The very title of Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book The God Delusion was intended to provoke, and the Oxford evolutionary biologist has seemingly done nothing but, since taking his stand against religions of all kinds, particularly the big monotheisms that claim most of the world’s inhabitants. Dawkins infuriates theists on the right with his self-assured claim that “there almost certainly is no God” and skeptics on the left, who charge him with sexism and racism. Even journalist and journeyman intellectual Christopher Hedges—no friend to authoritarian religions—accuses Dawkins of the same kind of intolerance as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalists.
Meanwhile, thousands of people who may or may not follow Dawkins’ every inflammatory tweet credit him with giving them the courage and conviction to walk away from faiths they found oppressive. In that regard, he’s accomplished his goal, and his Richard Dawkins Foundation continues to advocate strenuously for “scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”
If you’ve somehow missed Dawkins’ message amidst the furor over his method, you can get caught up rather quickly with the film above. Titled, like his book, The God Delusion, the film compiles the two 45-minute episodes of a documentary series produced for BBC 4 called Root of All Evil?, first broadcast in 2006 as a companion to the book. (The producers chose the title to create controversy—Dawkins has called the notion of any one thing being the “root of all evil” ridiculous.) In his introduction to the film, Dawkins proposes to explore “a world increasingly polarized by religion,” and to find out why faith has such a grip on the human mind.
Surveying regions from America’s Midwest to Israel, the film “takes a hard look at the very concept of faith: how it behaves like a kind of ‘brain virus,’ infecting generations of young minds, how it perpetuates outdated and dubious moral values.” Why, asks Dawkins, should religion “demand, and usually receive, our society’s respect”? It’s still a question worth asking, even if you don’t like Dawkins’ answers, or Dawkins himself.
A completely unsurprising thing has happened during the first season of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot. Creationists vocally complained that the show does not give their point of view an equal hearing. Tyson responded, saying “you don’t talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let’s give equal time to the flat-earthers.” The analogy is more amusing than effective, since roughly fifty percent of Americans are Creationists, while perhaps 49.9 percent fewer believe the earth is flat. But the point stands. If scientific theories were arrived at by popular vote, the “equal time” argument might make some sense. Of course that’s not how science works. Is this bias? As Tyson put it in one of his well-crafted tweets, “you are not biased any time you ever speak the truth.”
“But what is truth?” asks a certain kind of skeptic. That, suggests the late Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman above, depends upon your method. If you’re doing science, you may find answers, but not necessarily the ones you want:
If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we’re going, what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you can easily become disillusioned and look for some mystic answer.
Going to the sciences, says Feynman, to “get an answer to some deep philosophical question,” means “you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an answer to that question by finding out more about the character of nature.” Science does not begin with answers, but with doubt: “Is science true? No, no we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out.” Feynman’s scientific attitude is profoundly agnostic; he’d rather “live with doubt than have answers that might be wrong.”
Feynman couches his comments in personal terms, admitting there are scientists who have religious faith, or as he puts it “mystic answers,” and that he “doesn’t understand that.” He declines to say anything more. While similarly agnostic, Neil deGrasse Tyson states his opinions a bit more forcefully on scientists who are believers, saying that around one third of “fully-functioning” “Western/American scientists claim that there is a god to whom they pray.” Yet unlike the claims of Answers in Genesis and other Creationist outfits, “There is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying, ‘I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let’s go test that prediction,’ and have the prediction be correct.”
Both Feynman and Tyson seem to agree that the scientific and Creationist methods for discovering “truth,” whatever that may be, are basically incompatible. Says Feynman: “There are very remarkable mysteries… but those are mysteries I want to investigate without knowing the answers to them.” For that reason, says Feynman, he “can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe.” His wording recalls the phrase Answers in Genesis uses to characterize human origins: “special creation,” the description of a method that places meaning and value before evidence, and doggedly assumes to know the truth about what it sets out to investigate in ignorance.
Confronted with the Creationists of today, Feynman would likely lump them in with what he called in a 1974 Caltech commencement speech “Cargo Cult Science,” or “science that isn’t science” but that intimidates “ordinary people with commonsense ideas.” That lecture appears in a collection of Feynman’s speeches, lectures, interviews and articles called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which also happens to be the title of the program from which the clip at the top comes.
