Book Review: "Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up" by John Allen Paulos (2008)

This bad book has three nontrivial merits. It is quite clear about the moral equality of theists and atheists, and the moral neutrality of one’s stance on the question of God. Though arrogant, it is not hateful. And it makes the rare but important point that God’s existence or nonexistence is not a matter of probability (pp. 135, 137). Dawkins’ 2009 London bus advertisement campaign said “There's probably no God”; Steven Unwin wrote a theistic book called The Probability of God, and my previous post here reviewed God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God, by Robert Nelson. That theism vs. atheism is not a matter of probability is an important point, one which I make from the theist side in the book I’m now writing. It was good to see an atheist assert the same.

Apart from that, however, Irreligion is a sleepwalking mess of a book. The phrase “question-begging” has deteriorated in public discourse so that it now means “begging for a particular question to be asked,” but it originally referred to a specific fallacy of reasoning that assumes the very proposition that’s supposed to be at issue. J. A. Paulos engages in this fallacy quite often, and the habit is diagnostic of a materialist frame of mind that tends to produce the same two types of character again and again: either a Dawkins-esque tiresome firebrand, or a Wildean jester, smiling on the foibles of naive mankind from somewhere above the fray (Christopher Hitchens’ unusual charm, erudition, and moral authority made him a rare combination of the two). Thankfully, Paulos is decidedly of the latter type, but it can get pretty tedious, pretty quickly, especially if you’ve read similar books before. Question-begging is common to both types. Here is Paulos on Hume’s argument against miracles:

That is, the whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle's having occurred. Carl Sagan's remark "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is germane and, incidentally, can be formalized by a use of Bayes' theorem. This doesn't mean scientific laws are always correct. Whatever evidence exists that a certain phenomenon miraculously violates a particular scientific law is evidence as well that the scientific law in question is simply wrong. If before the invention of the telephone, for example, someone heard the voice of a friend who was hundreds of miles away, one might consider this a miracle. The evidence for this miraculous event, however, would also be evidence that the physical law that the event appears to violate (regarding how fast sound travels in air, let's say) is wrong or doesn't apply.

Note that this is no mere exposition of Hume, but a set of assertions about the world. As I’ve often pointed out, a good response to Sagan’s famous remark is this: People who say "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" have a habit of ignoring extraordinary evidence. The rest of the paragraph begs the question whether there are or are not supernatural events, since if there are, the laws of nature do not apply to them but do continue to apply to nature. It will not do to insist that every rule must apply in all cases, since some rules have what are called “exceptions.” The ambition of scientific laws is to include all cases and exclude none, but that is aspirational, and to disregard that limitation is hubris, whether or not the hubris remembers to present itself as humility. 

Paulos quotes the mathematician Leopold Kronecker: “God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man,” but insists that “even the whole numbers were the work of man.” This unsupported claim runs counter to the views of the great mathematicians, but it is a good bit of instruction as to how an atheist ought to sound. If the market for the book is atheists-in-training, it’s an appropriate remark to make, though it begs the question of whether numbers and other mathematical structures are invented or discovered. 

Either everything has a cause or there's something that doesn't. The first-cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn't have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise. 

This level of theological ignorance is striking. Paulos’ quite reasonable logic applies to any entity you might want to put in the “first cause” position, except for God, the only relevant candidate for the job, whom the question is about. It is not part of the definition of “a tortoise” that it is eternal, uncaused, beyond the human intellect, and uniquely adequate to the ineffable fact that there is a world at all. The author seems remarkably uninformed.

On page 4, Paulos asks, “Why cannot the physical world itself be taken to be the uncaused first cause?” Because the physical is what must have a cause, and God is not physical. 

On page 6: “Placing God outside of space and time would also preclude any sort of later divine intervention in worldly affairs.” Nope. Panentheism is the name for the view that God is both immanent throughout the universe and infinitely transcendent of its boundaries. The Creation is no more a complete exhaustive  container of God’s existence than the number one hundred--for all its beauty of symmetry and structure--is an exhaustive image of infinity. 

