. Reginald Foster’s remarks to Bill Maher in the 2008 documentary Religulous. Foster, a Discalced Carmelite and the papal Latinist for 40 years agreed with Maher that the Vatican itself was at odds with the message of Jesus, that the pope should not be living in a palace, and that hell and “that Old Catholic stuff” was “finished” and “gone.” The twentieth century was witness to more and more stories like that of Uta Ranke-Heinemann (1994). The first woman to hold a chair of Catholic theology (1970), she lost her position for questioning the virgin birth (1987). She holds the (nondenominational) chair of History of Religion at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, her birthplace. Her controversial claims include the following: • • • •

The Bible is not the word of God but the word of men. That God exists in three persons is the imagination of men. Jesus is man and not God. Mary is the mother of Jesus and not the mother of God.

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• • •

God created heaven and earth, but hell is a product of human fantasy. The devil and original sin do not exist. A bloody redemption at the Cross is a pagan sacrificial slaughtering of a human being, based on a model from the religious Stone Age.

But the power of life-ever-lasting combined with the fear of “lying in a coffin: for ever and ever and ever … ” (Ranke-Heinemann, 1994: ix) helps the most critical, the most thoughtful, the most learned of men and women time and time again save God and Jesus and other wonder workers from the fairy tale apparatus that cleans out everything else in the storehouse of religious beliefs.

Closing the door on pure reason Gertrude Stein’s (1937: 289) “There is no there there” has been widely quoted and her meaning probed by critics. I was struck by how it echoes “the emperor has no clothes,” but adds a dimension of nostalgia to coming face-to-face with a reality that can take away things we cherish and challenge us with its recalcitrance. I have in the past linked this quotation to challenging the cult of pure reason (der Kulte der Reine Vernünft). There is no pure reason there; there is no God there. We are continually forced to wonder about the resistance of Platonic, transcendental, and supernatural thinking to the lessons of history and science. Those who continue to praise Plato and the gods include great thinkers who are prepared to dismiss out-of-hand beliefs about Yetis, alien abductions, astrology, and visions and voices of God. Platonic, transcendental, and supernatural thinking are robustly resistant to the lessons of modernity and post-modernity. The completion of the Copernican sociological revolution demands the end of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and God. These ghosts cannot be sustained in an age of sociological and cultural materialism. Increasingly, every mistake in reference, every error in logic, every gap in knowledge becomes a threat to reason in our liminal time. We are no longer working and playing on a planet whose limits we can take for granted. We may not have the resources we need materially and intellectually to solve the species and planet level problems we face. But we surely will fail if our efforts are burdened by the ghosts of philosophies and theologies past. Gödel, Einstein, and Heisenberg have not given us the keys to our survival as the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein (2005) would have us believe. If these are the only or the most important keys to our survival with quality we will fail. If we owe our survival thus far and into the future, it is Darwin, Marx, and Durkheim who hold the keys to who, what, where, and why we are. It is obvious that even my choices bind us to a white European male paradigm. But my choices, by contrast with Goldstein’s, are more readily linked to traditions from Madame de Stael to Harriet Martineau, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxembourg, and from Sojourner Truth to Betty Friedan, Angela Davis, Germaine Greer, and to post-colonial feminists such as Chandra Mohanty.

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If there was ever a time when we could defend art for art’s sake or science for science’s sake, if there was even a time when this was possible, that time has passed. We can no longer tolerate exercises in pure reason for the sake of pure reason, a strategy that still to this day sustains the lives and livelihoods of philosophers like Goldstein and Bruno Latour. I do not deny that the philosophers are well-intentioned, only that they are increasingly the theologians in a secular world sustaining a worldview more medieval than modern. Pernicious myths and dogmas flourish in this atmosphere. The claims that you can’t prove or disprove God, that faith escapes the chains of reason, and that science and religion stand apart as non-overlapping magisteria only make sense in a world without social science. We know with the same certainty that we know the planet’s orbits are elliptical that the referents for God and the gods are always going to be found in ourselves, our cultures, our material environments. This is a terrible, terrifying claim to make and defend. So even those with the courage to share what they know on this matter feel obliged to leave believers with hopes they know to be false. This is a formidable undertaking because God, gods, and religion are about the social glues of society. It is not, however religion or the gods per se that are the glue; moral orders are the glue, and moral orders can be variously configured, religiously, politically, and even around physical fitness (as illustrated by the life of fitness evangelist Jack LaLanne). Our goal in these liminal times should be to construct moral orders that are not anchored in entities and realms that do not refer materially, naturally, and socially. Making a distinction between “abstract” and “concrete” ideas and levels of reality brings with it a volatile potential for entrapment by transcendental and supernatural realisms. The difference between abstract and concrete is in fact a difference between levels or degrees or types of concreteness. Abstractions are a form of concreteness associated with highly professionalized activities, and find their acme in the intellectual professions and notably in mathematics and logic. As the boundaries defining a profession dedicated to ideas, concepts, and theories (mathematics and logic as the paradigms of such. professions) become increasingly well-defined, it loses contact with outside influences and resources. Its own products become the raw materials for future productions. In the realm of ideas, concepts, and theories this means its products become increasingly removed from the base level of everyday material reality. It becomes increasingly difficult to find practical applications for such products. When the physicist Eugene Wigner (1960) referred to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” he failed to take the ultimate consequences of professional boundaries and closures into account. There is nothing unreasonable about the effectiveness of mathematics in the sciences and engineering because historically the boundaries of these professions allowed for the exchange of information and resources. We can indeed expect to find that this “effectiveness” diminishes as boundaries stiffen and become more resistant to the exchange of resources and information. And indeed, some mathematicians have recognized just this possibility (e.g., Boos, and Niss, 1979). The very idea of an abstraction is an invitation to

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purified reason; it takes us to the very threshold of transcendental and supernatural realities. There also we find the danger of falling into the trap of believing in supernatural and transcendental entities. This brings me to a consideration of the unexpected limits on critical theology. Consider the writings of Una Ranke-Heinemann (1994) and Han Küng (1978/1980). Here are two extraordinary thinkers each capable in his or her own way of mobilizing the forces of reason to oppose “childish things” (to borrow from Ranke-Heinemann’s book title). Critical theologians’ fairy tale apparatuses plow under everything from virgin births to resurrections, Creationism, and papal infallibility but for some reason fail to work in the cases of God and Jesus. I’m left for the moment with such individual cases and only the mechanisms of trauma and fear to explain the limitations of their fairy tale cleansing apparatuses. Is it a characteristic of humanity to experience the overwhelming mystery of existence as a chasm between two infinite voids? Does this provoke an immeasurable anxiety because its impressive powers of reason show no signs of being capable of bridging that gap? Is this anxiety experienced as a gap, a hole, a profound emptiness, at the core of one’s experience of the world, a hunger? Does reason seek to satisfy that hunger, and does Nature fail to provide the means of sustenance? Is this why we turn to the Other in the form of drugs and stories for frightened children? I don’t feel the need to make this turn, my father didn’t. But Hans Küng? Look at the immense worldly learning he demonstrates in his Does God Exist? (1978). He has at his fingertips the works of all the great philosophers, theologians, and scientists of the East and the West. Why does he need an absolute ground, an absolute morality, an absolute truth, a God? I will return to this question in Chapter 10.

Ecumenical limits In my concern for understanding the limits of tolerance, I have come to the position that ecumenical efforts across the religious landscapes and bridging the gaps between science and religion are misplaced. If, as Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama claim, religion is universal and that all religions share the characteristic of compassion, then the ecumenical strategy has a chance to work. The problem is that compassion is a centripetal force, a force that draws people toward the moral center of their societies while establishing a more or less impenetrable boundary that outside forces of compassion cannot penetrate. Centrifugal compassion is weak at best. It is never easy to peacefully meld even equally compassionate societies. On Karen Armstrong’s views on the history of God and religion see www. google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=karen+armstrong+books. The mountain of evidence against the existence of gods and transcendental and supernatural realms has been built up from within religious institutions themselves and from outsider scholars and social critics. Outsider critics include scholars across the intellectual spectrum as well as importantly comedians. Comedians, like jesters, can get away with a lot before the king orders the guards

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to cut off their heads. Sociology as a discovering science has demonstrated that the gods are human creations, symbols of social life. But not all sociologists view their discipline as a discovering science, nor do they view the sociology of religion as a challenge to faith and belief. Personal beliefs among sociologists can trump sociological knowledge about religion, gods, beliefs and faith itself. Rodney Stark is a distinguished sociologist known for his lucid contributions to the sociology of knowledge and religion. Consider, then, what our expectations should be upon seeing the title of his 2008 book, Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief. This is a very promising title from the perspective of sociology as a discovering science. And indeed Stark’s sociology doesn’t fail him when it comes to criticizing the New Atheists and their fellow travelers. Religion, belief and God are not, as the logic of anger that guides the New Atheists would have it, delusional, based on ignorance, and worthy of contempt from the scientifically literate. What is missing in the New Atheist arguments is any religious sentiment or robust understanding of the sociology of religion and its findings on symbols, rites, rituals, and morals. The New Atheists are not religiously musical. Stark understands the sociological truth that society and religion are mutually implicated. He doesn’t see that religion is just one of the ways the glue – the moral order – that binds us in families, communities, and societies can be constructed. There is a great deal of valuable historical and cultural information about religion and belief in Stark’s book. The problem with the book is signaled by the leading headline blurb on the back of the book jacket: “Did God Create Us, Or Did We Create God?” The answer to this question is signaled by Durkheim’s discovery that the gods are symbolic constructions forged by humans in cultural contexts. But Stark is haunted by the shadow of a confusing experience of religious faith. In the late 1980s he described himself as incapable of religious faith but not an atheist. When he joined the private Baptist Christian Baylor University faculty in 2007, he said he had changed his view and now described himself as an “independent Christian” and in any case always a “cultural” Christian. He was also willing to associate himself with agnosticism. All of this may help to explain why all of the laudable scholarship that characterizes his book on “discovering God” comes apart in his closing paragraphs. Here he falls victim to intelligent design arguments and takes the side of those who believe that life, the universe and everything could not possibly be one big meaningless accident. At the end of the day, Stark claims the universe is the “ultimate revelation of God,” and that science is fundamentally theology. This is an exemplary failure of the sociological and the scientific imagination. Michael Harrington, political philosopher, social critic, and socialist activist writes more explicitly about the death of God but under a comparable burden of faith and belief. Harrington has stronger grounds for his atheism than Stark has for his beliefs. He nonetheless carries a religious burden that colors his brilliant 1983 book on The Politics at God’s Funeral. He was educated at St. Roch Catholic elementary school (which describes its mission as Faith, Education,

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Service, and Discipline), and the Jesuit secondary school Saint Louis University High School. His interest in left wing politics and Roman Catholicism led him to join Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement. He edited The Catholic Worker from 1951 to 1953. Though he came eventually to atheism, he always remained, like Stark, a cultural Christian, and more specifically a cultural Catholic and a “pious apostate.” Given this background should we – as sociologists of knowledge – be surprised that in a book that literally screams out that there is no God or gods, he timidly skirts around making that claim explicit. In the first place, Harrington repeats the oft-claimed “truism” that one cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. This is no longer defensible once we have a social science that can identify and explain symbols, rituals, and cultures. Second, he evades confronting the relevance of his analysis for the individual, which is exactly the most important focus for the sociology of religion for reasons I have discussed earlier. If the death of God is as significant as Harrington claims – even if this is “only” the death of the political God – how does this not redound to individual belief? Doesn’t Harrington think at least some of his believer readers will wonder why he doesn’t believe in the supernatural – isn’t that where the God of the believers if not the political God “resides”? One will find the same capitulation to everyday social expectations in sociology textbooks. Chapters on the sociology of religion never lead the student to the conclusions entailed by a full-fledged social constructionist understanding of religions, gods, the supernatural, and the transcendental. Finally, Harrington’s proposition for a coalition of believers and nonbelievers suffers from the same sociological naiveté expressed in the calls for a Charter for Compassion by Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama. We are in a competitive struggle of competing (in Darwinian terms) cultural species that will not break through the barriers of centripetal compassion simply because reason compels us. Some sociologists fail their discipline when it comes to religion by adopting the position of methodological agnosticism. James A. Beckford (2003: 29) follows this route even while defending a social constructionist perspective on religion: … in the absence of compelling proof of the existence of [supernatural] powers independent of human agents and agencies, the best course of action is to put aside questions about the reality of their existence and to concentrate, instead on less problematic questions about the uses that human beings make of religion. This is a legitimate sociological exercise but the idea that in the wake of the cumulative discoveries in the sociology of religions and the gods from the 1840s on, methodological agnosticism is a curious position for a sociologist to take. My position, to be clear, is that we have compelling proof that there are no supernatural powers, realms, or entities and that elevating what compels us to arenas of scientific, intellectual, and. public discourse is crucial for improving our chances of surviving the existential threats we face.

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It may be, as Harrington suggests, that the only way we can be successful (if success is possible) in solving the problems that face humanity and our planet is by mobilizing all the cognitive and intellectual resources at our disposal. This means mobilizing the resources of religious, scientific, and spiritual sages to address the existential threats of our time: the possibility of an AI singularity, cyber warfare, terrorism, the “coming of the robots,” climate change, pandemics, and the escape of nanoparticles from engineering labs. In the long run, however, science will have to triumph over religion and spirituality as we traditionally understand and experience them. Even if Jesus lived, and even if he was remotely the human character that evolved out of the pages of the Bible, his “life and works” would not explain the origins of Christianity. The matter of fact for the lay student of Christianity is that it arose on the foundations of and in the context of pagan cultures and Roman ways of life and social organization. The signs and scars of its pagan origins are still visible in the diversified Christianity of today with its pantheon of saints. Jesus is a symbolic construction manufactured out of pagan myths and legends, a selective reading of Hebrew Scriptures, and very likely bits and pieces of Eastern narratives that had traveled West primarily in the tales and ways of traders. On an organizational level, we see that religions are in and of the cultures they represent. Early Christianity organizes on the organizational template of the Roman Empire. The idea that gods dictate once and for all canonical texts is not borne out by the historical record. The texts are human works and humans change, correct, and translate, translate, and re-translate, and corrupt religious texts. The clearest examples of this are seen in the texts of Christianity. The Roman Catholic canon was not established until the Council of Trent in 1546. Martin Luther tried to remove Jude, James, Hebrews, and Revelation from the New Testament. Those books are still in the German language Luther Bible but are placed at the end of the edition. The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 established the canon for the Church of England, the Presbyterian canon by the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647, and the Greek Orthodox canon by the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672. The companion to the idea of a god-given canon is the idea that the canon is pure and free of inconsistencies. There is too much historical analysis of these inconsistencies in the Christian texts to support any level of belief in an internally consistent canon. One of the most widely cited examples is the nativity narratives. Matthew (1: 1–6) and Luke (3: 32–34) give different genealogies of Jesus (see Vermes, 2007; Metzger and Ehrman, 2005; Ehrman, 2005, 2009; Aslan, 2013); and for an introductory overview and extended bibliography, see the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_consistency_of_the_Bible. As critical thinkers, we need to have some strategies about how to proceed when we arrive at the intersection between faith and knowledge, at least if we still harbor knowledge as a strategy of life. What happened to those ancient people who were convinced about the reality of their gods? Some of them were as convinced that Osiris was real as some are today convinced that Jesus is real.

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What’s the difference between Osiris and Jesus? And who are those “other gods,” Mithras, Tammuz, Hermes, and a multitude of others whose lives mirrored the life of Jesus? Many of these gods were sun gods who revealed the truth in Macrobius’(aka Theodosius, 370–430 CE) claim that “All gods are only different powers of the sun.” Who do you think said the following? What is the first name that comes to mind as you begin to read? He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not have salvation. If you went to school in the West, and whether you are Christian or not, you are most likely to have associated the quote with “communion” and with Jesus. The correct answer is Zoroaster (c. 628-551 BCE). Zoroaster is the first person we know of to make this declaration centuries before Jesus. At the end of the day, however, we cannot be certain about attribution, but we can within the certainty constraints of the history of the ancient world recognize certain ideas that appear over and over again over thousands of years and get associated with persons who may or may not have lived. We know with a high degree of certainty that Jesus – whether he was a real person or not – stands in a long line of potential saviors, from Adonis and Horus to Krishna and Osiris, who occupied a social role with certain characteristics. To recall Chapter 1, they were all born on “Christmas Day” in a cave, underground, or in a grotto to a virgin, served their people, died and rose from the dead, and were celebrated with a eucharist. This social role, to varying degrees correlated with the solar messiah concept, or that of the myth of the magus, existed for thousands of years (see Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician, 1978 and Butler’s The Myth of the Magus, 1979). And it is a pattern that can still be found primarily but not exclusively in the poorer parts of the world. Consider, for example, the emerging cult of Elvis. Some people have constructed altars to worship him and there are many signs that, however small the scale at the moment, Elvis is being transformed into a Jesus surrogate who will return. Some of his followers believe he has already returned (Reece, 2006).

Programmed for criticism I had the advantage of a head start in critical thinking about religion and that made me more aware of the implications of these matters of fact. I got my head start because I grew up in a Roman Catholic household in which my mom and dad represented two widely different worldviews. My mom was born in Calabria, Italy, and came to the United States in one of the immigration waves from southern Europe in the early twentieth century when she was a young girl. She had a few years of schooling and then went to work. Her religious beliefs

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were inertial. She believed what she’d learned from her parents, relatives, and the church uncritically. She did not read books, not even the Bible. A student once asked my teaching assistant why she didn’t believe in God. She replied: “I read books.” My dad was born in Brooklyn, New York, of Sicilian stock. He went to school up to the eighth grade and then went to work when his dad died. What I remember most about his way of thinking is that he was fond of saying, “I don’t believe in anything.” I have no idea about how he arrived at this position. All I really know about his upbringing is that he was active in health and fitness and had the hands and brain of an engineer. My mother was, in short, an untutored, uncritical believer; my dad was an untutored critical nonbeliever. From all I could tell, my father did not experience something missing at the center of his existence. I don’t think my mother was reflective enough to experience something missing at the center of her existence. But her instinct was to shut down the conversation between my father and me when it turned to religion and the gods. She would leave the table to us, sometimes in tears. We felt bad but did not think tears should block such a conversation any more than the threats of barbarians. I took to science early on and almost immediately started to find church boring and filled with meaningless (not to mention terrifying) nonsense. In my teens and deeply engaged in science, math, and engineering, I shed the last remnants of belief but not without some misgivings. After all, I was only a teenager facing an unfathomable cosmos and death; what, after all, did I really know? It even occurred to me that the very fact that anything existed at all, the very fact of my own existence, was so improbably absurd that anything was possible, even a god. But as I read more, took courses, encountered nonbelievers, atheists, agnostics, and believers across the spectrum of religious and spiritual systems, matters of fact accumulated. Of course, I was slowly entering a world of research, theory, and experiment and therefore encountering more and more people and more and more information that undermined what I’d been taught as a Roman Catholic by birth. And the matters of fact continued to accumulate. A certain humility that does not come easily to me did keep me from fully and unequivocally embracing the fact that the universe is natural top to bottom and end to end, godless and without inherent meaning. I was well into my forties before the tipping point arrived in the form of too many Jesus surrogates, too many virgin mothers, too many sons of gods, too many twentieth-century discoveries of gospels in the deserts of the Near East (and now available in local bookstores and online; see The Nag Hammadi Bible (Robinson, 1988), the Dead Sea Scrolls (Vermes, 1997), The Other Bible (Barnstone, 1984), Siegel (2019), and other collections. Patterns emerged, took form, and solidified: the paradigm of the solar messiah; the social role of the magus (“magician”); the practice of transforming personages known to be human and of human parentage into sons of gods upon their death or during their lifetimes (as in such prominent cases as Julius Caesar, Alexander, and Plato); and the practice among young women in this world of mischievous beliefs to claim that their unplanned pregnancies were

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inspired by the Holy Spirit, a demon, or some other supernatural entity. There were godless early human societies, the ethical religions of the Far East, and just too many unlocked doors to mysteries people refused to open. All the Jesus stories have precedents. And this applies to all gods in all traditions. The differences are not differences that matter in this respect. Ultimately, as Durkheim concluded, gods are symbols period. When we combine the matters of historical and archaeological fact with the matters of sociological and anthropological research and theory there is no ground for believers to stand on. Only a fragile and ephemeral faith can sustain their beliefs. But do not misunderstand me; faith is a collective enterprise – it takes a village to raise and sustain a faith. And because faith is coupled with the fundamentals of belongingness that make us human as a biological species and cultural species it is a force to conjure with.

Culture, symbols, and veiled writing There are some basic things about human behavior and culture that we need to know in order to make our claims about religion, the gods, and their texts coherent. First, we need to understand the very idea of culture, the institutions and patterns of behavior that we are born into and do not choose any more than we choose our DNA. We are born into a language and a network of symbols that we absorb as our own. This process gets more complicated as societies and cultures become more complicated but the process of socialization, or programming, does not change. Societies and cultures are sui generis; that is, they are part of the natural world, products of general evolution, and they are a locus of causal forces. I can remember very clearly my mother moving my infant hand and arm through the signs of the cross, night after night, and repeating the words “In the name of the Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” programming that movement and those words until I could do it and say it on my own. The second thing we need to know is that human lives revolve around symbols. Symbols are ubiquitous but they vary by levels of reference. If I use symbols to direct you to a tree, and you follow my directions and come to a tree, the symbols I used are said to be first-order referents. “The sun” refers first order once removed to the glowing object we see in the sky. I can point you to it, but unlike the case of a tree, you can’t go to the sun. These are two forms of first order referents: we can walk up to and touch a tree as well as inspect it with all of our senses; we are restricted in the senses we can rely on to make the sun refer. Other symbols are not coupled to real objects accessible by way of our senses. From the point of view reflected in this book, God is not a first-order referent. The process of referring is more complicated than this but it is important to know the difference between first-order referring and second- and higher orders of referring. The development of science and knowledge is marked by changes in reference, notably in the present context the change from “God” referring to a transcendental supernatural entity to “God” referring to society. Again, cross-culturally and historically our term “God” doesn’t always translate neatly. “God” or “god”

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as a cultural idea can refer to material or natural symbols in the world at hand as well as refer transcendentally or supernaturally. For a review of the complexities buried in the word “God” see Armstrong (1994) and Küng (1978/1980). The third thing we need to know is that the Bible and other religious texts, along with many other kinds of texts including fairy tales and moral stories for children, cannot be read literally. We need to know that the art of concealment in writing has a long history that encompasses the ancient philosophers from Plato and Galen to the philosophers of Islam’s Golden Age (700 CE–1500 CE), including al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and notably Averroes and Maimonides. These philosophers operated with a sense of the separation between insiders and outsiders, knowers and novices, the initiated and the uninitiated. Averroes offers one of the best descriptions of the techniques of “veiled writing.” Veiled writing conveys one meaning to the uninitiated and a different meaning to the initiated. The basic techniques for achieving this form of writing include: symbolic allusion to doctrines, hiding the premises of an argument, treating subjects out of context, treating significant issues enigmatically, using equivocating language, confusing the reader with contradictory premises, stating truths very briefly, failing to draw obvious conclusions (choosing to be silent where voicing views is demanded), and attributing one’s views to hallowed real and imaginary ancients (Kogan, 1985: 21; and see Strauss, 1952; and Averroes, 1179-80/1961).

An interlude: The journey to the past and the East In the West, ancient wisdom was glorified in the works of such thinkers as Pico (1463–1494), Campanella (1568–1639), Henry More (1647–1687), and Roger Bacon (c.1220–1292). Pico listed Homer, Orpheus, and Zoroaster among the ancient masters who possessed exact and absolute knowledge. In 1632, Campanella wrote to Galileo that the heliocentric view reflected an ancient truth and foretold a new age. The Cambridge Platonist More described Cartesian mechanics as a truth known to Moses, preserved in the Cabbalist tradition, and divinely revealed to Descartes. The journey eastward in search of occult wisdom is a tradition that stretches from Pythagoras to Goethe to the twentieth-century mystical physicists. Moses was believed to have anticipated Pythagoras and Plato. Even Newton considered himself a “rediscoverer” rather than an innovator (Manuel, 1974: 38). This search for a single tradition running from ancient to modern thought was a search for a prisca theologie (Butler, 1970: 23). The route to absolute knowledge was conceived as a mystical path. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), for example, argued that Hermes Trismegistus had access to the divine mind (God) and received “the order of all things” through revelation. Ficino inspired a new gnosis that was just the old gnosis warmed over. Hermes Trismegistus is a mysterious figure from Ptolemaic Alexandria, a composite of the gods Hermes and Thoth, and a creator of the Hermetic tradition. In our own time, Theodore Roszak (1969), in arguing for a new gnosis, said there was nothing we could add to the old gnosis (Schumaker, 1972: 201, 256; Yates, 1964). The relationship

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reflected in these movements shows one of the many threads running from ancient times to the present that demonstrate an almost primal need for absolute knowledge, a need that inevitably leads to God (Restivo, 1983: 91–120). In our own era, we have the examples of physicists attempting to correlate modern physics with the Vedas and Hinduism, claims that the ideas of modern science are presaged in the I Ching, and that Einstein’s theories were anticipated by one of the Yellow Emperor’s advisors forty-five hundred years ago. The cultural grounds of these misguided intellectual strategies are discussed at length in Restivo (1983).

Veiled writing redux Often when veiled techniques are used, there will be an intra-textual warning to alert the reader. For example, in The Bible, the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks to the multitudes in parables (Matthew, 13:10–11, King James Version [KJV]); he replies: “Because it is given onto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” Clement of Alexandria wrote: “For neither prophecy nor the savior himself declared the divine mysteries in a simple manner, so as to be easily comprehended by ordinary people, but rather he spoke in parables” (Miscellanies 6 15,124. 5–6). In Mark (MK) 4:9–12, we read: –And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear; Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of God; but unto thee that are without, all these things are done in parables. The genuine, sole, and most profound theme of all world and human history-a theme to which all others are subordinate-remains the conflict between belief and unbelief. Goethe (1749–1832) The tradition of veiled writing begins, staying with the Western context, in the pre-Socratic period. In the Theaetetus, Socrates refers to an ancient tradition of veiling meaning from the “common herd,” and he specifically mentions Protagoras. It does not end there. Veiled writing is everywhere, from fifthcentury Athens to first-century Rome, from fourth-century Hippo (Algeria) to twelfth-century Cordoba, from Paris in the 1200s and Florence in the 1600s, to seventeenth-century Amsterdam and eighteenth-century London. It is practiced by Jews, pagans, Christians, Muslims, Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans. Veiled writing is used by nominalists, realists, mystics, materialists; indeed, every major philosopher before 1800 uses or refers approvingly to the practice. For a detailed history of the evidence and debates around veiled writing, see Melzer (2014), and Strauss (1952). Strauss adds the fear of persecution to the reasons for veiled writing besides not wanting to offend or over-extend the minds of the “common herd.” The issue of veiled writing ties into contemporary issues and debates around challenges to science, logic, and rationalism from the right (faith based

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thinkers) and the left (postmodernism). A book about the truth of God, the gods, and religions is bound up from beginning to end in this arena of challenges. This arena of challenges is part of the background against which this book and my perspective play out. I discuss this in more detail in the conclusion to this chapter. There is a specific version of veiled writing that applies to the Bible known as the “pesher” (Allegro, 1968; Charlesworth, 2006; Lim, 2002; Thiering, 2006). Use of the pesher as an interpretative technology is based on the knowledge that the authors of the Bible “hide” a “mystery” or a “puzzle” underneath the valid surface text that can only be unraveled by initiates. In their writing, they give words special meaning, turn universals into particulars, and use other techniques described in the writings of Averroes. These basic resources are enough to help us resolve the problem of miracles in the Bible. There are no miracles. When Jesus walks on water, he does not literally walk on water. This parable symbolizes Jesus adopting the role of the priest, traditionally an inherited role. Jesus does not literally raise Lazarus from the dead; he releases him from his excommunication by the Jerusalem community. Some critics may want to argue against these particular interpretations but the question you have to ask yourselves is whether a symbolic, allegorical interpretation is more plausible than the idea that a miracle occurred. Miracles require suspending natural laws. Symbolic interpretations require consistency with the laws of society sui generis and of the natural world at large. The authors of the Bible, just like the authors of other major religious, theological, and philosophical texts, were often highly skilled in their knowledge and use of literary devices. Allegories were basic to their trade. They were a small elite in a population where the percentage of literate adult males has been estimated to be two percent. Think of this, then. Most of the early Christians could not read let alone understand the Biblical texts. The canon, the four gospels, was a product of political reduction from no fewer than eighty gospels by some estimates. Tradition says that the final formation of the New Testament was the work of St. Jerome in 381 CE. And at the end of the day, when you pick up a Bible today, you are reading the most recent of a long line of translations and copies of copies. No wonder that in spite of the claims by believers that there are no contradictions in the Bible, there are in fact numerous variations and contradictions. The history of the Bible does not end in some final translation that solidifies into a final version. The text continues to be updated in line with changes in mores, values, and ethics. You can go into any bookstore, library, or online dealer today and find new versions of the Bible that reflect changes in our ideas about gender, social relationships, and other cultural factors (e.g., Gold et al., 1995). And see Stanton’s (1895/1993) The Woman’s Bible. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several prominent feminists deconstructed The Bible, demonstrating that its “degrading ideas of woman” were the works of men and not the word of God. For context, see Stone (1976). She archaeologically documents the religion of the Goddess in a period during which women’s roles were more prominent and held more power the in the patriarchal culture that gave birth to The Bible Stanton criticizes.

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The freely and readily available versions of religious documents are now part of the accumulated evidence that overwhelms traditions and faiths to a degree unknown before the 1950s. I have drawn on those materials in writing this book. My remarks on religion and the gods are a generalization of the knowledge, the facts of the matter, contained in the apex of the pyramid of that consilience of evidences. There would be no reason for books like mine if the learned of all ages hadn’t practiced the strategy of the double truth revealed in veiled writing. Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hume, Diderot, Comte, and in our own time the social theorist Jurgen Habermas all supported the idea that “the rabble” could not be trusted with the truth about religion and the gods. Max Weber saw in the social scientist the true manifestation of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch who could live, unlike the masses, without the consolation of religion. So while the bulk of humanity has been prompted to live with superstitions, mythologies, and outright lies the learned class has to different degrees carried on in a godless universe. A faithless economy under the ideological flag of an atheistic capitalism has been grounded in the true believer state. This tension lives under the clouds of uncertainty and indeterminacy, yea chaos that is a core feature of the postmodern worldview. This is not a friendly atmosphere for Joe and Jane Public; nor for theologians.

Sociology meets theology Against the background of the consilience of evidences, I want to consider the place of theology in the world today. In particular, I want to exam theologian Nancey Murphy’s (2008) argument that science needs theology. Murphy is an internationally distinguished theologian cum philosopher, and one of the most scientifically literate among contemporary theologians. She builds her argument on the foundation of a hierarchy of the sciences, with physics at the bottom followed by chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology. She follows biochemist Arthur Peacocke, widely published in theology, in placing theology above sociology at the top of the hierarchy. The rationale for this placement is that the interaction between God and the whole of reality is the most complex level of reality. There is an echo here of Auguste Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences. Like Murphy, he placed social science at the apex, and in particular placed sociology in that position. Whereas Murphy needs to add theology to the hierarchy, Comte accomplished the same thing godlessly by conceiving sociology as the religion of humanity. Murphy argues that up-down and top-down causation characterizes the hierarchy. She assumes with other Christians that God is the ultimate cause of the universe and furthermore that the laws of nature are fine-tuned by God to allow for His eventual creation of creatures like us. It follows in her scheme that we need a science above psychology and the human sciences that deals with “the ethical.” This reflects the fact that the human sciences are not value-neutral.

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Here she seems to be unaware of or she ignores the literature that brings into question the value-neutrality of the physical and natural sciences. In any case, she argues that the social sciences (she uses social sciences and human sciences interchangeably) are suited for studying means-ends relationships but not for studying the ultimate ends of human life. Notice that she assumes human life has “ultimate ends.” Therefore we need a “science of ethics” at the apex of the hierarchy of the sciences. Ethics needs theology because it is dependent on an account of ultimate reality and humanity’s place in that reality. That account does not have to be theistic. In fact, Murphy points out Owen Flanagan’s nontheistic grounding of ethics. Flanagan is a philosopher with wide-ranging interests across the sciences, arts, and literature. Murphy writes that she is at one with Flanagan in assuming that humans are born with a “predisposition” to social behavior (thus missing the fact that humans are born social). She also shares a physicalist worldview with Flanagan (where physicalism is opposed to dualism). Flanagan, however, is not a Christian and does not “know” that we exist in the God of Jesus Christ. How is it possible for Murphy, as learned as anyone could hope to be in our society, to argue for such a narrow theistic, indeed, theistist view, of the world? The puzzle has another dimension. Murphy is a physicalist; humans are their biological parts. Furthermore, she quotes me (from a personal communication) on the idea that we are individually and collectively social facts. It is not easy to be a physicalist and a defender of social facts and to defend a Christian theology that makes it into the hierarchy of sciences without negotiating some level of cognitive dissonance. How does God escape Murphy’s concept of society? Anne Foerst (2009), a theologian, agrees in principle with Murphy that humans are fundamentally social animals. And like Murphy, she tries to reconcile this view with her views on religion and God. Her first error is to try to defend the concept of “Christian anthropology.” There cannot be a Christian anthropology any more than there can be a Christian psychology or – to recall a particularly sinister historical moment – a Jewish physics. I am face to face here, as I am with Murphy, with an incommensurable cogito. Is there a way to have a collegial dialogue across such a chasm? One reason to try might be to follow Richard Rorty’s (1979: 378) advice and just “keep the conversation going” and rely on the principles of philosophical discourse to construct a useful dialogue. We are faced here with a fundamental issue in tolerance. I am certain that Murphy and Foerst would agree that whatever their own differences, their views can sustain a dialogue between them and utterly fail in a dialogue with me. But should we try, and toward what end? I will assume here that there might be some value in placing our views side by side so that we and others can explore and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. Dr. Foerst asserts that a new enriched understanding of humans can be expected as a result of observing the interface between theology and artificial life. She focuses on robots as “thinking tools” in order to reflect on the human capacity to bond and the limits of that capacity. As we engage this dialogue – or juxtaposition

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of worldviews – it is important to keep in mind that the ultimate arbiter of our differences is not logic, rules of debate, or science per se but how our worldviews – as cultural species – engage the material problems of our planetary system in eco-biological, physical, and social terms. Evolution is our ultimate judge. Let’s begin by noticing Dr. Foerst’s interest in redefining the concept of personhood so that it is more inclusive. This seems to follow from her commitment to tolerance and social justice. She is however boxed in by a worldview that only has room for the physical and natural sciences, and this leads her to view humans as “meat machines.” Judging from her citing circle, she shares the worldview of most of the scientists and engineers working in the areas of social and sociable robots. Social robots are designed to develop into machines with the full range of human attributes; sociable robots are designed to interact cooperatively and in comforting ways with humans (Restivo, 2018: 144–149). The reigning worldview in this arena ignores or eschews the social sciences. If we introduce social science, and in particular sociology, into this arena of research and development, some counter-intuitive and troubling consequences follow. Let’s have another look at Foerst’s concept of a Christian anthropology. The sociological cogito and social science in general are incompatible with the idea that there could be a Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Hindu anthropology. It also prohibits a Christian chemistry or a Jewish physics. This doesn’t mean that science doesn’t have an ethnic stamp. We have good reason to refer to the modern sciences as Western Science, an ethnoscience as opposed to universal science. “The West” is not universal. We know, for example, that Japanese physicists think somewhat differently than American physicists even though there is a great deal of overlap in their education and training, and in their methods, theories, and technologies. Mathematical problems are approached differently in different cultures. While there is no universal science per se, we do observe that the world’s ethnosciences converge on a general science. This becomes more salient as ecumenes grow to global levels and a world culture begins to emerge. Given the fact that the earth is a heterogeneous plane (resources are unequally distributed across the globe) and that humans are a highly diversified species biologically and socially, a world culture will never erase all signs of locality. What we can look forward to is a culture that is “worldwide” or “global” for all practical purposes (on East-West exchanges, orientalism, and science, see Restivo & Loughlin, 2000), What then of tolerance? Tolerance must have limits especially in a world with geographical and resource limits. The question can be put this way: Is tolerance available to us in the same degree in every context and at ever historico-cultural juncture? I discuss this question in later chapters so will briefly anticipate my position. In small worlds (societies) on a large planet, we can afford high levels of tolerance. We have room for serious differences to work themselves out cooperatively or in conflicts including wars. In a big world, a global village, our degrees of freedom with respect to tolerance are dramatically reduced and converge on zero. To return to the central issue in my dialogue with Foerst, why do we need robots for the task that she undertakes? Recall that she is interested in exploring the human

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capacity to bond and its limits. We have been studying human society and culture for centuries, and systematically and cumulatively (dare I say scientifically) since the 1840s. Furthermore, sociologists of science and technology have been studying machines as embodiments of the social relations and contexts of their production and use since the 1970s. This suggests that robots are not aliens in our environment; robots “r” us! How does Foerst approach her problem? Her objective is to enrich our understanding of ourselves by bringing theology and robots into dialogue with each other. I find this doubly problematic. Theology is not a social science, and is itself subject to social and cultural analysis and deconstruction. Given that we have had social sciences since the 1840s, theology has no equivalent credibility as a source of theories of human behavior. Even philosophy has more credibility in this area than theology, although often enough it is hard to tell them apart. Robots and artificial intelligence are no more credible than theology as sources of knowledge about human behavior. For most of its history robotics has ignored the most important fact about humans and human cognition; we are the most social of the social animals and we have social brains. Robotics engineers have tended to rely on psychologically inspired theories and models of mind, brain, and cognition. Vygotsky (1896–1934) has been more attractive to them than Mead (1863–1931). Vygotsky’s Marxism lent a sociological dimension to his work but his attraction to the robotics engineer was based on the fact that he was primarily a developmental psychologist. Mead, on the other hand, was robustly sociological. Given all of this, it is unlikely a dialogue between theology and robots will teach us anything at all about ourselves. There is a caveat. If we succeed in constructing sophisticated social robots based on sociological theories of mind, brain, and cognition we might be able to use them in social experiments. We might then be faced with a problem similar to the one we face in experimenting with non-human animals. The easier it is to assign personhood to an animal, the harder it is to feel it is morally responsible to manipulate them anyway we please in our own interests. We can do anything we please in experiments with mosquitoes; we face barriers when it comes to chimpanzees, monkeys, and apes and even dogs and cats. Animal rights activists go further in this respect, protecting animals like chicks and rats from experimenters. It is not too hard to imagine that the time will come when we lawfully and in good conscience will want to experiment with robots. It will be harder to do the more humanoid they are, easier the more appliance-like they are. And then robots rights activists will come along to draw broader protective boundaries around robots. Dr. Foerst’s paper has the advantage of bringing these possibilities into focus. An interesting puzzle arises out of her discussion of scientific anthropology and the concept of personhood. The sociological cogito is fully compatible with her description of “the human animal as body in community.” Furthermore, she writes that we humans as “embodied beings are entirely embedded in [our] social and physical environments.” The puzzle is that she doesn’t apply this perspective reflexively to Christian anthropology, to her theology. More generally,

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if we are embodied in communities, entirely embedded in our social and physical environments, why don’t our religions and gods participate in this embodiment and embeddedness? We arrive at the same point here that we arrived at in considering Nancey Murphy’s discussion of theology and science. How does God escape society? This is the critical discursive juncture where our cogitos – the theological cogito and the sociological cogito – meet. The possibilities are: we become ships that pass in the night; we annihilate each other; we face off in a constructive dialogue – which means someone will have to blink. Or following the Rorty imperative we just keep the conversation going – without stop signs.

