Yet another guest post on history and theology by occasional guest contributor Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace.

The story of Sir Isaac Newton stumbling upon the nature of gravity after seeing an apple fall to earth is one of the most enduring, and endearing, anecdotes of modern physics. Newton (1642-1727) was a genius with many skills. He laid the groundwork for classical mechanics, which usefully describes all macroscopic phenomena affecting our daily lives, built the first reflecting telescope, showed that white light was a mixture of colors, and invented calculus. His famous Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Principia) was to physics what Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was for biology.

Less well known is that Newton was a deeply religious Christian who wrote more on Biblical interpretation than he did on science. In particular he was very uneasy about the doctrine of the Trinity, and wrote a weighty tome entitled An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture. Most of his ire was aimed at the first letter of John (1 John 5:7), which in the King James’ Bible reads “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” By comparing early manuscripts in many languages, he came to the conclusion that the final phrase was a late addition. His writings were so controversial that he dared not publish them during his lifetime, yet modern scholars concur, and the Revised New Standard Version has been revised to end with, “these three agree.”

Newton also had a bone to pick with the doctrine esposed by Bishop Athenasius (293-373) of Alexandria (Egypt) over the question of whether Christ was a different ‘substance’ from the Father. Athenasius proposed a robust Triniarian creed, as opposed to the doctrine that there was a time when only God the Father existed, and that Christ was in some small way subservient to him. Here again, Newton wrote a spirited critique—Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers in the 1690s—and once again, history has him on the winning side. Athenasius’ creed is consigned to the archives of historical documents.

Today these issues of Christian theology seem arcane and tedious, but don’t think for a moment that Newton’s hesitation to publish during his lifetime was whimsical. His views in the 17th century were subject to prosecution, as it was an offense to deny any of the persons of the Trinity to be God, punishable with loss of office. Newton’s caution was clearly warranted, as a friend lost his professorship at Cambridge for this very reason in 1711. By comparison, he got off lucky—an eighteen-year-old student, Thomas Aikenhead, was hanged at Edinburgh, Scotland in 1697 for denying the Trinity.

Newton’s biography leaves two lessons to today’s students of history.

First, the fathers of the natural science—Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, and :ahem: Alfred Russel Wallace—did not find natural science to be incompatible with their Christian faith. If they merely attended church and nodded agreement at religious thought of the time, it might be easy to dismiss them as charletans who stuck to the thought of the time to protect themselves. Yet this was far from the case—all three wrote careful engagements of religion at the time, and all had unique takes on theology. This seems hard to consider when we see the vocal vitriol of those such as geneticist Richard Dawkins, who claims title to Darwin’s legacy of evolution.

Second, when we recoil at today’s Islamic religious zealots, such as the Ayatollah of Iran ordering the assassination of Salman Rushdie for blasphemy, public commenters think this is evidence of the intollerance of Islam. Yet we might stop and ponder what future generations will think of some of our attempts in the past of enforcing orthodoxy and the results it caused in spreading fear and stifiling free expression. How will history view us both centuries from now? After all, Rushdie survives to this day and has claimed celebrity status overseas. Thomas Aikenhead was not nearly so lucky.

The descendants of the Prophet Muhammed founded the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 A.D. and established it’s capital in Baghdad. Near the end of the 9th century, as it faced a number of lesser regional challengers to it’s rule in Egypt and Persia, a group of Shia radicals called the Qarmatians emerged and seized control of the island of Bahrain.

It’s unclear if the Qarmatians were utopian revolutionaries or apocalyptic militants, but either way, everything about their religion and way of life was radical. The Qarmatians mixed Shia theology, then a new minority sect of Islam, with Persian nationalism and Zoroastrian mysticism. Their key principle was a society based on reason and the equal distribution of real and movable property among their members—ignoring the fact that, outside the membership of the society they maintained large numbers of slaves and subjugated others as second-class citizens. The affairs of government were managed by a tribal council, led by a chief who was the first among equals. The Qamartians were also strict vegetarians and banned the consumption of all meat. And from Zoroastrianism they replaced the Qiblah, the niche in a mosque that indicates the direction Mecca, with a fire.

The Qarmatians were also militantly opposed to conducting the Haaj, the Muslim pilgramage to Mecca and Medina. They used their base in Bahrain to launch raids on the pilgrim routes crossing the region, massacring tens of thousands of pilgrims on several occasions and finally reaching all the way to Mecca and Medina in 930, during which time they desecrated the holy Well of Zamzam with corpses of pilgrims and stole the Black Stone from Mecca, holding it ransom. The caliph in Baghdad pleaded with them to return it, ultimately paying the Qarmatians tribute to stay on their island and refrain from raids, similar to how Rome paid German hordes camped across the Danube to stay out of Roman territory.

It is not clear if ransom for the stone was paid, or if it was returned by the Qamartians voluntarily. According to one historian, the Black Stone was returned twenty-two years after it was stolen, wrapped in a sack and thrown into a Mosque in Kufa, accompanied with a note that read, “By command we took it, and by command we have returned it.” The stone was shattered into seven pieces during its abduction, and it is for that reason that today, it is wrapped in a silver frame to hold it together.

“As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence.”

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Science magazine has a great article, with the same title as this post, on the science behind the origin of religion. It is prefaced with the quote above and notes that “every human society has had its gods, whether worshipped from Gothic cathedrals or Mayan pyramids.” But when and why did religion begin? Increasingly, scientists are drawing on the fields of anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience and many now believe that religion may be hard-wired in the human brain.