On page 8 is a particularly weak paragraph: 

Why did He create the particular natural laws that He did? If He did it arbitrarily for no reason at all, there is then something that is not subject to natural law. The chain of natural law is broken, and so we might as well take the most general natural laws themselves, rather than God, as the arbitrary final "Because." On the other hand, if He had a reason for issuing the particular laws that He did (say, to bring about the best possible universe), then God Himself is subject to pre-existing constraints, standards, and laws. In this case, too, there's not much point to introducing Him as an intermediary in the first place.

Again, one feels one is dealing with a stranger to the territory to which he claims to be a guide. “Arbitrarily for no reason at all”? Theism is not an impersonal hypothesis about the world that has nothing to do with the creatures who are persuaded of it; it is a form of life, a stance toward our own existence that attributes it to a Divine origin. To take seriously the idea that God is real---and far more real than waking embodied history (just as the latter is more real than dreams or fiction)---is to consider that the Divine motive for creating the universe, and us within it, may have been to experience relationship with conscious beings capable of freely engaging in such a relationship. 

Next, note that the “might as well” clause makes little sense. If “there is then something that is not subject to natural law,” why wouldn’t we turn to that greater power, rather than try to salvage the broken authority of a compromised naturalism? 

The paragraph ends with a version of Einstein’s question of whether God had any choice in making the laws of nature the way He did. Paulos insists---as if it were a matter of course---that if God, too, were bound by laws like those that describe the electroweak interaction, or gravity, or even the apparently ineluctable logic of arithmetic and the syllogism, this would amount to a diminution of His omnipotence. But it certainly need not. Why should God be in any meaningful way limited by the fact that He cannot, say, die or make a mistake, or conjure a stone so heavy that even He can’t lift it? 

On page 12, we find a strange assumption that pops up elsewhere in the book: that a “creator would have to be of vastly greater complexity …than the life-forms it created.” Need God be complex? For Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Idealist tradition, the noumenal world is not plural. Since number only pertains to the phenomenal world, Schopenhauer says somewhere of the noumenon that it isn’t even unitary! Long before those 18th and 19th Century philosophers wrote, medieval mystics noticed that the heart of monotheism---Hashem echad, “God is One”---might not even be the whole story of God’s freedom from plurality and number, as the Inventor of the integers themselves. So no, God need not be “more complex” than the organisms he creates.

Paulos’ chapter on the Argument from Design ignores evolutionary convergence, brackets-out randomness where randomness is the issue under discussion, and fudges its dismissal of Michael Behe’s argument from “irreducible complexity.” Paulos does a good job of evoking the way complex systems can grow into place as simpler antecedents are gradually enhanced and expanded. His excellent example is the global supply chain with its mines and forests, factories, ports, shipping lanes, distribution hubs, and grocery stores with their fully stocked shelves, all humming along as if designed at the same time and implemented onto a blank slate. Of course these complex webs of industry and commerce developed gradually from simpler versions, step by step. Of course complex organisms and ecosystems can be thought of in a similar way. But Behe’s famous example of the bacterial flagellum has still not been explained away (I write this in 2025, seventeen years after Irreligion appeared), and the briefly successful attempt to do so (by appealing to the injectosome as a supposed transitional precursor of the flagellum) has been discredited.

The chapter on the Anthropic Principle seemed to me quite unconvincing, while the chapter on the Ontological Argument just showed how inadequate are the left brain’s tools of logical discourse for the kinds of ultimate questions theism entails. Paulos the mathematician is good at debunking numerology, in a well-argued chapter critiquing supposed “Bible codes” that purport to find hidden messages in sequences of equally spaced letters in the Bible. I have no use for numerology. But he also accuses theists of confirmation bias (to which we are indeed susceptible), though he engages in plenty of it himself.

In the middle of the book, in a chapter called “The Argument from Subjectivity (and Faith, Emptiness, and Self)", we get the following frank admission: “Still, one shouldn't reject the insights and feelings of those with perfect pitch simply because one is tone-deaf. Or, to vary the analogy: It wouldn't be wise for the blind to reject the counsel of sighted people (my emphasis, p. 77).” This is very much the case with atheists who write books like this one about how illogical faith is, without realizing that logic does not encompass every kind of truth. How delightful to find an atheist with the imagination, and the humility, to realize this and state it with the analogy of atheism as blindness and faith as sight! Yet, a moment later, we are admonished:

The undermining disanalogy in this response is that a sighted person's observations can be corroborated by the blind. A sighted person's directions, for example, to take eleven steps and then to turn left for eight more steps to reach the door of the building can be checked by a blind person. How can an agnostic or atheist learn anything from someone who simply claims to know there is a God? 