Durkheim and theology When Durkheim corrected our reference error and showed that God is a symbol of society, he eliminated the need for theology. Coincidentally, he established the programmatic foundation for a science of morals and ethics. Sociologists (not including Kropotkinian anarchists) failed to build on this foundation and so philosophy and theology continue to hold onto their classical jurisdiction over all things moral and ethical. Durkheim has a powerful theological nemesis in the person of former Cambridge University theologian John Milbank, now a professor at the University of Nottingham. His book, Theology and Social Theory (1993) is on the surface a formidable engagement with sociology. Milbank’s objective in this book is to establish the legitimacy of theology as a meta-discourse for articulating “the word of the Creator God.” Judging from his later works his goal seems more like establishing a theocratic Christian state (see Eugene McCarraher’s remarks on Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order, 2014 at https://syndicatetheology. com/commentary/christendom-take-two/). It seems hardly worthwhile to bother, but there’s a lesson in Milbank’s misguided and misinformed effort to take down sociology. He challenges the ideas (1) that sociology gives a significant “reading” of religion which theology must take into account, and (2) that theology must base its diagnoses and policies for social ills on social theory. Milbank’s conclusion is that by identifying the “social fact” with the “sacred” sociology makes itself primarily sociology of religion and a theory of secularization. Milbank senses correctly that sociology is a science that emerges out of the scientific requirements of the industrial revolution. But his paranoid fear of the secular and the modern (never mind the post-modern) distorts his reading of this episode in the history of science and society. He badly misreads the sociological project out of necessity given how close he comes in more recent writings to calling for a new Crusade to resurrect Christendom on the ashes of the secular society. There is an interesting middle-range theology between the Constantinian theology of Milbank on the one hand and the philosophically saner theologies of Nancey Murphy (2008) and Anne Foerst (2009) whose concepts of God somehow escape culture (Restivo, 2009) on the other. In The Theological Imagination (1981) Gordon Kaufman, late Professor of Divinity at Harvard (d. 2011) offers

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a view of God as “creativity,” “ultimate mystery,” and a living symbol of our culture. This God is a god of the global ecumene independent of the local and world religions. This God bridges the faith-science divide and meets the requirements for a God of the twenty-first century, a century in which global threats have replaced the traditional existential questions of guilt, sin, happiness, and so on. But Kaufman does not reach the point of defending a social constructionist view of God. He views God in terms of a process of construction. God is the unfolding of creativity in the universe, a process that is happening around us and within us. This middle ground forces theology to take full account of modern thinking in evolution, biology, and cosmology. Sociology seems close by but Kaufman was unable to cross that threshold. His effort to construct a conception of God for the modern world should be compared with the “after God/death of God” theologians and philosophers, and in particular Hans Küng’s efforts, discussed in Chapter 10. I came early to the idea that religions and gods were not to be taken for granted. I discussed my family background above. When my two sisters and I had occasion to ask our dad if he believed in God or an afterlife, he emphatically said, “No.” His view was that God was actually nature – trees, flowers, the sun and stars, and so on (thus echoing Frank Lloyd Wright, 1987: “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature”). He had a pantheistic perspective free of any notion of divinity. God looked more and more like the same kind of lie that Santa Claus was. During my confirmation, there was a moment when the Bishop, who had already oiled and slapped me, proclaimed, “You are now all soldiers in the army of Jesus.” I buried by head in my godfather’s chest and said tearfully, “But I don’t want to be in the army.” My godfather of course didn’t believe in God either. This, not incidentally, seemed to be the case for all the men in my wider family circle. The women believed and went to church; none of the men did. If we consider that the traditional role of women in our society was to emotionally and socially keep the family glued together in social solidarity, it makes sense that they would be the ones nourishing and being nourished by the community functions of the church. By the time I got to college, I was experimenting with being an atheist and agnostic. I could see no good reason to believe in God or an afterlife. However, aside from the knowledge that there were very smart people who didn’t believe in God (not to mention very smart people who did), I really had no evidentiary grounds for not believing. I was still trying to make sense of it all when I came across a book on Catholicism and the intellectual life (O’Dea, 1962). I read it and didn’t find that it really appealed to the intellectual in me. Politically, my incipient atheism was being fed by my increasingly self-conscious attraction to socialism, communism, and anarchism. My professors at the City College of New York were all left wing politically, and the college was still deserving of its nickname, Red University. By the time I got to graduate school, I had a reputation as a Marxist and I was prepared for Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; and see Durkheim, 1994) to convince me that it was

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possible to theorize God and religion sociologically. This made a lot more sense to me than trying to theorize God logically or relying on physics, chemistry, or biology. It wasn’t until sometime in the 1970s that the evidentiary grounds for disbelief and for positive knowledge began to take shape for me. Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) was a major discovery. It put me on the path to developing a segment of my introduction to sociology course on the social role of Jesus. About the same time, I discovered E.M. Butler’s The Myth of the Magus (1948). The paperback version I read appeared in 1979. In the intervening years the development of an ensemble of probabilities and consilience of evidences had been fed by an improving appreciation for the contributions of the classical social theorists to the sociology of religion; in addition to Durkheim, Max Weber is among the most important in this group: see Weber’s writings on the religions of China (1920), India (1916), and Judaism (1917–1919), and see Weber (1922/1961). Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe’s Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic (1983) had a strong impact on me. John Leonard (1982: 13) of the New York Times described the book as “splendid, daunting, almost wicked.” It is a tour de force analysis of the place of magic in society and draws on materials from Egyptian theurgy to Zande witchcraft and from Western astrology to modern cults. In the process, O’Keefe develops a theory of religion. To my knowledge, O’Keefe never wrote anything like this again and when I contacted him about the book he was working as a senior staff editor at Readers Digest.

Conclusion: Postmodernism, fundamentalism, and science The issue I address here is stated clearly in Melzer (2014: 326): We face an unprecedented double attack on reason. The legitimacy of Western science, philosophy, and rationalism is being radically challenged by two opposite but mutually reinforcing movements: the ancient forces of religious orthodoxy and the “postmodern” one of historicism or cultural relativism. Reason is under attack from faith based thinkers representing the “church” and simultaneously by “cutting edge, secular intellectuals from the “university.” Leo Strauss (1952) called this the “crisis of modernity.” There is no doubt we live in an age characterized by attacks on science and reason; we see this announced virtually every day in pronouncements from our own Oval Office. There is no question that attacks are emanating from the religious right. The idea that postmodernism is in on this attack, however, is an at least partially false narrative. Postmodernism, whatever it is, is not a homogeneous, monolithic movement. To the extent that it is implicated in the attack on reason and science there are two things to consider. First, postmodernism is in great part a reaction to the excesses of Science and Reason, in particular their association with

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the destructive technologies of the twentieth century symbolized by the atomic bomb and the Nazi concentration camps. This part of the assault is fully compatible with a commitment to science in the public interest, science and reason as the basic tools of human adaptability and social and cultural achievements. Postmodernism is also a reaction to the failures of traditional (“modern”) systems of categories and classifications in the face of existential threats to human life and the planet itself. The “routinization of rationalities” is a part of the evolution of any culture. At that stage, we must begin to search for new rationalities, new ways of conceiving and organizing our systems of knowledge and knowing. This can lead to excesses but it is from the ocean of those excesses that we can expect new systems of categories and classifications to arise, systems more in tune in with new problems of a new age. There is no guarantee of a good outcome in our liminal age; the excess of new systems may just as easily be a step toward annihilation as a source of a new successful adaptation. Especially in the current moment, when we are working at the limits of our global system, it is possible that the excesses of postmodernisms will boil over into destructive forces that we could easily lose control over, resulting in global catastrophes we may not be able to recover from. But the proliferation of strategies is our only way out of our routinized rationalities. One of the specific currents within postmodernism that has come under attack is one I am closely associated with, science studies. Within science studies, the concept of the “social construction of science” has been widely viewed by intellectuals of all stripes as such a danger to science and rationality that it led to the science wars of the 1990s pitting philosophers and historians of science as well as other scholars against scholars in science studies and cultural and literary studies of science. This has been more a matter of who has jurisdiction over research on science itself as opposed to a matter of science studies researchers championing an anything goes relativism. Thomas Kuhn (1972) somehow became the whipping boy for the self-appointed bodyguards of science. Their misreading of Kuhn was encouraged by many of the founders of the science studies movement. Kuhn was read as encouraging a view of science as “socially constructed,” an idea interpreted as implying that science was at least in part socially determined. This challenged a long standing view that science operated in a simple and straightforward way as a logically dependable way to gather objective knowledge untouched by human hands, a view classically associated in the twentieth century with the logical positivists (the Berlin School and the Vienna Circle). Kuhn, an uncompromising believer in objective science and scientific progress, strongly resisted this interpretation of his work (Restivo, 1983a). The science studies movement was charged with promoting an unrestricted relativism that undermined the objectivity of science. This was curious because the founders of the movement were across the board champions of science. It’s true that in the heady atmosphere of creating a new discipline some of them might have confused their critics with the way they talked about and debated relativism. But with the exception of Bruno Latour, a wild card and deliberate

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provocateur in the science studies movement who has evolved into a champion of a metaphysics that borders on theology (Restivo, 2011) none of the most visible members of the movement were anti-science or out-and-out relativists. The fact is that the critics couldn’t really support their charges directly. For example, Daniel Dennett (2006: 312–313) described science studies researchers as perhaps well-intentioned but naïve observers of scientific practice who produced “comically bad interpretations of what they had observed.” These claims reflect a multiplicity of fallacies. Many of the founders of the science studies movement were originally trained and educated in the sciences and engineering (e.g., Woolgar in engineering, Restivo in engineering, Barnes in natural science, David Edge in radio astronomy). Those who were not (e.g., Sharon Traweek, Daryl Chubin, Karin Knorr) were highly sophisticated scholars well-versed in the sciences, history, and philosophy. The problem is that critics like Dennett could make sweeping claims but could not support those claims. In an exchange of emails some years ago, I challenged Dennett to produce a list of names of these “naïve observers” of scientific practice and he offered lame excuses for not doing so. The fact of the matter is, as I have clearly demonstrated, that he could not have produced one name, at least not from those most closely associated with science studies itself (Restivo & Croissant, 1995). Barnes and Bloor (1982: 47n) have tried to clarify some of these issues and indeed point out that the form of relativism they defend is nothing more nor less than “disinterested inquiry,” a classic conception of science. I don’t want to pretend that the issue of relativism can be simply resolved. Bloor (2007) has argued persuasively that relativism is not opposed to realism but rather to absolutism. Paksi (2016) has argued that Bloor’s relativism is just another absolutism. I find Bloor more persuasive in the context of the discourse I am unfolding here. This debate pushes us into the territory of reflexivity, errors, and self-refutation. This requires a serious application of the sociological cogito. To put it in the simplest terms, the sociology of knowledge claims that knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is caused and that the causes include social causes. Critics argue that if beliefs or knowledge are totally caused and especially if there is a social component in the causal nexus, the sociology of knowledge must necessarily be false or unjustified (Bloor, 1991/1976: 17–18): Any thorough-going sociological theory of belief [or knowledge] then appears to be caught in a trap. For are not sociologists bound to admit that their own thoughts are determined, and in part even socially determined? The result appears to be that no sociological theory can be general in its scope otherwise it would reflexively enmesh itself in error and destroy its own credibility. The sociology of knowledge is thus itself unworthy of belief or it must make exceptions for scientific or objective investigations and hence confine itself to the sociology of error to grasp mathegrammatical illusions. What are the assumptions that support the self-refutation argument? There are two: the teleological model and individualistic empiricism. They lead to

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the principle that “causation implies error, deviation, or limitation” (Bloor, 1991/1976: 17). The general premise that causation implies error is rejected: whether a belief or knowledge statement is true or false has nothing to do with whether it has a cause. Critics of science studies, social constructionism, and postmodernism are obliged by the facts of the matter to make some adjustments. Science studies researchers are not naïve relativists but neither are they naïve realists. Their work in the context of postmodernism has not undermined science and rationality but demonstrated their complexity as human and as cultural activities and processes. Social constructionism is not some vague philosophical idea; it is the fundamental theorem of sociology. It does not claim, imply, or entail that science is culturally relative in the classical “anything goes” sense of that idea. It does claim – and it only claims – that the only way we humans can make objective knowledge is through our interactions with each other at the nexus of our biographies, cultures, and histories. Objective knowledge cannot and does not mean that we have access to the ding an sich (Kant); nor does it mean that we have access to some Platonic fleshless realm of Ideas or Forms. It does mean that we can reach tentative, corrigible consensus on how to negotiate the world in ways that work, truths-in-practice. This means that truths come to us with varying degrees of facticity or matter of factness; they come to us with varying degrees of closure. Science is a process that works generationally. No individual, no laboratory, no law can by him or herself or itself be scientific. Science is a process of generationally linked intersubjectively tested outcomes. High degrees of closure basically close off further inquiries; the earth is not flat, no further inquiries required. Complicated phenomena like gravity are more open and reflect the evolution of temporary and limited closures. Newton and Galileo close up our inquiries into gravity but not in a way that prevents Einstein; Einstein closes the study of gravity but not in a way that prevents geometrodynamics. Finally, postmodernism has not made truth impossible. It has, as in the case of science, made it more transparent and more complicated. In general, the ghost of individualism and failures of the sociological imagination haunt critics of social constructionism, science studies, and postmodernism. Postmodernism in general and its critics focus on knowledge claims grounded in the experiences and perceptions of individuated subjects (Smith, 1999: 127). From a sociological perspective, “truth and knowledge are grounded in the foundational moments in which the social comes into being through language and through the sensory ground which human organisms share” (Smith, 1999: 128): Through together, individual experience becomes hooked up to a world known in common and is radically and forever transmuted. In terms of the idea introduced above that “relativism” as defined by Barnes and Bloor is nothing more nor less than science itself (“disinterested inquiry”), we are

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precluded from presuming that some standards and beliefs are “really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such” (Barnes and Bloor, 1982: 27–28): Because he [the sociologist of science] thinks that there are no context-free or super-cultural norms of rationality, he does not see rationally and irrationally held beliefs as making up two distinct and qualitatively different classes of things. They do not fall into two different natural kinds which make different sorts of appeal to the human mind, or stand in a different relationship to reality, or depend for their credibility on different patterns of social organization. Hence the relativist conclusion that they are to be explained in the same way. Smith, Barnes, and Bloor have what I will discuss later as a “feeling” for the social. This is almost by definition absent from the perspectives of philosophy which are grounded in the myth of the individual and often enough in Platonic beliefs that leave language, logic, and rationality floating in an ether of pure minds disconnected from society, culture, history, and even from time and space. The disinterested inquirer (i.e., scientist qua relativist) is as constrained by his/her relativism and in the same way as the members of any “primitive tribe” or knowledge community. This perspective erases the distinctions between credibility and validity and between context of discovery and context of justification. There are only local cultures of knowledge and belief. How does this viewpoint not degenerate into a naïve relativism that makes all systems and elements of knowledge and belief equally true or equally false? The world of societies and cultures across time, space, and history is constituted of communities of consensus or objectivity communities. A self-perpetuating community must by definition have hit on a sustaining system of knowledge and beliefs. But while all systems of knowledge and belief in sustainable self-perpetuating communities must be considered equally true, all communities exist in an ocean of evolutionary niches competing for survival. We are free to judge the claims of competing cultures as false and ours as true but the ultimate arbiter of truth and falsity is the evolutionary process itself. Similar truths and falsities may be shared across communities. Continuing success and survival in the world depends, certainly and most clearly in the long run, on getting things right. We may not be able to negotiate the differences between believers and unbelievers, between pro-life and pro-choice advocates, between climate change advocates and deniers, or between creationists and proponents of evolution, but the natural world can and will in the long run. I cannot hope with this book alone to change any one person’s mind unless that person has been primed by earlier experience to be prepared for that last straw that breaks the back of the camel of belief and faith. What I can hope for is that this book will add a little more weight to the mountain of consilience of evidences (inductions) and ensembles of probabilities (Restivo, 2017: 116) that speak to proving that God, the gods, and transcendental and supernatural realms, beings, and entities are symbols constructed by humans in the crucible of cultures.

4 FOUNDATIONS FOR A CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGIONS AND THE GODS

How is it that we humans came to believe in a world outside of our sensory experience, a supernatural, transcendental world populated by all-powerful invisible entities? Most efforts to explain such beliefs look to the brain and the mind. In recent years, some observers of religious phenomena have posited a God gene. What is often overlooked in considering this problem is that brains, minds, genes, and individuals are social facts. Humans as interconnected networked systems of brains, minds, and genes emerge on the evolutionary stage already, always, and everywhere social. There is no Hobbesian point at which a chaotic scene of individuals at war with each other, violently and non-violently fighting for their individual parcel of territory, their privileged access to the resources for their independent survival, pause to write a social contract. Humans arrive as social animals and culture individuates us. And they arrive already religious in the most general sense of that term. Not only do humans arrive already social through and through; they emerge everywhere, always, and already religious. That is, where we have societies, we have moral orders systematized as more or less distinct religious activities and institutions. We cannot argue as Nicholas Wade (2009) does in The Faith Instinct that the earliest societies vary according to whether they have religion or not and that natural selection selects for religion. Natural selection does operate on the level of culture and social organization, but cannot select for religion per se because religion is one with social order. Religion and belief in gods are not present in distinguishable ways in the earliest human societies. The first signs of what might be proto-religions, that is, the first signs of institutionalizing the religious imperative, emerge about 100,000 years ago. The main considerations in classic ways of thinking about the emergence of religion include increased brain size, tool use, the development of language, and the development of symbols. Signs of burying the

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dead ritualistically are considered early signs of religious activity. These are the basic explanatory concepts evolutionary psychologists rely on. All of these factors, however, are embedded in social relations. If we understand religion as the institutionalization of a moral order, then we should be prepared to look for the origins of religion in the very social nature of the human species. Again it is important not to get seduced by social contract concepts to explain the evolution of morality and its institutionalization in religious activities and organizations. As our evolutionary social origins unfold into increasingly dense social networks, moral orders and religions unfold simultaneously. These go with the crystallization of the fundamental elements of social solidarity (Shermer, 2004: 31): … attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism [sociologically, we should speak of cooperative compassion], conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detecting … Shermer is a well-known skeptic and science writer. He can lean on science in ways that press it toward scientism but he has a good critical approach to things. In this quote, he gets the sociology right. Let me paraphrase the rest of the quote: the additional ingredients that form the foundation of the moral order are high levels of self and other awareness and monitoring and pressures on self and others to follow group norms. Proto-versions of these characteristics are found among the social animals and are especially well-developed in our closest primate “relatives,” chimpanzees, bonobo pygmy chimps, and the great apes. Morality engages our reciprocal interest in the behavior of others. Social scrutiny is a feature of social life. Rossano (2007) has suggested that everyday scrutiny can be ratcheted up by drawing on ancestor worship, shamanism, and belief in natural and animal spirits. It isn’t the case, as he contends, that social scrutiny contributes to reducing individualism and promoting pro-social behavior. A radically social species is by definition equipped with barriers to individualism which depends on the evolution of culture, a division of labor, and space for self-reflection away from the group. However, the idea that ancestor worship became supernaturalized into an invisible ever-watchful “overlord” is more to the point. The other factor that contributed to the evolution of supernatural imaginings was the combination of cause and effect thinking and the capacity to make mistakes in reference. What is present are activities around rituals and moral rules that are the building blocks of religious organizations and institutions, patterned sustained structures with accompanying social roles. We can put together the basic building blocks for a general sociology of religion from the ideas of the nineteenth century founders of the sociological imagination. There are many thinkers whose ideas we can choose from but some stand out more the others, at least for me. We learn from Nietzsche (1887/1974: 35, aphorism 3) that we are not “thinking frogs” nor mechanisms that can register reality objectively and without emotions. Marx (1844/1956: 104) already

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grasps the radically social nature of humans, human thinking and consciousness, and science and religion; the self itself is eminently social. And Durkheim (1912/1995) gives us religion as an eminently social thing. Taken together, these three key thinkers give us the ingredients of the social constructionist paradigm for the sociology of religions and gods. The paradigm escapes the burdens of its Western European origins by virtue of its level of generalization. All three thinkers point us in the direction of the social origins of the realm of the transcendental and supernatural in human thought and culture. In the wake of the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century invention of social science, Durkheim’s discovery that God is a symbolic and not a natural or supernatural reality, and the renaissance in German studies of the origins of Christianity, why are we still mostly in the dark when it comes to religions and gods? After we sift through all the complicated reasons for this we come down to one basic fact: religions and gods are locked in an iron cage of authority, tradition, and tolerance that makes them immune to culturally visible and scientifically supported critiques and theories. And as I have pointed out throughout this book, we are talking about the glue that binds communities, families, and societies. We can’t expect to simply melt and replace that glue overnight. There are other factors that make grand discoveries such as the societal referent for God difficult to communicate. First, our cultural folk science reinforced by professional scientists tells us that religion and God are innate in the human brain and even that there is a God gene. Second, dissocism is a central feature of our culture. This is found elsewhere in the world but it is less prominent in Europe. I identified and named dissocism as the inability to “see” social life and to see it as the locus of the social causes that shape our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. You can think of it as “social blindness” by analogy to the mindblindness characteristic of people with autism (Baron-Cohen (1995). Dissocism reinforces and is in turn buttressed by the myth of individualism (Callero, 2009; Barlow, 2013). But truth is a wild animal; it’s hard to contain and control indefinitely. As the evidence piled up in the social sciences and history, and as the sociology and anthropology of religion entered the seminaries, the social nature of religion has leaked into the public arena. The media in recent years has brought to the public’s attention many theological and scientific ideas that bear on and indeed question the reality of the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and the validity of religious beliefs around the world. Sociologists should figure out how to out-maneuver the various pretenders in gaining the attention of the general public and the scientific community. We should not be naïve about avoiding imposing our views on others, or forcing others onto our intellectual court. Sociology, science, and education are inevitably about imposing viewpoints and values. Tolerance and open-mindedness are as much impositions as “facts of the matter.” We scientists and educators are engaged in a dangerous enterprise. Our ideas, concepts, and theories can present students and others with novel challenges to their ways of thinking and living. These ideas, concepts, and theories may take

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hold in the future. What gives us the right to expose people – especially students – to these challenges? Peter Berger (1963: 174–176) raised this question in his classic Invitation to Sociology. It’s especially relevant in the case of our current subject matter: “What right does any man have to shake the taken-for-granted beliefs of others?” Why not just leave them alone? If we assume that education has more than an etymological connection to intellectual liberation, then we will be motivated by the assumption that “it is better to be conscious than unconscious and that consciousness is a condition of liberty and freedom.” The civilized mind in our time is obliged to come in contact with sociology and what it brings with it in terms of strategies for critical thinking: Even those who do not find in this intellectual pursuit their own particular demon, as Max Weber put it, will by this contact become a little less stolid in their prejudices, a little more careful in their own commitments, and a little more skeptical about the commitments of others-and perhaps a little more compassionate in their journeys through society.

Foundations There are two pillars of critical sociological thinking that ground what has gone before and what is to come. One is the pillar of fallacies that I have identified and written about in earlier writings. They are part of the laws of critical thinking and I reiterate them here. The second pillar is the concept of the evolution of the social as an adaptive mechanism on the evolutionary stage and the emergence of humans as always, already, and everywhere social. Let’s begin with the fallacies.

The fallacies: Prelude to some laws of society There are certain fallacies that follow from a comprehensive interdisciplinary knowledge of and understanding of how the world and human beings work. I have identified the following fallacies: The Transcendental Fallacy (also known as the theologian’s fallacy) is that there is a world or that there are worlds beyond our own – transcendental worlds, supernatural worlds, worlds of souls, spirits and ghosts, gods, devils, and angels, heavens and hells. There are no such worlds. They are symbolic of social categories and classifications in our earthly societies and cultures. There is nothing beyond our material, organic, and social world. Death is final; there is no soul, there is no life after death. It is also possible that the so-called “many worlds interpretation” in quantum mechanics is contaminated by this fallacy as the result of mathegrammatical illusions. Such illusions also power the idea that we are a simulation. The world, the universe, may be more complex than we can know or imagine, but that complexity does not include transcendental or supernatural features. Stated positively, this is Durkheim’s Law. The Subscendental Fallacy (also known as the logician’s fallacy or eponymously as the Chomsky fallacy) is that there are “deep structures” or “immanent structures” that are the locus of explanations for language, thought, and human

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behavior in general.  Such “structures” are as ephemeral and ethereal as transcendental and supernatural worlds. They lead to conceptions of logic, mathematics, and language as “free standing,” “independent,” “history, ” “culture,” and “value free” sets of statements. And they support misguided sociobiological, genetic, and brain-centered explanatory strategies. Restivo’s Law. The Private Worlds Fallacy (also known as the philosopher’s fallacy) is that individual human beings harbor intrinsically private experiences. The profoundly social nature of humans, of symbols, and of language argues against intrinsically private experiences (as Wittgenstein, Goffman, and others have amply demonstrated). Goffman’s Law. The Internal Life Fallacy. When we engage in discourses about surrogate counters, imitation, and artificial creatures that mimic us, we need to remind ourselves that we are working in an arena of symbolic and materialized analogies and metaphors. Such efforts carry a high emotional charge because they take place at the boundaries of our skins as interfaces. Analogy and generalization, if they can be shown to have constructive scientific outcomes, need not obligate us to embrace identity. Consider, for example, the case of building robots. Robots (mechanical machines) will not have to have “gut feelings” in the identical sense humans (organic machines) have gut feelings. Even this “fact” needs to be scrutinized. What we “feel” is given to us by our language, our conversations, our forms of talking, our cultures and social institutions. At the end of the day, feelings are not straightforward matters of bio-electro-chemical processes we experience as “our own” feelings. Mechanical creatures will turn out to be just as susceptible to internal life experiences as humans once they have developed language, conversation, and forms of talk. They will have electro-mechanical “gut feelings.” This implies a social life and awareness. Roboticists may already have made some moves in this direction with the development of signal schemas and subsumption-based hormonal control (Arkin, 1998: 434ff.). The development of cyborgs and cybrids may make this point moot. What possibilities lie ahead of us as we implant chips in humans and fit them with artificial mechanical limbs and organs while we use organic materials in building our robots? The Psychologistic Fallacy (or neuroistic fallacy) is that the human being and/or the human brain is/are free standing and independent, that they can be studied on their own terms independently of social and cultural contexts, influences, and forces. This is also known as the neuroistic error. It encompasses the idea that mind and consciousness are brain phenomena. Human beings and human brains are in fact constitutively social. This is the most radical formulation of the response to this fallacy. A more charitable formulation would give disciplinary credibility to neuroscience and cognitive approaches to brain studies and psychological studies in general. These approaches might produce relevant results in certain contexts. Then there might be fruitful ways to pursue interdisciplinary studies linking the social sciences and the neurosciences. It may indeed be possible to construct a neurosocial model of the self. This would entail that socialization operates on a brain-central nervous system-body (signifying an integrated

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entity that eliminates conventional brain/mind-body and brain-mind divisions) and not on a “person” per se. Moreover, the body here is conceived as a node in a network of interaction ritual chains (Collins, 2004; Restivo, 2020). Brother’s Law (after Brothers, 1991, 2002). The Eternal Relevance Fallacy or Intellectual Fallacy is that ancient and more recently departed philosophers should be important and even leading members of our inquiring conversations about social life. An act of intellectual courage is needed to rid us of Plato and Hegel. Once they are eliminated, an entire pantheon of outmoded and outdated thinkers, from Aristotle to Kant, will disappear from our radar. This move might also go a long way toward eliminating the worshipful attitude intellectuals often adapt to the more productive and visible members of their contemporary discourse communities. The caveat here is that some ancient and some modern thinkers (departed ones, as well as some who are still with us) who can be claimed for philosophy are still extremely valuable for us. Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein come immediately to mind. The issue here is that philosophy is overwhelmingly contaminated by the myth of individualism, logicist, linguistic, and symbolic reductionism, and unbridled speculation masquerading as rational thought. The idea that philosophers hold the keys to the logical foundations of all disciplines is based on the idea that there is one logic that fits all (see Appendices D, E, G, and the Post-script at the end of Chapter 5). The limitations of that logic arise from the fact that it originates in the world of physical phenomena. Most of the problems of philosophy are now re-imagined as problems in sociology and anthropology, the pre-eminently empirical social sciences. Philosophers as philosophers (psychologists as psychologists, and theologians as theologians) have nothing at all to tell us anymore about the social world. In the wake of the work of sociologists from Emile Durkheim (1995/1912) to Mary Douglas (1986), all the central human problems of traditional and contemporary philosophy, psychology, and theology resolve into (not “reduce to”) problems in sociology and anthropology. The neque demonstra neque redargue fallacy; the “neither provable nor unprovable fallacy” is that one can neither prove nor disprove some claim, proposition, or statement. In some cases where this claim appears to be true, it is because it is made in the context of the physical and/or natural sciences for a claim that falls under the jurisdiction of the social sciences. Consider: One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. This has not kept theologians, philosophers, and mathematicians from Anselm to Gödel from proposing proofs for the existence of God; and other scientists and philosophers from offering proofs that God does not exist. While all proofs build conclusions into premises, God proofs are universally and transparently contaminated by this strategy. The fallacy has not, on the other hand, kept social thinkers and social critics from proposing proofs for their theories about God as a delusion or a myth, but it has tied their hands. In fact, proofs are situated, contingent, contextualized, community matters, and indeed, social constructions and social institutions. Therefore, within the world

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of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms and what follows a proof that God does not exist is clearly possible. The NOMA Fallacy. This is the fallacy, defended by S.J. Gould (1997), that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. Once we admit social science into the science and religion dialogue, this fallacy is revealed. The Tolstoy Fallacy. That experience and feelings are trustworthy modes of interrogating and knowing reality. Consider that our immediate sensation is that the earth is fixed in place; we do not experience the earth rotating, wobbling in precession, or racing through the galaxy. In order to understand and explain the earth in motion, we have to abandon our immediate experience of fixity, our feeling that the earth is stable. If we assume fixity and stability, we will arrive at absurd conclusions about the earth and ourselves. If, based on information garnered by expanding the scale, scope, and depth of our experiences collectively, we come to admit that the earth moves, then we can discover laws. In the case of history, society, and culture, we do not experience, we do not feel, we are not conscious of our dependence on the external world and on others. This is not straightforward. We are, in fact, more aware of our dependence on the material world than we are of our dependence on the social world. We do, of course, recognize the social influences of peer pressure and the interpersonal enforcement of rules of decorum and demeanor and so on. But this is not the same as consciousness of the way social relationships and interactions cause our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Differences in our levels of awareness across our material and social environments do not readily override our feeling that we are free-willing beings. In the prior instance, we had to discard a sense of an immobility that was not real and admit a motion we did not feel. In this instance we are required to renounce our experience of free will and admit to a dependence, and especially a dependence on social causes and forces, that we do not feel. It may be easier to admit to ourselves that we are subject to recalcitrant physical laws, that we are thermodynamic systems subject to the laws of thermodynamics than to admit that we are social systems subject to sociological laws. But we are just as subject to one set of laws as to the other set of laws. Here it’s important to keep in mind the distinction between open and closed systems and the distinction between lawful and determined in order to avoid the fallacy that being subject to causes is the same as unmitigated determinism. On our experience of the earth as fixed in space and the reality of its various motions, see further on in this section. For the most compelling compendium of sociological laws in propositional form see Collins (1975). The Napoleon Fallacy is that heroic larger-than-life individuals make history. How we think about and experience freedom and necessity depends (here I follow Tolstoy’s analysis in War and Peace) on three things: (1) the relationship between the person carrying out an action and the external world in which the action is carried out; (2) the relationship between the actor and time; and (3) the actor’s place in the causal nexus out of which the action arises. All things being equal, there are fewer degrees of freedom for the drowning person than for the

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person on dry land. If we focus on the person standing apart, alone in his/her room or within the woods, his/her actions seem to us and to his/her to be free. If instead we focus on his/her relation to the things (material and symbolic) and people around his/her now and in the past, we will begin to multiply the influences on who and what he/she is as a whole person. As we multiply the influences we diminish the degrees of freedom on his/her actions and thoughts and see how necessity weighs on his/her. It is also the case that our own current actions and thoughts appear to be freer by comparison with those of someone who lived a long time ago and whose life is open to our scrutiny in a different way than is our own. That person’s life appears to have fewer degrees of freedom than does our own; but from a future perspective, ours too will appear to have had fewer degrees of freedom than we can now perceive. This is the fact of the matter for untutored introspection; the trained observer can already see fewer degrees of freedom that the untutored person observing his/her own life. The more time passes, and the more my introspections and judgments sharpen, the more I will find myself doubting that I have freedom of action and thought. History makes events, actions, and thoughts seem less arbitrary and less subject to free will. The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of the crafty conduct of Bismarck. The Napoleonic wars still seem to us, though already questionably, to be the outcome of their hero’s will. But in the Crusades we already see an event occupying its definite place in history and without which we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe, though to the chroniclers of the Crusades that event appeared merely due to the wills of certain people. Finally, attending to the unfolding of our understanding of the nexus of causal chains leads us inevitably to seeing actions and thoughts as consequences of what came before, contradicting the transparency of free will in action at the moment that a particular idea occurs to us or we perform a particular act. Understanding is the greatest enemy of the ideology of free will, ignorance its greatest nourishment. And as for “responsibility,” that will appear to be greater or lesser depending on how much we know about the circumstances of the person under our judge’s eye, how much time has passed since the judged act, and how well we understand the causes of the kind of act being judged. Sociology forces us to reconsider the nature and limits of individual responsibility. Let’s consider the tale of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion wants to cross a river, but he cannot swim. He asks a frog to carry him across the river. The frog is skeptical: “If I agree to carry you across the river you will sting and kill me.” The scorpion promises not to sting the frog: “I really need to get to the other side.” The frog agrees. The scorpion climbs on the frog’s back and off they go. Half way across the river, the scorpion stings the frog. “What th…,” cries the frog, “you promised not to sting me.” The scorpion replies: “But it is in my nature to sting.” And so we should consider whether perhaps with humans too it is in our nature to behave as we have been socialized – or programmed. Are we any more responsible for our actions than the scorpion?

