There’s a prophecy in the Book of Joel, paraphrased later in the New Testament: “Your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.” Maybe something of that is being fulfilled in the simultaneously tightening and loosening effect of Craig’s presence. One on one, the younger students err on the side of acting holier-than-thou, while the older ones let a mild curse word or two slip. For both, this philosophy is changing their lives.

Read the whole article at The Chronicle.

Also, check out my addendum at Killing the Buddha: “7 Habits of a Highly Effective Philosopher.”

After ten years in the making, five years in the writing, and a few days doing little drawings, my first book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, is now becoming available. This is a guide on how you can get it for yourself and—please, please please!—help spread the word.

Buy the book

There are some choices for how to do this.

• Get it direct from University of California Press—with the discount code 13W3359 it costs just $27.96 for the hardcover. Shipping now!
• Help Amazon put everyone else out of business by ordering it there for their ever-varying low price—though it won’t ship until around the pub date on June 10. And leave a review if you’re so inclined!
• Ask for it at your local bookstore or find it wherever else books are sold.

The ebook version isn’t out quite yet, but it will be coming in a few weeks.

Come to the party

It isn’t a book release without a party!

• The big main release event, “An Evening of Song and Abstraction,” will take place on June 4 at 7 p.m. at the gorgeous Cathedral of St.?Joseph in Brooklyn. I will be reading from the book along with sensuous, hanting renditions of medieval music by the ensemble Resonanda, which is reuniting for the occasion.
  • RSVP and invite your friends on the Facebook event page
  • Retweet this tweet
• Other God in Proof events are in the works, in New York City and elsewhere. If you want to help arrange an event in your area, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Spread the word

Media is social nowadays, so I can’t do this without you.

• Tell your friends the old-fashioned way: There’s no substitute for that.
• Share the link: To send people straight to the basic info and buying options, this webpage is where I’m stashing all the latest updates and reviews.
  • Share this Facebook post
  • Retweet this tweet
• Review it on Amazon, Goodreads, or B&N: If you liked the book, tell the world why!
• Draw your own proof: Already, some people who’ve read the book have felt inspired to come up with proofs for various things of their own! I’ve set up a proof-making contest, which I hope you’ll enter, and the most popular entries stand to win free copies of the book courtesy of UC Press. See what others have come up with at GodInProof.com, and enter by tweeting proofs to #GodInProof or emailing them to [email protected].

Finally…

…a word of thanks. I am so grateful for your support and your willingness to help God in Proof reach readers who might not otherwise find it. I can’t do this without you, and I’d love to hear what you think about the book.

Resonanda was founded in December 2004 by Stephen Higa, who is currently a professor of medieval history at Bennington College. Since its inception, Resonanda’s members have taken an experimental approach to the performance of medieval song. In order to resurrect this antique repertoire, they work closely with medieval treatises and the nuanced period notation, relying heavily on improvisation, oral learning, and a wide variety of reconstructed vocal techniques. Resonanda savors lilting melodies, startling harmonies, and striking voices blending with fervent clarity and naked devotion.

Staff from Unnamable Books, an independent bookstore located nearby in Prospect Heights, will be present with copies of God in Proof for sale.

An after-party will be held following the performance with excellent beer, wine, and small dishes at Atlantic Co., 622 Washington Avenue.

RSVP on Facebook here.

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.

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.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs returned to the stage earlier this month to announce a long-awaited new product: iCloud. “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,” he said. “We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” No longer will the data that circumscribe our lives, from our dental records to our unfinished novels, remain confined to the tangible shells that presently contain them. They’ll live elsewhere, up there, in a better place.

Apple may be the latest to try, but no company has puffed out more clouds than Google. All of the Google services so many of us depend on — Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, YouTube, Picasa — lure our electronic selves, bit by bit, out of our computers and up into the cloud. If the cloud is a heaven for our data, a better place up in the sky, then Google is, well, kind of like God. But what kind of God?

Some have actually tried to find out. Their efforts may appear to be mere intellectual exercises. But they raise serious questions about the nature of faith. In 2004, a Universal Life Church minister named Peter Olsen started the Universal Church of Google; last year, the misleadingly named First Church of Google appeared as well. But by far the most developed denomination is the Church of Google, founded by a reclusive young Canadian around 2006. It comes complete with scriptures, ministers, prayers, a holiday and, best of all, nine proofs that Google is “the closest thing to a ‘god’ human beings have ever directly experienced.”

Read the rest: “Google as God.”

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 interview Colin Jager, professor of English at Rutgers and an authority on natural theology in British romanticism. He’s the author of, literally, The Book of God. Our conversation touches on many things swirling through my mind in connection with the book I’m working on—design, debate, and the existence of God. Here’s a bit of the exchange with Jager:

NS: The design arguments for God’s existence that you address in The Book of God are typically treated by philosophers and the public as sheer abstractions, or even scientific hypotheses; why treat them instead as literary creations?

CJ: No one discipline owns the design argument and its critiques. Historically, the distinctions that people typically draw today among literature, philosophy, and theology just don’t hold up. Professional literary study, especially, has only been around for a hundred years or so. A thinker like David Hume, who is very important to the story I tell about design, did not think of himself as a philosopher but as man of letters: he wrote history, philosophy, and theology, and he served as a diplomatic secretary. This was a typical “literary” career. I try to restore some of that broad range to the topics I write about—though no diplomats have signed me up yet!