If the theist “simply claims to know,” then he or she can teach very little. But with the motivation and the wherewithal to be of help in the matter, he or she may be able to teach a great deal of it. William James, Huston Smith, Iain McGilchrist, Karen Armstrong, Ann Lammot, Raimon Panikkar, and a thousand other authors have written books that helped struggling agnostics pivot into a faith they had been yearning for. This is a completely different accomplishment from the futile and absurd endeavor to convince a committed atheist of anything. 

A chapter on prayer asserts that there are no scientific studies establishing its effectiveness (p. 87). Though they are of widely varying quality, there are many such studies, some much harder to impeach than others (see, for example, Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe). On page 146 he expresses a wish that American atheists had some sort of civic organization to advance their cause and advocate for their preferences---but Paul Kurtz had already founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980, and the Center for Inquiry in 1991. 

Paulos’ know-nothingism extends to other chapters and subjects as well, often with ugly results. In an effort to demonstrate how unreliable are historical claims about Jesus, a single paragraph on p. 91 contains the following cluster of bullshit stories:

A bit more than forty years ago, in the full glare of the modern media, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we have only a hazy idea of the motivation of the killer or, possibly, killers. And a bit more than thirty years ago, the Watergate controversy erupted before a phalanx of cameras and microphones, and we still don't know who ordered what. And only a few years ago, well into the age of the Internet, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, the United States responded by invading Iraq, and we have yet to learn the complete story of the attack, the training of the attackers, the lead-up to the war, and so on.

These bogus claims are not only ahistorical, they are not even anecdotal: they are proverbial. It is a piece of cliche “conventional wisdom” that “we” know nothing significant about these three deep events (see Peter Dale Scott) in American History. Indeed, there is now very little of any significance that “we”---people who actually study these historical episodes---do not know about the assassination of President Kennedy. Though much has been learned since 2008, even then there was a near-complete picture of who played which roles, with which motivations, at various levels of the successful Dallas plot, and of the plots in Tampa and Chicago that did not succeed. To say of 11-22-63 in 2008 the phrase “killer or, possibly, killers” is obscenely negligent, irresponsible, and glib. Spend a few months studying Watergate or 9/11 and you are likely to feel similarly about Paulos’ use of these events, too, as emblems of supposedly inevitable and universal ignorance.

Some 17 pages later, Paulos goes back to this subject and performs a more egregious feat of intellectual poverty: 

Because of its momentous nature, people searched for a suitably momentous reason for the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill suited for the job of giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was the charming [sic] superstition that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators. 

This is not just a trite meme that has been redeployed in print by hundreds of intellectual prostitutes (like Gerald Posner---whereas Paulos is simply being lazy, not whoring himself) since it was spawned in CIA internal memoranda, long since released. It is a pernicious insult to people who did get off their asses and investigate, with results that turned up momentous bad actors motivated by momentous stakes. “Charming”? STFU, Sir. 

Now, I ain't no Christian, but it seems a little disingenuous to say “the New Testament accounts of Jesus” were “written many decades afterward (between 70 and 100 CE).” If he ever existed, and if he was murdered by Rome around 33 CE, then the year 70 CE may have been less than four decades later, which is not quite “many.” And the Letters of Paul, which comprise more than 48% of the New Testament, were written by a man who claimed to have had a vision of Jesus only two years after the Crucifixion, and who was himself murdered in 64/65 CE. 

J. A. Paulos’ comparison of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, while unoriginal, is poignant in its way. But its questions are either disingenuous or awfully naive, given that the author has undertaken the book that he has. Paulos is rightly criticizing Mel Gibson’s hateful movie "The Passion of the Christ," which actually dares recycle the old Christ-killing charge against “the” Jews: 

Assume for the moment that compelling historical documents have just come to light establishing the movie's and the Bible's contentions that a group of Jews was instrumental in bringing about the death of Jesus; that Pilate, the Roman governor, was benign and ineffectual; and so on. Even if all this were the case, does it not seem hateful, not to mention un-Christian, to blame contemporary Jews?