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Classic fallacies from philosophy The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, described by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, involves thinking something is a “concrete” reality when in fact it is an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are.  The fallacy refers to Whitehead’s thoughts on the relationship of spatial and temporal location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a real, concrete object in the universe can be described simply in terms of spatial or temporal extension. Rather, the object must be described as a field that has both a location in space and a location in time. This is analogous to lessons learned from E.A. Abbott’s Flatland (1952/1884): just as humans cannot perceive or even imagine a line that has width but no breadth, humans also cannot perceive or imagine an object that has spatial but no temporal position (or vice versa): … among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location … [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Whitehead (1925: 58). Also see Whitehead (1919) A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. For example, the statement “the business of the book sleeps eternally” is syntactically correct, but it is meaningless or nonsense or, at the very most, metaphorical, because it incorrectly ascribes the property,  sleeps eternally, to  business, and incorrectly ascribes the property, business, to the token, the book. The term “category mistake” was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind  (1949) to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind introduced by Cartesian metaphysics. It was alleged to be a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities. The mind is the body at work.

Evolution invents the social As soon as we humans awakened in our African homelands, we found ourselves haunted by three questions. Early on, these questions must have sat in our awareness like a small dense black marble, troubling, mysterious, weighty, and floating at the center of our awareness, just out of reach inside our skulls. This image comes from a recurring experience I remember from my days as an infant in a crib. Eventually, we were able to articulate those questions: Where did we come

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from, Who are we, and Where are we going? Sometimes these questions blended into a plaintive “Why are we here?” History is awash with efforts to answer these questions which early on came under the jurisdiction of philosophers and theologians. As the sciences evolved they haltingly added substance to the misty, mystery laden, and metaphysical ideas of the philosophers and theologians. By the time Darwin arrived on the scene, we were prepared to construct biologically grounded answers to these questions. Between Darwin and late twentieth century neuroscience, these questions began to absorb social, behavioral, and life scientists alongside the still strong voices of the philosophers and theologians. Already in the classic Age of the Social (1840–1930), the leaders of the embryonic social sciences understood our radically social nature. In the last thirty years or so that understanding has finally begun to make an impression across the sciences and has been slowly seeping into the public imagination. Where does that understanding leave us insofar as the existential questions this section began with? We’ve already seen that these questions fall under the “problem of Socrates” (see Appendix A) I introduced in the Introduction. Given our cultural mythologies and predispositions, it is not surprising that we are being exposed to the nature and significance of the social not by sociologists but by biologists and neuroscientists. In any case, we humans are and have been always, already, and everywhere social. We don’t appear on the evolutionary stage as individuals but as social animals. Social and cultural processes make us into individuals without ever overriding our essential social nature. If you grew up in America and were educated in our public schools, you like me, were overtly and covertly exposed to America’s guiding myth of individualism. We were introduced to the exploits of heroic, iconic individuals who made history: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt. The movies reinforced this myth and most of us can at this moment conjure the image of John Wayne. Individualism also had its anti-heroes: Americans like Benedict Arnold, world figures like Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler. All of this expressed what was known to historians as “The Great Man” theory of history. History, that is, can be largely explained by the exploits of “men” of extraordinary ability, intellect, and courage. It was easy for me, as for others, to accept the “common sense” rationale for this idea because we experienced ourselves as free willing individuals. We might not be heroes or be capable of heroic acts but we could feel ourselves willing our way through the behaviors needed for basic everyday survival. In my first years as a college student, I extolled the virtues of what I saw as great leaders. For reasons I don’t remember clearly, Anthony Eden was one of the men I wrote favorably about. I was seventeen when ill-health forced Eden to resign as the British prime minister. I was concerned at the time about what I saw as a decline of quality in leadership at all levels of society. I read Eden’s resignation as the loss of a paragon of the good leader. The fact is that he is considered one of the least successful of twentieth century British prime ministers. His role in the Suez Crisis may have played a disproportionate part in the general

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assessment of his career (Thorpe, 2003). It is clearer to me today why I wrote with awe about the heroic leadership of Churchill. As my education proceeded and the scope and scale of my experience expanded – through travel and virtually by way of books and various media – my belief in myself as a free willing individual began to wane. And then I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869–1996). Tolstoy’s War and Peace may be the most important epistemologically informed novel ever written. Tolstoy writes with great insight about what I later came to call the fallacy of introspective transparency. That is, everything about our own awareness, our consciousness, our mental acts seems to be absolutely clear and a reflection of our individual free will and agency. And then Tolstoy describes Napoleon as an infant in a carriage being pushed by history. Now I began to think about the limits of experience. Consider again that we experience the earth as stationery. And yet we know it moves. It wobbles in precession on its axis, it is rotating at any point on the equator at 1000 miles an hour, it travels around the sun at 66,000 miles an hour, it is part of a solar system orbiting around the center of the Milky Way at 140 miles per second. The Milky Way itself is part of a cluster of galaxies (The Local Group) traveling toward the center of the cluster at 25 miles per second. And The Local Group itself is speeding through space at 370 miles per second. We feel none of this complex system of motions. So if our experience deceives us how do we know about all of these motions? We know about them because of the collective intersubjectively tested experiences of scientists working across many linked generations. If we are deceived by our experience in the case of the motions of the earth, could we be deceived by our experience of our free will and agency? This is exactly what I claim; our individual experience fails even in our most intimate, immediate, transparent sense of who and what we are. And it fails us with significant consequences in the case of our experiences of gods, ghosts, angels, and aliens. We are evolution’s most radical experiment in social life and survival. Evolution is an extremely complicated multi-level multi-dimensional process that operates simultaneously on many different time scales. But it is driven by an overall paradigm. If we personify evolution as a certain type of scientistengineer (let’s call it E), we see E acting like a tinkerer. To tinker is to attempt to repair or improve something in a casual or unfocused way. The tinkerer experiments, and embraces failures in trial and error operations. The tinkerer’s goal is simply to succeed, to make something that works without thinking about immediate functions or long term objectives. E thus works without a specific goal in mind, takes advantage of whatever materials are at hand, and tinkers them into something that works. We can characterize the main feature of E’s work as marked by contingency. What resources are available in my local environment that I can play with? And this indeed is the way anthropologists of scientific practice have characterized the day-to-day work of scientists. We need to adjust this metaphor a bit for scientists and engineers whose tinkering may have specific practical goals. But they are still, like E, trying to make things

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that work. Figuring out why they work is at best a secondary consideration. Many people may have been surprised to see recent headlines announcing that we don’t know what keeps planes in the air. All that stuff we learned in school about “lift” is not based on a solid consensus among students of aerodynamics. We may not understand “lift” but we can keep planes in the air and E tinkered birds so they can fly. The idea of evolution as a tinkering process is not something I thought up but a theory proposed by serious students of the evolutionary process ( Jacob, 1977; and see Racine, 2014 for a review and bibliography). Different tinkerers and the same tinkerer at different times will produce different solutions to the same problems. Consider the following example. All living things share the same organic molecules and metabolic pathways. If E is a tinkerer, then we can assume that new functional proteins do not appear anew but arise from rearranging genetic elements. We see this reflected in the similar DNA sequences in fruit flies and pigs that cause wings to appear in one case and legs in another. E can be expected to work under the same natural constraints as humans, including the law of limited possibilities. The law of limited possibilities is illustrated by the invention of the oar. Keep in mind that in this case the tinkerer does indeed have an objective. Many different kinds of oars can be tinkered into shape. But they all must meet certain natural constraints if they are going to be wielded by a human and power a boat. This principle operates in technology but also in culture more generally and we can assume it applies in E’s case too. What we find when we study science in practice is a collective process. Science in practice, is contingent and opportunistic. Scientific practice involves using the results of earlier efforts to generate new results – everything from measuring devices and chemical reagents to test animals and mathematical processes. In a sense scientists make their own reality and test it progressively against the impositions and constraints of the world outside the laboratory. The world “outside” has two levels: the phenomenal world of our everyday experiences, and reality “itself.” Scientists test their results in the everyday phenomenal world and the results they see reflect the constraints of that seen world as well as the recalcitrance of the unseen world-in-itself. This applies to theorists too whose theories are in fact experiments in logic, reason, and mathematics based on experimental evidence produced by research scientists. Theories are not idle speculations, or wild ungrounded imaginings. Scientists are not searching for “truth” in some abstract sense but for something that works. Their goal is success not “truth” per se. This practice nonetheless leads to corrigible, tentative, fragile and dynamic facts of the matter. The dynamism of facticity has led some postmodern thinkers to stray into realities constituted entirely of uncertainties. But we do not live in a world in which we are completely at the mercy of constantly changing landscapes of causality. There are, if we stay at the level of crossing streets epistemology, certainties we can rely on to order our lives. There is no guarantee that this will inevitably be the case. It is reasonable to assume certain things will stay the same day to day. But an automobile accident, an accidental fall, or an earthquake

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can disorder one’s life in an instant. And it’s not clear that we have the technology to prevent a catastrophic collision with an asteroid. E’s tinkering leads to the discovery that cell-proximity in primitive organisms is a survival mechanism. More complex forms of “colonial cooperation” followed: cell collaboration and the emergence of multi-cell animals and internal fertilization among amphibia and reptiles. More advanced cooperation made its appearance among the mammals. The placenta, mammary glands, and long gestation and dependency periods added a strongly social dimension to the adaptation process. Increasingly among the non-human primates and then humans the survival of the young became dependent on extended caring behavior by two or more adults. Humans emerged as one of the eusocial species, building up dense complex social networks around the campsite. The campsite is the human equivalent of the nest in other species (Wilson, 2012: 226). In summary, E’s tinkering led to cellular collaboration which eventually led to grouping behavior and sociation. The importance of grouping behavior is illustrated by the fact that a single prey is more likely to survive a predator’s attack in a group. Sociation refers to the stable and patterned micro-level forms of more or less intense face-to-face interaction. Primary groups are small scale, close-knit, face-to-face, and long lasting. Intimate relationships, the nuclear family, and close friendships as well as some work groups are examples of primary groups. Secondary groups can vary in size, tend to be short-term but can be long-term, and are characteristically impersonal. They tend to be task oriented rather than relationship oriented. The longer secondary groups function, the more likely they are to generate primary relationships. The committee at your work place tasked with organizing a party is an example of a secondary group. A school committee organized to plan a bake sale is another example of a secondary group. Secondary groups can of course incorporate primary groups. Your entire family may get involved in planning the school’s bake sale. On the other hand, you may meet someone on the party organization committee and begin a primary relationship with that person. Most humans have lived in primary groups. Secondary groups proliferated as the industrial age unfolded. This process gave rise to classical primarysecondary dichotomies such as rural-urban, country-city, informal-formal, statuscontract, community and society, and the one best known to social scientists, gemeinschaft-gesellschaft (communal society-associational society). Communal societies, typified by rural, peasant societies, are characterized by face-to-face relationships defined and regulated by traditional norms, values, and beliefs. These traditional regulatory “laws” of family, kinship, and religion are weakened in the associational society by the ideals and goals of self-interested rationality. There is a shift from personal direct face-to-face interactions and a sense of universal solidarity to impersonal and indirect primarily economically and politically oriented interactions. These interactions are embedded in processes of rationalization, specialization, mechanization, and commodification. On the largest scale, we are in the realm of bureaucratization and professionalization. This transformation

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generates feelings of alienation. The individual can be become alienated from the products of his/her work, from nature, from those close to his/her, from his/ her own self, and from his/her ideal self. These are tendencies. How would one describe the relationship I have with someone who is a friend but lives in another country, someone I used to see once a year and don’t see at all anymore. We share occasional moments on email. This is neither a primary nor a secondary relationship but something perhaps best described in dialectical terms. The feeling of alienation is brought about by the loosening or destruction of primary ties. In the twentieth century, technological progress led to the development of complex relationships. First-degree relationships are unmediated faceto-face interactions. The classical telephone conversation is a prime example of a first-degree secondary relationship. The digital revolution gave rise to second-degree relationships. Face-to-computer interactions are a prime example of second-degree relationships. This transition from primary to second-degree relationships has profound implications for the human condition. Face-to-face relationships are a crucial feature of human evolution. They are the basic means for communication and the emergence of consciousness, mind, and emotions. We can view mediated relationships as a danger to this evolutionary construction or as a new stage in the evolution of relationships, communications, and emotions. Are we witnessing the emergence of new human-machine species – cyborgs or machine species that will compete with fleshy humans for an ecological niche? Are they the species waiting in the wings for humans to follow virtually all the other species into extinction? The digital revolution can be viewed as an existential threat to the human species or a “natural” evolutionary development. Perhaps we are on the verge of a new “Great Leap Forward” such as the one that characterized the Upper Paleolithic Age 40,000 years ago. We are faced with many unknowns as we move through the digital age at the same time that the human and other species along with the planetary ecology itself face doomsday possibilities. Whatever our future holds in store for us and our planet, it should be clear that messing with face-to-face relationships portends radical changes in our communicative, mental, and emotional lives. Humans have always had access to mediated communication (from drum beats to smoke signals). But the key moments in the evolution of mediated communication are associated with the emergence of literacy. Aside from language itself, the first key moment was the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440. Woodblock printing was available in China at least as early as the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE). The Chinese also invented movable type around 1040 CE (attributed to Bi Sheng). In our global village, people often find themselves or their organizations engaged in cross-cultural settings. These settings are replete with potential ambiguities due to variations in gestural, linguistic, emotional, and postural standards. Face-to-face relationships are much more reliable in such ambiguous communication settings that involve cooperation, conflict, and negotiations. There are professionalized international networks in which a great deal can be

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accomplished through virtual modes of communication. This is true for example in the airlines industry. But to return to the other horn of the dilemma, among infant macaque monkeys the more face-to-face interactions they have with their mothers the more sociable they are in later life. We know that face-to-face interactions and grooming behaviors are important aspects of non-human primate behavior. The relevance of these studies which show long-term sociability effects of face-to-face interactions is that humans and macaques, for example, exhibit similar child-rearing behaviors and developmental trajectories. We are facing a digital dilemma. The development of secondary and higher order relationships and communication platforms has produced increasingly prominent and pervasive alternatives to face-to-face relationships and communication modes of interaction. The dilemma is this: on the one hand, secondary and higher order modes break down geographical and temporal barriers to faceto-face interaction. It is now possible to instantly and efficiently put yourself in contact with anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection. On the other hand, secondary and higher modes cannot reproduce the ways in which face-to-face relationships support gestural, voice modulation, postural, and emotional options. These are not just basic ingredients of communication. Face-toface interactions engage more of the senses than mediated interactions. They are the primitive origins of and sustaining factors for consciousness and emotions. To put it differently, primary, secondary, and higher modes are associated with different types and states of consciousness and emotions. Consider that consciousness and emotions are relational; they are in-between phenomena and not phenomena that are generated and sustained within the individual. So the digital revolution is leading to new forms of consciousness and emotions – not face-to-face but face-to-interface. We can misinterpret meaning and intent in face-to-face interactions but digital forms of communication tend to reduce the number of factors available for interpretation and so the possibilities for miscommunication are greater. This is not simply a matter of managing interpersonal and organizational communication; it comes down to a process that arose in the evolution of animal life and that is implicated in the biology and sociology of survival. Looked at from the vantage point of the evolutionary stage, what we have are mediated and un-mediated forms of relationships and communication competing for ecological niches and for survival. Evolution, we’ve seen, unfolds on multiple levels, in multiple dimensions, and on multiple time scales. One can imagine that a species based on mediated technologies – robots, for example – might have better long-term survival potential than humans. These are the considerations being discussed and debated around ideas such as “the singularity,” Humanity 2.0, and the Technium. In mathematics and physics, a singularity is a point at which the value of a function becomes infinite. For example, matter that has become infinitely dense at the center of a black hole is a singularity. The “technological” singularity is an hypothesized future point in history when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. Robots and Artificial Intelligence are considered

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the most likely pathways to the technological singularity. For this reason, some observers consider robots and artificial intelligence (AI) existential threats to humanity. These technological “intelligent agents” with their capacity for upgrades could lead to an “intelligence explosion.” This combination of intelligence and upgrading could reach a point of rapid expansion and leave humans vulnerable to replacement and even in some scenarios enslavement if not extinction. Some observers believe that we could reach a technological singularity by the middle of this century. Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are among prominent figures who view artificial general intelligence as an existential threat. The social philosopher Steve Fuller (2011) has argued that we are evolving towards Humanity 2.0, a “singularity” in which we can no longer take the “normal human body” for granted. Humanity 2.0 can be viewed as one of the ways we can address the problems raised by the prospects for a technological singularity. On the one hand, computers, robots, and AI show signs of surpassing the human condition; on the other hand, they are tools – prosthetics – for extending our species specific survival mechanisms. Of course the end result in both cases could be a technological singularity. Computers, robots, and AI may surpass us; or we might become indistinguishable from our prosthetics. In a sense, we’ve already gone through a manual singularity, the industrial revolution. The difference is that we tend to define our essential humanity in mental rather than physical terms. The worry here is an old one, the worry that technology can take on a life of its own (see Winner, 1977). This can be thought of as the Frankenstein problem. Kevin Kelly introduced the concept of the “Technium,” encompassing all of our technologies, machine processes, societies and cultures, and sciences, arts, and humanities in one global system. The sheer complexity of the system gives it increasing autonomy. It evolves and develops its own structures and dynamics. Technologies as small as drones and as large as electrical grids can indeed already become independent of human control. The larger technological networks become the more susceptible they are to problems of scale. Large-scale electrical networks can generate impactful new circuits that go unnoticed and unmonitored by human operators and observers. There is a dark side to our evolutionary story. Species come with an expiration date and 99.9% of all the species that E has tinkered into existence are extinct. Besides being a biological species, we humans are a cultural species and that has given us survival advantages. But at the same time culture seems to be the most efficient way to destroy a planetary ecology. Many learned observers, citing things like climate change, the destruction of ecological niches, dangers to bees, and species extinctions are persuaded that we are in our last days as a biological species and that the planet’s life-giving qualities are themselves in danger. Something like a Technium kingdom may be the only thing that can survive a catastrophic singularity. The Technium may be just another tinkering experiment by E that may extinguish itself in an evolutionary cul de sac or become a new feature of the evolutionary stage, settling in as a seventh kingdom,

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Technium, alongside the six biological kingdoms: Archaebacteria, Eubacteria, Fungi, Protista, Plants, and Animals.

Touch and evolution One of the correlates of our radical social natures is our need for touch. One of the consequences of fracturing our face-to-face communities is literally losing touch with each other. And when we lose touch with each other we lose touch with ourselves. We also escape our social selves when we industrialize sex and mask its realities behind walls of fear and ignorance based on ideologies and commodified morals. There are good reasons we need to regulate sexual behavior, but industrializing sex and moralizing it tends to emphasize negative and negating regulations and not positive ones. All discussions of sex should begin at the level of the fundamentally sensual nature of human beings. The power aspect of sexual relationships is a reality we have to deal with. The association of sex and violence may be more complicated than we can know anthropologically. Intercourse may be inherently violent (Dworkin, 1987). Of course, sex is more than intercourse. But we may have to reconsider sex in cultural and in biological terms; can we humanize sex? The anthropologist Ashley Montague wrote a book that should be required reading in our schools, maybe in classes titled “Health Education for the Real World and Not One Where We Imprison Our Largest Organ, Our Skin” The book is called, simply, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (1971). We have come to associate sex and touching with predatory behavior and violence. This has distorted the critical role sex and touching play in keeping the peace in relationships, families, communities, and society at large. Let’s consider, as Montague does, the life of a kitten. If it is taken from its mother immediately at birth, it will die. If it is born normally, the mother will lick it all over from genitals along the center of the kitten’s body to its mouth. This is critical because kittens don’t spend much time in the birth canal. Human infants do, and in passing through the birth canal they experience a stimulation of their bodies that is just like the licking experienced outside the birth canal by a kitten. In both cases, Montague argues, signals are sent to the brain that link it to the location of the alimentary canal. In general, Montague draws out attention to the way touching impacts behavior; in his terms, “the mind of the skin.” In 1927, W.J. O’Donovan had written about “dermatological neuroses.” Troubling thoughts can lead to skin disorders like boils and psoriasis. Montague was interested in the reverse process, the path from the skin to the mind. Healthy animal babies who are not licked are likely to die due to failures of the genitourinary and/or gastrointestinal system. More generally, touching is one of the ways we stimulate the nervous systems of newborns. All of their sensory pathways need stimulation-touch, smell, hearing, tasting, and seeing – or they atrophy and diminish in their powers to respond to stimuli. This “need” is widely recognized to be critical in infants. The problem

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for society is that it remains critical – and equally critical – throughout our lives. It is not too much to ask that we at least consider the possibility that many if not all of the mental and physical health issues we are burdened with in modern societies may arise from a simple lack of sufficient touching. Earlier I expanded Bidney’s categories – technofacts, mentifacts, and socifacts – to include emotifacts and biofacts. Perhaps we need to add a sixth sense that isn’t extrasensory but simply mentality, a sense which we activate socially by way of consciousness: conscifact. E’s tinkering is a not merely a story of networks rather than egos, it is a piece of an evolutionary epic. If we are social beings, it is because E invented us that way. And E went on to create culture. In tinkering society and culture into existence, E invented three things that can, if you understand them, unlock the secrets to explaining many confusing and mysterious aspects of the human condition: boundaries, symbols, and rituals. A symbol is something – a word, a gesture, or an image – that stands for or represents something else. For example, objectively a limousine is a large luxury vehicle driven by a chauffeur usually with a partition between the driver’s compartment and the passenger’s compartment. As a symbol, it represents wealth, power, status, privilege, and authority. When I was growing up, Cadillacs were a symbol of an elite lifestyle. Symbols are culturally specific. Symbols can more or less arbitrarily be assigned to stand for whatever you want. That decision is a cultural one. The meaning of a symbol is shared, maintained, and transmitted by the members of a culture, sub-culture, or group of any kind. A piece of cloth can be designated “flag” and used to represent a nation, a sports club, or a neighborhood gang. Given our capacities for causal thinking and imagination, symbols have a volatile potential for becoming reified. This has explanatory implications for the emergence of belief in the gods. Americans know raising the middle finger as an insult, but in Japan it represents the word “se” (which can mean “chance,” “position,” or many other words). It has no meaning at all in some parts of the world. Raising the middle and index fingers with the back of the hand towards someone (V sign) is an insult in Great Britain and its former colonies (except Canada); it’s the same as “giving the finger.” Given with the palm facing outwards it is a sign of peace. “Thumbs up” has the same meaning as “giving the finger” in Iran and Iraq. The “OK” gesture, making an “O” with the thumb and index finger is widely used to connote assent but it is offensive in parts of the Middle East, means “zero” or “worthless” in Tunisia, and represents coins and wealth in Japan. In many Mediterranean countries it means “You’re an asshole;” in the Arab world it represents the evil eye and is used as a curse. We’re all familiar with the fact that we associate colors with sex and gender; in America, pink is traditionally for girls and blue for boys. A kiss on the cheek is a symbolic gesture of intimacy in America; in many European cultures it is interpreted as a basic greeting. For example, it’s one kiss in Chile and Peru, two kisses in Spain and Italy, and three kisses in Serbia and Switzerland. In some countries, especially in the Middle East, it’s two kisses but not between a man and a woman.

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Boundaries and symbols are created and interpreted through shared cultural understanding. Verbal and non-verbal communication is based on the mutual understanding of shared symbols. Boundaries establish the cultural context within which communication is meaningful. Boundaries and symbols and the communication systems they support are produced and maintained through shared traditions of norms, values, beliefs, and practices. Boundaries can be territorial and determine the property line between your house and mine or the line of demarcation between nations. They can be manipulated in fashion and create greater or lesser degrees of sexual or sensual tension by shortening or lengthening skirts or raising or lowering bust lines. The history of men’s and women’s bathing suits shows the significance of boundaries in terms of the amount of skin and body parts it is acceptable to reveal in public. The third key invention I want to draw your attention to is ritual. I grew up in a Catholic community and was introduced to Catholicism by way of my mother’s beliefs. For many years, I associated the term “ritual” with the rituals of the Catholic church. As I grew increasingly distant from Catholicism, religion, and God I developed a distaste for ritual. Even as a young sociologist I continued to disparage ritual. I even criticized one of the leading students of ritual, the anthropologist Mary Douglas, for her positive perspective on rituals. I referred to her disparagingly as a “bog Catholic.” I don’t remember how I came to know this term but the term is a derogatory term for Irish Catholics who moved to England and practiced their religion more as a matter of appearance than of conviction. The term “bog” in reference to the Irish is a racial slur; bogs are a type of wetland. sometimes called a “quagmire,” that accumulates peat, a deposit of dead plant material, and they are abundant in Ireland. My view was that Douglas’ position on ritual represented a lower-class Catholic understanding. I was wrong on two scores; Douglas was a brilliant anthropologist, and rituals were ubiquitous. And I was triply wrong because Douglas was a follower of one of the two most influential sociologists in my sociological coming of age, Emile Durkheim (the other was Karl Marx). So, ritual. Yes, there is more to ritual than was dreamt of in my sociological imagination. It is one of the founding concepts of sociological and anthropological theory. Douglas stood in a line of giants of the discipline starting with Emile Durkheim himself, one of the founders of the discipline. My concept of ritual was not unusual among academics and the lay public; I understood ritual as a thoughtless action empty of content and context. It is in fact, ubiquitous, an integral and indeed the most important feature of human social life. It is in a sense the glue of social life. Let’s begin by clearing up a major misunderstanding. The term ritual, as opposed to habit, is normally reserved for social – that is, collective – behaviors. Habits are settled or regular tendencies or practices carried out by individuals. Rituals are the glue that holds social groups together; they support social solidarity and group spirit. Habits are the rituals practiced by individuals and they are part of the glue that contributes to the coherence of the individual self.

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You can think of rituals as machines that fuel and enhance collective energies, and are crucibles for constructing and sustaining ideals and symbols. The most important thing these machines do is support social solidarity, the sense of relationship, family, group, or community. The machine goes into action as soon as a group of people gather in the physical presence of each other. This is enough to create a flow of energy that results in building up shared emotions. The ritual machine will create conditions that make the individuals in the group mutually aware of their emerging shared emotional state. To sustain this process, they must engage in coordinating actions of voice and gesture according to a more or less explicit script. The shared emotional state (emotional contagion) is maximized if the group’s actions are patterned and rhythmic. This is achieved by chanting, singing, and/or dancing together against a musical background that includes a strong rhythm section – especially drumming. Once the ritual machine is fully engaged, we no longer have a group of loosely linked individuals but a cohesive group. We now have to think about the evolution of society and culture and E’s tinkering. In the emerging social lives of the earliest humans, individuation was minimally developed and group activities were crucial to sustaining the group and its individual members. Rituals tend to turn the group’s attention to its own identity and over thousands of years, as language and increasingly sophisticated levels of attention evolved the group members began to feel that the “spirit that moves them,” the contagious energy felt in the group, was physically real. We can’t document every step in this process, but we know that eventually the group constructs symbols to represent the spirit (emotions) that moves them. The foundation of the reality and power of any such symbol is the reality and power of the group itself. We have here in boundaries, symbols, and rituals the key ingredients for explaining the emergence and evolution of religion and the gods. Therein lies an extraordinary discovery first discussed in the context of the first account of the sociology of God by Randall Collins (1992: 30–59). The discovery is originally crystallized in Emile Durkheim’s 1912 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. These three concepts not only help us answer one of the greatest questions ever confronted by humanity but also reveal themselves in our everyday lives. They are implicated in constructing and sustaining ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our very consciousness, and our nations.

5 ASSUME THE POSITION God proofs

A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their “belief ” an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could convince someone that God exists by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way. Wittgenstein (c. 1944/1984: 85e) Proofs in the God dialogues and debates are a peculiarity of the Western religions and in particular of the Mediterranean religions, and even more specifically refer to the Christian God. There are several reasons for this. One is the assumption in the Western tradition that what is at issue is “existence as such” (M. Levering, 2016). This assumption is opposed to the idea that the universe “just is,” or that it is a “brute fact.” This use of the proof is often ambiguous and not intended to imply the level of proof we expect in mathematics or logic. It is often a distraction from the fact that we are dealing with what can loosely be described as “reasoned demonstration.” The theologian Hans Küng (1978: 529–551) has pointed out that to the extent that proofs are designed to prove the existence of God they are meaningless. Their importance lies in bringing God into our discourse. According to Küng, God can neither be proved nor disproved. Anthropologist Rik Pinxten writes in a personal communication: I have always been very uncomfortable with the identity of the West’s God as a human-like person. “God” is a denomination of a process of becoming of which humans are a part. “God” is the process of eternal growth and decline of phenomena that interact with each other all the time (as in some

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Native American and eastern traditions, as I understand them). In general, against such backgrounds: why that heavy emphasis on proofs in our traditions? What would be the relevance of proof in cultures with a different intuition of the religious or spiritual realm? From at least Pythagoras and Plato on, the Western tradition has always shadowed intuition, faith, and belief with some form of rationality. All forms of Western thought are infected with rationality. Thus, believers are always in a challenge arena provoked to demonstrate the grounds of their beliefs through reason, empirical demonstrations, or logical arguments and proofs. We should not expect to find provocations to prove God in traditions not subject to the Western scientific (and more broadly rational) traditions. To some extent this means a different attitude toward proof in modern and pre-modern societies. Proofs are part of the Islamic tradition. Averroes (Ibn Rushd; 1126–1198) claimed that there were two arguments given in the Koran based on “providence” and “invention.” The Koran tells us that basically the earth is fine-tuned to support life; therefore, there must be a fine-tuner, God. The Jewish scholar Maimonides (1138–1204) claimed that God exists but is beyond our understanding. We can know of God’s existence by way of the logical conclusion that a universe of finite physical objects must be powered by an infinite force; therefore, there must be an infinite being-God. Pantheists believe nature and divinity are one and the same. God is immanent in nature and not a personal or anthropomorphic entity. Early pantheists include Laozi (sixth century BCE) and Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE); later pantheists include Giordano Bruno (1548– 1600) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Other pantheists include such luminaries as Hegel, Beethoven, Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Einstein, and the American cosmologist Carl Sagan. Deists and panentheists believe in a non-interventionist God who is outside of time and space; pandeists believe that God evolved into a pre-existing universe. The beliefs in God who is one with the universe and the one who post-dates the universe converge with the two interpretations of the phrase “In the beginning” in Genesis to give two views of the problem of evil. If God is one with the universe, He has to answer for the existence of evil. If He post-dates the universe one can argue that he emerged into a universe that already possessed evil. Let’s consider the possible ways we humans could come in contact with a Creator God. If we follow the teachings of the Catholic Church we can know God “with certainty” by using reason to contemplate our world. Our guides for this method include the Apostle Paul, Thomas Aquinas, and the First Vatican Council. The first question we need to address in the context of traditional proofs for and against God is what or who are we trying to prove or disprove. Is it the God of classical theism, the ultimate, the first, the timeless, the “absolutely simple” sovereign being (more on this later) possessing no anthropomorphic qualities? These adjectives do not completely define God; this is impossible since “He” is transcendent. This is one of the points at which contradictions

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begin to emerge. The idea that we cannot define God is that “He” is transcendent, somehow doesn’t prevent us from knowing that “He” exists. This problem gives rise to two forms of theology: Cataphatic (or kataphatic) theology is the theology that uses “positive” terminology to describe or refer to the divine –  specifically, God – i.e., terminology that describes or refers to what the divine is believed to be, in contrast to the “negative” terminology used in apophatic theology to indicate what it is believed the divine is not. In general, the problem we face here is that any effort to define God limits the unlimited. Somehow, theologians twist themselves out of this conundrum in ways that allow us to know that something we cannot know exists, and exists with a finite level of certainty. One cannot help being reminded here of Edwin Abbott’s little gem, Flatland (1884/1952). For three dimensional beings like us to know a God who transcends dimensionality would be something like one-dimensional creatures coming to know two- or three-dimensional creatures. If cataphatic theology is neurotic, apophatic theology is psychotic.

Let there be light Consider the situation of a person, X, in a dark room. There are other people in the room who make claims about a light outside the room. Y says Trust me, there is a light outside. Even though the room remains dark that light will sustain you if you believe. If you leave the room you may not see the light. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You must have faith that the light is there even if it doesn’t appear to your senses. X is baffled, but trusting. The room remains dark. W says I don’t know for sure whether or not there is a light outside, but I can tell you this: it is highly improbable that there is a light out there. The light might exist but the weight of the evidence makes it improbable. Z chimes in, “No, in fact the idea that there is a light out there is logically contradictory and therefore it is impossible that there is a light out there.” Y, W, and Z then proceed to discuss and debate various proofs for and against the existence of the light leaving X totally in the dark! Finally, A, who has stood by through all of this in stoic silence says: X, get up and open the door. If you see the light then you will know it exists. If you do not see the light you can safely, even if tentatively, assume that there is no light. If there is a light you can bring it into the room and make the room bright; if there is no light to bring into the room you will have to return to a dark room.

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The point of this story is to force us to consider why the question of whether there is or is not a God has been owned by theologians and philosophers. For all but the most enlightened theologians the answer is given by virtue of tradition and authority, sometimes bolstered by alleged “proofs.” Philosophers tackle the problem on the assumption that what we are dealing with is free standing claims. Statement 1 is: there is God; statement 2 is: there is no God. These claims in the context of philosophy can and should be addressed using the tools of logic and argument, debate and discourse. It should be clear that two thousand years and more of theological and philosophical attention have left all of us in the dark. Why has it not occurred to any but the most enlightened of these professors of God to get up and look outside? This book is about what happens when we stop listening to theologians and philosophers (never mind physicists and cosmologists) and get up and look outside. On what expert grounds, incidentally, do physicists and cosmologists (and some well-meaning “lesser scientists” like chemists and biologists) claim jurisdiction over the God question? The cosmologists’ claim appears to be based on the assumption that their job is “looking up to the heavens.” The physicists’ claim is that, after all, everything in the end is about atoms as they demonstrated when their science helped to blow up Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let’s be fair; physicists and their brethren in the physical and natural sciences possess a trained arrogance about the unlimited scope of their analytic and rational powers across the full spectrum of the facts of the world. There is, nonetheless, another voice to be heard from.

How do I prove thee? Let me count the ways There are, according to philosopher novelist Rebecca Goldstein, 36 ways of proving the existence of God. She addresses the flaws in each of the proofs. I will be concerned with only the most relevant proofs in the philosophy and theology of God proofs and in particular the classical proofs. Here is what you need to know about proofs in general. First, proofs are mechanized collective witnesses. That is, they are designed to make some claim objective and demonstrate it with a certainty grounded in the beliefs, assumptions, and expectations of a specific community. Proofs are sometimes designed to speak to outsider communities but they inevitably fail if members of the outsider community do not share enough in the proof culture that produced the proof. In such cases, they may succeed by way of proof by authority. You will accept the proof because you trust the community that produced it even if you can’t understand it. Proofs, furthermore, even in mathematics, logic, and science, bury their conclusions in their premises or in what I call shadow premises, unstated conclusions implicit in the premises logically or linguistically, and present in the culturally programmed mind of the person constructing the proof. This is transparent to varying degrees but it is most transparent in proofs for the existence of things that do not exist such as gods and unicorns.

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To put it otherwise, there is a “deep structure” buried out of sight in every proof that underwrites the conviction projected by the proof. There are four levels of deep structure in every proof: the values, beliefs, and norms of (1) the general culture within which the proof is constructed; (2) the professional culture within which the proof is constructed (e.g., science); (3) the specialty science within which the proof is constructed (e.g., physics); (4) the specific community of specialists the proof addresses (e.g., particle physicists). What I am proposing is an alternative to the view that proofs, like mathematical statements, scientific laws, and logical propositions stand alone and outside of history, culture, society, time, and space. God proofs fail as proofs in the following ways: •

•

•

• • • • •

Their conclusion – God exists – is assumed from the outset and the proofs are fashioned to reach this conclusion. If you set out to prove that God exists and you begin by holding to a belief that God exists your proof will always confirm this. This is proof by forced conclusion. Some God proofs fail to understand some principle of science and violate it in the proof. Proof by “irreducible complexity,” for example, fails to get evolutionary theory and natural selection right. Such proofs are proofs by ignorance of physical and natural science. Some God proofs fail to understand the nature of randomness, probability, and statistics. These are proofs by ignorance of mathematics and logic (see Appendix E). Some God proofs fail to understand the basics of human behavior as understood by the social sciences; proofs by ignorance of social science. Some God proofs are simply proof by gross ignorance. Some God proofs are proof by strength of belief. Some God proofs are proofs by obscurantism. Some God proofs are proofs by ignoring the question “How do you know that?” (the “et quid scis quod” or “Pós to xéreis aftó” fallacy).

