My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it’s the hype:

Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional ones and certainly more automated. But it also creates a means for corporate ownership and abuse to creep ever deeper into people’s lives through new and more invasive kinds of contracts. To perceive the world through a filter like Ethereum is to think of society as primarily contractual and algorithmic, rather than ethical, ambiguous and made up of flesh-and-blood human beings.

How this new ecosystem will take shape depends disproportionately on its early adopters and on those with the savvy to write its code — who may also make a lot of money from it. But tools like Ethereum are not just a business opportunity. They’re a testing ground for whatever virtual utopias people are able to translate into code, and the tests will have non-virtual effects. Idealists have as much to gain as entrepreneurs.?As for any utopia, though, the power struggles of the real world are sure to find their way in as well.

As a journalist, I’ve been doing the same. Everyone with a notebook or a camera seems to be covering the movement now, so I’m letting them do the work I was doing early on, when few others were there. I’m going through my notes and through my pictures and through my memories, trying to sort out where this came from and how. In the meantime, some more publications and appearances:

• My article “From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere” was the lead story of the October 31 issue of The Nation.?I subsequently discussed it on The John Batchelor Show.
• A bit of an essay of mine forthcoming in The Catholic Worker?newspaper is now up at OccupyWriters.com, a petition that I helped start with Jeff Sharlet and Kiera Feldman.
• An essay?on the meaning of “diversity of tactics” for Occupy Wall Street at Waging Nonviolence has been pretty widely circulated—and I hope its call for nonviolence will be heard. I’m told an edited version will appear in a new book being put out by YES! magazine next week.
• In an essay in?The New York Review of Books, Michael Greenberg mentioned the article of mine in the first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, adapted from my Nation?FAQ.

As I read the book, I kept coming across lots of parallels with my own work-in-progress about proofs for the existence of God. One thing about both that certainly sticks out: it’s all dudes.

I’m the questioner in bold, Brook is the answerer:

You note that most of the searchers you write about, maybe “not surprisingly,” are men. Why is that not surprising? Not surprisingly, too, I’ve found something similar in my work on the search for proofs of the existence of God, which has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman?

The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this book, not to find any full-fledged Eden-seeking women. I kept running into historical women on the edge of the search, who were always sort of “tsk-tsking” dreamier male Eden-seekers. The feminist Victoria Woodhull gave an entire lecture in 1871 refuting the idea; she said that any “schoolboy over the age of 12” who would read Genesis 2 and think it describes a literal place “ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” Others were more diplomatic. Gertrude Bell, who lived in Iraq for much of her adult life, only mentioned Eden once in her diaries: her friend William Willcocks had come to town, to discuss “Eden and other reasonable things.” She called him “dear old thing.”

I feel like this kind of biblical musing was a creative canvas for men, but it brought out a certain practical streak in women. Then of course there’s the stereotypical demonization of Eve—if Eden is the origin of women’s villainy and/or victimization, why would we want to go back there?

Also, keep an eye out for the review of Paradise Lust in the New York Times Book Review this weekend.

Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism movement.?My report appears today at Religion Dispatches. Instead of focusing on the arguments per se—for them, see a play-by-play at Common Sense Atheism—I spent my time hanging out with the debaters and the student organizers before and after the event. Here’s a bit of it:

Controversy was the intent all along. “The main reason we did it was for the discussion in the dorms,” says Malcolm Phelan, a junior, who helped put the debate together and gave the opening speech. He’s tall, a bit lanky, steady with his eye-contact, and erring on the side of clean-cut. Around here, he’s someone who can get things done and get money out of the administration. Even professors talk about him with a shade of awe. As a freshman he was class president, but then he quit student government for greater things. He also has a visionary streak, and a knack for stringing winged words together into crescendos. Busy Notre Dame students need this, he says. They live in an “upper-class Catholic Disneyland” and need to be shaken up. “I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an instigator, but—” he says, trailing off. His word, not mine.