My fellow 21st Century Jews can appreciate this compassionate distinction between us, who cannot possibly be guilty of Jesus’ killing, and our ancestors, who were innocent of it, too. Gibson’s movie is, of course, a lot worse than Paulos’ grotesque little thought experiment, in which, for the sake of argument, we are to imagine that our ancestors’ Jewish leaders---the Sanhedrin in charge of Roman-dominated Jerusalem---were somehow responsible for Jesus’ torture and murder. Only an ignoramus can indulge in this offensive fantasy, because it is well known that Pontius Pilate had already been recalled by Rome from previous similar assignments because his crowd control tactics were excessively violent and provocative of avoidable civil unrest among subject populations. He was by no means “benign and ineffectual.” 

It is just not interesting to point out the mere illogic of Christian bigotry. What is interesting, is to explain how and why the anti-Judaism---of the Gospels, and of Paul’s letters, of John Chrysostom and Luther and Pope This and Pope That---got in there in the first place. But that takes research and time and effort, not just armchair speculation and musing.

It is refreshing to read Paulos’ comparison of Jesus’ execution to that of Socrates, asking “what zealous coterie of classicists or philosophers would hold today's Greeks responsible?...It would be absurd, not to mention un-Socratic, for anyone to attribute guilt to contemporary Athenians” (p. 93). But it is not so refreshing to hear the next question, novel though it is: “Would a cinematic account of [Socrates’] death focus unrelentingly on his clutching his throat and writhing in agony on the ground after drinking the hemlock?” (p. 93). The “Passion” of Jesus’ Crucifixion was a death by torture, an ordeal that went on for at least six hours, designed to be humiliating, agonizing, and prolonged. Socrates, by contrast, was executed not by a brutal military power from an alien culture, but by the magistrates and citizen-jurors of his own city-state. He drank the mandated poison in the privacy of a prison cell, surrounded by his ardent admirers and friends. Apparently, death by hemlock ingestion is typically traumatic, but brief---though it can also be sudden and painless, and according to Plato, it was so for Socrates. The lack of drama, the philosopher’s peaceful acceptance of the court’s verdict, and of the brevity of embodied life (with or without capitol punishment) was part of the point of Plato’s story about the wise old man whose gifts Athens squandered. 

“Whatever one's beliefs or lack thereof,” writes Paulos, “Socrates and Jesus (at least as portrayed by Plato and the authors of the New Testament) were great moral leaders whose ideas constitute a good part of the bedrock of our culture.” Tell that to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas constitute a good part of the bedrock of modernity. Nietzsche (mostly) despised both of those men as ruinous corrupters of the noble cultures of Classical Athens and Rome, a pair of con-men who swindled people into trading strength for weakness, achievement for idleness, and healthy competition for a race to the bottom. Nietzsche lost his mind in 1890 at the age of 56 and died in 1900, long before the darkest of his widely varying ideas took root in European soil, and were realized in unprecedented horrors on a vast scale. I do not agree with his critiques of Jesus and Socrates. But Paulos is mistaken to claim that “Whatever one's beliefs… Socrates and Jesus were great moral leaders.”

All in all, this is a mediocre example of a mediocre genre that appeals to smug nihilists. I don’t hate the book, but I sure don’t like it, either. I read it for the same reason I read its myriad equivalents: to find out whether they have any strong arguments for atheism. 

 

Book Review: "God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God" by Robert H. Nelson (2015) Cascade Books.

True to its title, this book provides five rational ways to think about the question of God. An introductory chapter called “Thinking about God” explains: “it is the most important questions — dealing with issues at the greatest historical and social significance — that are the least suitable for applying the formal methods of social science quantitative analysis.” This is a generous admission from an economist, and Nelson is preeminent among scholars for his multiple books exploring the unacknowledged religiosity with which members of his profession espouse and apply their doctrines. His frank admission of the bad fit between the methods of economics, and the question of God, is a promising overture to what is sometimes a sensitive and insightful book. Though it’s well worth reading, the text seems hobbled by habits of thought—quantitative, evidence-oriented, and always probabilistic—that seem almost intractable.