It is possible to prove that God doesn’t exist. But in order to avoid the problems listed above God has to be understood in cultural terms, not physical or natural terms. That is, God has to be understood as a social construction, a concept developed in and through social life. This is an idea that is derived from the very idea of society and culture as social facts sui generis and humans as symbolic creatures immersed in rituals. Once we admit society, culture, and the sciences that study them, all traditional God proofs fail. Particular proofs that God doesn’t exist may still be subject to some of the problems listed above if they are based on physical or natural science, mathematics, or logic. The sociological proof that there is no God proves that God is a cultural construct and eliminates all other forms of God. At the end of the day, we are faced with two opposed proof communities. The only basis for choosing between the two depends on which proof community you belong to or aspire to. I propose the following strong programme in the sociology of proof, a step we need in order to demonstrate the fallacy of the idea that you can’t prove or disprove God.

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• • • • • •

PROOFS ARE SITUATED PROOFS ARE CONTEXTUAL PROOFS ARE INDEXICAL PROOFS ARE SOCIAL INSTITUITONS PROOFS ARE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS PROOFS ARE PRODUCED BY, IN, AND FOR PROOF COMMUNITIES

The implications here are that proofs are elements of a culture, that they are constructed within a linguistic (language and rhetoric) space, and that they have attributes of beauty and elegance as already appreciated by mathematicians and logicians themselves. One of the criterion mathematicians use in evaluating a proof is: can they “walk” through the proof. In an exploratory study of mathematicians at two universities, one in New York and one in Italy, a colleague and I asked whether the mathematicians considered the proof of the four color theorem a proof. The question arose because the 1976 proof by Appel and Haken used 1200 hours of computer time. In summary, the applied mathematicians at the New York math department generally agreed that a proof is a proof. The pure mathematics oriented mathematicians at the Italian university were not satisfied: they wanted a proof they could walk through, that is, they wanted to be able to visually inspect every step in the proof. Mathematicians use several different modes of reasoning in proof validation, including formal reasoning and the construction of rigorous proofs, informal deductive reasoning, and example-based reasoning. Conceptual knowledge plays an important role in the validation of proofs. The practice of validating a proof depends upon whether a student or mathematician wrote the proof and in what mathematical domain the proof was situated (Weber, 2008). How mathematicians view the proof will also be impacted by who constructed the proof and where he/she works. We read a proof linearly from beginning axioms or premises to a conclusion. But this is not necessarily the way the proof was conceived. Cheng (2004) points out that we rarely write a proof in the order we conceived it; proofs are often thought up backwards: … to build a bridge across a river, we might well start at both ends and work our way towards the middle. We might even put some preliminary supports at various points in the middle and fill in all the gaps afterwards. But when we actually go across the bridge, we start at one end and finish at the other. Proofs are constructed so that the order makes sense. Except in the case of the simplest proofs; proofs have to be carefully planned. It’s not enough to include all the right steps, they have to be written down in the right order. Writing them down in the wrong order is like writing a word with all the letters in the wrong order. This is one reason that proofs are vulnerable to the tautology problem,

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especially when we set out to prove something we believe in. The classical proofs for the existence of God and their modern mathematical imitations are tautological in extremis and border on if they do not indeed involve schizophrenic constructions. They resolve to “God exists therefore God exists.” Consider, in evaluating the nature of proofs, that the classical syllogism is itself a tautology in extremis. If A is B and B is C, then A is C. But if A is B, then B is A. If B is C, then C is A. So here is what the syllogism states: If A is A, and A is A, then A is A. This is a little more complicated as Jean Paul Van Bendegem points out in Appendix G. Proving is a complex social activity. But proofs are, at the end of the day, communal technologies for reinforcing social solidarities and moral orders. Let’s consider an exemplar by a paragon of logical thinking, Kurt Gödel. He was not a neutral prover. He was religious and although he did not attend church he read the Bible on Sunday mornings. A Christian, he thought highly of Islam as an open-minded religion. So much for logic (Appendix D). Let’s review two of the classical proofs or arguments for the existence of God. The ontological argument postulates that we cannot conceive anything greater than God. So we already begin with an assumption that God exists. This is followed by the claim that it is greater to exist than not to exist. Suppose that we imagine that there is no God. This, we are asked to conclude, implies that something greater than God exists. We cannot conceive that God does not exist. Therefore, it is not possible that God does not exist. This is Emperor’s new clothes logic if not an outright schizophrenic composition. Nonetheless, this has not prevented taking the proof seriously enough to bring forth no less a philosopher than Immanuel Kant to identify “the” fallacy in the proof. The fallacy is treating “existence” as a property like height or weight; formally, this means that existence is not a predicate. This has some philosophical justification but is vulnerable to objections (e.g., Johnson, 2016). If you can treat existence as a property of God you can do this for anything you can imagine such as a camel with three humps. Sidney Morgenbesser constructed an ontological proof that there is no God: “Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?” (Goldstein, 2010: 449). The cosmological argument assumes that everything must have a cause. The universe exists so it must have a cause. Nothing can cause itself therefore the universe cannot be its own cause. Something outside of the universe must have caused it. [Take special note of the next step]. God is the only thing outside the universe. Therefore God caused the universe. Therefore God exists. An intelligent ten year old can pose the fatal questions here. We know the universe is here; where did we get the idea of God? How did we know to introduce it at this critical point? And then, if everything must have a cause what caused God? If we assume God was not caused we violate the assumption that everything must have a cause. If we claim that God is self-caused we violate the assumption that nothing can cause itself. If you argue that God is the exception to the assumptions our ten year old will ask why the universe can’t be the exception. If everything has a cause we enter an infinite regress. God caused the universe; what caused God? X caused God. What caused X, and so on. If we have to stop somewhere we can

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just as easily stop at the universe. The only reason for positing God is that we entered the proof already convinced that there is a God. The very idea of “cause” is suspect because it is based on our earth bound everyday experience of billiard balls physics. I hit the cue ball, I cause it to move. The cue ball hits the eight ball, the eight ball moves. David Hume was one of the philosophers who saw through this fallacy of extrapolation. It is dangerous to reason from billiard balls physics to the physics or metaphysics, the philosophy or theology, of the universe. That takes us as far out of the bounds of our world as we can experience it day to day. How much trust can we put in applying our everyday experience of causality to cosmic causality? That would seem to test in the extreme the limits of reason. Here I do not even consider the causal weirdness we encounter in quantum mechanics. What this may all come down to at the end of the day is our utter bewilderment and radical confusion about why there is anything at all. What this proof tells us is that belief in God was so powerful in the lives of the theological and philosophical provers that it overrode their basic abilities to reason. The belief had to be incredibly powerful because these provers were by any standard metric of intelligence very smart, often brilliant, and in some cases gave us grounds to consider them geniuses. At the same time their failures in reason can be explained by various types of cognitive biases and in the extreme by psychiatric disorders. Philosophers and theologians who construct proofs for the existence of god tend to be victims of grammatical ambiguities and equivocations in a logic that is built out of linguistic, syntactic, and semantic elements. Such elements have no material equivalents in the world accessible to our sensory experience. The provers enclose themselves in this insubstantial world of signs. They then make the same error that mathematical cosmologists make when their failure to grasp mathegrammatical illusions leads them to posit the substantive reality of multiple universes when all they have done is create a multi-verse out of signs. Therefore, my conclusion on God proofs is that they depend on grammar not on meaning and that accounts for their transparent incoherence. Proofs that there is or is not a God begin with the prover’s prior cultural inculcation that there is or is not a god. Their proofs must rely on grammatical and logical gymnastics that abuse necessity and consistency, and possibility premises “that are stronger than their conclusions.” It is child’s play to prove possibilities a priori (Sobel, 2004: 90–92). Consistency does not entail possibility. Leibniz believed it reasonable to presume that every being and especially God is possible until someone proves the contrary. This makes no sense and is especially suspect when we have inculcated the concept of God before we reached the age of reason and in a culture in which this was the common experience. In summary, following Sobel (2004: 402): arguments against, like arguments for, the existence of God, and indeed as arguments in general, are 1. A priori: deductive arguments from necessarily true premises. 2. Inductive in spirit: consist of considerations that are held to provide sufficient support for, without entailing their conclusions.

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3. Arguments that contend for a logical problem for perfect beings, first of all evil, then of the world’s not being a best world, next of the world not being a best world a perfect being could create. 4. “The evidence of suffering and evil rather obviously tells against traditional theisms and, Hume says, decisively so in the absence of ‘tolerable reasons a priori for them’…”(Sobel, 2004: 407). 5. “Shall we because of the problem of evil in its myriad devolutions give up on the God of the philosophers and classical theologians, that omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent being, that perfect being? I think so” (Sobel, 2004: 479). 6. Perfect being theologies are the most vulnerable – and devastatingly so – to the problem of evil. 7. What Sobel’s 652 page book demonstrates (“proves”?) is that the God that is the subject and object of proofs is a logical, semantic, linguistic thing and not any sort of being who exists in some way or other in our universe. God proofs in general prove the “existence” of a sign. Proofs are based on prior socialization in cultures and sub-cultures. They cannot in their own terms stand as scientific. Their validity is a function of the historical unfolding of science over generations. Like any proposed scientific truth, fact, or finding proofs must stand the test of repeated collective intersubjective tests over many generations of science. We have the background of such tests against which to evaluate the status of God proofs. They fail in that context. In her novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (Goldstein, 2010) the philosopher novelist Rebecca Goldstein lists 36 proofs (Appendix F) for the existence of God and summarizes the flaws in each one. The detailed original is a very handy little appendix to this chapter. I list the proofs by name only here.

Appendix D: Gödel’s mathematical proof of the existence of God Axiom 1 (Dichotomy). A property is positive if and only if (iff ) its negation is negative; Axiom 2 (Closure). A property is positive if it necessarily contains a positive property. Theorem 1. A positive property is logically consistent (i.e., possibly it has some instance). Definition. Something is God-like iff it possesses all positive properties [WHERE DID “GOD-LIKE” COME FROM?] Axiom 3. Being God-like is a positive property [WHO DECIDED THIS?]. Axiom 4. Being a positive property is (logical, hence) necessary. Definition. A property P is the essence of x iff x has P and is necessarily minimal. Theorem 2. If x is God-like, then being God-like is the essence of definition. NE(x): x necessarily exists if it has an essential property. Axiom 5. Being NE is God-like Theorem 3. Necessarily there is some x such that x is God-like. Gödel (Wang, 1996) described his proof as a monadology in which the central monad is named God. The logic of the proof is thus modal and considers many “possible worlds.”

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He was a Platonist, a believer in the preeminence of mind over body, and rejected materialism. The monads, then, are spiritual beings. He believed in other worlds and alien others different and of a higher kind than humans; that our world is only one of the worlds we will live in. The basic criticisms of the proof center on the axioms. In general, the criticism is that the axioms are not grounded; we are given no reasons to believe they are true. For further inquiries, see the selected bibliography on the history of the ontological argument from Barth to the present time (1931–2020): www.bibliographia.co/ontologicalproof-contemporary-biblio.htm

Appendix E: Bayes theorem & Swinburne’s probability argument for the existence of God Bayes’ Theorem was constructed by the eighteenth century mathematician and theologian Thomas Bayes (1702–1761). The theorem was proposed as a method for calculating the validity of any Xs (beliefs, hypotheses, claims, propositions) given the best available evidence. Horgan (2016) describes the theorem in three increasingly complicated steps: (1) Initial belief plus new evidence equals new and improved belief; (2) “The probability that a belief is true given new evidence equals the probability that the belief is true regardless of that evidence times the probability that the evidence is true given that the belief is true divided by the probability that the evidence is true regardless of whether the belief is true.” The basic mathematical formula takes this form: P(B|E) = P(B) X P(E|B)/ P(E), with P standing for probability, B for belief and E for evidence. P(B) is the probability that B is true, and P(E) is the probability that E is true. P(B|E) means the probability of B if E is true, and P(E|B) is the probability of E if B is true. The fashion of using Bayes’ Theorem began in the 1950s and can be explained in part by the fact that it formalizes “common sense;” The plausibility of your belief is based on the degree to which only your belief explains the evidence for it. The greater the number of alternative explanations, the less your belief is (Horgan, 2016). Your evidence might be faulty, or if sound explicable by hypotheses other the your own. The common sense, even tautological, nature of the theorem has made it a prime resource for promoting superstition, pseudoscience, and a God proof (Swinburne, 2012). In brief, then, we have a theorem that states that your beliefs are only as valid as the evidence behind them. The starting point for the abuse of the theorem is the initial estimate of the probability of your belief, the so-called “prior,” which is often little more than guesswork. If you are careless in exploring alternative explanations, your evidence will simply confirm what you already believe. Swinburne (2012) abuses Bayes’ Theorem as follows. He claims that the probability of theism is its explanatory or predictive power, multiplied by its prior or

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intrinsic probability divided by the prior or intrinsic probability of the evidence occurring by itself, or:

P ( h\e.k ) = P ( e/h.k ) XP ( h/k ) / P ( e/k )

Where P = probability, h = the theistic hypothesis offered as an explanation of the world, e = the items of evidence, and k = background (in this case tautological) knowledge. Using the Bayesian approach, Swinburne has estimated the probability of the existence of God as above fifty percent, and the probability of the resurrection to be around ninety-seven percent. In terms of the “prior,” Swinburne assumes a probability of fifty percent (either God exists or He does not). But given the large number of things other than God that people have believed in, Swinburne’s prior is (assuming the Bayesian approach is valid here) too high, which would correspondingly lower each outcome’s prior probability. For critical reviews of Swinburne’s arguments see Czobel (2010), and Wiggins (2006). In the light of these and my review of Swinburne it’s sheer madness that this kind of nonsense isn’t just ignored. But the fact that it is taken seriously is a sign of the bankruptcy of theology and philosophy. In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the simplest data. Edgar Allen Poe (1838/1999: 18) Gödel repeats the classic fallacy in Descartes’ 5th meditation which Leibniz recognized as assuming what was to be proven (Sobel, 2004: 33). Swinburne is tricked by the same fallacy.

Appendix F: 36 proofs that God exists (see Goldstein, 2010: 445–446) for their contents and refutations). • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The cosmological argument. The ontological argument. The argument from design. The classical teleological argument. The argument from irreducible complexity. The argument from the paucity of benign mutations. The argument from the original replicator. The argument from the Big Bang. The argument from the fine-tuning of physical constants. The argument from the beauty of physical laws. The argument from cosmic coincidences. The argument from personal coincidences. The argument from answered prayers. The argument from a wonderful life. The argument from miracles.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The argument from the hard problem of consciousness. The argument from the improbable self. The argument from survival after deaths. The argument from the inconceivability of personal annihilation. The argument from moral truth. The argument from altruism. The argument from free will. The argument from personal purpose. The argument from the intolerability of insignificance. The argument from the consensus of humanity. The argument from the consensus of mystics. The argument from Holy Books. The argument from perfect justice. The argument from suffering. The argument from the survival of the Jews. The argument from the upward curve of history. The argument from prodigious genius. The argument from human knowledge of infinity. The argument from mathematical reality. The argument from decision theory (Pascal’s wager). The argument from pragmatism (William James’ leap of faith). The argument from the unreasonableness of reason. The argument from sublimity. The argument from the intelligibility of the universe (Spinoza’s God). The argument from the abundance of arguments.

Appendix G: A logical encore by Jean Paul van Bendegem JPvB: On the notion of logical necessity: I agree that, if such necessity is “present,” the conclusion is already contained in the premises of the argument. When we talk about “truth preservation from premises to conclusion,” we are saying that in all situations wherein the premises are true, so is the conclusion and therefore the conclusion does not add anything new. It could, of course, be “new” to us, that is, on the epistemic level. One can genuinely be surprised that a particular conclusion does indeed follow from a number of premises. That being said, it must be noted that the proofs for the existence of a particular being, G, are usually quite simple in the sense that one should not expect such surprises. What I mean is that an ontological proof of G that would have the complexity of, say, the proof of the classification of the finite simple groups now that would be surprising. (And probably not convince anybody). The second comment is that I agree with the four levels you mention – (1) the general culture, (2) the professional culture, (3) the specialty science, (4) the specific community of specialists – and that these levels have to be “in place” to let a proof do the work it is supposed to do in that community. This is really close to what the

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Signific Movement in the Netherlands in the first half of the past century had in mind, especially in the writings of Gerrit Mannoury. The third comment concerns the failure of ontological proofs to qualify as proofs. In a sense all of these proofs are too transparent; you see the conclusion “hidden” in the premises. There I certainly agree. I do have a remark concerning the tautological nature of logic. In the context of the logical necessity I talked about above, this is inevitable. If I have a proof that shows that from premises P1 and P2 a conclusion C necessarily follows then the statement (P1 & P2) –> C is a tautology. Likewise P –> P is also a tautology and, at least in classical logic, one can show that if A and B are tautologies, then A and B are equivalent. It then follows that, again inevitably, ((P1 & P2) –> C) –> (P –> P) is a tautology. All this means that, if a proof for the existence of G is logically correct, then it is a tautology and hence equivalent to “If God exists, then God exists”. But that will work only if (P1 & P2) –> C has been shown to be a tautology first. What I am trying to say here, I guess, is that this argument is not really that strong and can be left out. SR: Spinoza, Anselm, and Descartes purport to deduce the existence of God from what would be God’s nature. The logics used by Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza “are implicitly of quantifiers and descriptions, definite and indefinite, and not modalities”: their arguments are not valid. “These able philosophers were, it seems, taken in by equivocalities of Latin forms corresponding to ambiguities and amphibolies in English of definite and indefinite articles” (Sobel, 2004: 81). JPvB-The “proofs” of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz only require first-order predicate calculus, so you can quantify over variables but not over predicates. Or in other words, the propositional level is insufficient. But you do not need second-order logic or first-order predicate logic with modalities, the two basic ones being “necessary” and “possible.” Whereas a definite description can be expressed in first-order language – “the unique thing x such that so-and-so” becomes “there is a thing x that is so-and-so and, if for all y that are also so-and-so, x = y” – a modality cannot unless one introduces a new predicate or a new connective, so you are extending the language. SR: In a study of a small sample of mathematicians (eight subjects), Weber (2008) found that different modes of reasoning are used in proof validation: formal reasoning, informal deductive reasoning, and example based reasoning. Conceptual knowledge is important in validating proofs, as is the role of the mathematician responsible for the proof (student, amateur, or professional) and the mathematical domain in which the proof is situated.

Post-script: Logic redux One of my colleagues when I was a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was the philosopher Selmer Bringsjord. During his lectures, he often began by writing the words “Logic is irrefutable.” He argued that since there was a once

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and for all and only logic, anyone who wanted to debate or otherwise oppose him was obligated to rely on that same logic. All the points I made earlier about proofs and context apply to logics. Bringsjord admits that there are a variety of logical systems, some of them “very bizarre.” “But,” he says, “we study them and build them from the standpoint of background logic, which is unassailable.” But when the focus of our logics and proofs is God, that background logic fails us. It fails us because it is a reflection of the physical realm of reality, and becomes complicated at the biological and sociological levels of reality. Bringsjord is a believer and he holds religion to a “much higher standard than science.” He understands science to be inductive and therefore false because we can expect it to change in the future. Natural theology, he claims, is a largely deductive enterprise and therefore eternally true (?). Bringsjord is known in his field as someone who is quite competent with the form of logic but not with its substance. The sociologist C. Wright Mills (1963: 428ff.) wrote, following C.S. Pierce, that reasoning “involves deliberate approval of one’s reasoning”: One operates logically…from the standpoint of a generalized other. It is from this socially constituted viewpoint that one approves or disapproves of given arguments as logical or illogical, valid or invalid…No individual can be logical unless there be agreement among the members of his universe of discourse as to the validity of some general conception of good reasoning…the “laws of logic”…are not arrived at intuitively, nor are they given innate within the mind…the principles of logic are conventional without being arbitrary… These remarks and quotations come from a special issue of an internal newsletter of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Facts & Artifacts, published in 2004–05 and edited by graduate students Jill Fisher, Rachel Dowty, Matt Francisco, and Selma Sabanovic.

6 EVIDENCE REDUX

Why is it that for people like me it is self-evident that there are no transcendental or supernatural realms and entities and for others it is obvious that there are or must be such realms and entities? I’ve reviewed some of the mountain of evidence, logical, empirical, and theoretical that ground my perspective. I want at the end of the day to ground that perspective in a discovering science. In this case, the relevant discovering sciences are sociology and anthropology. Why isn’t the evidence they offer convincing to everyone? The basic answer to this question lies in the concept of objectivity communities. The conventional answers to the question, answers that appeal to specific cultural populations, come from the evolutionary and cognitive sciences. They look primarily to the architecture of the brain that developed and unfolded in the genus Homo. This tends to make religious belief and belief in the gods a matter of individual rationality. As a result, critics are encouraged to think of beliefs as vulnerable to logic and reason. But beliefs and religious behavior are embedded in social networks not individuals. They are collective representations and activities that reflect more or less closed communities of consensus, or objectivity communities. I suggest we think of systems of truths as rooted in objectivity communities. This means that each community is associated with and defined by its system of truths. Objectivity communities are variously permeable to outside truths but we should assume in general that their boundaries resist such outside truths. We can now adopt a bird’s eye view of objectivity communities and see that they exist over historical time and in the present on an evolutionary stage where their truths are tested for their long- and short-term survival potential. So objectivity communities are not equal. I am not making an argument for naïve relativism. To put the matter simply and bracket the complexity of the sciences as we understand them sociologically, the objectivity communities of science are most closely coupled to the natural world and therefore the most realistic in their worldviews.

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In general, we shouldn’t expect to be able to communicate across the objectivity communities of our own society any more than we should expect to communicate our objectivity communities across the boundaries of cultures with less advanced technologies and different languages. I have heard a physical scientist claim that scientific truths can be communicated across cultural barriers because they are universal. This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of cultural barriers and the notion of objectivity communities. I heard a physicist claim that you can explain physical truths such as equations to an “African pygmy.” One cannot simply present a “universal” truth to a culture that does not share the scientist’s language and entire cultural apparatus. The situation is not hopeless. The objectivity communities in a given society are always interacting in various ways with each other. Linkages can be forged that allow cross community communications. University students come to university from a variety of objectivity communities. Some of those communities already have linkages to the objectivity communities found on our campuses which tend to be organized around the sciences. They are primed to move more fully into the objectivity communities of science. Some come to university with a resistance to crossing cultural bridges and they seek to bring their objectivity communities with them and create enclaves they can return to after classes that give them the opportunity to remain enclosed in their alternative objectivity communities. Their truths may be challenged in class but when they return to their enclaves and their brothers and sisters in truth, the classroom truths loosen their grip. They will form religious, cultural, and other identity clubs that will help them resist the seductions of new ways of living and thinking available in the alternative objectivity communities of the science oriented universities. This is why logic and reason alone cannot be expected to impact or change people’s ideas about religion, or any other socially institutionalized system of belief and knowledge. The mountain of evidence that supports the argument that transcendental and supernatural realms and entities are human creations will not in general communicate across the closed boundaries of the objectivity communities of the faithful. It can make headway where social and historical factors have created cracks and larger or smaller openings in their boundaries. The more complex the society, the more a cultural Brownian motion will create collisions among objectivity communities and the more likely it will be that cracks and openings will appear in their boundaries. Of course, this works in all directions. So university students will tend to get exposed to various “truths” during their education. The media will broadcast these cross-community transgressions. The result in our contemporary world is that we are confronted with various culture wars and science wars. This can lead to some unfortunate skeptical extremes among very smart people. Take the case of Terry, someone I have known all of my life. Terry is a senior, a highly intelligent high school graduate who has earned enough college credits to qualify for an honors BA. Terry knows a lot about the flaws and fractures

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in our political system, our education system, and our media. Like the radical journalist I.F. Stone, she believes that “all governments lie.” He/she has been reading president Trump’s truly fake news about voter fraud and is convinced it is widespread and likely to undermine the upcoming election. I pointed out to Terry that skepticism is one of the key norms of science. But there are two types of skepticism: rational skepticism and irrational skepticism. You can and should be skeptical of everything. But rational skeptics can live in the real world. You should be skeptical of everything you read in the NY Times or elsewhere. But educated, intelligent people know how to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of falsehood. Truth never comes with a capital “T” but it does come in ways that allow us to have a life. It is one thing to be skeptical of the NY Times and another to be skeptical of the National Inquirer. As I write this, a COVID-19 pandemic is raging across the United States, which has not been as successful as other countries in getting the pandemic under control. The reason in part is that the culture and science wars have led to a bifurcation in which one culture (to oversimplify reality a bit) looks to science for answers and the other looks to a misguided understanding of individual freedoms as some Americans understand them to be protected by the Constitution. Politically, America is faced everyday with Trump facts versus the facts of science. This shouldn’t rise to the level of a conflict, but it has. The fact that “Nature” has a preference for the science based system is no guarantee that it will win the day. The “Civil War” now looming can at this point in time as easily annihilate both parties as lead to a clear winner or some perpetual warfare that will undermine our adaptive potential as much as a win by the anti-science groups will. I will have more to say about the nature and limits of science in Chapter 8. For now, I want to make clear that I am not arguing for scientism, logical positivism, or an unrestricted Enlightenment. It would help if those of us in the scientific objectivity communities could see past the variety of natural science explanations for the existence and persistence of religion and support the social science framework I argue from in this book. We are not predisposed to spirituality by the YMAT2 gene; we are not religious because the limbic system is older and stronger that the neocortex and the reptilian brain is older and stronger than either the limbic or the neocortex (triune brain hypothesis); evolution does not select for religious beliefs genetically or biologically: it can’t because religion as a manifestation of moral order is one with society. We are not religious because religion helps us understand the world. We are religious because we are a belonging, compassionate species. And finally we are not religious because we are dopamine dopes or addicted to Soma. Humans emerge always, already, and everywhere social and moral. The elements of moral order gradually evolve as societies evolve into the rituals that give rise to religious beliefs and behaviors and we see the earliest evidence of this reaching an identifiable level about 45–200 thousand years ago (Middle Paleolithic era). We take as a sign of this development the ritual treatment of the dead including burials. Emotional connections to the dead, reflected in burying

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the dead with various objects, reinforces the experience of the continuing presence of the departed and develops into the concept of ancestors and then superior beings living on in another realm. This view of things evolves over millennia. What could account for such an evolution? The elements would include the capacity for identifying patterns and relations of cause and effect which would develop as a consequence of basically trial and error efforts in adaptation and survival; and the development of symbolic systems and language. The resources for constructing the transcendental and supernatural existed in ancestor worship, shamanism, and animism. It’s hard to imagine religion and belief in the gods following such a path unless you allow the process to unfold over hundreds of thousands of years. I introduced this idea in Chapter 2. Rituals give rise to emotional contagion, an effect that requires a cause. Social life is not yet recognized as a collective causal force so the experience of the emotional contagion leads to projecting the cause outside the group. In combination with all that had evolved in the preceding tens of thousands of years, this leads to a mistake in reference. In spite of insightful thinkers scattered across the historical landscape who could see that the Emperor of belief was naked, that mistake could not be finally corrected until the emergence of the social sciences in the nineteenth century. The failure of theorists to recognize a collective causal nexus has led to an understandable but misguided emphasis on the individual capacity for abstract thought and imagination. The first religious texts appear only between 2400–2300 BCE. Of the thousands of cultures listed in the Human Relations Area Files, only some 30 developed writing. Of those 30, only the Mediterranean “religions of the book” wrote down their experiences of God, giving their religious myths cultural and political power. Religions of the Book (religions of the philosophers) were rooted in a separation of mind from body and emphasized “matters inside one’s head” (Collins, 1975:182). If we understand knowledge, beliefs, and faith in terms of objectivity communities, or communities of consensus, we can see why unreasonable beliefs are so tenacious (Schimmel, 2008) and why people believe in weird things (Shermer, 1997). The reason is that they are centripetally rooted in their communities. For the same reasons, tenable beliefs and beliefs in things that are not weird are also tenacious. We have already seen that the universality of compassion is prevented from serving to link people across religious and cultural boundaries by the fact that it too is a centripetal force. Signs of organized religion appear about eleven thousand years ago probably around the world of that time but the clearest evidence comes from the Near East. By the time we arrive at the well-documented history of the ancient Greeks, we find one of the giants in the history of thought, Plato (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BCE). He stands at a watershed between the pre-Homeric and Homeric gods and the emergence of Christianity and the world religions. He is an anchor in what Karl Jaspers (1953/2011) called the “Axial Age”: Confucius and Laozi were living in China; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to

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materialism, skepticism, and nihilism. In Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato; of the tragedians, of Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West.

Requiem for Plato As an anchor, Plato is important for leaving us a legacy of transcendental ideas, in particular The Forms. Many gods populated the pre-Homeric world and some survived into Homer’s time including Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon. There were pantheons worshipped at Knossos and at Pylos. Homer’s gods had recognizable human qualities: they were born; they had sex, and females gave birth; they ate, took naps, and could be injured. But they could also morph into lower animals. Plato’s gods began to take on qualities of the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent gods that would lead to the Creator God of the Mediterranean religions. They are purer versions of Homer’s gods, perfect in wisdom, generous to humans especially to those who love and imitate them, and significantly they are more mind than body. We don’t see Plato’s influence in Jesus and the New Testament but it begins to appear in the systematic theologies of the Church Fathers. Justin Martyr (100–165 CE), is a leading exponent of the “Divine Word” or “Logos,” a principle of universal reason immanent in nature, the cosmos, and humanity; it is an unchanging truth. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is referred to as the “Divine Logos.” Martyr appears to have for some time at least considered the Platonists early Christians. Philosophers in the ancient world struggled with the paired concept of universals-and-particulars. The problem was taken up by Plato and he eventually concluded that there must be “somewhere” an essence that was manifested in particular material objects in our everyday world. There had to be an essential “tableness” that was manifested in the variety of tables in our world. The Forms eventually took on the aura of the Divine Logos and were located in a “place” out of time and space. Thus, Plato introduces an idea that prefigures the very idea of Heaven as a perfect transcendental, supernatural realm that makes its appearance in the writings of the Church Fathers. Plato gives them the resources for thinking in terms of absolute truths and an unchanging reality in another world ruled over by God. Forms, like God in some versions, are beyond space and time, even beyond the human mind. This is in part why by the time we move from Plato and the Platonists through Augustine and on to Kierkegaard we are dealing with a God who is beyond reasoning and we can only reach Him if at all by way of a “leap of faith.” Augustine (354–430 CE) described Plato as the source of a pure and bright philosophy free of error. Eusebius (265–339 CE) described him as the only Greek

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on the porch of Christian truth. Clement of Alexandria (150–215 CE) claimed that Greek philosophy brought the Hellenic mind to Jesus Christ and prepared the way for his perfection. For Plato, the gods are forced to be good because they are subservient to the essential truths of the Forms. That, at least, is my reading of Riel’s (2013) thesis in Plato’s Gods. Alfred North Whitehead (1867–1947), the English mathematician and philosopher, famously said that the European philosophical tradition “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead, 1927–1928/1978: 39). In this sense, he is “responsible” for underwriting otherworldly views of religion and the gods, mathematics, and philosophy in general. This has made the objects of philosophical discourse in general exercises in mental gymnastics with the resources of language and logic. As a consequence, philosophers have emphasized the power of mind and rationality to reveal important features of reality more or less independently of empirical data. This is one reason I have found less and less to value in philosophy as the sciences, and especially the social sciences, have advanced. In this respect, the objective of my life’s work professionally and personally has been to bring philosophical and theological realities back to earth, and back to science.

The rejection of transcendence In our own time, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cracks and openings have appeared in virtually all objectivity communities. The consilience of evidences that this book rests on and that overwhelmingly demonstrates that there are no transcendental or supernatural realms and entities has been built up from within as well as outside of religious institutions. Outsider critics include scholars from across the humanities, arts, and sciences. Some are believers, some non-believers; some are comedians, notably among them George Carlin. Sociology as a discovering science has demonstrated that the gods are human creations, symbols of social life. But not all sociologists view their discipline as a discovering science, nor do they view the sociology of religion as a challenge to faith and belief. Personal beliefs among sociologists can trump sociological knowledge about religion, gods, beliefs, and faith itself. We saw two examples of this in Chapter 3 in the cases of Rodney Stark and Michael Harrington. Their lives and works exhibit conflicts between science and religion, and the tensions between knowledge, belief, and faith. This is the topic I explore in the next chapter.

7 THE END OF GOD AND THE BEGINNING OF INQUIRY

The god question and the science question are intimately intertwined. The god question is simply “Is there a god?” The science question is “What is science and what are the boundaries, if any, of its jurisdiction?” My objective in this book is to show that if we answer the science question correctly, we will be able to answer the god question correctly. If we understand science to be at bottom the human capacity to reason, and to reason not just or even mostly at the individual level but collectively; and if we understand reason to be collectively exercised generationally and with intersubjective testing and transmission of the results of reasoning; and if we understand that reasoning cannot simply be a cognitive exercise, that it must involve experiment and demonstration; then (1) reason is a key to human adaptation and survival; (2) its jurisdiction has no boundaries; and (3) reason is understood to be paired with experiments and demonstrations; reason is a social practice not a purely cognitive exercise. We are free to reason our way through any and all problems of the human condition. This is a general claim that does not apply automatically to institutionalized Science and certainly is not meant to apply to scientism or the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment. The sciences (not Science in the grammar of the ever-present tense; not Science as the once and one and only method of inquiry) are in a contemporary perspective our best guides to the question “Is there a god?” As I pointed out earlier, I reject the claim that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria (Gould, 1997). Amir D. Aczel (2014) has made the non-overlapping magisterial argument (NOMA: Gould, 1997) in this way: Science and religion are two sides of the same deep human impulse to understand the world, to know our place in it, and to marvel at the wonder of life and the infinite cosmos we are surrounded by. Let’s keep them that way, and not let one attempt to usurp the role of the other.