Produced by the BBC in 1981, the hour-long interview was taped for a show called Horizon which, like Cosmos, showcases scientists sharing the joys of discovery with a lay audience. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan before him, Feynman was a very likable and accomplished science communicator. He had little time for philosophy, but his practice of the scientific method is unimpeachable. Of the Feynman TV special above, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto remarked: “The 1981 Feynman-Horizon is the best science program I have ever seen. This is not just my opinion — it is also the opinion of many of the best scientists that I know who have seen the program… It should be mandatory viewing for all students whether they be science or arts students.”
Perhaps no one single person has had such widespread influence on the countercultural turns of the 20th century as Cambridge-educated occultist and inventor of the religion of Thelema, Aleister Crowley. And according to Crowley, he isn’t finished yet. “1000 years from now,” Crowley once wrote, “the world will be sitting in the sunset of Crowlianity.” The self-aggrandizing Crowley called himself “the Great Beast 666” and many other tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic titles. The British press dubbed him “The Wickedest Man in the World,” also the title of the above documentary, one of a four-part BBC 4 series on famously sinister figures called “Masters of Darkness.” Crowley is perhaps most famous for his dictum “Do what thou wilt,” which, taken out of its context, seems to be a philosophy of absolute, unfettered libertinism.
It’s no surprise that the particular treatment of Crowley’s life above adopts the tabloid description of the magician. The documentary—with its ominous music and visual effects reminiscent of American Horror Story’s jarring opening credits—takes the sensationalistic tone of true crime TV mixed with the dim lighting and hand-held camerawork of paranormal, post-Blair Witch entertainments. And it may indeed take some liberties with Crowley’s biography. When we’re told by the voice-over that Crowley was a “black magician, drug fiend, sex addict, and traitor to the British people,” we are not disposed to meet a very likable character. Crowley would not wish to be remembered as one anyway. But despite his pronounced disdain for all social conventions and pieties, his story is much more complicated and interesting than the cardboard cutout villain this description suggests.
Born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875 to wealthy British Plymouth Brethren brewers, Crowley very early set about replacing the religion of his family and his culture with a variety of extreme endeavors, from mountaineering to sex magic and all manner of practices derived from a synthesis of Eastern religions and ancient and modern demonology. The results were mixed. All but the most adept find most of his occult writing incomprehensible (though it’s laced with wit and some profundity). His raunchy, hysterical poetry is frequently amusing. Most people found his overbearing personality unbearable, and he squandered his wealth and lived much of life penniless. But his biography is inarguably fascinating—creepy but also heroic in a Faustian way—and his presence is nearly everywhere inescapable. Crowley traveled the world conducting magical rituals, writing textbooks on magic (or “Magick” in his parlance), founding esoteric orders, and interacting with some of the most significant artists and occult thinkers of his time.
As a mountaineer, Crowley co-lead the first British expedition to K2 in 1902 (the photo above shows him during the trek). As a poet, he published some of the most scandalous verse yet printed, under the name George Archibald Bishop in 1898. During his brief sojourn in the occult society Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he exerted some influence on William Butler Yeats, if only through their mutual antipathy (Crowley may have inspired the “rough beast” of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”). He’s indirectly connected to the development of the jet propulsion system—through his American protégée, rocket scientist Jack Parsons—and of Scientology, through Parsons’ partner in magic (and later betrayer), L. Ron Hubbard.
Though accused of betraying the British during the First World War, it appears he actually worked as a double agent, and he had many ties in the British intelligence community. Crowley rubbed elbows with Aldous Huxley, Alfred Adler, Roald Dahl, and Ian Fleming. After his death in 1947, his life and thought played a role in the work of William S. Burroughs, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Ozzy Osbourne, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Genesis P‑Orridge, and countless others. Crowley pops up in Hemingway’s A Movable Feast and he has inspired a number of literary characters, in for example Somerset Maugham’s The Magician and Christopher Isherwood’s A Visit to Anselm Oakes.