NS: What’s an example of how you, as a scholar of literature, can shed light on a philosophical debate?

CJ: In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo, who is skeptical of design arguments, wins the battle, but Cleanthes, who supports them, wins the war. One thing Hume might be suggesting is that if you’re on Philo’s team, you’d best give up your belief that better arguments can win the day all on their own. Yes, the philosophical or conceptual idea of design seems rather abstract, but, at the same time, those arguments are lived and experienced by real people in real time. This is one thing Hume figured out—and it’s a literary point, if you want to put it that way: the rhetoric, the habits of mind, the practices of sociability that accompany what we could call the culture of design aren’t just window-dressing for some philosophical argument. Those things are the argument. That’s why the culture of design is easier to come at through literature rather than the history of philosophy—through practice rather than theory, if you will. We’ve misunderstood the way secularization works if we think that better arguments drive the discussion.

Here’s philosopher Mark Johnston to the rescue, with Saving God: Religion After Idolatry, a book published last year by Princeton University Press. It has met a warm, unusually wide reception; in The New Yorker James Wood called it “the non-fiction book I most enjoyed this year,” and it’s slated to wrangle an award at the American Academy of Religion meeting this November. In the elegant, one-page preface, Johnston spells out what we have to hope for, which tantalizingly coincides with what so many of us need:

One kind of ideal reader would be an intelligent young person who is religious, but feels that his or her genuine religious impulses are being strangled by what he or she is being asked to believe, on less than convincing authority, about the nature of reality.

What follows, true to his promise, speaks to the best features of the late-adolescent imagination, the mind of that crucial time when many people end up forming their lifelong religious commitments, hardly ever with the care and prudence such commitments might seem to call for. Somewhere between an academic monograph and a manifesto, Saving God alternates from epic, not-quite-substantiated pronouncements to obsessively-precise tangents. Either it’ll change your life or (to use Johnston’s words, not mine) waste your time.

The gist is this: most of what goes by the name of religion is really idolatry—especially the appeal to supernaturalism. The only kind of God that satisfies the ancient claim of being the “Highest One” is a God of this world, offering no selfish fantasy of paradise in the next. This God is perfectly in tune with the immanent, Carl Sagan-ite account of science, yet one can also find information about Him in scriptures and religious traditions, selectively read. It’s a God that calls to mind, for instance, Spinoza’s “God or Nature”; J. N. Findlay’s 1948 paper claiming that the object of the ontological argument for God’s existence must be something higher than the God of religion; and sociologist Philip Rieff’s critique of the gods we invent to serve our own desires—religious, clinical, and otherwise. The second half of Saving God features a series of technical moves that, as best I can gather, is an attempt to squeeze some kind of Heideggerian phenomenology into the back door of analytic philosophy, which in turn makes room for introducing a close-to Hegelian view of God as Being’s self-disclosure to beings in history—yada, yada, yada.

All this is to say (and here I am imitating Johnston’s alternating rhetoric referred to above) that God is here and now, not beyond. Inscribed in all the fluff and error of religion—even in the story of the Christian Passion—there are basic truths about the universe and the Mind that pervades it which philosophy, fortunately, has the means to extract.

I noted recently the use of this strategy of “truth-ing mythology” by Aristotle in the Metaphyiscs, the use of popular religious tradition as a bearer of hidden truth. Aristotle takes the belief that the planets and stars represent the eternal gods of myth to be the relic of a truer, ancient knowledge that the stars are actually eternal godlike orbs—not capricious Zeus and Hera, but geometric and impersonal. It’s a plausible conclusion for the fourth century BCE, though one rendered utterly false by modern astronomy; the stars are old, we now know, but they’re not eternal. Close, Aristotle, but no cigar.

It raises a troubling question for any such attempt: how can we be sure where mythology ends and true philosophy begins?

I’d like to carry this point forward with Johnston’s book further than I did before (distracted as I was by a reverie on the mythology of war). This same move of Aristotle’s is deeply-seated in the history and habits of how liberal-minded scholars study and think about religion today; Saving God is only the latest example. I previously mentioned the Eranos set: Eliade, Jung, and Campbell. But then there’s also Thomas Jefferson clipping away at his Bible, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Paul Tillich’s God as Ultimate Concern. Each took religious tradition as a thing which now needs to be translated and, most of all, extracted from. Each, in retrospect, can look rather silly and shortsighted—if not quite with the flat wrongness of Aristotle’s astronomy, at least as a mythology in its own right. If Jesus were just Jefferson’s moral teacher, everything else he said would’ve made him a lunatic. Feuerbach’s ideas took hold nowhere more than in the doctrines of Marxism. And Tillich’s eloquence aggravated and empowered the populist anti-modernists he meant to supplant.

One can see the appeal of going with Aristotle, with Johnston, with a reinterpretation by philosophy. I’ve done so myself sometimes. It offers both freedom of mind and the resources of tradition. It holds out the possibility of a necessary about-face, a brilliant and startling move that can change everything, saving God enough that God might be able to save us. But it’s not as easy as it looks. A few generations can pass and you’ll find yourself in error like Aristotle, or spouting mythology in your own right like Jung. Plus, philosophy is nearly always the occupation of but a few, who run the risk of losing track of what religion really is and means for most people in the rest of society.

If one is to take these risks, though, it’s hard to find an attempt that better satisfies the pressing need to reconcile science, human responsibility, and our debt to religious heritage than the brand of transcendence Johnston outlines here: “this world properly received.”

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.