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But like many NOMA defenders, he has no problem bringing science in to support the idea, to offer indirect and direct proofs, that there is a god. This can achieve absurd results. Science should know its place. But if we want to know why everything necessary for the eventual emergence of life and a “wondrous” infinite cosmos (some would describe this as terrifying), let’s turn to a great British mathematician for the answer. Roger Penrose, one of our great contemporary exponents of the fallacy of introspective transparency, has calculated a probability for this “miracle,” the fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants: it is one divided by ten, raised to the power of ten, and raised again to the power of 123. This is one of those mathegrammatical illusions that tell us a lot about the nature and rules of mathematics and the fantasy worlds of mathematicians but nothing about reality and certainly nothing about objects, entities, or realms outside of the physical universe. Let’s look at the fine-tuning argument in more detail. Ryan Stringer (2015) has formalized the fine-tuning argument as follows: (P1) Life as we know it requires that the universe’s physical constants have their actual values instead of some other set of values. (P2) The actual values of the universe’s physical constants are uniquely life-permitting. (From P1) (P3) The uniquely life-permitting values of the universe’s physical constants are due to necessity, chance, or supernatural fine-tuning. (P4) The uniquely life-permitting values of the universe’s physical constants are not due to necessity. [Why not; what is the elimination rule here?] (P5) Given the enormous (perhaps infinite) number of possible values for the universe’s physical constants, it is extremely improbable for these constants to have, by chance, the uniquely life-permitting values instead of some other, non-life-permitting set of values. (P6) The uniquely life-permitting values of the universe’s physical constants are probably [N.B.] not due to chance. (From P5) (P7) The uniquely life-permitting values of the universe’s physical constants are probably [N.B.] due to supernatural fine-tuning. (From P3, P4, & P6) (C) Therefore, it is defeasibly reasonable to attribute the uniquely lifepermitting values of the universe’s physical constants to God. Here we find ourselves trapped once again inside a scientific box that shouldn’t be relevant to the God question (by NOMA). We can carry on in this way and try to show, for example, that there is an internal conflict between (C) and the argument’s premises, as follows: (Q1) The uniquely life-permitting values of the universe’s physical constants are probably due to supernatural fine-tuning. (P7 of the fine-tuning argument)

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(Q2) The supernatural fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants is either due to God, or to some other supernatural being or beings. (Q3) Given the enormous (perhaps infinite) number of supernatural options that could account for the fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants, it is extremely improbable that this fine-tuning is due to God instead of some other supernatural being or beings. (Q4) The fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants is probably not due to God. (From Q3) (Q5) The fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants is probably due to some other, non-God supernatural being or beings. (From Q2 & Q4) (C) Therefore, it is not defeasibly reasonable to attribute the uniquely life-permitting values of the universe’s physical constants to God. (From Q5). In brief, Stringer begins his argument with the last premise of the fine-tuning argument (P7). Then applying the same logical strategy reaches a contradictory conclusion. Thus, the fine-tuning argument’s strategy is just as effective at ruling out God as it is to proving God. The fact is that this is all logical and linguistic gymnastics that can only prove or disprove in a formal domain divorced from empirical realities. We can approach the flaws in the fine-tuning argument less formally. Again, by doing this, we violate the NOMA fallacy. The first point is that given an initial set of physical constants as yet unknown ours may be the only possible universe, thus invalidating the fine-tuning argument. The other possibilities are the “multiverse” conjecture and the “oscillatory universe” conjecture. On the multiverse conjecture, we live in a cosmos composed of many and perhaps infinity of universes. We happen to live in the one (or one of the rare ones) that supports life. On the oscillatory conjecture, the history of the cosmos is a series of big bangs that produce universes with different physical constants and one (or some) of these oscillations produce a universe compatible with the emergence of life. The problem with the fine-tuning argument is the same as the problem with any effort to prove God, and the problem is two-fold. First and foremost is that the prover begins with the concept of God already at hand. Second, in order to prove that God exists the prover must violate the NOMA fallacy. The underlying problem here is that when theists use the word “science” they always mean physical or natural science; they are particularly fond of physics because of its robustness measured by successes that range from predicting the existence of impossible objects like Black Holes to underwriting extraordinary weapons like the atomic and hydrogen bombs. They never call on the social sciences for help because the social sciences play a major role in theorizing God as a human construction. This is especially true for anarchism understood following Kropotkin as one of the sociological sciences. Enter our smart ten year old. If an all-powerful God fine-tuned the universe for life, he/she asks, why didn’t He tune it up a notch or two more and fine-tune it for life without pain and suffering? As with the case of the problem of evil,

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our ten-year old is not as susceptible to sophisticated sophistry as brilliant philosophers and theologians and will not be easily moved from his/her skepticism. Before we consider the problem of evil let’s look at a theory that undercuts the fine-tuning argument. The alternative to fine-tuning is bootstrap physics. In the 1960s, the physicist Geoffrey Chew introduced the concept of bootstrap physics. It lost favor in the following decades but has made a comeback in recent decades. According to this theory the universe is the way it is because it couldn’t be any other way. In other words if our choices are necessity, chance, or supernatural explanations for fine tuning the right choice is necessity. The laws of nature dictate one another based on their mutual consistency. The universe is the way it is because it has to be consistent with itself. Look back at (P3): “The uniquely life-permitting values of the universe’s physical constants”: these values are dictated by the principle of the self-consistency of the laws of nature (Chew, 1966; Poland and SimmonsDuffin, 2016). Let’s return to the problem of evil. The problem of evil offers non-believers perhaps their easiest pathway to disproving God. The approach is to rely on proof by logical inconsistency; that is, there is a logical inconsistency between the existence of an all-powerful all-loving God and the existence of evil in the world. Defenders of God in the light of the problem of evil have many strategies at their disposal. Skeptical theism claims that God engages in a balancing act allowing one evil in order to prevent a greater evil or promote a greater good. Another argument is that the omnipotence of God cannot be used to override free will. Then there is the “mysterious ways” argument that we are not privy to some ultimate plan God has in mind that requires evil. I made up an argument as a smart ten year old that God was above and beyond our concept of evil; He was “beyond good and evil.” That is, evil was a feature of the human landscape that was outside the ken of God. God sees only “acts” and “thoughts” and doesn’t judge them as good and evil. If God does judge, my ten-year old self-imagined, he judges humans by their own standards. The “natural evils” gambit is that we suffer natural evils because of the “fall of man,” the existence of natural laws, as punishment for the moral transgressions of humans, or the actions of evil supernatural beings such as the Devil or various sorts of demons. There is no end to the gymnastic machinations of logic that can be entertained in this discussion. Animals don’t have free will, why should they suffer? The answer is that they have natural freedoms that exposes them to various dangers. And if God could create a Heaven free of evil, He could just as easily have created an earth free of evil. Well, maybe not, given the “mysterious ways” concept. What about simply denying divine omnipotence? This is the argument in process theodicy. Irenaean theodicy (named for the second-century Greek theologian Irenaeus) claims that pain and suffering are necessary for spiritual growth. Cruciform theodicy is reflected in the words of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he was about to be executed by the Nazis: “Only a suffering God

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can help” (Scott, 2015: 146). The reference to Jesus here is transparent. We also sometimes encounter the argument that a God who cannot suffer cannot love, and the argument from “redemptive suffering.” Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), an Italian Dominican friar widely influential in the history of philosophy and theology, advocated a natural theology. His solution to the problem of evil was to weigh an ever-lasting after-life against a brief life on earth during which our moral actions, pain, and suffering can allow God to judge us and assign us to heaven or hell (After-life theodicy). As if this twisting and turning wasn’t enough to strangle efforts to explain evil, the pretzel gets twisted even more tightly by simply denying that evil exists (e.g., Clement of Alexandria “privation theory of evil,” and the Christian Science claim that evil is an illusion). The defensive response to the problem of evil is this: assume evil exists; this assumes a moral ground, which gives us cause to identify evil; that moral ground implies that God exists. David Hume argued that we can infer evil from suffering itself rather than from a person’s actions; so no moral ground is implied and there is no basis for assuming the existence of God (Russell, 2016: 625–32). In the pandeism argument, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God creates the universe and in the process becomes the universe and loses his powers to intervene in human affairs. And finally, the evil God challenge takes on the conjecture that symmetrical consequences follow on whether God is good or evil. It is an open question whether God is, is good, is evil, or does not exist. In Indian theology, the problem of evil is solved by karma-transmigration theory (Herman, 1993). Our souls wander through various cycles and we pay in current lives for transgressions in past lives. Indian religions tend to emphasize the karma principle of first cause and innate justice. The human being is the focus and there is less concern with the divinity and powers of God than in Western theology. Let’s recall as a conclusion to this section Sobel’s earlier remarks: 1. The evidence of suffering and evil rather obviously tells against traditional theisms and, Hume says, decisively so in the absence of “tolerable reasons a priori for them” … (Sobel, 2004: 407). 2. “Shall we because of the problem of evil in its myriad devolutions give up on the God of the philosophers and classical theologians, that omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent being, that perfect being? I think so” (Sobel, 2004: 479). 3. Perfect being theologies are the most vulnerable – and devastatingly so – to the problem of evil. It is worth repeating again that the God that is the subject and object of proofs is a logical, semantic, linguistic thing and not any sort of being who exists in some way or other in or outside our universe. Truths or facts of the matter come with different degrees of closure. I pointed out earlier that the sequence of closures concerning gravity kept the path open for Einstein to surpass Galileo and Newton, and for geometrodynamics to carry

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us beyond Einstein. At this point we cannot claim that we have a closed system theory of gravity; it is still an open system in evolution. The belief that the earth is flat and floating in an ocean was widespread in the ancient world among the peoples of pre-classical Greece, the Bronze, and Iron Ages in the Near East, and India until the Gupta period (mid-to-late 3rd century CE to 543 CE). This belief is found in early Egypt (Pyramid and Coffin Texts) and Mesopotamia, Homer’s poetry, and among the Israelites for example. This truth was already at odds with spherical earth conjectures by the fifth century BCE. Today, the truth that the earth is an oblate spheroid wobbling in precession is essentially a closed system truth, as close to an absolute fact of the matter as we can get. We can imagine a new concept of the earth in a new theory of space, time, gravitation, and matter. But we cannot imagine going back to a flat earth idea. The truth of Santa Claus is believed by many children in the US, Europe, and elsewhere because adults lie to them not because there really is a Santa Claus. This belief cannot be sustained beyond the age of seven or eight. Belief in God is as much a function of being lied to as belief in Santa Claus. The difference is that that belief can be sustained into adulthood or even for a lifetime due to the way various reinforcing institutions function. But as in the case of Santa Claus, there are many resources available to adults that allow an increasing number, especially since the 1800s, to come to see the belief as untrue. For them, as for me, the non-existence of God is a closed system truth with as much evidentiary support as the spherical earth truth. To put it crudely and sociologically unfairly, it’s time to give up this childish belief. But not so fast! There are reasons to tread carefully here. We have seen that religion is bound up with the social/moral order as the glue of social solidarity, belongingness, compassion, and cooperation. It is not possible to erase the institutional functions that religion has traditionally performed. The problem is not religion per se but its association with transcendental and supernatural entities, realms, and beings. What is required is the institutionalization of a moral order that reflects the trend(s) in the secularization movement. The old religions with their heavens and hells, gods and angels, cycles of reincarnation, and so on will not do; they are out of synch with emerging cultural, scientific, and world orders. The mistake many make is to view secularization as inimical to religion when in fact it is a manifestation of the same underlying human need for a moral order. Secularism can become the glue of social solidarity that functions across a wide swath of humanity and is consistent with the knowledge we possess about how the planet works. Let’s do a little review and then see how secularism might seed a future “religion.”

First steps toward a secular moral order It is transparently clear that you do not have to believe in God to live a moral life. On the other hand, believing in God is no guarantee that you will live by a moral code I recognize as based on good values and right living. Morals do not come

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from God but from our families and communities whether we are right living teachers or members of the Mafia. Religion and the gods have been safeguarded in an iron cage guarded by tradition, tolerance, and authority. We have all, as individuals, civic communities, and state apparatuses been encouraged, indeed coerced, to tolerate religious differences and the very idea of religion. It is not only these social forces of tolerance we must deal with; we are also put at the mercy of logical and philosophical arguments. Easily the most pernicious claim historically is that we cannot prove or disprove God. This fallacy is reinforced by taking religion and the gods into a realm that it is assumed cannot be touched by science. The concept of non-overlapping magesteria completely segregates science and religion leaving defenders, advocates, and exponents of religion free to pursue their faiths and beliefs free of critical scrutiny using the methods of science. The basic flaw in this idea is that science is understood in a way that excludes the social sciences. As soon, however, as we allow the social sciences to enter the marketplace or arena of the sciences, this idea and all other efforts at segregation evaporate. The social sciences – and sociology and anthropology in particular – make religion and God subjects and objects of scientific inquiry. Notice the dangerous idea still held in a sort of medieval abeyance by many members of the “real” (read “physical” or “natural”) sciences that the social sciences are not really sciences. This idea no longer has legs to stand on in the twenty-first century though this doesn’t mean the struggle to include the social sciences among the sciences is over. One indication of the growing acceptance of sociology as a science is the awarding of the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman award on April 27, 2005 to sociologist Dalton Conley. The award is given to outstanding young scientists and engineers and Conley was the first and still the only sociologist to receive this award. I stand unequivocally with the anarchist Bakunin (1814–1876) as “a fanatical lover of liberty.” But I am worried that the defense of freedom of religion, religious liberty, and religious traditions is a license to subscribe and succumb to delusions and grand mistakes in reference. Religion is a social institution, God is a social fact. Transcendental and supernatural thinking comes to a striking halt in the works of Marx, Durkheim, Nietzsche, and Kropotkin. This is somewhat exaggerated since we can find religious sentiments and beliefs in these thinkers, but they certainly slowed the religion express. These are the names that resonate for me, iconic projections of my readings and not a claim that I am representing them faithfully. And moreover, my understanding has been rewritten and revised recursively as my experience and readings have expanded through time. One conclusion has become more and more concrete, that there is no God, no gods, no spirits and no realms where they could reside and rule invisibly. This is the great discovery – hinted at and intuited for millennia by the most insightful and fearless men and women. They have stood strong in the face of the void, not flinched in the face of infinity. In order to discover humanity’s mistake in reference they had to become alienated from themselves and their communities. Only then could they help to make the discovery that dwarfs all other discoveries except the discovery of how

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to discover, and how to invent. And that is why the wisest ones find life worthless and are often counted among those who choose to die at the right time. There is a high cost to extracting yourself from your social humanity but it seems to be the only way out of the dark. Without an alternative social grounding, sickness and suicide are all too likely. That is why on the larger landscape I am working in it is important to fill in the gap left when we eliminate god from our lives. Why did the Western God die in the nineteenth century? First of all, gods die. I referred earlier to Mencken’s list of dead “immortal” gods. Gods die because the societies they symbolize die; and they change as those societies change. European society in the nineteenth century had been experiencing major changes since the 1600s; the scientific revolution, great social revolutions, most recently the American and French Revolutions, the republican revolutions of 1848, and the emerging industrial revolution. And amidst all of this political and economic turmoil we witnessed the revolutionary discoveries in the history and archeology of religion, notably by researchers in the German universities. The societies of the Mediterranean God could no longer recognize themselves in His image and His powers. This great discovery began to consolidate in the loss of faith among the nineteenth-century intelligentsia as one historical or archaeological find after another piled up into an imposing ensemble of probabilities or consilience of evidence that buried faith and belief – or began to. Secularization was just one sign that the old God was dying or dead. Gods die but they do not go quietly or quickly. Enlightened thinkers might have thought that this era of revolutions and historical and archeological revelations would be enough to correct history’s greatest mistake in reference once and for all. But God has lived on, transformed, perhaps hobbled, but still a force to contend with. It is important to understand why God isn’t dead and why it’s so hard to kill him. But it is important to understand also that while He is not dead, He has lost a great deal of his power, especially in the Old World. It’s important to understand and appreciate the phenomenological or experiential reality of people’s experiences with religion and God and the positive value of these experiences. But one of the trends we see accompanying secularization is the development of spiritual movements. People give up allegiances to institutionalized religion when their families, communities, and churches fragment. They sustain their faiths and needs for social solidarity through individual spiritual exercises. This reflects a society in which social solidarity has fragmented, the myth of individualism nourished by the ideology of capitalism has flourished, and alienation has come to define the human condition. It is a “warring states” period waiting for the society to reconsolidate around a new collectively relevant moral order. We have achieved something like that with civil religion and the religion of sport but this gives us a fragile and dangerous surrogate god, the state and republican monarchs known as presidents and premiers, and entertainers, sports figures, and artists as moral icons (oh! the irony). This system has not shown itself capable of sustaining the kind of community solidarity that nourishes belongingness, compassion, and cooperation. The various World Order plans, movements, and rhetorics are a

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sign of the form the next godless state of society may take. What are the consequences for the view of history as the divine unfolding of God’s plan and God’s voice if we adopt a view of history as a human narrative and moreover as a social and cultural narrative? What is the significance of death of God narratives in theology and philosophy for our understanding of history and time? Physical and natural scientists have had a great deal to say about such issues in dialogue with theologians and believers. I pointed out earlier that the basic premise of the Charter for Compassion is flawed. It assumes correctly that compassion is a defining universal feature of religion. But it fails to recognize that compassion is a centripetal force and as much or more a barrier to cross-cultural communication as a facilitator. The problem with the skeptics is that they lack the “religious sentiment” we saw in Durkheim and Marx that allowed them to critically theorize religion without diminishing it or believers. Beliefs and faith in transcendental and supernatural things obstruct our collective capacity to address real world problems. They are also major moments in energizing the centripetal force of compassion. Bringing belief and faith down to earth will strengthen the centrifugal force of compassion and help to realize the Charter for Compassion and similar ecumenical and world order movements.

The emperor’s new clothes Students often asked me, “If sociologists have discovered God, why isn’t this more widely known and taught?” My colleagues themselves are very tentative, ambivalent, and uncertain about this issue. One of them said to me, “I agree with you that we have discovered God, but I don’t think you should be revealing that sociological truth in your lectures or writings.” Even those who agree with me are suspicious of my use of the term proof because they think the phenomenon is too complex to be captured in a proof, sociological or otherwise. Some of them write textbooks that demonstrate this discovery, but in the interest of a kind of misguided tolerance often start or end with the ill-fitting caveat that their findings should not disrupt your beliefs. Science – systematic inquiry – is nothing if not a continuing process of upsetting and resetting our beliefs, replacing beliefs with warranted knowledge, and most importantly correcting mistakes in reference. At some point, those of us who are in a position to communicate mundane and revolutionary findings to our students and the public need to reveal the nature and substance of our convictions. We are cautioned and sometimes constrained by our more conventional colleagues to do this without any intention of imposing our views on others, or with the goal of forcing others to take up our intellectual causes. Without potential for imposition, there can be no science, no education, no knowledge. We have an obligation as scholars and intellectuals to let people know what we are up to and to support the solidarity efforts of our existing and emerging thought collectives. Science and education are dangerous enterprises because they propagate new ideas that may eventually take hold in the future. There is no neutral position here. The very ideas and

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practices of science and education entail a politics of knowledge, a preference for a certain form of life. We are the children who will speak up when we see that the emperor has no clothes, even while all the adults claim that he does so as not to appear foolish or what amounts to the same thing out of step with their neighbors. The reality is that science and education are impositions! What good would they be if they weren’t? I read an essay recently in which the author complained that science was ruining everything by giving an explanation for why people see ghosts. But without the disenchantments of science we will be subject to delusions and illusions that I argue will contaminate our adaptive potentials. We will have to learn to live with science as enchantment.

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Look around at those adults who can’t bring themselves to say out loud what they see, that the emperor has no clothes. They are eight years old in child years and it is time for them to put away childish things. First, we all need to belong, to experience social solidarity, to feel together. We need these things to optimize our humanity. However, it MATTERS how those needs are satisfied. Second, believing in things that don’t exist, when sustained over long periods of time institutionally and culturally, can lead to a form of institutional or collective insanity. At this juncture of history, culture, and global ecological geopolitics, our survival as a species depends on eliminating delusionary takes on how the world works. Truth, of course, is a social construction and a creation of truth communities. There are good reasons why diverse contemporary truths and truth communities that are at odds with each other will continue to stand tall and firm. In the end game, however, the choice will go like this; those who stand with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton against Ptolemy, who stand with Darwin against the creationists, who stand with the germ theorists against those who believe in demon possession – those people, those communities, who stand with Durkheim, Marx, Nietzsche, and Emma Goldman, and with Einstein, Salk, and Rosalind Franklin – will have the best chance to solve the developing problems of survival we face as a species. The United States perhaps more the any other modern nation needs scientific literacy more than ever before to erase fake news hawkers and eliminate the possibility of electing politicians who are fools. We need new laws or perhaps Constitutional amendments to prevent executive orders that King presidential checkers in the King Me row. We need a way to move House bills to the Senate floor without arbitrary gate keepers. The last chapter of God will be written in the language of science; and the hopes of humanity in the face of multiple existential threats are in the hands of the scientists. But not only of the

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scientists. Their efforts will be to no avail without an educated citizenry, and we in America have not yet learned how to educate a citizenry. This is not as straightforward as it may sound. There is no Science, there are only sciences. Appendix H in Chapter 10 argues for a coalition of thought leaders in science, religion, spirituality, and the broader intelligentsia to address the existential threats we face. This will be antithetical to my call for an end to God and a sea change in religion but it will be a more realistic policy for the immediate future. For the moment, let’s consider the complexities of science. Science is widely assumed to be a successful and valuable enterprise. But critics who recognize the need to challenge current institutions and societies should also recognize that modern science as a social institution is a social problem. It is a machinelike product of industrial and technological society, and indeed the mental framework and cognitive mode of industrial capitalism (Berman 1984: 37; Geller 1964: 72). There is in C. Wright Mills (1963: 234) conception of the transformation of science into a Science Machine by “military metaphysicians” echoes of Marx’s (1844/1956:110–111; 1973: 699ff.) notion of modern science as alienated and of Veblen’s (1919: 1–55) critique of modern science as a machinelike product of our “matter of fact” industrial and technological era. The consequences of institutionalizing science have certainly not all been benign, and the negative consequences should not be brushed off as “mere side effects.” Foucault’s lectures and interviews provide a subtle perspective on the relations of power and truth, and point to a major source of a continuing ambivalence toward science. What makes power hold good, what makes it acceptable, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. (Foucault, 1984: 61)

Science and progressive thought Critical thinking mated with ambivalence about science is characteristic of progressive traditions. This ambivalence reflects a fundamental bankruptcy in modern science as a social institution. I frame this inquiry in a context of structural and intellectual crises brought about by transformations in the relations of global capital, generally identified as “postmodern” (cf. Jameson, 1991). Each of the progressive traditions has complex and contradictory relations to each other and to these transformations. It is important to recognize the regressive tendencies of Science as institutionalized inquiry and Science as an authoritarian icon. In order to avoid confusion, I will spell “science” with a small “s” throughout this discussion except where it is perfectly clear that I am referring to Science. I am writing with a sense of the distinction between “Science” (modern, institutionalized), “science” as the systematization of the basic form of human reason, and “sciences” as a reference to the pluralism of scientific practices.

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It makes no more sense for progressives to support what is essentially state-science than it would be for them to support state-church, state-justice, or any of the other core institutions of modern industrial societies. In fact, Science, Reason, Logic, Truth, and Objectivity, along with Responsibility, Guilt, Shame, Obligation, Duty, Morality, and God are all tyrannical ideas that have been used singly and collectively to intimidate and restrict humans, and to attack the foundations for liberating human and cultural development. The use of capital letters signifies the iconic or symbolic use of Science and related concepts as powerful “abstractions” that suppress dissent and constrain discourse. I recognize the complexity and multiplicity of scientific practices, but at the same time we can all to different degrees see and experience the hegemonic power of Science as system, institution, and icon. This re-radicalizes the proposition that “Science is Culture” in social studies of science by grounding it in an older tradition in radical science studies (e.g., the journal Science as Culture, the re-birth of Radical Science Journal) which gave us the slogans “science as culture” and “science is social relations”. My intention is to raise a polemic against capitalized Science (in all possible senses of the term). How do we diffuse the trap question: What are the alternatives to Science for critical thinkers? Modern science (including the scientific role and images, symbols, and organizations of science) came into the world as a commodity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it has developed in close association with the discipline of the machine. One of the widely ignored consequences of looking to impersonal machinelike truths and measures (relying on proof-, logic-, language-, and number-machines as validating mechanisms) to guarantee knowledge has been to transform inquirers and thinkers into machines behaving in a supposedly value-free, value-neutral wonderland. The tyranny of Science means in part that while it is possible and easy to criticize and oppose “distorted” versions of science (science corrupted by capital, politics, and sexism), it is impossible and futile to criticize or oppose “true,” “pure,” or “unadulterated” science. Claims about “the scientific method” and “pure science” are convenient myths, ideologies, and rhetorical constructs (a tyranny of methodolatry, in Mary Daly’s terms: 1985:11). They justify objectification and alienation, and mask the constructed nature of the necessary statements scientists formulate as “laws of nature.” The tyranny of Method makes it an obstruction to inquiry. No one has made this clearer than Paul Feyerabend (1978). His slogan, “Anything Goes” is the conclusion of a thorough search across the history of science for the scientific method, a fruitless search in the end. The phrase “anything goes” is meant as a rhetorical challenge to the cult of method and not as a signal of naïve relativism. The insight of the idea is revealed in the discoveries in science studies beginning in the late 1960s that empirically uncovered the pluralism in science across the disciplines (thus, sciences not science, scientific practices not scientific practice). Similarly, Foucault’s (1972) search for a final cause of the emergence of “man” was thwarted by the multiplicity of medical and social practices, interests, and

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authorities framing discourse. This leads more or less directly to a consideration of the role of philosophers’ search for the rules of practice in science. Scientists do not seem to have much use for philosophy as an aid in their studies. The physicist Paul Dirac pointed out that philosophy is not designed to discover things; it’s just a way to talk about discoveries already uncovered by scientists. The search for “the” scientific method or “the” logic of science in philosophy has proved to be futile. The problem with philosophers of science is that they have tried to identify the method and logic of science from their armchairs rather than by investigating science in practice. One of the most influential figures in this effort was Karl Popper (1959) whose argument that science is demarcated from non- or pseudo-science by the principle of falsification reigned unchallenged for decades. It is still widely assumed to be the sine qua non of science in scientific, intellectual, and public arenas. Popper proposed that for a theory to be considered scientific it must be able in principle to be tested and proven false. For example, the hypothesis that “all swans are white,” can be falsified by observing a black swan. But like so many efforts in the philosophy of science empirical studies of scientific practice have demonstrated that such a principle cannot and does not work in the real work of science. The physicist Mano Singham (2020) has recently helped to bring this finding from science studies to the attention of readers of Scientific American. Given how science is practiced rather than how it is characterized in myth and ideology, Feyerabend argues that we cannot assume a universal reason, nor can we assume that unreason will always be excluded in our discourses. This is the grounds for “Anything Goes.” The idea of an unadulterated science (as institution or method) is certainly not yet dead. It has become increasingly vulnerable thanks to almost a century of research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and almost half a century of research in the interdisciplinary field of social studies of science. What is not yet clearly and unequivocally resolved is: What does it mean to criticize science, and what can it possibly mean to prophesy a new science? Marx and Foucault challenged intellectuals to work toward changing rather than exclusively studying the world. And the questions plaguing progressive traditions in the era of postindustrial societies and postmodern theories are about what knowledge about the world is needed and what the bases for that knowledge must be to effect the desired changes. These are a central feature of the history of progressive thought. Marxists, anarchists, socialists, feminists, post-colonialist theorists and other progressive thinkers over the past 200 years or so have struggled with these questions in one way or another. On the one hand, progressives tend to recognize that science is social relations and that it is a problematic activity in modern societies; and on the other hand they feel that they need to be “scientific” or follow scientific agendas to retain some level of legitimacy in the arenas of public (and especially intellectual) discourse, not to mention in their own eyes. The concept of science as social relations leads to a recognition that science in modern societies is in the service of capital, patriarchy, and authority. It is

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important that we not let this complexity veil the extent to which modern science is implicated in the social and environmental problems of our times, including alienation, dehumanization, ecological degradation, and nuclear, chemical, and biological hazards and warfare. It has played a role in increasing anomie, alienation, environmental disasters, the commodification of individuals and social relationships, and the spread of authoritarianism. In its current institutionalized form, scientific inquiry requires the control and co-optation of intellectual labor at several levels, and is inextricably linked to the agendas of the state and capital. In recent years, scientific work has itself become the object of degradation as industrial forces have moved to complete the rationalization of the knowledge production process. This is part of the general process of reducing mental labor that is an inevitable strategy of late capitalism. The process was well underway in the university research centers I and some of my colleagues studied in the 1970s (Croissant and Restivo, 2001). Research centers brought industrial, governmental (including military), and academic interests into direct contact, and served as crucibles within which to begin the industrialization of universities, including laboratories, classrooms, and graduate programs, in earnest. Let us be clear that what was new about this was its intensity and scale of application. Information is rapidly becoming the new “industrial base” for the first tier industrial-technological nations. As a result, we can expect to see the further degradation of science as an institution, and yet with further invocations of Science as a justification for repressive policies and authoritarian tendencies in the social relations of multinational capital and states. I don’t begin by referring to some golden era of science for judging the relative degradation of scientific institutions. The question is what progressives might make of such transformations. For example, what does “Science,” or “Technoscience,” have to do with the rapid commodification of biotechnology and the erosion of peer review, public accountability, and regulation as concerns about property rights and international competitiveness in this field arise. And how does God shadow these developments?

Marxism: Bourgeois versus human science Karl Marx (1956: 110–11; 1973: 699ff.) introduced the potential for Marxist ambivalence about science by distinguishing between bourgeois science and human science. He did not spend much time clarifying this distinction. But a couple of points are clear. First, he recognized perhaps more clearly than any other thinker of his age that science was social relations. More importantly, he understood that scientists themselves were social relations. He thus also understood that modern science (as a social institution) was a product of and an ingredient of modern capitalist society. If there is any question about this, it is dispelled by Marx’s introduction of the concept “human science.” The new social order Marx blurrily envisaged would give rise to a new form of science; science-as-it-is would be negated, and a new science-dealienated, integrated (but not Unified), wholistic, and global– would emerge.

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Following Marx, it is relatively easy to conclude today that modern science is part of the hegemonic ideology of modern capitalism, and an integral part of the relations of production. For example, there is a formal similarity between the calculus and the forms of representation in capitalist production (Dickson, 1974). In the seventeenth century, commodity transactions could be easily calculated using algebra. Later, the calculus helped to establish a quantitative relationship between process and product, fully articulating and controlling the links between labor and commodity. The radical science movement of the 1960s and 1970s established Science and Technology as systems out of democratic control, controlled by industrial and military moguls, and threatening not only to whatever shards of democracy exist but to the very existence of life on this planet. It is also increasingly clear that it is misleading at best to continue to separate science and technology. This separation has as one of its consequences the allocation of blame for many of our social and environmental ills to technology (and engineers) while science is held aloft as an exemplar of Platonic purity. Perhaps this purity might be better understood as an indicator of alienation. Marxist critiques of the effects of contemporary science and technology (or “technoscience”) grow primarily out of studies of the workplace and the relations of production, and of the ideology of science as a justification for capitalist enterprises. Critical analyses of the historical roots of the factory, the rise of Taylorism and scientific management, the introduction of new technologies in new industries in the context of manipulations of the world labor market, unemployment, and the degradation of work all take us to and beyond the threshold of tyrannical Science. The technosciences (including the social sciences) generally serve capital. They have provided rhetorical ammunition for justifying social programming and policies and militarism. Technoscientific expertise has been used as “cultural capital” to justify imperialism and the patronization of weaker nations by stronger ones. And yet none of this has been able once and for all to exorcise the specter of science the Good from Marxist scholarship. The Marxists (here including Marx, with due respect for his objections) over and over drew attention to the facts that those who control the means of material production control the means of mental production, that new theories and technologies are grounded in social conditions, that the commodity form penetrates all areas of society, that the imperialist expansions and conquests of Capital require the development of the technosciences, and that – finally – the technosciences and capital are inextricably linked. And yet, in this same tradition, we find a tendency to exempt science and technology from the basic principles and perspectives of Marxism, to conceive of the content of technoscience discoveries as independent of social relations, and to identify bourgeois philosophies as ideological but not the empirical sciences. The bottom line seems to be, then, that the empirical sciences, based on observation and experiment, are not ideologically mediated.

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The sources of these contradictory and ambivalent views should be obvious. The material successes of the natural sciences and the recalcitrance of the material world demand of Marxists as realistic (and perhaps in some cases, Realist) thinkers that they accept the findings of science and the methods of science that led to those findings. The dynamics of power and knowledge are simultaneous processes of coercive relations and the making of useful “goods.” What many Marxists have missed is the fact that these findings and methods are inseparable from a variety of social relations. The associations of Science that make it problematic for Marxists include a domineering orientation to nature and humans, and the alienation of humans from each other and from the natural world as objects of study, sexist social relations, and gendered knowledge. Within this set of problematic social relations, science is especially troublesome for feminists because it embodies the contradictory impulses of liberal traditions within the debates on realism, knowledge, patriarchy, the male gaze, and postmodernism.

Criticizing science without losing your mind or voice While Mary Wollstonecraft relied on evidence and the emerging discourses of rationality and science in her arguments for the equality of women, her daughter Mary Shelley created Frankenstein, the paradigmatic tale of male appropriation of reproduction and creativity and the terror of masculinized inquiry. The most radical feminist agendas reject science as method and institution and as patriarchal discourse. Science requires that we objectify nature in the natural sciences and persons in the social sciences. For ecofeminists, scientific inquiry is the rape of nature and has produced not “knowledge” but rampant degradation of environments and peoples. The symbolic imagery of “penetrating arguments,” “seminal theories,” and “unveiling nature” is described and decried by various feminist authors. Because women and nature are associated historically, the domination of nature demanded by science mirrors, justifies, and reinforces the domination of women. Feminists have helped to reveal the extent to which the scientific method is by its very nature in the service of Capital, Authority, and Patriarchy. Scientific technologies under the influence of masculinist ideologies entail the exploitation of the natural world, women, and minorities (Merchant, 1980; Harding, 2011; on the masculinity of logic, see Nye, 1990, and Restivo, 2017: 283–310). Science becomes a question mark for feminists because there is sexism in science as in other social worlds, and because whatever progress has fallen out from developments in technoscience has not fallen equally across the lives of men and women. The conclusion that a sexist/gendered society will produce a sexist/ gendered science is not adhered to by all feminists, but it is a sensible conclusion from the sociological principles of Marxist thought. Still, the conclusion is not transparent. To make it transparent, we need to clarify some points about the phrase, science, and society.

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Society can be looked at as a set of more or less well-defined institutional sectors. The more well-defined the boundaries of a given sector, the more sense it makes to conceive of it as “autonomous.” But autonomy does not entail “separation.” It simply identifies the degree to which a given sector of the society is dependent on or independent of the resources of other sectors, and the extent to which it interacts with other sectors through communication, transportation, and exchange linkages. Thus, even the most autonomous of institutions is in and of the society it is part of, and conditioned by that society. Its members are initially socialized in families, schools, and religious organizations; this prepares and allows them to be socialized later in life in the technoscience professions. The social structures and value systems of those professions thus reproduce to different degrees the social structure and value system dominant in the wider society. The social institution of science is thus an arena like any other institution in which power relations between social groups and conflicts in relation to value systems are reflected and acted out. It is clear that science and the roots of liberalism were effective legitimating and liberating ideals, relative to the strictures and structures of feudal Christendom and to the confines of women’s lives. Scientific knowledge has served as an ally for feminist agendas. In the writing and lives of thinkers from J. S. Mill and Harriet Martineau to Mary Wollstonecraft, and later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots of women’s liberatory activities in the West relied on notions of rationality and the emerging rhetoric of science and proof to argue for the equality and emancipation of women. Donna Haraway (1989) has documented the efforts of sociobiologists to argue from primatology that a woman’s “place” and the nuclear family are “natural” and “inevitable,” and that their support and continuity are in the best interest of the human species. Norms of sexuality that justify violence, rape, and male “promiscuity,” and myths of female passivity are reified in sociobiological agendas. Flawed studies of the heritability of intelligence and personality are called on to find (and justify) novel treatments for the “ills” of drugs and poverty in modern society, and to explain away the underrepresentation of women in science, mathematics, and engineering. Much of the science of “woman” fails to adequately foster the emancipation of women, whether in the now discredited phrenological enterprises of the nineteenth century, or in present theories of sexual difference. And this is despite numerous attempts to develop feminist biologies and explicit challenges to the existing frameworks of science. Recent expressions of concern about gender and science come from “liberal” traditions concerned with equity and employment. The quality and availability of work for women in the technosciences has long been questioned. Women have not had access to the professions in the same way men have; and when they have gained access, the tendency has been to marginalize them. Ethnic groups face similar problems. Many of those concerned with these issues assume that scientific practice is “objective” and that it is matters of equity and civil rights that need to be addressed. The idea is that “science” would “work” and

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produce objective knowledge and unambiguous progress without alienating and damaging women’s lives if society were working properly. As forms of feminist empiricism, these agendas leave untouched the core ideas of science as pure and disinterested. Further, these perspectives beg questions of whether or not, and if so, why, women and feminists might be interested in or capable of doing or organizing science any differently. The ambivalence about science is a variation on the theme (and tension) of a feminist separatist politics where we find the general problem of voice. Feminist activists have worked assiduously to give women a voice. The problem is that the language of science which is most likely to give them a voice may be inherently oppressive and exploitative, a danger to women and to democratic and socialist principles. However, few feminist critics of science support Audre Lorde’s claims about the limited value of the master’s tools for dismantling the master’s house. The idols of science and technology have underwritten STEM programs that promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educational initiatives for young people, notably women and minorities. The assumption is that these disciplines are keys to the future of the United States and the world. From a critical perspective, the problem with STEM is the assumption of a science and technology “fix.” That is, the assumption is that science and technology offer general solutions to all, or at least most, of our problems, including by implication our social and cultural problems. A more realistic approach would combine STEM with social science and humanities approaches. We already have, in fact, STEAM programs: “STEAM” represents STEM plus the arts – humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design, and new media. I propose adding social science to this mix. The reactions against postpositivist critiques of science are similar to other feminist reactions to postmodernist agendas. Radical critiques of knowledge leave an inquirer and activist at a loss in the face of the apparent necessity for real knowledge regarding causes, effects, and facts to be wielded in the name of emancipation. Demands for realistic assessments of science’s instrumental effectiveness and for certain knowledge (and Truth) are indicative of the hegemonic power that Science as icon has as a legitimating idea. Postpositivist critiques of science, whether in sociology or philosophy of science and knowledge, across feminist, Marxist, and other progressive traditions, are tenuous in the face of unbridled enthusiasm for technoscience’s instrumental effects. These effects are not unequivocal successes. Numerous critics echo Haraway’s rejection of “epistemological anarchism”. But anarchism, whether of the most limited epistemological varieties or the most radical social imaginings, does not necessarily justify anti-realism or anti-naturalism. Properly understood and applied as a sociological science anarchism can in fact contribute to building a shared politics by, for, and with women and minorities. The possibilities of partial knowledge coming from situated knowers and standpoint epistemologies illustrate an emerging sophistication about the social roots of knowledge. The realist/relativist dilemmas are not merely intellectual

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conundrums, but are central to the debates about the possibility of social change and the grounds for action. They manifest the contradictory impulses of individualistic liberalism and the promises of the Enlightenment, and the problems of identity for feminists destabilized by the postmodern deconstruction of the natural category of woman. These contradictions have been reinforced by the fracture of feminist movements along racial, class, and international lines. To date, except perhaps in healing and medicine, the need for legitimate discourse has generally outweighed hesitations about the foundations of science. The question remains about what the grounds for reliable knowledge are. Certainly, establishing such grounds requires refining the distinctions between the institutionalized inquiry we call Science, and other processes for devising reliable, sustainable knowledge about ourselves and our worlds. It is not so much a problem that the works of Foucault, Derrida, and other postmodern scholars have left those desiring social change without an “absolute” ground for action. It has, instead, become a matter of considering what grounds are available, and under what conditions. The historical contingency of our grounds can be admitted without eliminating them. The multiple visions of internationalized progressive, feminist consciousnesses arising from the paradoxes of occupying multiple, and contradictory, social roles invites heterogeneous knowledge. These multiplicities, however, have not moved far from their roots in the social and health sciences. Such an agenda and approach toward knowledge requires a radical re-visioning and perhaps also a reengagement of all the human senses in the social relations of inquiry, knowledge, and authority.