Phelan’s co-conspirator behind the scenes was Arnav Dutt. Someone introduced him to me as The Thinker. While he talks, he looks down and pauses mid-sentence if it isn’t coming out exactly right, his eyes covered behind glasses and a Justin Beiber-type mop-top. He’s the child of a Catholic and a Hindu, both non-practicing. Like Phelan, Dutt considers himself an atheist, though his education has been mostly in Catholic environments. “This issue”—that of the debate—“has thrust itself on me my whole life.” He takes it seriously and wonders whether some of the critics are right; maybe a big debate is the wrong approach. When I ask what he thinks it will do for people, he turns pensive again. “There’s a big difference between what I think they’re getting and what I hope they’re getting,” he says.

While I was at Notre Dame, I had the pleasure of a long afternoon’s conversation with John O’Callaghan, a philosophy professor there who specializes in Thomist thought, and who runs the Jacques Maritain Center. Before the debate even happened—I guess the same afternoon we met—he put together a very different kind of essay from mine, a reminder that the debate’s apparent choice between religion and science isn’t one we have to make.

The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn’t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas’ Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and “most manifest” argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.

The upshot of all this should be obvious enough: if you’re looking for the subtle truth, maybe a big staged debate like this isn’t the place to find it.

I remember an instance of good, anyway, with or without God, when Arnav Dutt and I were leaving the debate. A woman dropped her pocketbook as she started walking out into the rain. A handful of others around noticed, and called out—“Miss! Miss!”—and handed it to her. “That’s nice to see, after this,” I heard Dutt mutter. I think I also heard some irony.

Today at The Immanent Frame, I have the pleasure of sharing a conversation I had with Ann about her new book, as well as her distinguished new role as president of the American Academy of Religion.

NS: Like your plans for the AAR, Religious Experience Reconsidered attempts to expose humanists and social scientists to new approaches in the study of religion. What obstacles need to be overcome?AT: There have been certain problems in the study of religion that we keep coming back to and gnawing on without being able to solve very well. One is the relationship between experience and what we call religion; another is whether, when you’re defining religion, it is a unique—or sui generis—thing apart from other things; and a third is the threat of reductionism. All of these have been inhibiting our ability to bring scientific approaches to bear on the study of religion. What I try to do in this book is to open up pathways that will make it easier to engage the scientific literature on the study of the mind without simplifying the conceptual framework in ways that would frustrate scholars of religion. What I’m working on is just one possible avenue for doing this, but however we do it, we have to responsibly connect the study of religion to other disciplines. Humans are biological beings; we’re cultural animals, as one psychologist puts it. We therefore have to take our biology into account, as well as culture, and the way the two have interacted over the course of human history.

Jean-Luc Marion wrote, at the opening of his book God without Being, “One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure.”

Today, at the remarkable online journal Triple Canopy, I’ve got an essay that’s about the closest thing I’ve so far come to writing theology. It’s called “Divine Wilderness.” It is a project, actually, that I’ve been working on for some years now—originally when I was 19 years old studying computer science, then in a very confusing essay I wrote two years later, and, most recently, with a talk I gave at the Bushwick Reading Series. Thanks to the guys at Triple Canopy, the essay—as well as the accompanying images and computer code—are finally in a form that approaches comprehensibility. I hope.

They situate it in an issue called “Urbanisms: Master Plans,” putting the theological abstractions of my piece squarely in the context of architecture and urban design. It really is a wonderful thing to do to abstraction—to thrust it onto the ground, to put it among things and ask, “What have you to say to one another?” So the reflection is theological, but its consequence is intended to be of the world. I very much recommend reading it in the context of the issue as a whole, which is being slowly published a piece or two at a time.

I’ll leave you with the passage that inspired the whole project, which I discovered hidden away in David Cayley’s 1992 book Ivan Illich in Conversation. The characters are Illich and Jacques Maritain, the neo-Thomist French existentialist philosopher.

In a 1988 interview, the priest-turned-radical Ivan Illich recalls a 1957 encounter with Maritain. Illich wondered why there was no reference “to the concept of planning” in his work.

[Maritain] asked me if this was an English word for “accounting,” and I told him no… if it was for “engineering,” and I said no… and then at a certain moment he said to me, “Ah! Je comprends, mon cher ami, maintenant je comprends. Now I finally understand. C’est une nouvelle espèce du péché de présomption. Planning is a new variety of the sin of pride.”

Find out what he means at Triple Canopy.

