For as long as I’ve been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I’ve been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn’t seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As I wrote my new book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, I was drawing every step of the way — and my publisher, University of California Press, let me stick some of my pictures in the text.

In doing, I soon discovered, I was retracing the history of proof itself. Long before the mathematical symbols and notation we generally use today, ancient proofs were drawn in diagrams and images.

Now that the book is finished, I want to share the fun I’ve been having by making these drawings with you. The press has agreed to pony up some free books for a drawing contest, and here’s how to win one: Draw a proof of something, divine or otherwise, and tweet a scan or photo of it to #GodInProof, along with any explanation you’d like to add. (You can also email them to [email protected].) Selected proofs will appear here, where they’ll be entered for a chance to win a free book. Entries with the highest number of social media shares win. Multiple submissions are allowed, but only one book is allowed per winning author.

Download the PDF version of the contest postcard here.

The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

The gods—and, of course, I include under this title that whole ‘hemisphere of magic fiction’ which flows indirectly from them—the gods were not to paganism what they are to us. In classical poetry we hear plenty of them as objects of worship, of fear, of hatred; even comic characters. But pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake, is curiously rare. There is, I think, only the one passage in all Homer; and it is echoed only by Lucretius [Odyssey, vi, 41 & Lucretius?De Rerum Nat. iii, 18]. But Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. For he himself, in another place, has laid his finger on the secret: it is?religio that hides them. No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry?of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.

The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958 [1936]), p. 82.

My passage concludes a particularly confounding chapter in the book—chapter 8—where he goes back and forth between whether there is one mover or many, a process which requires some weird resorting to prime numbers and the momentary conclusion that there are either 47 or 55 movers, only then to determine that there can be only one. Irrespective of that, however, he is quite satisfied to accept that the stars which these movers move are themselves eternal, and indeed are actually eternal gods. It’s obvious to his astronomy and his reason. And that’s where we begin:

We should also consider tradition. From old—and indeed extremely ancient—times there has been handed down to our later age intimations of a mythical character to the effect that the stars are gods and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The further details were subsequently added in the manner of myth. Their purpose was the persuasion of the masses and general legislative and political expediency. For instance, the myths tell us that these gods are anthropomorphic or resemble some of the other animals and give us other, comparable extrapolations of the basic picture. If, then, we discard these accretions and consider the central feature, that they held the primary substances to be gods, we might well believe the claim to have been directly inspired. We might also conclude that, while it is highly probable that all possible arts and doctrines have been many times discovered and lost, these ancient cosmologies have been preserved, like holy relics, right up to the present day. It is these, and these alone, that we can know clearly of the ancestral—indeed primordial—beliefs. (Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred; Penguin, 1998.)

Why does this strike me so eerily? However much scholars today would like to forget it, the modern study of religion was founded on just this impulse. It was the hope of figures like Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell to take the myths and ritual of the “primitive” imagination and, by comparing and contrasting, synthesize for ourselves the truth buried under all the fluff, the essential archetypes that are real beneath, as Aristotle puts it, the “extrapolations” and “accretions.” There’s a noble ambition in such historical phenomenology, even though, as in the case of Aristotle’s eternal stars, it can be as mistaken as the mythologies themselves: to rescue the absurdities of one’s ancestors from themselves and find in them the truth that couldn’t be adequately appreciated earlier. Well, says Aristotle, now we can. This is what gods actually are and always have been: stars. Those wild mythologies are messengers, carrier pigeons whose messages now we can finally open. We need not declare war against our traditions, though they be false, for we can distill the truths hidden in them.

Speaking of war—as Alexander the Great traipsed across the Mediterranean and the steppes and the deserts building his great empire, he kept two things under his pillow: a dagger, and a copy of the Iliad that his teacher Aristotle had given him. Now Alexander wasn’t such a great student; born conquerors like him know early on that they won’t have much need for syllogisms. Gathering as much, the teacher didn’t bother giving his student any of his subtle philosophy, like the Ethics or the Organon, for the road. He gave him a good story. A mythology, about battle and glory and love and gods, and Alexander loved it enough to take it along.

Alexander conquered everything he saw, but of course after his death at age 32, the empire he built crumbled in the rivalries of his generals. It was fleeting, though its legacy was not. Those conquests spread Greek culture around the known world. As Alexander was clinging to his knife and his war stories, he was making way for scholars from Egypt to Persia to study his teacher’s delicate arguments, though they hadn’t stuck with Alexander himself. He, whether he knew it or not, with mythology under his pillow, was the carrier pigeon.

Hear, for instance, last week’s discussion hosted by Killing the Buddha, The Prison-Spirituality Complex. Also, in the current issue of Tricycle, I review a new book by one of the panelists at that event, Yale professor Caleb Smith. Since Tricycle is a Buddhist magazine, I took the opportunity, also, to interview and discuss Buddhists who are involved in prison work. (Unfortunately the review is available online only to subscribers. Buy it at your local Whole Foods!)