The first of Nelson’s five rational ways is the subject of chapter 3: “God the Mathematician: The Miracle of Mathematical Order in the Natural World.” That highly stimulating subject is often discussed by physicists, not least by Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, whom Nelson deftly quotes. But just as it has proven unfeasibly difficult to explain how mathematics “governs” the physical world, it also seems quite difficult to explain why exactly this is a mystery in the first place. A parallel development has occurred in consciousness studies, where the Hard Problem of Consciousness remains more or less intractable—while alongside it, there has sprung up what is now called the Meta-Hard Problem of Consciousness: why exactly the original Hard Problem has the grip on us that it does. 

Throughout this book, whenever Nelson discusses the relationship between mathematics and the physical world (which he does quite a bit), he uses the language of active authority, governance, control, and so on. But as some commentators have recently pointed out (in response to the ubiquity of such language on this question), the mathematical laws of nature do not reach out and “govern” events. They are inferences of abiding patterns which great scientists have hit upon from observations of nature, in the field and the laboratory. 

Something more sophisticated is meant, despite how often we are told plainly “The physical world than is miraculously controlled by this non-material, mathematical world…” (66). This brings to mind the strange book by Robert Pepperell, recently reviewed here, called What Matter Feels: Consciousness, Energy and Physics (2024)---a panpsychist work in which the author insists that physicists across the centuries should be taken at their word when they say a stone “experiences” a force when impacted. For Pepperell, this means that a rock has a rudimentary but real proto-consciousness that feels things like impacts and the cold. But for most of the scientists he quotes about objects “experiencing a force,” the phrase is, of course, a metaphorical use of that verb. Nevertheless, Dr. Pepperell carries it with him into philosophical waters where that metaphoricity readily dissolves. 

Something similar may be happening when matter is said to be “controlled by” and “governed by” mathematical laws. Except it isn’t only popularizers and synthesizers like Pepperell, or Nelson, or myself, who use such language. As Nelson shows, some of the finest scientific and mathematical minds have been explicitly astonished by the power of math over the physics of nature, including Kurt Godel, Heinrich Hertz, Cheng Ning Yang, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Frenkel, Roger Penrose, and others. This makes them Platonists on this issue, which has plenty of adjacent entailments of its own, some of which (can) extend all the way to theism and the dualist picture of an immortal soul animating the mortal body. 

I hold those spooky ideas myself, so I dearly wish to catch sight of just why everyone deeper than I is so very surprised at nature’s conformity to mathematical regularities. I am surprised by the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, and that’s comprised not only of the values of constants like lightspeed, the gravitational constant, and the mass of the proton, but also of the formulas that pertain to those values and activate them. Perhaps those are what is meant---yet it still feels as if something more profound is at issue that I still don’t get.

When three apples are placed on a table, it is not a mystery where the number three came in from. The threeness is an aspect of the event at hand, not an outcome directed by Mathematics in an act of will. Of course, the situation is different when the math in question is not arithmetic but, say, the Universal Law of Gravitation. Many are reluctant to suppose that God actively governs the universe by driving the mystery of gravity’s “spooky action at a distance.” They are less reluctant to think of God as framing that law of nature, and the others along with it, as designs for the Creation which He implemented “in the beginning.” That is where the “fine tuning” argument slots in. The values of the constants of nature (the mass of the electron, the ratio between it and the mass of the proton, etc.) appear to be exquisitely specific to the requirements of life’s eventual emergence from a lifeless physical universe. This abundance of satisfied narrow requirements, in turn, suggests the designing hand of a Creator. 

Efforts to refute that theistic inference proceed along the same general lines of argument that have proven so successful in biology: rather than direct creation by a designing God, complex organisms evolved from simpler ones through natural selection, a continuous competition among organisms whose differences result in differential rates of survival and inheritance. Those differences are themselves caused by random variation. 

That account of biology is hotly contested, but the point here is its awkwardness as a model for cosmogony (the part of cosmology that deals with the universe’s origin). If a random process called genetic mutation accounts for the differences among competing organisms, what could ever be its cosmic equivalent, that could result in the life-friendly universe we in fact do observe? How could multiple universes compete to produce this one, as multiple bacteria might compete to produce one “fittest” strain? The universe cannot have competitors. The universe is unique by definition.