So who was Aleister Crowley? A sexually liberated genius, a spoiled, egomaniacal dilettante, a campy charlatan, a skeptical trickster, a cruel and abusive manipulator, a racist misogynist, a Nietzschean superman and “icon of rebellion” as the narrator of his story above calls him? Some part of all these, perhaps. A 1915 Vanity Fair profile put it well: “a legend has been built up around his name. He is a myth. No other man has so many strange tales told of him.”
As with all such notorious, larger-than-life figures, who Crowley was depends on whom you ask. The evangelical Christians I was raised among whispered his name in horror or pronounced it with a sneer as a staunch and particularly insidious enemy of the faith. Various New Age groups utter his name in reverence or mention it as a matter of course, as physicists reference Newton or Einstein. In some countercultural circles, Crowley is a hip signifier, like Che Guevara, but not much more. Dig into almost any modern occult or neo-pagan system of thought, from Theosophy to Wicca, and you’ll find Crowley’s name and ideas. Whether one’s interest in “The Great Beast” is of the prurient variety, as in the investigation above, or of a more serious or academic bent, his legacy offers a bountiful plenty of bizarre, repulsive, intriguing, and completely absurd vignettes that can beggar belief and compel one to learn more about the enigmatic, pan-sexual black magician and self-appointed Antichrist.
A quick note: Shaye J.D. Cohen, a professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard, has just released his second free course on iTunes. The first course was called The Hebrew Scriptures in Judaism & Christianity. The new one, simply titled The Hebrew Bible, “surveys the major books and ideas of the Hebrew Bible (also called the Old Testament) examining the historical context in which the texts emerged and were redacted. A major subtext of the course is the distinction between how the Bible was read by ancient interpreters (whose interpretations became the basis for many iconic literary and artistic works of Western Civilization) and how it is approached by modern bible scholarship.” The new course, featuring 25 sets of video lectures and lecture notes, has been added to our collection of Free Online Religion Courses, a subsection of our collection of 1,300 Free Online Courses. Other related courses worth exploring are Introduction to the Old TestamentandIntroduction to New Testament History and Literature, both from Yale.
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Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men and women alike made scrapbooks as a way of processing the news. As Ellen Gruber Garvey shows in her book Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, the practice crossed lines of class and gender. Everyone from Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony to Joseph W.H. Cathcart, an African-American janitor living in Philadelphia who amassed more than a hundred volumes in the second half of the nineteenth century, selected and pasted articles and ephemera into big books, often annotating and commenting upon the material.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has recently digitized ten scrapbooks belonging to Harry Houdini. The books are divided into three groups: volumes compiled by other magicians about their careers; scrapbooks holding Houdini’s clippings on the practice of magic in general; and books that chart Houdini’s investigations of fakes, frauds, and conjurers. (Later in his life, Houdini became fascinated with the post-WWI fad for spiritualism—mediums, séances, and psychics—and took on a role as skeptical debunker of spiritualist performers.)
The scrapbooks are fun to look at on a number of levels. First, it’s cool to think of Houdini and his magician colleagues selecting the articles and images and arranging them on the page. Second, the material that’s covered is colorful and bizarre (an article in one of Houdini’s books: “Trial By Combat Between A Dog And His Master’s Murderer”). Third, Houdini and his cohort clipped and saved from a wide array of periodicals; while it’s sometimes annoying that many of the articles have lost their metadata (date and place of publication), it’s still interesting to see the range of types of coverage that prevailed at the time.
The book put together by the performer S.S. Baldwin, mailed to Houdini by Baldwin’s daughter Shadow after Baldwin’s death, is particularly interesting. The Ransom Center’s introduction to the collection notes that some items in the Baldwin scrapbook “depict graphic subject matter”—a sure enticement for this researcher, at least, to make sure to check it out. The warning may refer to this amazing image of the Indian goddess Kali draped in severed heads and limbs, or an engraving of an execution by elephant. Alongside many articles about his performances, fliers, and other ephemera, Baldwin also collected images of people living in the places where he performed—an approach that adds yet another level of interest to his scrapbook.