You know Iceland? The tranquil little island nation northwest of Ireland that looks like a flying cow without legs? No place had been immediately hit harder by the economic tailspin, its banks having gorged themselves full on a plate of Europe’s most toxic assets. So get this: no other country has a higher rate of belief in monkey-to-man evolution—not one. Coincidence? The man thought not.

For more, rush on over to Viceland.

Search magazine has just posted “Evolving Allah,” an article of mine on how people think about evolution in the Middle East. More in-depth than my earlier piece for Seed, it revolves around my interview with Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar), the leader of a Turkish religious community known for his passion for creationism.

When Oktar arrived, he was wearing a variation of his usual outfit: black slacks, black blazer, and black Versace T-shirt. He greeted me kindly, but had no interest in small talk either before or after the interview. We sat in elegant white upholstered chairs and drank peach juice. He answered my questions in long paragraphs, making clear to me what he sees as the cosmic urgency of his struggle. The translator raced to keep up on his notepad.

“God created Darwinism to test human beings,” he explained. “Thousands were caught in this godly test, and they failed in this test. Even a child would not believe in the dictates of Darwinism.”

That said, the emphasis of the article is not on Yahya’s polished polemic. I instead try to focus on the many Muslims I met who had quite sensible views about evolution, and who are eager to learn more about it. In this way, I echo Salman Hameed’s argument that the matter of evolution in the Muslim world is right now very much an open question.

One encounter that was particularly striking, which I don’t have the chance to discuss in the article, was at Dana Nature Preserve in Jordan, a beautiful canyon that has been protected as an animal habitat and a place to enjoy nature. Abu Ahmed, the manager, was an older man who described himself as “nearly illiterate.” When I first asked him about evolution, he said, Islam doesn’t allow it. Nature was created for the purpose of man—whenever nature turns against us it is because we have interfered with it. All is a balance, and man was created at the end by God, not from monkeys.

But I had gotten him thinking. The next day at breakfast he came to me and asked why, if evolution is true, monkeys don’t turn into people. I explained the principle of common ancestry. He was interested when I suggested how God might have worked through the evolutionary process. At the end, as we left, he approached me again to apologize if he seemed to be saying that others are wrong. He had only offered his opinion and was eager to know more.

Ibrahim, a young ecologist at the park, said that evolution was taught to him in school, in biology class. As he understands it, evolution is compatible with the Qur’an. But his teacher told them they didn’t have to believe evolution is true.

We cannot let Harun Yahya represent the Muslim world’s views—on anything, really. Let the conversation continue, and let it go more smoothly there than it did in the West.

To celebrate, I have essay in today’s Religion Dispatches called “Five Things We Can Learn From Creationists.” It’s actually something I’ve been meaning to write since doing my 2006 college thesis on public performance in the evolution controversies. Amidst all the necessary creationist-bashing out there, I’ve always wanted to point out some of the little benefits that creationism has brought us. Who cares if they’re probably less significant than the damage?

Don’t worry, I’m a neo-Darwinian fundamentalist (Catholic, too) bred on old-school Richard Dawkins. My heart melts at the very sight of Carl Sagan and his angelic Ann Druyan. But I’ve also had fleeting moments, deep in the basement of my old college library, where Phillip E. Johnson convinced me evolution is all a materialist sham. I’ve eaten fish on the Bosporus with the sidekicks of the Turkish creationist guru Harun Yahya and, you know what? I had a great time (meeting Yahya himself was a bit more awkward). So here’s to good, old-fashioned, intransigent creationism!

Enjoy!

Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to their posterity a tradition, in the form of a myth, that these bodies are gods, and that the divine encloses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical form with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian expediency; they say these gods are in the form of men or like some of the other animals, and they say other things consequent on and similar to these which we have mentioned. But if one were to separate the first point from these additions and take it alone-that they thought the first substances to be gods, one must regard this as an inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and each science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions, with others, have been preserved until the present like relics of the ancient treasure. Only thus far, then, is the opinion of our ancestors and of our earliest predecessors clear to us.