In other words, what strikes me as strange about most arguments against the fine tuning argument is that they assume the nature of the universe is somehow inherently probabilistic. The values of the constants of nature are assumed to be the eventual results of some originary random process of variation. But there cannot have been such a process, as Nelson explains:

The fine-tuning has to precede the workings of the universe which is itself then fundamentally shaped in part by this fine-tuning—so something about the physical universe that would already require the fine-tuning cannot itself be said to have caused the fine-tuning that we observe. The physical universe was seemingly created out of nothing, there is no series of intelligible previous events to explain it, and it is thus an altogether unexplained miracle—or explainable only in supernatural terms—that the specific constants of nature of our universe are fine-tuned with such extraordinary exactness as to support life, and now finally the existence of human beings on earth such as me (41).

Yet elsewhere in the same book, Nelson seems to take for granted that metaphysical truths about ultimate reality are probabilistic, just like truth claims about events in the physical world: 

Although the best rational argument for the existence of God, and the best argument for the existence of other minds, may be philosophically analogous, it is still conceivable that one is correct and the other is incorrect, perhaps by random chance (it is after all a matter of probabilities), although human beings would not be able to resolve this issue by their own rational analysis ([my emphasis] p. 22). 

I submit that the existence of God, like the existence of other minds, is not a matter of probabilities at all. To be fair, Nelson’s book is subtitled, “Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God,” and this commitment to rationality makes probability an almost ineluctable feature of the his approach. Conversely, it also entails the rest of the left-brain’s standard epistemic equipment: a pursuit of certainty, driven by evidence and argumentation under logical rules of non-contradiction. I would be foolish glibly to attribute such limitations to a genius like Richard Feinman---but Nelson quotes him, too, calling the issue of God’s existence a probabilistic one: “He finds that in any case the question of God's existence is one of probabilities-as Feynman says, ‘is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?’” (87). Perhaps I can dare frame a response from a safe distance away.

There really is a side to theism vs. atheism that concerns objective reality---the immanent side, not the transcendent side (William James was particularly effective on this subject). But the objective side of the question is continuous with the side that transcends the objective-vs-subjective duality, and this can be hinted at using an analogy with music. The person who weeps in the private darkness of the concert hall, swept up in the sublimity of Chopin or Satie or Beethoven, is saturated with an affective and spiritual reality to which a tone-deaf bean-counter is utterly oblivious, no matter how well informed he or she may be with the details of the printed score, the compression waves in the air, the acoustics of the violins, and the physiology of the eardrum and the temporal lobe. Is the difference between the worlds of these two very different people a probabilistic one? Is there any sense whatsoever in calling it a matter of probability as to which world is more true than the other (“Is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent?”)? Only one of the two worlds includes both, and it is the world of bittersweet tears, not that of value-neutral information. 

Nelson’s fourth chapter, on the limitations of Darwinism, includes a fine description of the intellectual poverty of militant atheist Richard Dawkins, and an homage to Lynn Margulis, the great evolutionary biologist whose intellectual independence proved crucial to the advancement of biological science at the close of the 20th Century. It notes how little of Darwin’s Origin of Species actually explains the speciation problem, and how little progress has been made on it in the intervening century and a half, despite the staggering achievements of molecular biology, genetics, embryology, and the growth of the fossil record. 

Chapter Five, on consciousness, was what motivated me to read the book, and for the most part it’s quite well done. Writing in 2015, Nelson repeats (p. 161) David Chalmers’ 1990’s claim that consciousness serves no discernible function for the organisms endowed with it. Since then, however, the claim has been strongly disproven by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring (2021), who identified the function of consciousness as actionable feelings that give the subject appropriately prioritized motives for meeting multiple needs whose relative urgencies are always shifting in novel circumstances. Consciousness is feelings, whose purpose is to tell the organism how it’s doing, and what to do next. It isn’t Nelson’s fault that this was discovered some years after his book’s appearance. 