Once more, anarchism: Social chaos or social theory? Review, summary, and new horizons Modern anarchist thought emerged in a nineteenth-century milieu in which the sociological perspective was crystallizing, and was itself considered one of the sociological sciences by Peter Kropotkin (1908). But the anarchists had trouble, along with other progressives, making and sustaining the distinctions between science as a social institution, science as a set of statements about regularities in the world, and science as a symbol for the best form(s) of inquiry. Kropotkin recognized that the state and capitalism are inseparable, and that state-justice, state-church, and state-army are inextricably linked in a network of insurance for the landlords, warriors, judges, and priests of modern society. But he was unable to see that state-science could be added to the list of capitalist institutions and that the social roles of scientists and scholars could be added to his list of exploiters and oppressors. Already in Kropotkin’s time, the hegemonic ideology of pure science had contaminated anarchist thought as it had contaminated all of the emerging social sciences (including, of course, Marxism; and see Bakunin, 1916/1970: 62ff.). Kropotkin’s (1902/1955) defense of mutual aid and individual liberty (but not individualism) was grounded in a commitment to the scientific method.

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By scientific method, he meant the inductive method of the natural sciences. The goal of anarchism, as a sociological science, was to use this method to reveal the future of humanity in its progress toward “liberty, fraternity, and equality.” Kropotkin’s ambivalence about science is reflected in the fact that while on the one hand he was a founder of scientific (and even scientistic) anarchism, he was also aware of some of the problems with using the natural scientists as role models for anarchists. Most of the scientists of his time, he argued, were either members of the possessing classes and shared their prejudices, or they were actually employed by the state. He did not, however, seem capable of imagining that science and the state were or would become so inextricably intertwined that any convergence between anarchism and “modern” science would in the end prove impossible. The increase in scale of organizations is a consequence and cause of the organizational search for control, discipline, and standardization. Bureaucratization rationally extends and deepens this search, and stimulates the development of conservative behavior. This prevailing logic of the organization is just another manifestation of that Authority that every anarchist opposes. But what sort of opposition is this? In the face of the logic, sheer pervasiveness, and energy of state power, anarchism may seem to offer little more than the possibility of “opposing goliath” (Horowitz, 1964: 26): “Anarchism can be no more than a posture. It cannot be a viable political position.” Indeed, Horowitz (1964: 59) claims that anarchism has failed in part because it fails to address the problem of bureaucracy and in part because when it does address that problem it becomes enmeshed by it. But anarchism can be viewed more positively as the symbolic flag followed by all those on the path to liberty, as opposed to the path to Authority. Tucker (1964: 173), for example, sees this in terms of the parting of the ways by Marx (state socialism) and Proudhon (anarchism). The logic of bureaucracy is not, as might be suggested by Horowitz’s argument that anarchism can only be a posture, invulnerable. Indeed, as Horowitz (1964: 58–59) is quick to point out, the inertial extension and concentration of bureaucratic logic has made it problematic as an organizational form. Other anarchists, such as Bakunin and Proudhon, although equally enamored of science, were at the same time somewhat more sensitive to the fact that it could be a dangerous institution, one that could divide the world and tyrannize the unlearned masses in the name of Science and Truth. Many anarchists agreed with Proudhon that science was the basis of the unity of humanity, and that society should be organized on its foundations rather than on the foundation of religion or of any Authoritative institution. Science and thought, according to Bakunin, must be the “guiding stars” of any social progress. But he was skeptical of arriving at socialist or anarchist convictions only by way of science and thinking. He was critical of science because it could be divorced from life, from “the truth of life.” Then, its “cold light” would produce only powerless and sterile truths. Here he is, in this moment, at one with Nietzsche.

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On the whole, the anarchists were ambivalent about science because they generally recognized that science was social relations on the one hand, but that on the other it provided important anti-authoritarian ammunition in the conflict with religion and with authoritarian institutions in general. And they struggled with the fact that science seemed to be the source of truths not only about nature but about society. But it also seemed to produce a cold, harsh, violent, distant, and alien truth far removed from the human projects of love, community, and honest trusting relationships. Nietzsche needs to be considered here because he was, in an important sense, an anarchist (in spite of his antipathy to the anarchists of his time). He was an uncompromising enemy of the State and an equally uncompromising defender of individual liberty (although he has a tendency to stray toward individualism). And like many progressives, he was an advocate and an opponent of science. But even in his advocacy it is easy to detect the bases of his opposition. For example, he defends mathematics and physics – but not for the usual reasons. Mathematics is good because it helps us to determine our human relations to things, physics because it reflects the honesty that compels us to turn to physics for explanations. But he criticized modern science because even though it had helped to “kill” (anthropologize) God, it was in general rooted in the same motives underlying religion. It was not, he claimed, a way to the goodness and wisdom of God. It has not exhibited the absolute utility claimed for it by Voltaire, or any intimate association with morality and happiness. And it is not immune to evil impulses. Science is dangerous because it has the potential for divesting life of its “rich ambiguity” and turning it into an indoor mathematical diversion. He went so far as to describe science as the stupidest of all interpretations of the world because it deals with the most superficial aspects of life, the most apparent things, only those experiences that can be counted, weighed, seen, and touched. Science might yet, Nietzsche claimed, turn out to be “the great dispenser of pain,” a means for making humans cold and stoic. Unlike other students of science and society of his era, Nietzsche (1887/1974) was able to complement his criticism with a relatively clear vision of an alternative to modern science – what he referred to as “the joyous wisdom” (or the gay science). In place of the scientist, Nietzsche put the thinker. The thinker has inclinations that are strong, evil, defiant, nasty, and malicious in relation to prevailing values. To think is to question and experiment, to try to find out something. Thus, success and failure are equally valued because they are, above all, “answers.” And the thinker constantly – day by day and hour after hour – scrutinizes his/her experiences to answer the question, What did I really experience? Love and passion, laughter, and the complementary roles of the fool and the hero rather than the detached cold light of reason are at the root of the wisdom the thinker seeks. The more emotions we bring to bear on a given problem, Nietzsche claimed, the more eyes we bring to it; and the more emotions and eyes we bring to bear the more complete our conceptions will be and thus the greater our “objectivity.” Paul Feyerabend’s defense of an anarchistic or dadaistic theory

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of science has much in common with Nietzsche’s joyous wisdom, even though Feyerabend defends a limited and temporary form of anarchism: epistemological anarchism.

Conclusion: Toward humane inquiries I myself am not immune from the ambivalence found in the progressive traditions. That ambivalence is reflected on a larger scale in the debates about the cultural meanings of science. The defenders – worshipers, advocates, apologists, and ideologues – of science have been heard; they were, and for most of us continue to be, our teachers, mentors, educators, and peers. What types of resources, then, are needed to resolve the tensions within the progressive traditions and in the networks of thinkers who create, carry, and change those traditions, caused by ambivalence about science? The idea that there is somewhere out there a science that is autonomous and free is a pernicious myth. The more we have learned about science as a social and cultural phenomenon, and about scientific knowledge as a social construction, the better we have been able to focus our critique of science. This critique is still widely misunderstood, even within the arenas of criticism themselves. The questions that need to be answered are: What are the bases of the radical critiques of science; What if anything can we do to change scientific institutions and ideas about knowledge in line with the critiques? Does it make sense to talk about replacing science, and if so, what would a “new” or “alternative to” science look like? The basis for radical critiques of science is the recognition that long prevailing and pervasive ideas about the nature of science are grounded in icons, myths, and ideologies. Archimedes, for example, is a leading icon of ancient science. As an icon, he is a paragon of pure science motives; as a real person, however he is a military engineer who often serves the interests of his government. Behind every icon, from Euclid to Einstein, is a more or less sinister figure or social role. It is important to understand the concept of social role because a social role can be consistent with a wide range of personal motives. Perhaps the most pernicious myth in science is the myth of pure science. In fact, whether we are considering knowledge systems in the ancient world, cultures across time and space, or modern science, we find that in every case the most advanced forms of gathering and using knowledge in a society are closely linked with the centers of power. Just as Platonic knowledge in ancient Greece was tied into the Greek oligarchy, so modern science was institutionalized as the mode of knowing of modern capitalism and the modern nation state. The violence associated with the emergence of modern capitalism and the modern state is at the heart of the modern science generated during the ages of the commercial and industrial revolutions. Will Wright (1992) has made a contribution to expanding the criteria of legitimacy for science to include environmental and social justice in his argument for a “wild,” critically reflexive knowledge.

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He argues that if inquiry does not improve the human socio-natural condition, it fails on epistemological and instrumental grounds; it is thus incoherent and unsustainable. Mary Daly (1978: 343–344) also insists on wild knowledge: undomesticated, asking “unfragmented” questions, ungovernable, and also extreme and prodigious. Wild knowledge entails more than linguistic revisions in codes and metaphors. It requires the liberation of human beings and a reorientation to human ecology and the social order. Perhaps the most important aspect of the ideology of science is that it is (in its allegedly pure form) completely independent of technology; this serves among other things to deflect social criticism from science and to justify the separation of science from concerns about ethics and values. Interestingly, this idea seems to be more readily appreciated in general by third world intellectuals than by the Brahmin scholars of the West and their emulators. Careful study of the history of contemporary Western science has shown both the intimate connection between what we often distinguish as science and technology and also the intimate connection between technoscience research and development and the production, maintenance, and use of the means (and the most advanced means) of violence in society. This is true in general for the most advanced systems of knowledge in at least every society that has reached a level of complexity that gives rise to a system of social stratification. If religion is the opium of the masses, perhaps we could say that Science is the Valium of the intellectual. It is the sedative, the soporific that engenders a feeble somnambulism rather than active, critical inquiry, self-reflection, and consciousness of one’s social role. What could it possibly mean to argue for a new science? Or to seek to destroy science-as-it-as and to replace it with a better form of science, or a new form of inquiry all together? What will we, if we are indeed become cyborgs, be capable of building and what might we indeed build? The problem is that this is the wrong way to pose this question: it is a tyrannical trap, designed to paralyze the critics who might challenge, or ignore, the hegemony of technoscientific – or scientistic – discourse. Marx was critical of religion, but he did not see any reason or way to go out and destroy religion in particular. Create a new society with new social relationships of the kind I imagine, he claimed – a socialistic or communistic society – and religion will disappear because there will be no need for it, no function for it to fulfill, and no resources to sustain it. This is the way we should approach the critiques of any specific institution, including the institution of science. If we create a new society, we will also set the stage for a new form of knowing and new interrogative methodologies. This does not mean throwing out “science” as a symbol of our human and cultural capacity to distinguish between truth and falsity, or to learn about how our world works. Every human society generates some form of inquiry that we would recognize as including some of the basic ingredients of what we imagine “ideal,” “human,” or “humane” science to be. Some have been demonstrably more environmentally sustainable and a smaller number supportive of more egalitarian relationships.

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The best forms of human inquiry are distinguished by their capacity for criticism (including self-criticism), reflexivity, and meta-inquiry. These are basic epistemic strategies for critical realistic inquirers, and not for naïve realists. Truth and falsity are not determined by the so-called “purity” or alienation of the inquirer, nor by some simple symbolic or linguistic associations between things in the world and terms that refer. They grow out of social relations. Let us admit that it is difficult to imagine exactly what a new form of inquiry would look like relative to our current understanding of so-called scientific methods. But nonetheless, just as there is something to be gained from imagining new forms of social organization and political economy, however shadowy and ethereal our imagery, so there is something to be gained by imagining what new forms of inquiry might look like. Imagine, then, a mode of inquiry in which we grant the acceptability of necessary statements and the weight of evidence, but treat claims as nothing more than well founded; and in which we formulate necessary statements rather than laws of nature. In this way, we can begin to imagine how to erase or circumvent the tyranny and hegemony of institutions of Rationality, Logic, Proof, and Method. We can begin, then, to imagine modes of knowing that emerge out of standpoints (local experiences in everyday/everynight lives) rather than only out of centers and relations of power. We need, for example, to study schools from the perspective of parents and children, rather than from the interests of existing institutional imperatives and the perceived needs of capital and social elites (Smith, 1987: 187). But we must be cautious about ceding education to local school boards and allowing parents to dictate standards of education. We need social theory grounded in the perspectives of women, the colonized, the oppressed, not the relations of ruling elites. Technological design must be carried out in terms of the perspectives and with the participation of people as users, rather than as passive consumers. Given such perspectives, we are always at the mercy of education. No progressive agenda can be realized if our populations are characterized by knowledge and epistemological deficits, as is the case in contemporary America (Barber, 2010). The single most important thing to understand about modern science if we are going to be able to study it critically is that it is a social institution and not an abstract body of knowledge, set of Platonic-like ideas, statements, laws, or facts, or a hall of fame populated with the images of scientists with eyes – to recall Nietzsche – such as no human being has ever possessed, eyes that can see the world unmediated by society and culture. It is equally important we become more aware of the knowledge/power axis in modern science and understand that this is a feature of science and of inquiry throughout history. The charge of envisioning new sciences prior to a new society is an attempt by the hegemonizing interests of the state, military, capitalists, technoscientists, and apologists to defuse and resist potentially explosive visions of radical thinkers. An alternative progressive science or mode of inquiry can only emerge as the mode of knowing and thinking of an alternative progressive society. Marx

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offered us a brief and fuzzy view of what such a science might look like when he used the term human science in conjunction with his image of a future society. Imagine, then, a social formation in which the person has primacy, in which social relationships are diversified, cooperative, egalitarian, nonauthoritarian, participatory, and expressive. The mode of knowing and thinking in such a society would be nonexploitative, nonsexist, nonauthoritarian, and non-elitist. The imperative for progressives, then, is to press forward with their social change agendas. A nuova scienza will follow their successes, just as it has the social changes that have gone before, only rarely as a science of, by, and for the people, and then only in localized arenas. Harding (1991: 173) challenges the science-as-a-social-problem formulation, pushing for specific proposals for the nuova scienza and asking what “science and epistemology are to contribute to this project” of fostering humane social forms. The recent history and current activities of progressive agents offer prototypes and examples of marginal improvements in achieving goals for a different science and society. The Boston Women’s Health Collective is an example of different means and modes for achieving, legitimating, and transmitting useful knowledge. The challenges that acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) activists posed to the National Institutes of Health and the medical community at large for evaluating protocols, and getting onto the research agenda in the first place, indicate participatory promises well beyond “the disease of the month” strategy for managing the national health research agenda. The University of Maryland’s rejection of an National Institute of Health (NIH)-sponsored conference on crime and genetics should be seen not as an indication that “the public” is irrational and unprepared to speak about science, but rather that the public is capable of exercising a legitimate voice in and on science. We saw a good example of how this might work in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1970s with public participation in the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) research controversy (Goodell, 1979). And there are many efforts outside the borders of the United States, however rudimentary or partial, in the participatory design of workplace technologies or public access to scientific information. And participatory discourse on science and ethics exist, however tenuously, as possible models for progressive action. I should also mention the Science for the People movement, the associated Radical Science Movement, and the Dutch Science Shops. We have many exemplars to draw on for a new science and society architecture, exemplars that do not isolate and purify science, and that ground science in new forms of life. Epistemology, science, and the philosophy and sociology of science, as professionalized discourses separated from ethics, method, ontology, and metaphysics, and separated from community life, are likely to have little to contribute to new inquiry enterprises. Sociology, feminism, anarchism, or Marxism in bureaucratic or scientistic forms, rather than as imaginative enterprises, will likely be impediments to goals of social and environmental justice. Rather than settling on a craft model of scientific practice (as a number of feminists and progressives do) as

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a remedy, we need to develop organizations and other modes of supporting and legitimating inquiries. These are difficult changes to work toward, especially in light of postmodernist theories critical of progress, and the role such theories then play in relation to the status quo (ranging from reactionary to revolutionary). The hope for a better society stumbles across problems of relativism in the service of institutional and capital inertia. Haraway (1988) calls it a postmodern “god trick” akin to the “god trick” of the universalizing discourses of modernism. Relativism is suspicious to a number of feminist scholars, for it seems that as women, people of color, and nations emerging from colonialism begin to speak with authority and out of their experiences, they are told it’s all relative and doesn’t much matter anyway (Mascia-Lees et al., 1988). Further, the hopes of progressives are eroded by postmodernism’s corrosive nihilism, which induces a cynical paralysis. This can be contrasted with Nietzsche’s cautious and constructive use of nihilism, in a manner reminiscent of the way Feyerabend uses anarchism. If linear models of progress and unambiguous utopias are eliminated as possible futures, we can still remain committed to struggle. We are not reduced to despair and cynicism. And indeed, we can struggle despite and in joyous defiance of our probable futility. Social progress is not a modernist, Enlightenment fantasy, despite the Enlightenment assumptions of Marx, many feminists, anarchists, and other progressives (Hekman, 1990) and despite the end of progress ideologies and utopianism rightly heralded in postmodernist critiques of culture and capital. What are we to make of assumptions about the efficacy of the instrumental “successes” of science, in the face of widespread environmental degradation and social injustice? Let’s not be awed by “great discoveries” or by the “lives of the great scientists.” We need to ask the sorts of questions about science and scientists that focus, for example, on what scientists produce, who they produce it for, how they produce it, and with what social, political, economic, and environmental consequences. In the end, we will want to know not what scientists discover or invent, but what sorts of people they are and what sorts of social worlds they are associated with. These are not issues of motives and intention, but of communities and commitments, institutions and interests, and the assumptions, practices, and agendas by which we create and re-create our social worlds. I have lived and learned across the progressive traditions in ways that blur their distinctions. Consider the distinction between Marxism and anarchism drawn by Todd May (2009: 11–12). Marxism focuses on exploitation, an inevitable consequence of the extraction of surplus value under “capitalism.” The defining focus of anarchism is domination, oppressive power relations. Exploitation is by definition restricted to the economic sphere, whereas domination ramifies across all of the institutions of society. Suppose we conceive of the issue here as one that concerns class and power. If power is more elastic it is because (and Michel Foucault is probably our great teacher here) it can operate consciously, unconsciously, anonymously, and as a restrictive as well as a creative force. Whether we focus on class, power, and gender or Max Weber’s categories of class, status,

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and party, our objective should be to eliminate exploitation and the restrictive modes of power as well as other material and symbolic distinctions that manifest in inequalities. It is crucial that we work toward these ends not with them “in view” but with them as conditions of our immediate practices. We must be democrats, socialists, communists, and anarchists now if we are going to realize our progressive goals in the future. Without resources for and resourcefulness in these pursuits, the absolutism of God and church will continue to obstruct our efforts to re-make our world.

9 PERSONAL QUEST REDUX, SUMMARY, AND REVIEW*

Imagine a child who believes in Santa Claus with such passion that he imagines seeing him leaving presents under the family Christmas tree with his dad and mom sleeping close by and no other adults in the house; hears Santa’s sleigh with flying reindeer and bells jingling land on the roof top of his cousins’ home on Christmas eve. The adults already know that by the time he is seven or eight he will realize there is no Santa Claus; this will, indeed, be expected of him. That child was me and I don’t remember when the realization hit me that there is no Santa Claus. Certainly, over time I wondered about a fat little old man dropping down chimneys all over the world in one night; carrying toys for millions of children in one small sled; and so on. That is, the feats of Santa Claus begin to clash with my experience in the world. I learn how large the earth is; I learn about rooftops and chimneys; and real life reindeer. And the accumulation of implausibilities and impossibilities eventually reaches a tipping point and all of a sudden the shadows of doubt evaporate in the bright light of truth. In order to sustain my belief, adults lie to me over and over and over. They think they are protecting my innocence but the anger I feel when I ultimately realize I’ve been lied to by the people closest to me, the ones who gave me life and loved me unconditionally, I was propelled toward becoming the author of this book. What did this process look like when the object of the lies was God, not Santa Claus?

Raiders of the last illusion Religious beliefs and institutions were an important concern of the nineteenthcentury social thinkers who fashioned the sociological perspective. However, because of the central functions of religion as a tool of state power and a source *Chapter 9 is an edited version of Chapter 8 in my The Age of the Social: The Discovery of Society and the Ascendance of a New Episteme, published by Routledge, in 2018.

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of individual and community solidarity, the most profound results and implications of their work on the social construction of gods, religious beliefs and institutions, and faith have been basically ignored. They were, however, manifestations of secular trends that had been slowly growing stronger. People grew up and left childish things behind. This chapter is a summary and review of the sociological way of looking at and talking about religions and gods unveiled in Chapters 1–8. It is pitched at a more introductory level than earlier chapters in order to extract and underscore the basic conclusions of Chapters 1–8.

Types of societies and types of religions One of the most important tools we have for gaining an explanatory perspective on our ways of living and thinking is the comparative method. Examining a significant number of societies across time and space is the basis for the observation that different types of societies generate different types of gods and religions. The nature and extent of the division of labor, the degree of social differentiation, the type of stratification system, and social changes (within and across societies) are some of the factors that determine the dynamics of religions and gods over time. One of the most important tools for the comparative study of religions and the gods is the Human Relations Area Files. The Outline of World Cultures organizes and indexes a few thousand cultures in the eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases. All religions reflect the cultural concerns of the societies they develop in. In general, gods of war are products of warlike societies; agricultural peoples worship fertility gods; and the gods of patriarchal societies are male. Monotheism is found in societies with three or more levels of hierarchical sovereignty (e.g., clan, city, empire); polytheism is found in societies dominated by classes; ancestor worship is a product of societies in which the extended family is a core institution; and reincarnation is associated with small village communities in which individuals experience intense face-toface interaction. Most hunting and gathering peoples have no conception of a Supreme Creator. The belief in a Supreme Creator who is involved in and supportive of human morality is rare in hunting and gathering, simple horticultural (no plow), advanced horticultural (metal weapons and tools), and fishing societies, but common in agrarian and herding societies. In general, then, the sacred realm is a sort of map of the social geomorphology, and the correlations between types of societies and types of religions illustrate the relationship between technological and economic development on the one hand, and religious beliefs and institutions on the other. One of the curious things about the theological literature and especially about proofs of God is that they never so far as I’ve been able to determine address these comparative anthropology facts.

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Principles and patterns in the sociology of religion In 1975, Randall Collins published what is still perhaps the most extraordinary effort in modern sociology to put the discipline on a scientific foundation. He set out the foundations for sociology as an explanatory science in the form of causal propositions founded on a set of basic axioms. These propositions condensed large bodies of sociological research. Here are some examples of the propositions he constructs for religion: The following principles concerning the locus and nature of religious ceremonies and gods, remember, formalize empirically established results of sociological studies. •

Generally speaking, “political power and the coalitions formed around it have been reflected on the ideological side in religious beliefs” (Collins, 1975: 368–69):

With the separation of church from household and state, religions have both changed and become more complicated in their relations with politics. In commercialized, cosmopolitan, or industrialized societies, governments and political factions have even organized themselves in secular terms, and religions have fallen into the background of politics. But modern ideologies are variants of the same basic set of conditions, new forms appropriate to modern conditions of the same appeals for moral solidarity and for obedience to the organization stretching beyond individuals that make up the social essence of religion. •

•

•

•

•

The locus of coercive power and material resources determines the places for and nature of religious ceremonies; “the ideals of loyalty and morality reflect the social unit to which the individual must orient for…physical safety and support” (Collins, 1975: 369); Swanson’s (1964) principle: “The more levels of hierarchy within a ceremonially united group, the more likely the religion is to admit only a single and highly powerful god” (Collins, 1975: 370); To the extent that group membership entails ceremonial participation the more ceremonies are likely to foster particularistic loyalties to the gods that represent the group, and the more likely the gods are going to be turned to for material well-being; The level of diversity of communications determines whether a group is more or less likely to reify its symbols and locate them in a transcendental realm; a high level leads to symbols that are regarded as human creations related to the physical world; a low level leads to symbols (gods) existing in a transcendental realm The level of social density in a group determines the intensity of ideological (including religious) commitment.

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The next set of propositions deal with the relationship between hierarchy, cosmopolitanism, and social density and their impacts on religion: •

• •

• •

•

The emphasis on awe in the face of a powerful god or spirit varies with the level of hierarchy within the ceremonially united group. The greater the hierarchy, the more likely ceremonies will be carried out by specialists and members relegated to being spectators and offering deferential gestures. The degree of cosmopolitanism in a group affects whether ideologies are going to be secular or transcendental. Lower diversity of communications in a group is associated with a greater likelihood the group will reify its symbols and locate them in a transcendent reality. The social density of interaction and the level of physical threats determines the intensity of commitment to an ideology. The greater the threat of violence to a group, whether from within the group or from outside the group, the greater the intensity of the group’s commitment to itself and its symbols. Greater equality with the ceremonially united group signals greater emphasis on mass participation rituals, membership signs, and the ideal of group brotherhood.

For the full complement of these propositions and their empirical grounds, see Collins (1975: 364–390).

The functions of religion In general, religious systems divide the world into sacred and profane realms. Sometimes these realms are clearly dichotomized, sometimes they are enfolded into each other. The more democratic the society the more clearly the realms are distinguished; the more theocratic the society, the more enfolded the realms are. The profane world is that part of the world that can be dealt with in a practical, matter of fact way. The sacred realm, by contrast, has to be approached seriously, respectfully, and with careful preparations. Behavior in the sacred realm must be strictly controlled. Rituals accomplish this by stressing appropriate forms of dress, demeanor, and behavior. One of the major functions of rituals and worship is to help ground and sustain the feelings and orientations necessary for group solidarity and for preserving the prevailing social structure. This idea is a key to the origins of religion. It was first discussed in sociological detail by Emile Durkheim in his study of the Australian aborigines. Among the Australian aborigines, clans are organized around and take their names from totems. A totem is generally a commonplace animal or plant. The symbol used to represent the totem is considered sacred. On the basis of his study of totemism, Durkheim concluded that when people worship a totem or a more highly developed sacred object, they are really worshipping “society,” their own

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group or community. Thus, there are referents for religious and spiritual beliefs, and they are real. Only they are not in some supernatural or transcendental realm but rather right here on earth in our own collective lives. There are reasons to criticize the cross-cultural viability of the sacred-profane distinction and the methodology underlying Durkheim’s study. Realizing the complexities and flaws in Durkheim’s study, we must ask if the God=Society equation make more sense than the alternatives including miracles. In the greater schema of the sociological cogito, there is a rationale for accepting the God=Society equation. The earliest forms of religion have their roots in the periodic group activities of the earliest human societies. During these activities, individuals experienced a certain kind of excitement, not unlike the excitement we feel when we enter into the spirit of a rock concert crowd, or an intimate get-together with a small group of friends. The source of this feeling in early human societies was eventually located outside of the individual and outside the group. Some readily available object was chosen to symbolize or represent the activity or gathering (society) and the associated emotional response (religious feeling). Rituals were then developed which regularized and enhanced the solidarity generated by the gatherings. Rites are group activities oriented toward objects that symbolize the feelings or emotions generated by raw group activities. A cult is a collection of rites and associated myths and beliefs clustered around a group of sacred objects. A religion emerges when a set of cults becomes interrelated and rationalized. The process of developing the complex religious systems already evident in the material remains of the earliest human societies we know about began in an unknown prehistory. And it took tens of thousands of years for the primordial generation of affect in group activities to develop into religious systems. One factor in this process was the human capacity for generalization and reification. This, combined with limited experience, helped to generate mistaken beliefs about referents for certain feelings and thoughts, and led to speculations about a supernatural realm. It’s possible that the experience of dreams and hallucinations helped to fuel these beliefs. Some scholars have speculated that the idea of a god was stimulated by drinking soma, a ritual drink associated with the historic Vedic religion and Zoroastrianism. Soma was prepared by extracting the juice from a plant, but information about the plant has been lost to history and is a matter of speculation. It is possible that soma was prepared from poppy, the ephedra plant, and cannabis. It is unlikely that there was a direct connection between ingesting soma and encountering god. It was more likely used in rituals to enhance collective effervescence and emotional contagion. Personal emotional experiences during collective rituals cannot by themselves explain the origin of beliefs about the supernatural and religion. Generalization and reification as part of language use, especially in the process of naming experiences and objects, in combination with imagination would have been more significant sources of religious feeling than drugs, including soma.

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An example of how such factors operate is the development of ideas about the gods comes to us from the Hindu tradition. In the ancient Hindu texts known as the Vedas, fire is considered a god, or at least a concrete god’s body. Later on, the view develops that there is an eternal god who possesses and controls, or somehow incorporates, all individual fires. This is the kind of thinking that led Plato to propose a realm of Forms. The idea of a fire god is secured over time through the activities of a cult which identifies itself with the god. The next stage, the development of a religion, is reached through the intellectual efforts of specialists who systematically organize ideas about the gods. Generalization (abstraction), symbolization, and reification are all at work throughout this development, side by side with organizational activities. In societies where people have not yet been alienated from the basic rites that generate gods and religions, there may be some individuals who are aware at some level that the gods are created, sustained, nourished, and rejuvenated by the rites, that people literally manufacture the gods in those moments. But the concepts for consolidating that sort of awareness are unavailable at this stage of cultural development. By the time the concepts become available, their control has passed to classes of political, religious, and intellectual leaders. Some of them will develop and pass on the idea that religions and gods are social creations. For most people, however, religion will be so complicated and removed from any immediate relationship to social solidarity, and alienation will be so strong, that consciousness of projection will not have much of a chance to develop in any direct, experiential way. This process may be more ubiquitous, more natural and universal to the religious experience. Consider the research carried out by the psychological anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann (2020: 183). She makes the strongest case one can make for the idea that religious practice is more important than religious belief and faith. She argues that “strange beliefs” should not be dismissed as false but rather as events, as relationships. Beliefs and faith have social functions: …[the] gods and spirits are made real for people through human practices and come to be experienced as genuinely autonomous – as agents in people’s lives…people have ontological commitments, faith frames, in which gods and spirits matter – but…those commitments must be made relevant by learning to feel that gods and spirits are real, sometimes in vividly sensory ways. …there are two analytic stories. There is, first, the faith frame, the way people reason when they think that gods and spirits matter and how that ontological attitude works in the ecology of other beliefs, thoughts and attitudes. Then, second, there is the story of the way the feeling of realness is kindled through practices, orientations, and the training of attention. This is a special case of the idea that we bring the structures of everyday life into action anew through relevant practices.

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Consciousness about the social meaning of religion may be greatest when a society or its political constitution is new, when people – even in complex societies – can recall that they designed the social order, and they created their gods as symbols of and in celebration of their new society. The fact that religions are active instruments in the creation of societies helps explain why creation is so central to religions. Religion is literally about creation; but it is not about the creation of the universe by gods; it is about the creation of social orders by men and women. Once the celebratory period has passed, religions become prescriptive frameworks for future generations. An example of the creative, celebratory function of religion is provided by the history of the ancient Jews and Midianites. The Yahweh of the Old Testament was a god of the political organization they created, a celebratory symbol of federation, association, and alliance. The Covenants between God and Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David in the Old Testament represented real contracts binding the societal partners in a new social order or social relationship. The Mediterranean “religions of the book” report the prescriptive words delivered directly by God to particular prophets. Other religions are not characterized by a definitive canon revealed to humans by God. The relationship between creation myths and the creation of new societies doesn’t apply neatly across cultures. There are other types of creation myths which are related to the creation of new social orders – for example, myths of emergence (e.g., the Hopi and Zuni), myths of order-out-of-chaos (e.g., Sumerian, Babylonian), earth-diver (The earth-diver is a common character in various traditional creation myths. In these stories a supreme being usually sends an animal into the primal waters to find bits of sand or mud with which to build habitable land; e.g., Cherokee, Iroquois), ex nihilo (e.g., ancient Egypt, the Maori). World parent myths: Sky and Earth in an eternal union are pulled apart leading to creation; or creations comes from the dismembered parts of the body of a primeval being (Kumulipo, Hawaii; China’s. Pan Gu myth); and the problematic Divine Twins mythology, a conjectured mythology based on comparative archaeological evidence from proto-Indo-European studies. These myths are not mutually exclusive empirically but all are linked to the creation of new social orders. Since societies, especially the more complex ones, are never totally unified, religion must ultimately construct rival gods, evil spirits, and devils. The symbolism of religion mirrors the simplicity or complexity of social worlds. Heaven, then, generally symbolizes the moral righteousness that makes you a member in good standing of the society or group. The security of knowing you belong is a reward for adhering to the moral standards of your group. Hell, by contrast, symbolizes the banishment of the deviant or heretic from the group. That is the social meaning of hell as a punishment for sinning against god – that is, deviating from the morality of your group. Notions about right and wrong are intrinsically social; they regulate relationships among people. The very idea of morality implies a force beyond any individual. People adhere to moral precepts because the group demands it. Belongingness is a feature of the fact that humans are always, already, and

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everywhere social. This evolutionary aspect is nourished through socialization. Thus, we all experience the need to belong to different degrees and orientations to different parts of our societies. Some of us, of course, follow the moral guidelines of our society or group because we do not want to be dismissed, punished, or killed by the guardians of morality. In simpler societies, morality expresses the rules of behavior believed to be necessary (based on experience) for group survival. In more complex societies, morality is designed to sustain the reigning patterns of domination. If a person has multiple group memberships, if groups are in conflict, or if there is a pattern of joining and leaving groups then there will be multiple and often conflicting moralities. If societies nourish and sustain the gods, gods should come into being when societies do and they should die when societies die. This is reflected in the fact that “immortal” gods die. Classic gods who have “died” can be brought back to life to symbolize new social groups. For H.L. Mencken’s list of dead immortal gods and more on the graveyard of the gods see http://nowscape.com/atheism/ dead_gods.htm. Isis is one of the gods who has been resurrected in contemporary society by pagan groups, the modern Goddess movement, and interfaith organizations such as the Fellowship of Isis. Against this background, let’s pause and consider what the church or collective worshipping experience is about. What are you paying attention to in religious gatherings? Are you really focused on the words of the pastor, imam, or rabbi? Or are you focusing on the gathering itself, on being together with others, on the experience of belonging? Is it the common activities that get to you, the singing, the chanting, or is it the often obscure words of the religious or spiritual leaders? I think you will find that church, or religious gatherings in general, are more about the feeling of belonging than they are about God. God may indeed come down to being the feeling of belonging generated in the practices of belief and faith.

The transcendental religions Transcendental religions emerged when the fashioning of early states into civilizations through urban and commercial revolutions gave rise to the social role of the priest and priestly organizations. These religions (including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, and Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism), sometimes referred to as “world religions,” developed in cosmopolitan centers. The eastern religions (sometimes referred as ethical religions) generally place less emphasis on God and the “other world” and more on “this world” and good behavior. Differences between religion East and West are more apparent than real. They appear more different when we compare texts and the lives of the virtuosi, less different when we compare the lives of everyday people (Spiro, 1982). Priests and their organizations emerged in close alliance with military and political institutions. The separation of “this worldly” and “other worldly” realms offer new opportunities for salvation. In traditional societies, people were considered to be in the good graces of the spirits if they were prosperous, healthy,

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and victorious in war. Bad luck was viewed as the result of spiritual transgressions. In the transcendental religions, good and evil were separated from success in this world, and the possibility of salvation was separated from one’s worldly fortunes. Max Weber (1905/2002) argued that hard work, discipline, and frugality followed from a person’s subscription to the values espoused by the Protestant faith, particularly Calvinism. Issues and problems arose about the direction of causality in the relations between Protestantism, capitalism, and science. It wasn’t, at the end of the day, a matter of causal links between these phenomena but rather three parallel institutional reactions (religion, economy, and knowledge) to the ecology of political and economic developments in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century and carrying through to the nineteenth century. Two basic pathways to salvation became possible with the emergence of the transcendental religions. Mystical salvation put the individual in direct contact with the “other” world. “This” world became more illusory or less important. For Christians and Muslims, the imbalances of this world were redressed in an after-life. The good who have suffered on earth are rewarded with ever-lasting life in heaven, and the evil who have prospered are punished at last and forever. The “ethical” religions such as Confucianism offered an alternative to salvation in a “real” heaven; the Confucians stressed right behavior, behavior in tune with the basic principles of the everyday social world. Religious specialists or virtuosos could, in the transcendental religions, devote themselves full-time to the project of achieving salvation. For everyone else, however, religion continued to serve social functions appropriate to their social classes. For the upper classes, it was a social activity intertwined with political ideologies and alliances, and a tool of oppression. For the lower classes, religion was a source of hope and release from the trials and uncertainties of everyday life. For the middle class, it was the source of rules about appropriate demeanor and deference (Collins, 1975: 181): For along with the more abstract accounts of the universe – the forces of Yin and Yang, the higher realms of Nirvana and the veils of illusion, the spiritual powers of an omnipotent and omniscient God presiding over the mundane world – came changes in the forms of deferential relationships and in the emotional tone of life. The demeanor emphasized in these religions reflected their ideal of eternal peace and quiet in the other world. It also represented a way of demarcating these religions from, and underlining their superiority to, traditional religions.