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
Bill Nye the Science Guy has spent his career trying to “help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work.” A graduate of Cornell and a student of Carl Sagan, Nye has produced educational programs for the Science Channel, the Discovery Channel, and PBS. Most recently, he has gone on record saying that teaching creationism in America’s classrooms is bad for kids, and bad for America’s future. “If the United States produces a generation of science students who don’t believe in science, that’s troublesome” because the United States needs science to remain competitive,” he warns in this video.
For some weeks, the internet has been abuzz about a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis (AiG) and the Creation Museum. The debate — something Richard Dawkins called a pointless endeavor — took place last night in Petersburg, Kentucky. It’s now online, all two and a half hours of it. We’re you’re done watching the spectacle, you can view some other high-profile religion-science debates that we’ve featured in the past.
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Debates are modern gladiator contests—predicated on the blunt force of the opponents’ forensic stamina, charisma, and personal conviction. Speakers lacking in personality make for tedious debaters, and substance seems to matter little when partisans gather to cheer on their champion. Rarely do rhetorical spectacles sway the faithful. At least in our time, they tend to seem more like competing pep rallies. We’ve learned, for example, that such high profile events as U.S. presidential debates have little effect on the outcome of elections. But verbal contests over who will make the best Leader of the Free World can seem modest next to debates between theologians and philosophers over the existence of God. After all, we’ve heard more or less the same arguments for centuries now, and no one’s any closer to a “proof.” And though I’m not aware of anyone who argues thus, there is no way to disprove God’s existence either.
Nonetheless, with the rise of religious fervor worldwide, and rejection of the same by vociferous seculars, we’ve seen so-called “New Atheists” mount challenge after challenge to the authority and validity of religious institutions—primarily those representing the big three monotheisms. The philosophically inclined religious have their heavyweights as well. Biola University professor of philosophy and evangelical Christian William Lane Craig has taken on the mantle of defender not only of his particular brand of faith but of the existence of God generally. Craig is a skilled orator—his fans like to point out that he “wins” all of his debates, though what exactly that means is unclear. His critics call him everything from “dishonest” and “sleazy” to an apologist for genocide and religiously motivated pseudoscience. Whatever you think of Craig, he certainly does draw a crowd. But so do his most famous antagonists. Today, we bring you two such existence of God debates: at the top, see Craig debate the unflappable Christopher Hitchens on his home turf of Biola. And directly above, he takes on Sam Harris at Notre Dame.
You may be wondering, if you’ve followed these squabbles at all, whether the infamous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has stepped into the ring with Craig. He has. Dawkins appeared with skeptical authors Michael Shermer and Matt Ridley in an intellectual wrestlemania of sorts at a Mexican conference called “Ciudad de las Ideas” (City of Ideas). On the other side of the stage sat Craig, his colleague Doug Geivett, and rabbi David Wolpe. You can see the event above—each speaker gets up and steps into a literal ring, complete with bright red ropes, and the result is less a debate than bewildering series of metaphysical sales pitches. Dawkins himself did not consider it a debate. Though he’s made plenty of enemies among atheists and believers alike, accused of intolerance, sloppy reasoning, sexism, and worse, Dawkins has won adherents for declaring a principled stand against appearing with Craig in a true debate format, citing Craig’s “dark side” as a “deplorable apologist for genocide.” As with all these attacks and ripostes, not to mention the universe-sized questions, you’ll simply have to make up your own mind.
The great British empiricist Francis Bacon once remarked that Johannes Gutenberg’sprinting press “changed the whole face and state of the world.” Although Gutenberg did not independently devise the press, he invented a mass-production process of moveable type and concocted an oil-based ink which, when combined with the wooden press, revolutionized the flow of information. Books could now be published in vast quantities, at only a fraction of the time required previously.
For his first seminal printing, Gutenberg picked the Bible — an obvious choice for a Christian, and in retrospect, perhaps the only book whose historical significance rivals that of Gutenberg’s invention. Produced in 1454 or 1455, the few surviving copies of Gutenberg’s Bible remain exemplars of the printer’s forethought and craftsmanship; the page dimensions, it is believed, were devised by Gutenberg to echo the golden ratio of Greek aesthetics. The first page appears above.
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