Another limitation is Nelson’s rather breezy engagement in the all-too-common practice of eliding the deep differences between Jewish and Christian theologies, with terms like Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian, and “the Jewish and Christian God” (162). The dim view I take of that practice, and my predecessors in that dim view such as Gershom Scholem and Arthur Cohen, will be familiar to readers of my book reviews on this blog and elsewhere (a particularly egregious offender is Anthony Kronman’s book After Disbelief (Yale U.P., 2021), my review of which is currently under consideration at Jewish Action).

Nelson does readers good service in emphasizing the role of fear in the rhetoric of materialism, and the hidden terror that pervades much of the most sweepingly materialist discourse found in consciousness studies and adjacent disciplines. People who don’t believe in the soul are oddly afraid of it, and this can be hard to notice if we expect fear to come exclusively from dualists who are scared of getting extinguished into oblivion by a death in a physicalist universe. This other fear---of being wrong on the other side, with a false negative about the soul and, with it, perhaps, the Divine---is driven by the unconscious worry that one might have to answer to a Creator for the ethical aspect of one’s metaphysics. If I am the creature of a Creator of whose existence I am unpersuaded, is my intellectual error a type of ingratitude? 

As Nelson discusses the nervousness of his materialist opponents, he cites two fascinatingly equivocal figures, the philosophers John Searle and Thomas Nagel, each of whom repudiates materialism and theism alike. What they do believe is much harder to sift out, but their frankness and intellectual independence are refreshing, with a revitalizing effect on the debate at large. Yet at some points Searle strikes a false note, adduced by Nelson thus:

As Searle explained, there had once been a widely held ‘Cartesian view that in addition to physical particles there are 'immaterial' souls or mental substances.’ Such views were often associated with a belief in God as the source of the soul. Whatever large problems he had with his fellow philosophers, Searle did agree with them that ‘nowadays, as far as I can tell, no one’ of any high professional reputation in the philosophical study of the mind ‘believes in the existence of immortal spiritual substances except on religious grounds. To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls (177).

Perhaps not. But to take “high professional reputation” as some sort of meaningful criterion of philosophical seriousness is to write as if Thomas Kuhn never wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is to forget the history of science and the sociology of knowledge, as well as the rivers of blood and ink that have been spilled over intellectual controversies like the Arian Heresy, the monophysite and monothelite controversies, the Albigensian Crusade, and all the other doctrinal wars and feuds between duelling experts, and between authorities and and insurgents, with both fools and sages to be found on each side. Moreover, Searle and those who quote this passage with uncritical approval (Nelson is not among them) are ignoring plenty of figures whose dualism or religious faith have not entirely prevented them from enjoying a measure of “high professional reputation.” 

If dualists thinkers like David Lund, David Ray Griffin, Freeman Dyson, or Bruce Greyson are said to have legitimate academic credibility, then the statement which asserts other wise is false. But if they don’t, then the statement is circular, since those who disdain their achievements generally do so on the grounds that they are dualists in the first place. Reputation aside, Searle has also written as if there were no vast fields of anomalous evidence for which dualism can account where materialism cannot: “To my knowledge, there are no purely philosophical or scientific motivations for accepting the existence of immortal mental substances’ such as souls.” 

I will close with a salient moment from Nelson’s discussion of the published encounter between Searle and Nagel:

While rejecting Dennett and other scientific materialist reductionists, Searle still maintained that any future correct argument about consciousness must be scientifically grounded in material fact and theory. As Nagel concludes, however, this is not viable, leading Searle to disguise what is really "an essentially dualistic claim [as developed in his 1992 book] in language that expresses a strong aversion to dualism"—and thus even Searle himself also falls prey to the philosophical contortions that have plagued the philosophy of mind in desperately seeking to uphold the naturalist orthodoxy (180).

I would add that Nagel disguised what is really an essentially theistic claim [as developed in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos] in language that expresses a strong aversion to theism.

Eno River Players' MEASURE FOR MEASURE

(2/15/25—3/1/25, at the Doxsee Theater, 232 52^nd Street in Brooklyn)

I’ve just come from some of the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a bit. Measure for Measure is a hard play to mount, and they crushed it (in the good sense). Director Leo Egger builds a frame story that contains the show, a device Shakespeare might’ve smiled at, given his love of metatheater (Hamlet’s Mousetrap, Midsummer’s Pyramus and Thisbe; Brutus’ “How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport…”, etc.). The conceit is that this play’s actually being put on in a psychiatric hospital, where patients, staff, and doctors daily cope with trauma, physical and otherwise. Early on, we’re given Brian Linden—who shines as the Duke and his alter ego Friar, those two faces of one kindly, privileged asshole—janitorially mopping up a streak of blood. “You should have gloves on,” he is told, by one who passes him a pair. We groundlings, too, are about take on the several agonies of M for M, and this frame story helps us handle them, as gloves help vulnerable hands.