Politics and religion Smaller, technologically less developed societies are, of necessity, relatively democratic (I follow Collins, 1975: 348–413 in this section). The centralization of power and the formation of states and ruling elites occur as societies increase

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in size, develop coalitions, and in particular develop surpluses of foodstuffs and other goods. The emergence of leaders under such conditions is based on the social positions and political skills of particular people. Given the appropriate material resources, the would-be ruler still has to fashion them into a basis for leadership. Relatively democratic small-scale societies do not get transformed into centralized states when access to the weapons of advanced societies makes war coalitions and careers of conquest possible. A coalition leader who wishes to make himself a king has to deal with followers who will try to avoid giving him too much power. The same holds for the more aristocratic situations. Coalitions of charioteers or mounted knights will try to hold on to their feudal autonomies by supporting certain forms of weapons, suppliers, and a division of labor. A potential leader must thus create loyalty among his or her followers, especially in a way that allows him or her to use those followers to enforce his or her commands upon themselves. And he or she must gain control of the distribution of supplies and the tax-collecting apparatus, preferably with the help of a non-military hierarchy of officials reporting directly to him or her. These are all problems in politico-religious organization. There has always been a close connection between politics and religion. Political and religious authority are usually vested in the same person in societies up to the advanced horticultural level. Kings are usually considered gods or the earthly ministers of gods. Organizing military coalitions such as the Greek city states involved organizing joint religio-political cults. Religion and politics began to separate (institutionally) with the emergence of agrarian, commercial, and cosmopolitan societies. But crucial connections were, and continue to be, maintained. Religion is drawn on by governments for ideological legitimation and administrative organization. And priests engage in political activity in order to gain state support or theocratic (hierocratic) power. Gibbon, the historian of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, noted that the people of the Roman era considered the various religions that flourished in their world equally true, the philosophers considered them equally false, and the magistrates thought of them as equally useful.

Magicians, wonderworkers, and messiahs In social systems that are not characterized by a high or even moderate degree of cultural diversity, identity crises are rare. This is the case for the ancient world in which religion emerged. Boys and girls grew up to be pretty much like their fathers and mothers. But it was possible to be different. Individuals could be released from a routine succession by an extraordinary endowment or event. Every society has labels for normal and abnormal social types or roles. Some “normal” social types occur in a wide range of societies from antiquity to the present, reflecting common social goals, functions, and activities tied to universal human needs and lifecycle events. Butchers, bakers, and farmers are such social types. But other “normal” social types are peculiar to given societies or

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historical periods. Such is the case, for example, for the tribunes and lectors of ancient Rome. “Abnormal” social types are also classified in similar and different ways depending on time and place. We recognize psychiatric categories such as schizophrenic, paranoid, and manic-depressive and healing professionals such as psychiatrists and faith healers. The ancient world had demoniacs, divine men and prophets. We have freedom fighters, radicals, left and right wingers; first-century Palestine had messiahs, prophets, brigands, and charlatans (Smith, 1978: 19). Jesus, for example, was variously viewed by contemporaries as a miracle worker, a messiah, a beggar, and a fugitive. The lives of magicians, wonderworkers, and messiahs from Moses on (including Apollonius, Jesus, Simon Magus, Gregory the Wonderworker and, from our own time, Rasputin, Aleister Crowley, and Eduardo the Peruvian healer) are variations on a common theme. The stock legendary features of the magus career are the divine origin and miraculous birth, the annunciation and nativity portents, the menace to the future magus during infancy, the initiation, the trial of spiritual strength (temptation resisted after a long solitary fast), miracles, the sacrificial feast, trial and death (by crucifixion, for example), the disappearance of the body and descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. There are parallels between this career pattern and the career pattern for mythic heroes. The career of the mythic hero is characterized by following features and stages (Rank, Raglan, and Dundes, 1990; Dundes, 1999): • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The hero’s mother is a royal virgin; The father is a king and often a near relative of the hero’s mother; The circumstances of his birth are unusual; The hero is reputed to be the son of (a) god; The life of the infant hero is threatened, usually by his father or maternal grandfather; He is spirited away and raised by foster parents in a faraway country; There is no information about the hero’s childhood; The hero reaches adulthood and returns or goes to his future kingdom; He is victorious over a king, giant, or dragon; He marries a princess who is often the daughter of his predecessor; He becomes a king at about the age of 35; He reigns uneventfully, and prescribes laws; He eventually loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects and is driven from the throne; He meets with a mysterious death, often on a hilltop; His children, if any, do not succeed him; He is not buried but nonetheless has one or more sepulchers.

And a similar pattern characterizes the transformation of outstanding personalities in ancient Greece into divinities. Seusippus, Plato’s nephew, began the process of transforming the famous philosopher into a divine figure when he

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delivered Plato’s funeral oration. He referred to his dead uncle as the son of an alliance between his mother and Apollo. In our own time in our own society, Elvis Presley is undergoing a similar process (Reece, 2006). As scholars, we know more about the social nature and origins of religions and the gods than the majority of peoples around the world. This material is even available to clerics in the world’s religions who do not pass this knowledge on to the faithful. Today, our knowledge is widely available in libraries and on the Internet. The last chapter of God began to be written in the early nineteenth century and the story can now come to an end. Already in the Bible itself God disappears as we move from the Old Testament through the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelations. This is not reflected in the linear order of the various books but in the attitudes of the authors and editors of the Bible stories. Their lives reflected changes in the human-divine relationship wrought by changes in the power and knowledge of humans as cultures evolved. The discovery that religion and the gods are social constructs has its origins in the works of some of the outstanding thinkers of the ancient world. The hero narrative paired with the solar messiah narrative gives us a compelling narrative in terms of the anthropology of the gods. In order to understand the social construction of the gods we must be attuned to the central role of allegory and symbolism in human story telling. Any study of the gods must begin with the central role of the sun in the human narrative. It should be transparently clear why the sun becomes an object of worship across all the earliest civilizations. The sun god (God the Sun) is over time brought down to earth and personified in the person of the king or emperor who becomes the son of god or God incarnate. Greek and Latin mythologies make many references to Sons of Gods but in everyday life the term “son of god” was primarily used to refer to Roman emperors. In Hebrew and Aramaic, “sons of god” and “the gods” are equivalent. This is the starting point for the solar messiah narrative. Let’s review this narrative first sketched in Chapter 1. The sons of gods are defined by a birth to death narrative that mirrors the heavens. Sirius is the star in the East, the brightest star in the sky. On December 24 it is aligned with the three brightest stars in Orion’s belt. We know these stars as the three kings and so were they known in the ancient Palestinian period. If you follow the line connecting Sirius and the three kings they point to the rising sun on December 25. Thus, the three kings follow the star in the East to locate the new born God, the rising sun. The idea of the “virgin Mary” is derived from the constellation “Virgo,” the Latin term for virgin. The ancient glyph of Virgo is the altered “M,” the source of the names for the virgin mothers (for example, Mary, Myrra, Maya, and so on). Virgo is also known as “the house of bread.” the source of the image of a virgin carrying a sheaf of wheat. This symbolizes harvest time. The Winter Solstice occurs around December 25. Beginning with the Summer Solstice, the days become shorter and colder. In the northern hemisphere the sun appears further south as the summer wanes and fall ebbs. The sun also appears to

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become smaller as it moves toward the southern horizon. Symbolically, the sun dies. When it reaches its lowest point, it appears to stop moving for three days before it begins to move north. During this three-day period the Sun appears to “hang” close to the Southern Cross constellation, the Crux constellation. After three days, on December 25, the Sun moves one degree north up from the horizon before beginning its movement north – giving us the sun/son rises from the dead. While this has all the makings of an anthropologically reasonable symbolic narrative, it has to stand the detailed comparative test of applying across all the cultures of the world which have given us a solar messiah. The Jesus narrative does appear to fulfill this solar cycle. We now have and have had for decades all the evidence we need to support the Durkheimian anthropology of God. Interestingly, the last book of the Bible could be titled the “last chapter of God.” As the Bible unfolds from Genesis to Revelations, human cultures progress over several hundred years of growth and development in the sciences and arts. Increasingly as we move through the stories of Adam, Noah, and Abraham God’s place in the narrative becomes increasingly marginal. Humans take on more and more responsibility, there are fewer and fewer miracles and appearances of God, and by Revelation God has all but disappeared as an entity with a hand in the everyday doings of human lives. It takes until the blossoming of Biblical and religious studies in the European and especially German universities of the nineteenth century for scholarly declarations of the death of God to appear. God dies in this century philosophically as in the case of Nietzsche, anthropologically as in the case of Durkheim, and in literature during the first decade of the twentieth century in Thomas Hardy’s (1840–1928) poem, “God’s Funeral.” From this point on it is only a matter of propagating research, knowledge, and theory to bring the God narrative to an end. That is the process we are engaged in at the moment. The Emperor is out and about, and it’s just a matter of more and more people catching on to what one child has had the courage to say: “The Emperor has no clothes.” Credit for crystallizing and systematizing the discovery goes to a small number of the founders of modern sociological perspective, notably Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oswald Spengler. They all had precursors, notably in the case of Durkheim the lectures of William Robertson Smith (1846–1894) published in 1889 (The Religion of the Semites). Smith was a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar, professor of divinity, minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The empirical evidence for this central discovery in the social sciences has been accumulating for centuries. Some efforts have been made to systematize that evidence and establish a firm empirical foundation for the theory of religion and the gods as social facts, as social constructions. For reasons mentioned earlier, this work has proceeded slowly, and has not been able to find its way easily into the worldviews of most contemporary social groups and classes. But as Marx pointed out, religion is not simply invented by scoundrel priests and rulers; it is

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also an expression of human suffering and the quest for comforts and security in an alien universe. He looked forward not to an atheist society, a society that needs to deny God, but rather to a society so transformed that the question of God will not exist. In a sense, the last chapter of God has almost been written many times. Michael Harrington’s book The Politics at God’s Funeral (1963) could have been that chapter but Harrington refused to see the social fact of God in his own conclusions. Harrington was a non-believer who described himself as “religiously musical.” I take this to mean something like Durkheim’s notion of “religious sentiment.” The problem is that Harrington repeats the uninterrogated “truism” that you can’t prove or disprove God and reports the death of the political God but not the death of God. The sociologist Rodney Stark in his book Discovering God (2008) might have written the last chapter of God but this several times over reconstructed Christian concludes an otherwise interesting sociology of religion by arguing that the universe is the ultimate revelation of God and science is theology. And Richard Eliot Friedman in The Disappearance of God (1995) concludes another book that could have been the last chapter of God by conjecturing that in the aftermath of the Biblical unfolding of the story of God hiding his face, we are perhaps on the verge of recognizing that the universe is the face of God. Nonetheless, all the material for writing the last chapter of God has been available for a long time and it has never been easier than it is today to collect, organize, and present that material and at last tell the full story. It is now time to write the last chapter of theology.

Epilogue: The slave catechism Religious texts function differently in different strata of stratified societies. A classic example is the “slave catechism.” A Catechism for Slaves (1854) “Frederick Douglass’s Paper,” June 2, 1854, from The Southern Episcopalian (Charleston, S.C., April, 1854). A catechism explains the principles of Christian religion in the form of questions and answers. Below is an excerpt from one used for the instruction of American slaves. In the churches attended by the slave masters, the message was that God intended for them to hold slaves. Q.  Who keeps the snakes and all bad things from hurting you? A.  God does. Q.  Who gave you a master and a mistress? A.  God gave them to me. Q.  Who says that you must obey them? A.  God says that I must.

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Q.  What book tells you these things? A.  The Bible. Q.  How does God do all his work? A.  He always does it right. Q.  Does God love to work? A.  Yes, God is always at work. Q.  Do the angels work? A.  Yes, they do what God tells them. Q.  Do they love to work? A.  Yes, they love to please God. Q.  What does God say about your work? A.  He that will not work shall not eat. Q.  Did Adam and Eve have to work? A.  Yes, they had to keep the garden. Q.  Was it hard to keep that garden? A.  No, it was very easy. Q.  What makes the crops so hard to grow now? A.  Sin makes it. Q.  What makes you lazy? A.  My wicked heart. Q.  How do you know your heart is wicked? A.  I feel it every day. Q.  Who teaches you so many wicked things? A.  The Devil. Q.  Must you let the Devil teach you? A.  No, I must not.

10 READING HANS KÜNG The last chapter of theology

6.432. How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. L. Wittgenstein (1922: 187). Why do smart, educated people believe in God in the wake of the evidence against the existence of God I have reviewed in the preceding chapters? I want to explore this question by considering a brilliant defense of the claim that God exists. I know of no believer with a greater multidimensional knowledge base across the humanities, arts, sciences, history, and philosophy than that possessed by the theologian Hans Küng. His terrifyingly brilliant command of this knowledge base is on full display in his almost 1000 page opus, Does God Exist? (1978). This book offers up a narrative proof for the existence of God. It seems to me that a deconstruction of his approach to answering this question should throw light on my effort to understand why people as brilliant as Küng believe in God. Why does someone who seems to know “everything” and has a powerfully critical imagination travel across time, space, history, and culture from Plato to our present era still believe in God? It seems to me that he can only reach this conclusion if he fails to pick up certain sociological signals. That may be too cognitive; it may have more to do with a fear of the void and a need for absolute certainty. One clue that this is the source of his error is that he gives a great deal of space to Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, but only a couple of passing references to Emile Durkheim. So let’s begin where he begins, the epigraph at the beginning of the book: “Where is there a rock like, unshakeable certainty on which all human certainty could be built?” Is there such a rock, and if not what then? And what is the motivation for seeking such a rock? Does that quest already determine the final answer to the question, Does God Exist? Allow me a sidebar on Durkheim and the God=Society equation. On November 1, 1992, the Associated Press reported that Pope John Paul II formally

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proclaimed that the Roman Catholic Church had made a mistake in condemning Galileo for advocating that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Will there come a time when the Pope or other powerful religious leaders or theologians will acknowledge Durkheim’s equation or more generally the sociology of religion? Küng begins his quest at the feet – or mind – of Descartes. And he immediately introduces questions that will haunt his own quest: didn’t Descartes believe in his existence before he put it in doubt; and didn’t he already believe in God before he set out to prove God? God or a God surrogate has inspired many great minds to seek a single key that would unlock the secrets of life, the universe, and everything. That key has been thought to be God per se, or surrogates like “the universal field equation” or the “theory of everything.” Some physicists, the primary exponents of universal field theories and the theory of everything, like Mujadded A. Izaz (1988), believe that the only way such a theory can be constructed is to include God or make God per se the unified theory. One of the ways to read history is to see it as the progressive realization of Protagoras’(481-411 BCE) imperative that “man is the measure of all things.” This was a radical claim for his time since it meant that the individual human being, rather than a god or an unchanging moral law, is the ultimate source of value. Descartes represents an epochal turning point in Küng’s view in the unfolding of Protagoras’ imperative. For the medieval philosopher, certainty of God was the key to certainty of the self. Descartes represents a Protagorean moment, shifting the European consciousness toward certainty of the self as a key to the certainty of God. This Protagorean moment can also be viewed as culminating in the nineteenth century sociological decentering of self and the placing of the group at the center of social life. This begins the slow death of the myth of the individual. Küng is dimly aware of this movement, but his failure to grasp its full historico-cultural significance sustains his orientation to a Christian theology and the God of Jesus Christ. But it behooves us to continue to document his quest even if – and because – we already know where he will stand at the end of his quest. Historically as the Protagorean imperative unfolds it is always mixed in with contradictions on all sides. So while Descartes is developing the rationale for cogito ergo sum, while the ideal of mathematical certainty is becoming a feature of the unfolding scientific revolution, Descartes is dividing the universe into two different kinds of things, the hard things of the material world and the soft things of the mind, soul, and consciousness (Cartesian dualism). The issue is that the mind and the body though different natural kinds nonetheless are able to interact. This will give rise to what is in our time known as the “hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995): how is it possible for us to have phenomenal experiences, experiences that “feel like something?” Inanimate things, we assume or assert, do not have such feelings. In other words, the dilemma is to explain how a material thing like the brain can generate phenomenal experiences. Classically in philosophy this is the mind-brain problem, in theology it

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is the soul-body problem. One of the religious functions of the soul historically is to distinguish humans from other animals; in a secular age, the soul morphs into the mind which then serves not only to underwrite the distinction between humans and animals but also the distinction between humans and machines. The other contradiction Descartes embroils himself in involves his claim that faith is exempt from the general rules of evidence and offers the greatest certainty of all methods of establishing truth. It addresses the obscure content that cannot be accessed by reason. It is achieved by an act of will, not through the exercise of the intellect. We can make assertions about this obscure content without evidence because a God who cannot deceive us (a Cartesian postulate) predisposes us to faith as an avenue to His revelations. It is a brief leap from this view to the ontological argument that a perfect being (God) must exist, a leap that can only be supported if we accept a Platonic-Augustinian realism that assigns ideas a reality of their own. This argument does not look so persuasive to the twentiethand twenty-first-century mind, though there are still some unreconstructed Platonists among us, especially in mathematics. The eighteenth century was an important moment in the breakdown of the traditions of order, hierarchy, authority, discipline, Church, dogma, and faith which were still important pillars of values, ethics, and morals in the seventeenth century. One should read this as more writings on the wall pointing to modernities and post-modernities that while proclaiming the death of God and the end of traditional religion would still ring with hymns to traditional faith and belief. Küng turns his attention next to Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Pascal said that we were faced with two possibilities, two uncertainties regarding the God question: God is or He is not. Once again, it seems that the Age of Reason (late 1600s to mid-1800s) could not sustain an unequivocal, unwavering commitment to reason above all. Pascal said we couldn’t reason our way around the uncertainties about God; we were reduced to gamblers playing “You Bet Your Life.” Here “reason” seems nonetheless to show some life. A rational person should live his/ her life as if God exists. If you bet wrong and there is no God, your losses will be finite material ones and certain pleasures. If you bet correctly, your gains will be infinite (life everlasting in Heaven) and you will avoid the infinite loss of an eternity in Hell. The real value of Pascal’s Wager was that it ushered in important advances in probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism. More writings on the wall appear in the eighteenth century the full implications of which escape Küng once again. With materialism already in the air (the term is introduced by chemist Robert Boyle in 1661), the period between the late 1690s and the early 1800s is witness to the emergence of atheistic materialism. This was one of the achievements of the Encyclopedists (1751–1765). PierreSimon Laplace (1749–1827) famously presents his four volumes on Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon and is asked about the role of the Creator in this work; Laplace replies that he does not need the God hypothesis.

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At this point, we are faced with the possibility, in opposition to the entire apparatus of traditional authority, of a natural science without God. Küng is forced to ask at this point – and not for the first or last time – whether belief in God still has a future. The weight of history affords him little space for a conventional argument for God. So he adopts the strategy of a new future for God that takes this weighty history into account, especially the modern processes of secularization and emancipation. He paints a rosy picture of a “new awareness” of an improving relationship between natural science and theology. There were two related key challenges to theology and belief in the early twentieth century; one was the double movement to reduce philosophy to logic and linguistic analysis and mathematics to logic and symbolic analysis; the other was the effort to banish metaphysics. Theology, already damaged by the death of God movement and the nineteenth-century loss of faith (Lilla, 2007), now seemed to be a priori senseless. But the death blow could not be delivered in part because the opponents had gone too far in seeking strict objectivity freed of subjectivity. The early decades of the twentieth century saw one of the great philosophical ages led by the logical positivists and their debates with rivals like Karl Popper. Amidst all the positivist-anti-positivist noise there were some signs of new ideas boiling up out of the Age of the Social that had begun in the 1840s with the crystallization of the sociological disciplines. There were cracks in the armor of “cogito ergo sum”; Descartes’ “I think” became Russell’s “It thinks within me” and then Carnap’s “It thinks,” to be followed by the sociologist’s “sum ergo cogito.” The latter part of the Age of the Social mixed in with positivism and antipositivism churned up ideas about the limits of objective science that would eventually crystallize in the sociology of knowledge and science and then the concept of the social construction of science in the 1970s and thereafter. Popper shook up the logical foundations of science. Kuhn challenged verificationist and falsificationist models of science with his concept of paradigms or exemplars. Between the two World Wars and 1980 there was an “internal correction” that led from hyper-Cartesian rationality, logical positivism, and linguistic analysis “back again” to the necessity of history, psychology, sociology, and even “metaphysics.” Küng was once again on the right track but his faith disturbed his path. The frustrating thing for me is to watch Küng come up to the threshold of the sociological cogito and fail to grasp the moment. Go back to the epigraph I started this chapter with and you will see why that threshold could never take shape and substance for Küng. With God and theology under constant attack on various fronts especially since the 1800s, what strategy should the theologian motivated by faith adopt? Hostility between theology and natural science cannot lead to good news about God. Peaceful co-existence is in our time no more promising. The strategy for the theologian is to push for meaningful critical dialogue and cooperation between theology and natural science. Theology, philosophy, and natural science all face difficulties adapting to changes in the world picture. We are confronted

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as never before by one world and one humanity. One might imagine that a man of Küng’s brilliance would see the virtue of a God for one world and one humanity. But he is unable to escape the clutches of the Christian God. The Copernican revolution for our time, the one that follows on the Copernican revolutions identified with the theologies of Clement and Origen, then Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther, is nothing more nor less the a counter-revolution in favor of the Christian God and Jesus. Küng’s call for abandoning the medieval world picture and a transition to a new paradigm is not a transition at all as we will see. Rationality is not absolute; reason must be linked with willing and feeling; l’esprit de géometriè plus l’esprit de finesse. What has happened here? Küng’s paradigm shift has restored body-soul dualism! He keeps stressing the “absolute need” for a new modern understanding of God but resists his own call. But he bravely carries on a quest that keeps putting him back on an ancient path despite so many encounters along the way with the most profound thinkers in history. Inevitably, his quest leads him to Hegel. Hegel is one of the great unifiers, postulating an Absolute Spirit that unifies subject and object, being and thought, and real and ideal. God is at the center not of a rigidly mathematical system but of a universal dialectical system. God as Absolute Spirit has and is a history revealing Himself in His becoming. Hegel hand waves away the facts of suffering, pain, and death in order to defend world history as the history of the rational world. Küng takes his quest beyond Hegel in a search for God as a living God. Again we are promised a post-Copernican modern God in the world, transcendence in immanence, the hereafter in the here and now. To go beyond world history as the history of God we have to turn to Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and the atheistic view of world history as the history of humanity. It just so happens that Comte is considered one of the founders of sociology, and his rock of certainty is sociology as the religion of humanity. Recall that his mentor, Saint-Simon referred to sociology as the new Christianity. Comte’s vision of a new sociological positivistic world order ruled by sociologist priests quickly evaporated. The concept of the technologically driven progress of humanity was not going to fare well in the emerging industrial revolution and the coming World Wars of the twentieth century. Was there any hope for working out a science without religion and progress without God? Hegel’s S(s)pirit still shows some life in theologian de Chardin’s (1818–1955) vision of the universe as an evolution toward spirit, fully realized in the form of the personality of the universal Christ. And it shows up again in the mathematical philosopher A.N. Whitehead’s (1861–1947) concept of God and world as one, of God as the poet of the world, of God as a fellow sufferer. This is not a creator God in the Biblical sense, and in the end just more Hegelian speculation, too much optimism, too much absolute idealism. Popper, attacking Whitehead’s logic, complained about his contempt for argument and dogmatism. Where does Küng stand at this point? He is not yet prepared to answer yes or no to the question of God’s existence. In another effort to put himself on a path to a new

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concept of God for moderns, he writes that the question must be asked without reference to Greek, medieval, or early modern assumptions. He reiterates his course correcting idea that given one world and one humanity, we are obliged to seek a critical dialogic collaboration between theology, natural science, modern philosophy, and modern thought. Social science, the most critical ingredient for a revolution in the God paradigm, is not going to be part of this collaboration. We are going to witness a “miracle” as Küng engages and grapples with the secularity and historicity of God and somehow is not moved off a path we can see from our bird’s eye view is headed straight for Christ. Küng opposes all efforts to make God a product of man. In spite of his apparent willingness to consider a paradigm shift in our understanding of God, he is blocked by (1) an unwillingness to contemplate a God manufactured by human beings; (2) the myth of individualism; he views history, biography, and culture through a lens that filters out social groups, social networks, and social construction; and (3) an overwhelming predisposition to faith in the Christian God. For Küng, God is the ground of all being and of all morals. Thinking now sociologically, God is to man and morals as the aether is to the propagation of light. If it’s true that we cannot prove or disprove God or the aether, we have the Einsteinian option of postulating God out of the equation. Let’s see now what happens when Küng considers sociological, materialist atheism. God is not, he asserts, a projection of man as Feuerbach claims. Nor is God consolation serving vested interests as Marx claims, neither is it an infantile illusion as Freud claims. After in-depth critical assessments of these thinkers, he finds that God is still an open question. He cannot help wondering, however, what would our situation be if God did not exist and never existed. Wouldn’t our world be different if in place of God there was a “bare nothing”? He is clearly aware that the choice isn’t between a God and nothing but between a God that possesses an immaterial ontology and a cultural ontology God. He understands that this is what Durkheim claims but simply ignores it. And in the case of Marx who gets the full critical treatment, he misses Marx’s sociological moments – his understanding of the social nature of self, being, and consciousness. What could be worse than atheism? The consequence of atheism, nihilism. And so we arrive at Nietzsche. Here as in all the other cases he considers, Küng’s critical faculties do not fail him; but neither do they advance him. Nietzsche is the embodiment of nihilism, at once patient, diagnostician, and therapist of that fatal disease. Perhaps Küng is right that at the end, with only living alone without God or morality left to him, Nietzsche failed to defeat his supposed adversaries, Wagner and God. But Küng fails to come to terms with the Nietzsche who dances, whose thinking sizzles, whose hammer reveals that the emperor is naked, and who is willing to make himself a guinea pig in the science of humanity. On the other hand, Küng recognizes that there is conflict in Nietzsche. The philosopher who proclaims “God is dead” is also the man who seeks God. The decisive rejection of Christianity, the narration of the true history of Christianity, is juxtaposed with respect for the person of Jesus. Cybulska (2016: 196) offers a detailed

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psychiatric deconstruction of Nietzsche’s ambivalence about God, tracing it to the traumatic loss of his father when he was five years old: [Nietzsche viewed himself as a battlefield, a man different from his writing]. Perhaps the Antichrist, as Nietzsche called himself, was yet another mask of hardness, behind which stood a reverent, spiritual, albeit embattled self. Having dived deeply in the atheism of Feuerbach (who stood Hegel on his head), Marx (who presupposes Feuerbach), and Freud (who presupposes all the great unbelievers of the nineteenth century), and Nietzsche (who doesn’t justify atheism but “simply” accepts “man created god” as a given) Küng concludes that atheism and nihilism, never mind the sociological God, have not been substantiated. From my perspective, it is not these individual thinkers that substantiate the death of God, it is the context, the social networks of their lives and works that substantiates it. And yet, Küng claims that nihilism is irrefutable; no rational argument can establish the impossibility of nihilism, neither can any theory justify it. Can nihilism be overcome? Is the alternative to nihilism to say “Yes to Reality”? Küng returns us to the basic attitude that has guided his quest from the very beginning: can we find a basic certainty to transcend the cogito, the credo, and the law of identity. So he turns to a claim that will drop him into the center of a fundamental sociological insight: he claims that irrationalism is the foundation of critical rationalism. This puts into question the reasonableness of reason and the reality of reality. How should we proceed? Should we align ourselves with fundamental mistrust or fundamental trust? Fundamental trust vanquishes nihilism factually. It is grounded in a reality that is uncertain. But this choice does not erase the basic question: To be or not to be? Where do we stand at this juncture? The world, my very existence, is groundless. If we stop here, God is at best uncertain and very likely does not exist. To avoid this conclusion we must simply affirm God, say “Yes” to God. Küng’s rationale here seems to me no more substantial than that he must avoid uncertainty at all costs. We have vanquished nihilism, now we must vanquish atheism. What can we say to those for whom life remains a riddle? Can we lead them to a solution? If it hasn’t been made clear already, now we must assert that what is at issue is the very term “God.” No term in human language has been more misused, stained, and desecrated. What is to be done? Let’s take a break from Küng’s quest to explore the sociological issue he raises when he claims that irrationalism is the grounds for critical rationalism. In Dawn (1881/2007: 26, aphorism 18), Nietzsche wrote: “Nothing has been more dearly bought than the minute portion of human reason and feeling of liberty upon which we now pride ourselves.” Indeed, as sociologist Randall Collins (1992: 3) writes, “We pride ourselves upon our rationality.” We call ourselves homo sapiens, the reasonable or reasoning animal. Nonetheless,

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Collins (1992: 3–40) seems to endorse Küng’s notion that there is something irrational about rationalism: Against all…common sense belief in rationality…sociology stands out as a dissenter. One of the central discoveries of sociology is that rationality is limited and appears only under certain conditions. More than that, society itself is ultimately based not upon reasoning or rational agreement but upon a non-rational foundation. Collins point was initially made by Emile Durkheim. Take as a specific example: rationally constructed contracts are based on a non-rational foundation. Durkheim called this “precontractual solidarity.” More generally, society is based on trust. We can work together not because of rationally agreed to arrangements but because of non-rational feelings that we can trust each other. We approached this way of thinking earlier in discussing the cooperative principle in evolution and the emergence of humans as always, already, and everywhere social. Ultimately, our rational calculations work because and to the extent they are underwritten by sentiments of trust. So there is a sociological rationale for Küng’s intuition that fundamental trust seems to be without foundations. The reason for this is that it is the foundation and it is upon this foundation that it is possible for us to deal with the uncertainties of reality. Humans can act without trust but the consequences for social life in such a situation are dire; they lead to a society that is fragile and vulnerable to fracturing and disintegration. In the light of all of this, Küng, echoing the distinguished Austrian philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), argues that we should not stop talking about God just because the word has been soiled and mauled. This is all the more reason we should keep talking about God but in a fresh way we approach with care. The question is: does the confirmation of God arise from reason or from faith? Whatever the case, we want a justifiable, not a blind, belief, a belief related to reality. Notice that Küng has already declared reality uncertain, and seems to be asking that we ground certainty of God in the uncertainty of reality. And so we arrive at the question: can God be proved? Proofs of God may have lost most of their medieval power to persuade, but they continue to fascinate us. What is possible and what is impossible when it comes to God proofs? The proofs for God assume that God’s factual existence can be proved in principle. What are we trying ascertain here? Is God knowable in principle as defined in Vatican 1, by the natural light of human reason from created things? Can God be “immediately experienced,” as Pascal suggests in his 1654 poem, “Memorial”? No, the question for Küng is can God be proved in principle and in fact. Classically, four proofs of God are distinguished: cosmological, teleological, ontological, and moral proof. The cosmological proof begins with our experience of movement, change, and causality in the world. Given the principle of

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causality, and the fact that we cannot abide an infinite regress, it follows that there must be a first cause. My reply to this proof is that in our contemporary technoscience world, the principle of causality has not gone uncontested. It has been contested at the highest levels of scientific and philosophical inquiry but has not erased the everyday causality of crossing the street and hard-boiling eggs. It now also seems unreasonable to simply claim that the infinite regress is meaningless. We saw earlier that if there is indeed a need to posit a first cause, there is no necessary reason to identify the first cause with God. The teleological proof is based on the order, appropriateness, purposefulness, and dynamism of the natural world and the human mind. In addition it assumes the principle of finality. The world and life are not “here” by chance; there is a world Creator; and there will be a final end. My reply to this proof is that we now have enough information from the sciences, mathematics, and probability theory to understand how random, chance processes could give rise to the order in the world and life. We also now know that principles of chaos are natural to nature and the brain. The question of order in the world and life seems to be more a matter of perspective than of some objective reality. Where is the order in earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones; where is the order in poverty, disease, pain, and suffering? Admittedly, science can find order in these phenomena (in their lawfulness) but they cannot be ordered in the everyday life of human beings. Can a rainbow, a sunset, or a daffodil offset a Holocaust, the Black Plague, starving children by the millions? The ontological proof is that God (innate in every human being) is the most perfect and necessary being. Perfection and necessity entail existence. This is a purely ideational logic and could lead to a priori proofs for the existence of the most improbable things, from unicorns to dragons. The moral proof is based on the assumption that the possibility of the “highest good” depends on the existence of God. The concept of culture is the immediate and transparent rebuttal to the moral proof. We don’t get our morals, values, or ethics from God but from culture. Küng is not unaware of the objections I raise to these proofs. In general, he argues that these proofs lack coercive force. The proofs I have reviewed here and in earlier sections of the book are viewed by Küng as ingenious cerebral logical thought-constructs by and for philosophical and theological specialists. They are so abstract and opaque that they can hold no conviction for the “average man.” He recognizes that principles of causality and finality are contested in contemporary science and philosophy. There is no good reason to exclude infinite series or the coincidence of pure facticity. In the end, Küng makes a crucial concession that will come back to haunt him: all the assumptions behind the God proofs reflect that what is to be proved is assumed to begin with. For every proof and argument, he writes, there is a counter-proof or argument. He agrees with the argument I gave earlier that can be put in the form of the question: Can the God in a proof still be God? If we are going to prove God with physics or mathematics, doesn’t that mean that God must be something like a physical or

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mathematical object? Can we really know God by way of a “smart syllogism?” He claims that there is not a single God proof that is universally accepted. Of course, this is true for all proofs. Karl Jaspers (1948/1958: 33) wrote that in the aftermath of Kant’s refutation of all God proofs and the failure of Hegel to restore the proofs in the wake of a new interest in the medieval proofs, it has now become urgent that we encourage a new philosophical appropriation of the proofs of God. In our contemporary situation we have on the one hand the argument from dialectical theology that it is not enough to assert God; God must be verified. On the other hand, natural theology tells us we should verify belief in God but eschew proofs. Küng asks if there is a middle ground between these two positions. We need a middle ground because we are dealing with a God who is not of this world, and is not accessible and knowable like the things of this world; it is a question of knowledge of a very different reality. But let me point out they we humans evolved in this world, we live and adapt to this reality. All of our senses are attuned to this world and this reality. Our senses have not evolved in order to access a “different” world, a “different” reality. We could say that our senses are fine-tuned for our everyday reality and not for some transcendental or supernatural reality. So now what? Küng argues that we are not bound to believe in God, so how are we to justify belief in God? Note here another example of Küng’s individualist worldview. Küng is convinced that there is a new openness and trust in the relationships between science and religion. Natural scientists do not, in general, have a specific relationship to religion, but social scientists tend to be negative about religion; and natural scientists are more negative about it than scientists of mentality. It appears to Küng that militant atheism has lost ground among scientists. Surveys of scientists over the course of the twentieth century clearly show a divide between religious belief among scientists and across the general population. Scientists are half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. Scientists are not, however, likely to be militant atheists. In any case, this does not mean that belief in God has gained ground. Küng believes that every situation is characterized by a universal constant (an absolute factor) and a particular variable determined by the situation. Duty is a function of the situation. This idea seems to put us close to a situational ethics. But Küng claims that in some situations duty can become an absolute categorical. The point here is that the ethical expression of the fundamental trust that is the primordial foundations of society is trust in God, belief in God. Without the rationally (?) justified trust in God, no ethical norm can be absolutely, ultimately justified. We need somehow to negotiate across the divide between the abstract God of the philosophers and the concrete God of the Bible. We need to see where we finally end up as we move from Hegel, de Chardin, and Whitehead to the modern understanding of the historical, secular God. And so we arrive at saying “Yes to the Christian God.” In his survey of the world religions, Küng claims that the gods of those religions, and the god of the philosophers leads only to ambiguity and inconsistency.