This passage I offer as one of the great early moments in the study of religion. Aristotle’s ecstasy is one that would be repeated many times since, driving scholars to scour the depths of beliefs of people they deem less enlightened. They can celebrate the roundabout truth of such beliefs, but only once framed in the latest and greatest science. Such a discovery is so exciting because it testifies both to the intrinsic wisdom of the human race and to the magnificent uniqueness of the new.

I think of Feuerbach, who proclaimed (to Marx’s delight) that the essence of Christianity would only be fulfilled in its translation to scientific atheism. Or Mircea Eliade, who taught us to distill the real core of the religions by methodically comparing ancient intuitions the world over.

At home in Virginia recently, a new friend shared a rich and peculiar book: Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, published in 1998 by Putnam. It relishes fully in Aristotle’s ecstasy (indeed, with Eliade in hand), bringing to it all the genuine originality, as well as wishful thinking, that accompany the genre in each incarnation.

Narby is an anthropologist by trade, and at the outset we find him doing fieldwork among the Ashaninca people of the Peruvian rainforest. He studies, with activist ambitions, their sustainable stewardship practices and their astonishing medical knowledge. But then he begins to ask where it all comes from. The Western hypothesis—that some trial-and-error process of natural selection, over thousands of years, managed to turn out some beneficial habits and understanding—doesn’t satisfy him. With no other alternative, he begins to take the Ashaninca shamans’ own explanation at face value: they get their knowledge from drug-induced hallucinations which, incidentally, are filled with serpents.

This sets Narby off on an adventure of scholarly gumshoeing. He finds that these serpents show up everywhere in “primitive” mythologies—often a pair of them intertwined. So what would intertwined snakes have to do with life-giving knowledge? DNA! The double helix! Thus he sets off on a grand pseudo-scientific journey of mystical hypothesizing. Could DNA be emitting low-level but detectable radio waves that then show up in hallucinations? Could this be The Secret of Consciousness? Whatever they are, Narby intuits, they sure didn’t come from any old Darwinian evolution. No; without a doubt, we’re talking extraterrestrial origin.

(I asked Robert Temple about this, since his classic The Sirius Mystery also deals with extraterrestrial reptilians as the secret of life. He had never heard of Narby’s book but immediately ordered it with great interest.)

By the end of The Cosmic Serpent, I felt perfectly dizzy. Not enough, however, to be terribly convinced that Narby is on to something that our rationalism-blinded science has missed entirely, as he claims. He sells short the power—a power almost mystical in its mundaneness—of evolutionary processes. DNA could have evolved, as could have human consciousness, as could have a vast supply of indigenous knowledge that is the envy of the most advanced pharmaceutical labs. There is plenty of evidence in computer simulation studies, for instance, to suggest this.

Still, Narby is right to listen to the shamans. Just “evolution” is not the whole story of how they obtained their knowledge (or even the origin of DNA), only the vaguest outline of one. The development of science, too, has been a process of evolution, ever accumulating. But what makes science work, and what makes shamanism work, is not evolution alone but the specific, complex, cultural practices that drive it—whether they be Ph.D. programs or visions of snakes. These things matter absolutely. They give rise to knowledge that couldn’t be created in any other way. Evolution should not be a way to write off shamanic visions but a way to understand their significance.

The evolution of cultures often works in ways that try to cover their own tracks, that act as if their knowledge came from nowhere, or nowhere normal, when it really came from somewhere, and everywhere is normal. In each generation, in the name of the new and of self-reliance, we claim values as uniquely ours that in fact have quietly passed on and on through history. I am working now to argue that the proofs for the existence of God, probably like the shamans’ visions, are an act of covering up the real origins of our knowledge—pretending to have discovered for ourselves the things we actually, at least in outline, learned from our ancestors. This is essentially what Pierre Bourdieu spoke of as misrecognition. Despite the word’s pejorative connotation, it must be remembered that social transactions require misrecognition to function. The cover-ups cannot quite be done away with. They are a part of the social and intellectual substance in which we live.

Both Narby and Aristotle, casting their glances back and forth between ancient knowledge and the newest of the new, cannot help but erode the distinction between the two. We are always natives and always moderns. Just when some possibility arises of knowing the real truth at least, it can reveal itself to be a hollow shell, an invention of crass pragmatism just like what it was meant to replace.