 

The first thing we see is Richard Brundage as Hospital Security Guard, passing the time in ecstatic enjoyment of operatic music. A love of the performing arts—the real thing, this love, and not a pose, since nobody’s watching this guy’s graveyard shift, and the watchman is himself—is found in this hospital. That makes it plausible that they would purge themselves of pity and terror by “producing” drama for a change, instead of just enduring it night and day. Periodically throughout the show, the fourth wall breaks—but not the whole fourth wall: it’s still a hospital, so when Brian Linden’s Duke-Friar-Janitor asks the front-row for a program, we’re an audience in a psych ward. This whole device works like a dimmer on a lamp in the Director’s hands, to raise and lower the immediacy of pain the tragedy supplies us with, till sweet relief comes at the end of Shakespeare’s just-so story. And as you’ll see, this time its sweetness isn’t saccharine; it’s bittersweet. It smarts.

 

I’d never heard of the Eno River Players. A third are Equity already, and I reckon the rest will get there too, if they so choose. It’s rare that a whole cast can handle blank verse well, and rare for everyone to have the acting chops to use it in. These people do. There’s no weak link. If anyone steals this near-unstealable production, it’s Chani Reese in the small role of Mariana, Angelo’s jilted bride. I was in tears just a few lines into her performance, and she sustained what she achieved. Reese is a powerhouse up there. 

 

Natasha Portnoy’s Isabella had my face wet more than once, not least with the brilliant choice to stay morose under the thumb of patriarchy’s choices as she resigns herself to marriage with the Duke. Most directors wrap the ending in the broadest joy they can; their Isabellas are delighted with their noble savior’s offer of his golden handcuffs. Not this Isabella, whose religious vocation is genuine—which is much of why she’s not despicable (if indeed she’s not, and I’m rather pleased to find I can’t decide) for refusing to save her brother’s life by “going through Hell” like Jennifer Connolly in Requiem for A Dream. Only with heartbroken reluctance does she doff her wimple and let down her hair, all but marrying the Duke already in that gesture. Her misery is like St. Mary’s in the best of all those paintings from the 15^th Century, where the holy girl seems none too pleased to be the vessel of a child her husband didn’t sire, and raise him to perish in a destiny she never chose. The same appalled chagrin on the face of Ms. Portnoy’s Isabella says that same futile aversion, and still-incomplete surrender. 

 

Angelo is a hard role to master, mastered here by Alex Roe. The character’s arc has him become such a shit of a human being that a big part of the job is keeping him as sympathetic as possible, for as long as you can. This, Roe and Director Leo Egger have pulled off, and in sharp focus. The result is worlds apart from a simple villain like Don John in Much Ado, or a complex but evil villain, like Iago. Angelo’s not evil, till he crumbles: he’s too militantly virtuous to be good. Real goodness doesn’t work that way—a timely theme!—and Shakespeare knows this best. 

 

Given power’s dangerous excess of freedom to do damn near anything to anybody, Angelo’s load of iron principles are too much to sustainably uphold. Virtue like his is brittle iron, not the steel he thought it was, because it is unmixed with any crucial pinch of sooty carbon—ordinary human lust—to forge resilient wisdom from useful experience. As Mao Zedong learned in his “Great Leap Forward,” iron principles alone just ain’t the recipe. Angelo’s rigid temperance has never properly been tempered; like iron and unlike steel (stick with me now), it has compression-strength aplenty, but no tensile strength, and amorous desire is the tension that undoes him. When he falls for Sister Isabella, a crush and its lust are overwhelming and disarming, as all the feelings seem entirely new to him. If that doesn’t make his conduct any less despicable, it sure does make his slide to villainy more interesting. 

 

I’ll be watching this company. You should, too.