Solitude can be a vehicle for liberation, or it can tear a person apart; the American cult of reclusive individualism, after all, has given us wise men, intrepid pioneers, and mountaintop transcendentalists, but also desperate housewives and deranged unabombers. Caleb Smith, a professor of English at Yale, reveals in “The Prison and the American Imagination” that nowhere is this contraditction better and more brutally expressed than in our penal institutions.

Since the opening of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829, the corrections business in this country has carried on a love affair with isolation. Though well after passing from the control of its Quaker founders, the city ensured its flagship prison was suffused with their theology of the Inner Light. Inmates lived alone in cells lit by a single skylight—the “eye of God”—where they ate, slept, worked at handicrafts, and waited. The intention was that a man would drift into reveries of meditation, coming face to face with himself and the divine spark within. Prison, said one of Eastern State’s founding documents, will “teach him how to think.” Reformist hopes also took on the transformative language of born-again evangelism. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, imagined that upon an ex-con’s release people would proclaim, “This brother was lost, and is found—was dead and is alive.”

My instinct is that, with religion so centrally a part of the birth of the American prison disaster, religion will somehow have to be part of the solution.

[Slavoj Zizek] is one of several leading thinkers in recent years who, though coming out of a deeply secular and often-Marxist bent, have made a turn toward theology. In 1997, Alain Badiou published a study of the apostle Paul, whom he took as an exemplar of his own influential philosophy of the “event”. Three years later, Giorgio Agamben responded in Italian with The Time That Remains, a painstaking exegesis of the first ten words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The purpose of both was not a more enlightened piety, but an inquiry into the texture of revolution. Paul is significant to them because he ushered in, and in the process described, a genuinely transformational social movement.

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.

But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning onto Dekalb— See the little bulbous shapes down at the bottom-center, right next to the building? Well, just before I got into my building to run up the five flights of stairs carrying my bike on my shoulder, in that exact spot, there was a beautiful field of mammatus clouds—so named because they resemble the shape of a woman’s breast. The sun was setting, its orange light slipping under the dark cumulonimbus that had just delivered a thunderstorm, illuminating the space between the earth and its cloudy ceiling.

Mammatus clouds are the strangest things, rare as precious rocks. The only other time I remember seeing them was during the summer I spend driving around the West with my book of clouds, looking for every new variety I could find. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia. Pretty close. But not the surrounding mystery of the city.

Why do you slip away before I can trap you, you little animal? Nobody else saw you. Will they even believe me that I did? It was only you, and me, and the moments of life that disappear the instant they happen, leaving us passing things to wonder whether they (the moments) are enough.

Trolling around on the Internet today, I found this Canadian Masonic website which denies the conventional wisdom that the pyramid on the back of an American dollar bill is truly Masonic. Concerned that everything I know might start crumbling, I shot an email to Samuel Biagetti, who joined me in seeing Angels & Demons last week. He studies Freemasonry in the history department at Columbia University which makes him, he says, “a real real history grad student and a fake real symbologist.” If his answer isn’t symbology, I’m George Washington.

Masons today will sometimes deny the Masonic nature of the seal reverse because of the claim’s conspiratorial overtones.? This is part of a genre of literature downplaying Masonic power and debunking conspiratorial myths, which has been common particularly since the anti-masonic movement.

The specific argument here has several flaws, and in my opinion is totally incorrect and disingenuous.? First, it is true that the “Eye of Providence” was a common element in Renaissance and Enlightenment art, often seen looming over a religious scene and set within a triangle.

However, the reverse seal does not show an Eye of Providence over a Christian mythological scene of animals or angels, but rather atop an architectural form, and an Egyptian one at that.? Most importantly, the architectural form is unfinished, with a gap in the pyramid preventing the base from reaching the Eye that would complete it.? The “all-seeing eye” looming over an unfinished temple or tower is a typical theme of Masonic iconography in the eighteenth century (an American example can be seen in Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 146), and the Eye of Providence is in fact very common in all Masonic iconography (an example in Ibid., 88).? It echoes the Masons’ founding myths surrounding both the Tower of Babel and Hiram Abif, the architect whose murder prevented Solomon’s Temple from being completed according to the divine plan.? The simple pyramidal form and the slogan on the reverse seal allow its message to be read quite easily: the earthly order must be completed and perfected in order to reach the divine.? Many of the elements for the reverse seal was of course available to anybody in the Enlightenment, but its overall form is clearly Masonic influenced.

Secondly, the argument dissociates the process whereby the seal was created from Masonry by labelling many people willy-nilly as “non-Masons.”? It may be true that Franklin is the only absolute, undeniable, and overt Mason on the committee, but that does not mean that the other men were not Masons. Masonry was hugely popular in the American literate gentry; there are contemporary references to Jefferson being a Mason, and it is quite possible that he was; and many other men of the eighteenth century were discrete about their Masonic activity, and have only been identified as Masons long after their deaths.? Probabilistically speaking, it is almost impossible that Franklin was the only Mason involved in the development of the seal.? The Masonic membership of Francis Hopkinson, designer on the second committee who proposed the unfinished pyramid, is uncertain, but he was the son of Thomas Hopkinson, a Masonic grand master and close associate of Franklin. In my opinion, based on the Masonic themes of the seal, I would say res ipsa loquitur-the thing speaks for itself; we may not know exactly how or through whom Masonic ideas gave shape to the seal reverse, but they clearly did.