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The religious experience comes in many varieties (think William James here), diverse expressions that tend to be superficial, unbalanced, and “perhaps wrong.” We need clarification. How do we achieve this? The answer Küng claims, is religious reflection on religious experience. But as we have seen, experience itself is no guarantee of truth (fallacy of introspective transparency). An eternity of reflection on the experience of the earth as at rest could never reveal the nature of its multidimensional movements through space and time. Why should we think this “reflection on experience” will work in the case of God? What has been achieved as a result of this almost 1000 page quest? We have traveled nothing more nor less than a narrative proof that suffers from the problem of all God proofs. God was already present (assumed) at the beginning of the quest. Indeed, God accompanied Küng from the very beginning of the quest. And neither science, philosophy, comparative history of the world’s religions, or any of the dearly gained achievements of human reason could stay Küng from a pre-determined path to God, and not to just any God, not to a God for a newly envisioned multi-cultural humanity and global society, but to the God of Jesus Christ. As we come to the end of this quest it becomes important to know if there is a rationale for Küng’s optimism about the relationship between science and religion. The statistics on religious beliefs and practices among scientists across the decades don’t show anything like a general movement toward atheism. A significant number of scientists hold religious and spiritual beliefs and a majority do not see any conflict between science and religion. A conflict view is more pronounced in Western regions, a cooperative view is characteristic of India, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Scientists in the US, like members of the general populations, tend to view science and religion as non-overlapping magisteria. There are, however, particular circumstances which give rise to conflict. There is no evidence to suggest that scientists are in the vanguard of secular movements. In all these matters, context is important (Ecklund and Park, 2009; Ecklund, 2010; Ecklund, Johnson, et al., 2016; Ecklund and Scheitle, 2017). Can we settle the conflict between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Küng decides he can turn Nietzsche’s “history of an error” on its head to give us “the (future) history of a (newly) discovered truth.” The philosopher’s God, as we have seen, is nameless, abstract, indeterminate – He does not reveal Himself. By contrast, the Biblical faith (Note Bene!) in God is concrete and determinate. This is a little confusing; is it the faith in God that is concrete or the Biblical God that is concrete? Unlike the God of the philosophers, the Biblical God has a name, and reveals Himself in history as He who is and who will be, guiding, helpful, strengthening. What about the gods of the religions? According to Küng, they are definite but not coherent. They display many contrasting names and natures. But isn’t this true of the Gods of Israel? Can we really defend the idea that God reveals Himself as singular, monolithic, and unchanging across the history of

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Christianity? We can’t believe in all those varieties of gods across the world religions at the same time. But how can we believe in all those varieties of the Christian God across time, space, history, and culture? What is to be done? We need to reach a rationally justifiable decision about what to believe. But why “rationally” when we have been warned over and over about the irrational foundations of rationality? The answer – contradicting much of what we have encountered along this quest – is that the Biblical faith in God (why not the Biblical God?) is coherent, rationally justifiable, and proved itself historically. With all of the immense learning he exhibits on this quest, Küng is stuck in a medieval, even primitive, world searching for the absolutely finite, absolutely last reality; Where does the world and its order (Note Bene!) come from? This is the theological equivalent of an extreme law and order politics! Why are we born; why do we die, where does our moral awareness and sense of ethical norms come from? Two things to keep in mind at this point. First, putting a question mark at the end of a sentence (“Why are we born?”) doesn’t automatically make a sensible or answerable question. Second, some questions seem to evoke only philosophical and theological possibilities because we have not yet graduated to cultural awareness (“Where does our moral sense come from?”). Next we encounter the theologian’s fascination with quantum physics which seems to eschew determinism and (as in the case of Bohr) encourage a complementarity view of science and religion. I have dealt with the issues, problems, and fallacies associated with this view at length in Restivo (1983). I discussed the distinction between determinism and lawfulness earlier, a distinction hardly ever if ever found in the theological literature. Now we arrive with Küng at some God postulates: • • • • • • • • • • •

God is not a person in the way that “man” is a person. God is more than a person. God is not less than a person. God is not a neuter, not an “it.” God IS a God of “men.” Dialectical theology has failed to dissociate the philosopher’s God from the Biblical God. Natural theology has failed to harmonize the philosophical and the Biblical God. These “two” Gods can be “sublated” in the Hegelian sense. This sublated God is at once affirmed, negated, and transcended. This is the more divine God modern “man” has grown so critical of. Now, without having to give up “his” reason, “man” encounters a God he “can pray and offer sacrifice, again fall on his knees in awe and sing and dance before him” (1978: 666).

On reading this last line, my reaction was: “Not I, said the little red hen!” What is it that makes a person of such immense learning want to prostrate himself

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before God or “man”? What is it that leads some people like myself not to bend knee to human or God? Prostrating yourself before God makes it easy to prostrate yourself before human dictators. The height of worship is the lowest level of self-esteem. Do not bow your heads. Do not know your place. Defy the gods. You will be astonished how many of them turn out to have feet of clay. Salmon Rushdie (1996) And now at last, and inevitably, Küng leads us to the objective of our quest: the God of Jesus Christ. We arrive at the quod erat demonstrandum (QED) of this narrative proof: God exists. We have traveled through philosophical, theological, spiritual, scientific, and general intellectual mine fields, skirted the upheavals of comparative anthropology, confronted and ignored the limits of reason, and remained all the while chained to the myth of individualism and the Biblical God. The mine fields and upheavals failed to nourish and sustain any and all doubts. We have been led on this quest by someone with an amazing, and inspired capacity for ignoring a scientific worldview that in the late twentieth century became completely complicated, multiplied, pluralized, de-scientized; and a scientific worldview that has not yet invited social science into its robust core. We are left with the critical reasoning of the high-functioning schizophrenic. Küng’s almost 1000 page narrative proof in the end does nothing that Lonergan’s proof for the existence of God doesn’t do: If all reality is completely intelligible, then God exists. But all reality is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists. 1. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (Wittgenstein, 1922: 189). Life can educate one to belief in God. And experiences too are what brings this about; but don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the existence of this being, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us. (Wittgenstein, c. 1844/1984: 86e)

Epilogue: Intelligence and religiosity The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished ever in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion. John Stuart Mill (1873)

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Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. F. Nietzsche (1865) I began Chapter 10 by posing the question: Why do smart, educated people believe in God in the wake of the evidence against the existence of God I have reviewed in the preceding chapters? In fact, it appears that smart, educated people are more likely to be sceptics than believers. In a meta-analysis of sixty three studies, Zuckerman, Silberman, and Hall (2013) found a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity: The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. INTERPRETATIONS First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices. Their research confirms the results reported by Beckwith (1981/82, 1986). The results of a study by Ganzach and Gotlibovski (2013; see also Zuckerman, Li, Lin, and Hall, 2019) were consistence with earlier studies demonstrating the negative effect of intelligence on religiosity. Furthermore, intelligence is associated with rationalism, skepticism, and a sense of control over the natural world. This tends to lead to secularism. Within families, the more intelligent sibling tends to be less religious. This tends to rule out explanations based on variables such as socioeconomic status (SES). Longitudinal studies show that intelligent people become less religious over time. Intelligence is thus linked to the level of religiosity and to changes in religiosity over time. There are contrasting results on the impact of education on the effect of intelligence on religiosity. Short-circuiting more and less obvious problems of method, measurement, and definition, the overall trend of these studies seems unassailable. But intelligence and education, however we conceive and measure them, cannot be the key to lack of faith and belief. I have reviewed in earlier chapters the faith and belief of three theologians – Murphy, Foerst, and Küng – with extraordinary levels of education and intelligence. At the end of the day, faith and belief seem to come down one’s relationship to the

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unfathomable nature of life, the universe, and everything. If we can learn to face death and infinity without flinching, we will not be susceptible to belief and faith. If we cannot, we are likely to believe and have faith no matter our intelligence or education. In the dialectic between secular trends and religious revival trends, these studies read differently when considered in terms of the relationship between Europe and the United States. My view as a professor who taught students in South America, various countries in Europe, Canada, and China is that students in the US do not compare favorably with students in other parts of the world. The research tends to confirm my experiences. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) studies over the years have consistently ranked United States students below other countries in standard school subjects. A recent study showed that twenty countries have higher high school graduation rates that the United States. One criticism of the OECD studies is that they over-sample the poorest, least academically able students in the US. But even Poland whose child poverty rates are similar to those in the US has stronger student achievement and faster educational system improvements. In her The Smartest Kids in the World (2013), Amanda Ripley personalizes why American students perform at lower levels than students in other countries. She documents the stories of three American teenagers who leave the United States to study in Finland, South Korea, and Poland. Instead of the anti-intellectualism Richard Hofstadter (1962) classically identified with the American mythos, these students discovered students and a people who embraced intellectualism. Anti-intellectualism has been reborn in the era of the Donald J. Trump presidency. Given the evidence on the comparative educational achievements of the rest of the world it shouldn’t be surprising that about twenty-one percent of Europeans in thirty-two countries say that religion is “very important” in their lives whereas that figure is almost sixty percent in the United States. One of the factors at work here is different impacts of the Enlightenment. In Europe, the Enlightenment meant freedom from religion; in America, it meant protecting religious rights from interference by the state (Ford [2005], quoting sociologist of religion Grace Davie). While American values remain rooted in, as President Bush put it, the idea that all humans bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and Earth, European thinking tends to root its values in a tradition of secular humanism. The “religious revival” I’ve referred to previously has been a primarily Christian and Islamic phenomenon and has not had a robust presence in Europe (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2009). My own assessment is that this revival is more individualist and spiritual than it is religious and “church” focused with due recognition of the impacts of fundamentalism and the American megachurch movement.

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Appendix H: A realistic perspective on science, religion, and world order The famous tree of liberty is all that we have ever really had. Now, for want of nurture, it is dying before our eyes. Of course, the sky-god never liked it. But some of us did-and some of us do. So, perhaps, through facing who and what we are, we may achieve a nation not under God but under man-or should I say our common humanity? (Gore Vidal, 1992: 57; 1992; NOT 2020!) I have argued in this book for an end to God, the transcendental, the supernatural, theology, armchair philosophy, and a world in which miracles are possible. I have argued further that this exercise in comprehensive deicide is necessary if we are going to have any chance of solving the existential threats to humanity and our planet. At this particular juncture of history, biography, and culture realizing those arguments in practice is un-realistic. We need a transition, something that moves us from a world of believers and non-believers to a world of knowers. I outline such a transition in this epilogue. In general, my transition paradigm involves the following elements: 1. identify thought leaders in science, religion, and spirituality; 2. identify thought leaders among atheist and religious humanists; 3. identify, mobilize, and exploit similarities in the worldviews of the representatives of (1) and (2), especially around the issue of existential threats to humanity and the planet; 4. oppose the “new atheists” and their fellow travelers and underscore their failure to understand the essential humanity of religion and its significance for social and moral order; 5. clarify and publicize the nature and reality of the existential threats identified by various thought leaders; 6. educate and mobilize citizens and public officials to provoke the necessary policy decisions at all levels of government. My argument here is that identifying, mobilizing, and exploiting convergences in the worldviews of thought leaders in science, religion, and spirituality offers us our best chance to answer the current and looming existential threats to humanity and the planet. These three groups will network with a wider group of thought leaders in the intelligentsia and community leaders. The next step would be to link my proposal to Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion. The idea that compassion is common to all religions is true. And one of the qualities of religious and spiritual leaders is compassion. We don’t normally think of compassion in relation to science. But perhaps we can identify some form of compassion in science’s norms that we can link to compassion in religion and spirituality. In general, the problem we face along with Karen Armstrong, is that compassion is a centripetal force. It works to reinforce the boundaries and solidarity of a group.

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It’s possible to mobilize centrifugal forces and create cross-cultural systems of exchange and communication. But this is difficult, and it will be necessary to explore and exploit strategies to build cooperation between scientific, religious, and spiritual thought leaders that can strengthen the centrifugal forces of compassion. We would need to draw on public and private funds to try to identify the most creative representatives of the thought leaders and mobilize and focus their creativity in problem solving venues on the local, regional and global scale. This would, for example, mean funding seminars, symposia, workshops, and media events around the world focused on the existential threats we face. The existential threats we face as a species and a planet include climate change (including global warming and ozone layer depletion), the potential for an artificial intelligence singularity (including the “rise of the robots”), the escape of nano-particles from nano-technology laboratories and industrial sites, terrorism, nuclear war, the rise and spread of authoritarianism, the decline in ecological diversity, and the potential for increasingly lethal pandemics. One aspect of contemporary life that is not generally considered an existential threat but that should be included is loneliness. We know that loneliness disrupts our thinking, our will power, and our immune systems. I hypothesize that it is a major factor in all forms of violence. I also hypothesize that loneliness is not just an individual phenomenon. The separation of groups and cultures may cause collective loneliness. The “Big Question” is: have we passed the point where we might construct a new and global social solidarity on the basis of traditional religion? If, as some thinkers have proposed, we have, where can we turn? Pure secularism does not seem to have the compassionate energy of traditional religion. Can we look to a new form of transcendental experience that can break through the centripetal forces of compassion? And does this experience have to find its source in Godhead or can it ground itself in society itself ? Can society be the basis of a global transcendental experience? I am not calling for a conventional transcendental experience that depends on resurrecting ideas about transcendental and supernatural realms and entities. The transcendental experience I have in mind here is grounding global solidarity and compassion in a consciousness of society sui generis and the causal forces embedded in social groups. Can environmentalism ground this concept, can it become in functional equivalent terms, humanity’s religion? (Livermore, 2006).

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INDEX

Abbott, E. 101; Flatland 87, 101 abstraction 57–58 Abu Bakr 22 Aczel, A.D. 119–120 Adams, D.: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, The 39 “after God” movement 44–50 Age of Reason 164 Age of the Social (1840–1930) 88, 165 agni/fire 43–44, 152 agnosticism 11, 47, 59, 60 agnostics 5, 6, 36, 63, 73 Aisha 22 alchemists 16 Alexander 63 alienation 92, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133–135, 137, 143, 152 Allen, Woody 4 anarchism 73, 121, 138–140, 144, 145; epistemological 137, 140; scientific 139 ancestor worship 80, 116, 148 Anderson, R.D. 19 animists 44 Annie Hall (film) 4 Anselm 84, 111 anthropology 13, 14, 20, 22, 27, 29, 34, 40, 53, 54, 64, 69–71, 81, 84, 95, 97, 113, 125, 148, 158, 159, 174; Christian 71; scientific 71 apatheists 6 apophatic theology 101 Aquinas, T. 100, 123, 166 archaeology 29, 53, 64, 67, 126, 153

Archimedes 117, 141 Armstrong, J. 55 Armstrong, K. 54, 58, 60, 65, 177 Arnold, B. 88 Aron, R. 14 Asclepius 3 atheism 11, 30, 35, 36, 47, 54, 59, 60, 73, 154, 167, 168, 171, 172 atheistic capitalism 68 atheist leaners 6 atheists 6, 35–36, 59, 63 Augustine 117, 166 authoritarianism 31, 133, 178 Averroes 65, 67, 100 axiom of uniqueness 14 Bacon, R. 65 Bakunin, M. 125, 139, 159 Barker, D. 26 Barnes, B. 76–78 Barnes, H.E. 76 Battle of Yamama 22 Bayes, T. 108 Bayes’ Theorem 108–109 Beckford, J.A. 60 Beckwith B.P. 175 Beethoven, L. van 100 belongingness 42, 45, 64, 124, 126, 153–154 Bendegem, J.P. van 105, 110–111 Berger, P. 42, 82 Berlin School 75 Bertrand Russell Day (May 18) 30

190  Index

Bible/Biblical 20–23, 25, 29–31, 33–35, 37, 40, 49, 50, 55, 61, 65–67, 105, 158, 159, 160, 166, 171–174; Ethiopian Orthodox Church Bible 21; Luther Bible 61; Plantin Polyglot Bible 23; Roman Catholic Bible 21 Bidney, D. 44, 96 Blackburn, S. 31 Bloor, D. 76–78 Bonhoeffer, D. 49, 122–123 Book of Mormon 18–19 bootstrap physics 122 Boston Women’s Health Collective 144 boundaries 26, 57, 58, 71, 83, 96–98, 113, 114, 116, 119, 136, 177 bourgeois versus human science 133–135 Boyle, R. 164 Bringsjord, S. 111–112 Brother’s Law 83 Brown, D.: Da Vinci Code, The 16 Bruno, G. 16, 100 Buber, M. 169 Buddhism 35 burial 79–80 Butler, E.M.: Myth of the Magus, The 62, 74 Caesar, J. 63 Calvinism 155 Campanella, T. 65 Campbell, D. 31 Camus, A. 3 capitalism 68, 126, 130, 133, 134, 138, 141, 145, 155 Caputo, J. 48–50 Carlin, G. 118 Carlyle, T. 21 Cartesian dualism 163 Cartesian metaphysics 87 cataphatic theology 101 category mistake (category error) 87 Catholicism 60, 73, 97 Celsus 23; On the True Doctrine 20 ceremonies 5, 55, 149, 150 Charles Darwin Day (February 12) 30 Charter for Compassion 60, 127, 177 Chauvin, D. 1 Cheng, E. 104 Chew, G. 122 Christian anthropology 69 Christianity 8, 17, 18, 20, 33, 35, 42, 43, 49, 51, 53, 61, 81, 116, 166, 167, 173 Chubin, D. 76 Churchill, W. 89 Church of England 61

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 18 Cleary, H. 38 Clement of Alexandria 66, 118, 166; privation theory of evil 123 collective effervescence 43, 151 Collingwood, R.G. 15 Collins, R. 14, 27–28, 85, 98, 149, 150, 169 communism 73 community solidarity 126, 148 compassion 26, 32, 42, 45, 55, 58, 60, 80, 82, 115, 116, 124, 126, 127, 177, 178 Comte, A. 68, 166 concreteness 57 condottiere 42 Confucianism 155 Confucians 16, 155 Confucius 116 Conley, D. 125 cooperation 36, 47, 80, 91, 92, 124, 126, 165, 178 Copernicus 129 cosmology 13, 38, 41, 50, 73, 100, 105, 169 Council of Trent 61 creationism 58 creationist museums 54 Crestiani 20 crisis of modernity 74 Croce, B. 15 cultural folk science 81 culture(s) 64–65; of reasoning 40–43 Cybulska, E. 167–168 Czobel, G. 109 Dalai Lama 51, 54, 58, 60 Daly, M. 131, 142 dangerous occupation 15–17 Darwin, C. 56, 88, 129 Davis, A. 56 Dawkins, R. 5, 6; God Delusion, The 25 Dead Sea Scrolls, the 63 death of God 10, 11, 29, 44, 45, 47–50, 54, 59, 60, 73, 127, 159, 160, 164, 165, 168 death threats 15–16 de Chardin, T. 166, 171 de facto atheist 6 de facto theists 6 deists 100 deities, arguments for and against 5 Deleuze, G. 48 DeLillo, D.: Zero K 38 Dennett, D. 76 Dent, A. 39 dermatological neuroses 95

Index 191

Derrida, J. 31, 49, 138 Descartes, R. 28, 56, 111, 163, 164 Diet of Worms 12 Dirac, P. 132 dissocism 81 doubters 40–43 Douglas, M. 84, 97 Dowty, R. 112 dreams 17, 18, 44, 97, 151 Durkheim, E. 15, 26–28, 30, 43, 46, 56, 59, 81, 84, 97, 125, 127, 129, 150–151, 159, 162, 167, 169; Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The 73–74, 98; and theology 72–74 Durkheim’s Law 82 earth, as stationery 89 ecumenical limits 58–62 Eden, A. 88–89 Edge, D. 76 eHRAF Archaeology 148 eHRAF World Cultures 148 Einstein, A. 56, 66, 100, 124, 129, 141 Emerson, R.W. 100 emotional contagion 43, 98, 116, 151 empathy 32, 80 emperor’s new clothes 127–128 Engelhardt Jr., H.T. 47, 48 Enlightenment of the Enlightenment project 11–12 Enlightenment, the 30, 45, 49, 53, 81, 115, 119, 138, 145, 176; theology 45 epistemological anarchism 137, 140 epistemology 31, 89, 90, 137, 141–144 ethics 26, 45, 47, 51, 64, 67–69, 72, 142, 144, 154, 155, 164, 170, 171, 173 Euclid 141 Eusebius 117–118 evidence redux 113–118 evil, problem of 5, 100, 107, 121–123 evolution: social and 87–95; touch and 95–98 existence of God: Gödel’s mathematical proof of 107–108; Goldstein’s arguments for 109–110; Swinburne’s probability argument for 108–109 existential utilitarianism 4 face-to-computer interactions 92–93 fallacies: classic, from philosophy 87; types of 82–86 al-Farabi 65 Feuerbach, L. 168 Feyerabend, P. 131, 140–141 Ficino, M. 65

First Amendment 30–31, 37 First Vatican Council 100 Fisher, J. 112 Fish, S.: First, The 31 Flanagan, O. 69 Flannery, T. 55 Floyd, G. 1 Foerst, A. 69–72, 175 Foster, R. 55 Foucault, M. 131–132, 138 Francisco, M. 112 Frankenstein problem 94, 135 Franklin, R. 129 Freud, S. 21, 49, 168 Friedan, B. 56 Friedman, E.: Disappearance of God, The 160 Fuller, S. 94 fundamentalism 12, 74–78, 176 Galileo 129, 163 Ganzach, Y. 175 gay science 140 Genghis Khan 88 al-Ghazali 65 Gibbon, E. 21, 156 Gilman, C.P. 136 Ginsburg, R.B. 2 gnostics 6 Gödel, K. 56, 84, 105; existence of God, mathematical proof of 107–108 Goffman’s Law 83 Goldman, E. 56, 129 Goldstein, R. 56, 57, 102; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God 107, 109–110 Gotlibovski, C. 175 Gould, S.J. 85 Great Leap Forward 92 Great Mosque of San’a, Yemen 22 Greer, G. 56 group solidarity 150, 177 GT see guilelessness Thesis (GT) guilelessness Thesis (GT) 24 Gutenberg, J. 92 Guthrie, W. 41 Gyatso, T. 54 Habermas, J. 68 Hall, J.A. 175 hallucinations 18, 53, 151 halo effect 32 Haraway, D. 136, 145 Harding, S. 144 Hardy, T. 29, 159 Harrington, M. 59–61, 118; Politics at God’s Funeral, The 160

192  Index

Hawking, S. 94 Hegel, G.W.F. 56, 100, 166 Heisenberg, W. 56 Hemingway, E. 39 Heraclitus 100, 117 Hinduism 35, 66 Hitler, A. 88 Hobbes, T. 30 Hofstadter, R. 176 Homer 65, 117, 124 Horowitz, I.L. 139 Howard, R. 16 human inquiries 141–146 Humanity 2.0 93, 94 Human Relations Area Files 148 Hume, D. 41, 106, 123 Ibn Sina 65 ideal teacher 42 ignostics 6 imaginative reconstruction 15 immodest proposal 36–37 inconsistency thesis (IT) 25 individualism 42, 77, 80, 81, 84, 88, 126, 140, 167, 174 Insurrection Act 1 intelligence 174–176 Internal Life Fallacy 83 Irenaeus, St. 22 irrational scepticism 115 IT see inconsistency thesis (IT) Izaz, M.A. 163 Jaspers, K. 116, 171 Jefferson, T. 23–26, 37 Jehovah 25 Jenkins, D. 55 Jesus the Christ 19–20, 23–26, 34 John Paul II, Pope 162–163 Josephus 23; Antiquities of the Jews 20 journalism, contemporary religion in 26–33 joyous wisdom 140, 141 Judaism 22, 74, 154 Jung, C.G. 6 Justice of Tiberius 20 Kant, I. 49, 56 Knorr, K. 76 karma-transmigration theory 123 Kaufman, G.: Theological Imagination, The 72–73 Kelly, K. 94 Keysar, A. 36 Khomeini, A. 16

Kierkegaard, S. 49 knowers 40–43 Koperski, J. 41 Koran 21–23 Kropotkin, P. 125, 138–139 Kuhn, T. 75 Küng, H. 65, 99–100, 162–178; Does God Exist? 58, 162 Laertius, D. 11 LaLanne, J. 57 Lamanites 19 Laozi 100, 116 Laplace, P.-S. 164 Latour, B. 56, 75–76 Lawrence, D.H. 100 Leehhardt, M. 27 Leibniz, G.W 106, 109, 111 Leiter, B. 50 Leonard, J. 74 life, philosophy of 3–4 light 101–102 Lincoln, A. 88 logical encore 110–111 logic redux 111–112 Lonergan, B. 51, 174 Lorde, A. 137 Luhrmann, T.M. 152 Luther, M. 61, 166 Luxembourg, R. 56 Luxenberg, C. 16 Macrobius (aka Theodosius) 62 magicians 156–160 Maimonides 65, 100 Mannoury, G. 111 Martineau, H. 56, 136 Martin Luther King Day 30 Martyr, J. 117 Marx, K. 10, 12–13, 15, 27, 28, 48, 49, 56, 80–81, 97, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132–134, 139, 142–145, 159–160, 167 Marxism 71, 133–135, 145 May, T. 145 McCarraher, E. 72 McGowan, K. 16 Mead, M. 71 Melzer, A. 66, 74 Mencken, H.L. 29–30, 126, 154 Menglong, F. 1 mentifacts 44, 96 messiahs 156–160; social paradigm 33–34 Milbank, J.: Beyond Secular Order 72; Theology and Social Theory 72 Mill, J.S. 174

Index 193

Mills, C.W. 112, 130, 136 misplaced concreteness, fallacy of 87 mistake in reference 43 modern science 66, 70, 130, 131, 133, 134, 139–141, 143 Mohanty, C. 56 monotheism 148 Montague, A.: Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin 95 moral(s) 12, 22, 25, 36, 45, 47, 51, 59, 72, 95, 124–125, 164, 167; doctor 4, 8–9; order 22, 26, 27, 32, 47, 48, 57, 59, 79, 80, 105, 115, 124–127, 177; solidarity 149 morality 11, 24, 47, 48, 58, 80, 131, 140, 148, 149, 153, 154, 167 More, H. 65 Morgenbesser, S. 105 Mormonism 17–19 Muhammad 21–23 Muir, W. 23 Murphy, N. 68, 69, 72, 175 Musk, E. 94

NOMA Fallacy 85, 119–121 non-overlapping magesteria 125

Nag Hammadi Bible, The 63 Naïve Reason paradigm 40 Napoleon Bonaparte 30, 88 Napoleon Fallacy 85–86 National Institutes of Health (NIH) 144 National Science Foundation 125 natural science 16, 26, 44, 69, 70, 76, 84, 102, 103, 115, 121, 125, 135, 139, 165, 167 natural selection 26, 27, 79, 103 Navarro-Rivera, J. 36 Nelson, W. 11 “neque demonstra neque redargue fallacy” (“neither provable nor unprovable fallacy”) 84–85 neuroistic error 83 Nevins, A. 14 New Testament 21, 25, 26, 34, 45, 50, 67, 118, 158 Newton, I. 65, 129 Nietzsche, F. 16, 23, 27, 29, 42, 49, 80, 100, 125, 129, 139, 140, 143, 159, 167, 175; ambivalence about God 168; on joyous wisdom 140, 141; on moral doctor 8–9; “problem of Socrates” 3, 88; on profundity of the surface 48; Übermensch 42, 68; on voluntary death 6–8 nihilism 117, 145, 167, 168 NIH see National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Paksi, D. 76 panentheists 100 Parmenides 117 Pascal, B. 5, 164 Paterson, D. 55 Paul, A. 100 Penrose, R. 120 Percy, W. 47–48 personhood 70, 71 pessimism 9 Philo of Alexandria 20 physical science 16, 44, 51, 69, 70, 84, 102, 103, 121, 125 Pico 65 Pierce, C.S. 112 Plantin Polyglot Bible 23 Plato 3, 56, 63, 65, 100, 116; requiem for 117–118 Pliny the Younger 20 pluralism 13, 130, 131 politics, and religion 155–156 polytheism 148 Popper, K. 132, 165, 166 postmodernism 27, 46, 67, 74–78, 130, 135, 145 postmodern sociology 15 precontractual solidarity 31, 169 Presley, E. 158 Private Worlds Fallacy (aka philosopher’s fallacy) 83 profane 43–44

objectivity communities 113, 114, 116 O’Donovan, W.J. 95 OECD see Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) O’Keefe, D.L..: Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic 74 Old Testament 21, 25, 26, 152, 158 ontology 41, 44, 51, 87, 105, 108, 110, 111, 144, 152, 164, 167, 169, 170 open-mindedness 29, 81 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 176 Origen 166; Contra Celsum 20 Orpheus 65 Osiris 61, 62 Other Bible, The 63 Outline of World Cultures, The 148 outside agitators 1 overture 13–15

194  Index

profundity of the surface 48 programmed for criticism 62–64 pro-social behavior 80 Protagoras 30, 163 Protestantism 155 proto-religion 79 psychological reductionism 32 Psychologistic Fallacy (neuroistic fallacy) 83–84 PT see purity thesis (PT) Ptolemy 129 pure reason 56–58 pure science 31, 131, 138, 141 purity thesis (PT) 24 Pythagoras 100 QED see quod erat demonstrandum (QED) quod erat demonstrandum (QED) 174 radical science movement 134, 144 Ranke-Heinemann, U. 55, 58 rationality 31, 77, 78, 91, 100, 113, 118, 135, 136, 143, 166, 168, 169, 173; critical 18; hyper-Cartesian 165; non-rational foundations of 31; routinization of 75 rational science 18 rational scepticism 115 Ratzsch, D. 41 reincarnation 124, 148 relativism 27, 46, 75–76, 113, 131, 145 religion 14; abolition of 12; contemporary, in journalism 26–33; critical sociology of 79–98; criticism of 12–13; definition of 45–46; functions of 150–154; by the numbers, general overview of 34–36; politics and 155–156; proto-religion 79; realistic perspective on 178; and social change 46; sociology of, principles and patterns in 149–150; transcendental 154–155; types of 148; see also individual entries Religion Clause 31 religiosity 174–176 religious suffering 12 “respect for religion” paradigm 37 Restivo, S. 66, 76, 173; Einstein’s Brain 28 Restivo’s Law 83 rhythm 43, 46, 98 Riel, G.V. 118 Ripley, A.: Smartest Kids in the World, The 176 rites 59, 151, 152 rituals 5, 28, 40, 43, 46, 59, 60, 80, 84, 96, 97, 98, 103, 115, 116, 150, 151

Roosevelt, E. 88 Roosevelt, T. 88 Rorty, R. 69 Rossano, M. 80 Roszak, T. 65 Rousseau, J.J. 30 Rushdie, S.: Satanic Verses, The 15–16 Ryle, G. 43; Concept of Mind, The 87 Sabanovic, S. 112 sacred 43–44 Sagan, C. 100 Salk, J. 129 Santa Claus 124, 147 Schleiermacher, F. 30 science 15, 27, 28, 31, 74–78, 127; ambivalence about 130, 133, 137, 139; of ethics 69; gay 140; human versus bourgeois 133–135; modern 66, 70, 130, 131, 133, 134, 139–141, 143; natural 16, 26, 44, 69, 70, 76, 84, 102, 103, 115, 121, 125, 135, 139, 165, 167; physical 16, 44, 51, 69, 70, 84, 102, 103, 121, 125; and progressive thought 130–133; pure 31, 131, 138, 141; rational 18; realistic perspective on 177–178; social 17, 27, 40, 44, 57, 60, 68–71, 81, 83–85, 103, 115, 116, 121, 125, 134, 135, 137, 138, 159, 167, 174; as social relations 132–133; technoscience 133–137, 142, 170; without losing mind or voice, criticizing 135–138 science-as-a-social-problem formulation 144 scientific anarchism 139 scientific anthropology 71 scientific knowledge 136 scientific method 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 143 secularism 47, 49, 50, 54, 124, 175, 178 secularization 11, 29, 30, 36, 45, 72, 124, 126, 165 self-solidarity 29, 32 Seusippus 157–158 Seutonius 20 shamanism 80, 116 Shelley, M. 135 Signific Movement 111 Silberman, J. 175 Singham, M. 132 singularity 50, 93, 94, 178 slave catechism 160–161 Sloterdijk, P. 45–47 Smith, J., Jr. 17–18, 19, 22

Index 195

Smith, M. 78; Jesus the Magician 62; Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? 74 Smith, W.R. 159 Sobel, J.H. 106–107, 109, 123 social chaos 138–141 social construction(ism) 27, 60, 73, 75, 77, 81, 84, 103, 129, 141, 148, 158, 159, 165, 167 socialism 73; state 139 social justice 70, 141 social messiah paradigm 33–34 social order 26, 27, 33, 79, 124, 133, 142, 153, 177 social science 17, 27, 40, 44, 57, 60, 68–71, 81, 83–85, 103, 115, 116, 121, 125, 134, 135, 137, 138, 159, 167, 174 social solidarity 26, 29, 45, 46, 73, 80, 97, 98, 124, 126, 129, 152, 178 social theory 33, 72, 138–141, 143 societies, types of 148 socifacts 44, 96 sociological cogito 27–28 Socrates 16, 51, 66 Sojourner Truth Day 30 solidarity 47, 91, 127, 151; community 126, 148; group 150, 177; moral 149; precontractual 31, 169; rituals of 43; self-solidarity 29, 32; social 26, 29, 45, 46, 73, 80, 97, 98, 124, 126, 129, 152, 178 Spengler, O. 159 Spinoza, B. 100, 111 Spitzer, R. 50 Sprenger, A. 23 Stael, Madame de 56 Stanton, E.C.: Woman’s Bible, The 67 Stark, R. 118; Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief 59, 160 state socialism 139 STEAM 137 Stein, G. 56 STEM 137 St. Jerome 67 Stone, I.F. 67 Strauss, L. 66, 74 Stringer, R. 120–121 strong atheist 6 strong theists 6 ST see sublimity thesis (ST) sublimity thesis (ST) 24 Subscendental Fallacy (aka logician’s fallacy or Chomsky fallacy) 82–83 Swanson, G.E. 149

symbols 19, 33, 34, 41, 43, 44, 59, 60, 64–65, 72, 73, 78, 79, 83, 96–98, 118, 131, 138, 142, 149, 150, 153 systematic inquiry 28, 127 Tacitus 20, 23 Taylor, M.C. 45–47 Technium 93–95 technofacts 44, 96 technoscience 133–137, 142, 170 terror 10–12 Theaetetus 66 thee 102–107 theist leaners 6 theology 49, 50, 54, 58, 59, 68–72, 84, 102, 106, 109, 127, 160, 163, 165, 177; apophatic 101; cataphatic 101; Catholic 55; criticism of 13; dialectical 171, 173; Durkheim and 72–74; Enlightenment 45; natural 112, 123, 171, 173; political 23, 30 theology, criticism of 13 Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 61 Thomas Paine Day ( January 29) 30 Thoreau, H. 100 Thucydides 117 tolerance 19, 28, 29, 37, 42, 50–52, 54, 58, 69, 70, 81, 125, 127 Tolstoy, L.: War and Peace 89 Tolstoy Fallacy 85 totem 44, 150 touch 95–98 Transcendental Fallacy (aka theologian’s fallacy) 82 transcendental religions 154–155 Traweek, S. 76 Trevelyan, G.M. 14 Trismegistus, H. 65 truism 45, 60, 160 Trump, D.J. 1–2 truth 50–52, 53–78, 129 Tucker, B. 139 Ubayy bin Ka’b 22 Übermensch 42, 68 unnaturalness thesis (UT) 24 UT see unnaturalness thesis (UT) Vattimo, G. 48–50 Vedas 66, 152; arguments against deities in 5 veiled writing 65; redux 66–68 Vermes, G. 20 Vienna Circle 75 Voltaire 14, 140

196  Index

voluntary death 4, 6–8 Vygotsky, L. 71 Wade, N. 26–27; Faith Instinct, The 26, 79 Wagner, F. 14 Walby, S. 47–48 War of the Sixth Coalition 1812–1814 30 Warraq, I. 16 Washington, G. 88 Wayne, J. 88 Weber, M. 15, 34, 46, 68, 74, 111, 145–146, 155, 159 Weil, G. 23 Wellhausen, J. 23 Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 61 Whitehead, A.N. 87, 118, 166 Wiggins, C. 109 Wigner, E.: Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, The 57

Wittgenstein, L. 99, 162 Wolfe, T. 16 Wollstonecraft, M. 135, 136 wonderworkers 156–160 world order, realistic perspective on 177–178 Worldwide Independent Network/Gallup International Association 36 worship 5, 19, 62, 84, 117, 150, 154, 158, 174; ancestor 80, 116, 148 Wright, F.L. 73 Wright, W. 141–142 YouGov survey 55–56 Zarathustra 4 Zoroaster 62, 65 Zoroastrianism 151 Zuckerman, P. 36, 175