The moral of the story: symbology is out there after all. It is just hidden in more useful disciplines like history, art history, philosophy, religious studies, and anthropology. I would suspect that Joseph Campbell-style pop scholarship (mainly nonsense, though it’s hard not to love) is to blame for Dan Brown’s impression that Harvard is crawling with people studying symbols for their own sake. Historical symbols are worth studying not because they are ladders to ultimate truth or because they’ll help you stop clerical terrorists from blowing up the Vatican. Interpreting them is simply a part of the far more interesting, sensible, and diverse questions with which scholars concern themselves. But it’s still great fun.

Sure, it’s nice, but I would have thought no more of it but for a message from my dear friend Thinker Bill Hackett, Santa Barbara?o extraordinaire. He began:

I was impressed with the Globe people who did that little illustration.

If you find, who created the jewel, I’d like to ask for that person’s interpretation of what the illustration illustrates!

I’d discuss what I see, but I don’t want to pollute anyone else’s thinking before they put their own clearly in mind. I know what I see and will save for maybe later.

May I ask what you see?

Then, maybe ask if you will ask the artist what he intended?

(Or, “what she intended” except that I am over 40. And the “he” included “her”.)

Also, note well, please: I would like to buy an autographed original.

Seriously. My limit though is probably like the price of a good lunch — maybe two at Farmer Boy? ($25?)

Never to let Thinker Bill down, I duly got in touch with my editor at the Globe, who replied,

The illustration was done by the Ideas section’s art director, Greg Klee: he literally composed it as he designed the page. He’s very good — although I suspect he would not have nearly as much to say about its meaning as your friend hopes…

Not an hour passed (59 minutes to be precise) before I heard from the aptly-named Mr. Klee himself:

My intent was to show one person is walking away from the churches and the ‘rest of society’ and to be perfectly happy doing so. Is that deep enough? I’d love to know what Mr. Hackett saw?

Upon sharing these remarks with the Thinker, he saw fit to rejoin:

Noting the article’s illustration (which I found to be a first class illustration for my taste and opinion (rare)), I focused the aging visual sensors of it and they sent to the old upstairs computer which then whirred and went to its answering via “What is this? What do I see?”

The initial report was highly favorable. Very highly. “Positive! Positive! Positive! Worth considering. Worth considering. Worth considering. ”

Clean lines. Happy. Cheerful. Clearly positive!

And WOW…all about “religion” and yet with no arguing.

======

Towers and spires and domes and churches, temples, mosques?

… and all of them seen as a worthy and positive!

Wow. Good stuff.

==

Undefined but apparently nice people (Nice people. You know — people just like me. [ No wonder I liked the portrayal. ]

But that was not the end of it. 23 minutes later, Hackett continued:

Just as the semanticist said. “The meaning is not in the word. The meaning is in the mind.”

The illustration’s meaning is not in the illustration. The meaning is in the mind.

“Truth and beauty are in the mind of the beholder….”

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The Correct Vision of the Illustration

[ Note that I do not believe there is one “correct” vision. There are several, including the artist;s and yours and my own. ]

If you see the illustration as a charming positive, a whole crowd of people are heading toward their religion to get the spiritual lift and to enjoy the togetherness they anticipate from visiting their house of worship.

My vision? All very positive.

And this is topped off with a charming illustrated note that rings like crystal: One man is especially cheerful. Alive and well, he has already experienced his visit to his house of the spirit and is now so happy inside that he is called to whistle his pleasure.

And then, nearly six hours later!

Yeah! Publicity! Fame and fortuoon (sic) await! I very much liked the little illustration. Quite seriously think quite highly of it.

Do you see several interpretations? Example: The unchurched happy character doesn’t need all that stuff. The nonconformist may be either an early churchgoer should got happy ahead of the rush or perhaps a follower of some guru who believes God is best known by whistling on the streets?
==

As friend Vernon Johnson once said of real estate “deals”, so with churches and temples and mosques, and all… “Any deal’s a good deal if you look at it long enough.”

And, while on the general subject, everyone is roaring and rioting, hollering, ( and writing.) over the definition of the three-letter word.
==

Vastness over to you.

And finally, the next moring, the gentleman made a most appealing proposal (by “The Center” he means none other, of course, than The Center for the Study of Social Structures):

[ Between you and Mr, Klee cooperating in creating museum-quality, 100% response-drawing First Class letter mailings, The Center should garner at least one donor’s interest and support. Shucks, one billion is all we need.

And, you and Mr. Klee may thence enjoy Open Residence Fellowships with the Center in sunny Santa Barbara-by-the-Sea, with airline passes (for two, each, of course) good anytime you want and a well-stocked Center Guest Quarters (Maybe just at San Ysidro Ranch or the Biltmore? ]

As ever, let us heed Thinker Bill Hackett in his reminder (he is always giving such reminders) to look harder and give glory to the good things.