When did religion begin? Humans have been around for perhaps two million years, but the archaeological evidence suggests religion emerged recently. The earliest discovered deliberate burials are 95,000 years old. Only from 30,000 years ago do we find the first evidence of symbolic expression—headless woman figurines with huge breasts that some think are religious. The oldest temple ruins that have been discovered are from an 11,000-year-old site in Turkey. Yet once civilization emerged, religious activity exploded onto the scene, in the form organized religions managed with hierarchicy and boasting identifiable supernatural gods. This all began just 5,000 years ago.

Why? It turns out there may be a neurological foundation for human religious belief that may have evolved at that time, or emerged through the birth of civilization. The article cites numerous studies ranging from the cognitive psychology of children to the performance of undergraduate students under pressure to show our capacity for believing that things are intentionally caused by an unseen “agent,” and that human beings have a bias to see the natural world as purposefully (or intelligently) designed. As one researcher notes, “When I hear a bump in the night, I think ‘Who’s there?’ not ‘What’s there?’ … Given ambiguous stimuli, we often posit an agency at play.” Evolutionary biology and natural selection may have favored this—if the bump in the night is a burglar or lion, you could be in danger, while if it’s just the wind, no harm done, so the pre-ancient humans that had no such bias for seeing unseen agents could have been more vulnerable. And if humans insinctively suspect that unseen agents are responsible for mysterious events, it’s a short step to believing in omens or higher powers.

There may be another another reason why religion is found in every civilization—it promotes cooperative behavior among strangers and thus creates stable and cohesive groups. People are also more helpful when they believe they are being watched, so a supernatural omniscient god promotes stable society. And religion also boosts reproduction of their members, the evidence of which we can see today looking looking at the low replacement rates of the rich and casually religious societies of Western Europe (Spain: 1.3, Czech Republic: 1.23) and East Asia (Macau: 0.9, South Korea: 1.2, Japan: 1.22) compared to the high fertility of many devoutly religious Islamic societies that are otherwise chaotic (Afghanistan: 7.07, Somalia: 6.04, Nigeria: 5.2).

What about life after death? Here also, from childhood children have an instinctive belief that no matter what happens to our bodies, our minds are immortal. Every human society has developed explanations for what happens to our minds, or souls, or spirits, after our body dies. As research into religious belief continues, and we further understand the human need to explain events with supernatural explanations, we may understand further what drives religion in today’s age when scientific understanding and rational thought have refuted many core beliefs of religion, yet it continues to flourish nonetheless.

Last week, a newspaper advertisement in Italy invited hostess/escorts to attend an anonymous hosted party, promising cash payments and gifts to attend. After about 200 women showed up and waited for about an hour, comedian-tyrant Colonel Gaddafi of Libya popped in, lectured for 45 minutes on Islam, gave each woman a copy of the Koran and his little Green Book that outlines his philosophy, and then the party was over. Apparently one woman accepted the invitation to travel to Libya to check out Islam, but most were reportedly offended by some of the mad colonel’s comments on Christianity. And of course, the reverse of what Gaddafi did—to preach Christianity in Libya—is outlawed.

The same week saw the publication of former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin publish a memoir that had this gem:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat? … I love animals—right next to the mashed potatoes.

Avoiding all the obvious flaws in logic displayed there—people and babies are also animals; does Palin also eat her pet dogs and hampsters? etc., etc.—Sarah’s actual thoughts on this mirror my own, or as Roy of MutantFrog once said to me in a private discussion on vegetarianism, “but animals are so tasty!” But do I say this to my vegetarian and vegan friends? Certainly not using those words, no—besides winning a few cheap chuckles, that type of argument would not win anyone over.

As it happens, I believe a lot of outlandish things, and in the right situation won’t hesitate to advocate them. But I can’t even begin to imagine all the information I would have failed to learn if I’d followed the Gaddafi-Palin strategy of bull-in-China-shop-style preaching, regardless of the audience. When I sat at the dinner table of a Soviet-Afghan war veteran in Kazakhstan and heard his story of fighting, I did not chime in with my support for the US invasion of Afghanistan after he loudly criticized it. When I visit the homes of Buddhists in Japan, I don’t explain to them my philosophy on being Christian. Now living in a Muslim country, I’m doing all I can to learn about the theology and culture of the region, acting as an explorer and adventurer but certainly not as a missionary. Doing this broadens my horizons and improves me as a person, all while strengthening some of my core beliefs and values—as Kipling said, “What can one know of England he who only England knows?”

Rational arguments, reason, even emotional appeal can be effective in promoting your viewpoints, but what do Gaddafi and Palin think they’re doing with their methods of promoting their views besides alienating people and impressing upon them their own chauvinism and lack of class? I think the ratio of success would be pretty close to what Gaddafi experienced—one person out of 200 showed some interest, while most of the rest are indifferent or angry.

Seeing as the anniversary is next week, this could be one of his more controversial pieces. Brilliant writing nonetheless. See the whole series at mrdeity.com.

UPDATE 2: And here’s the finalized version.

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Many will probably remember the incident several years ago when the image of the Virgin Mary was allegedly discovered in a grilled cheese sandwich. It was sold on eBay to an online casino for $28,000 in November 2004. Welcome to the Christianity of white trash America.

But Christians aren’t the only one to spot religious images in the goings about of their everyday life. Islam has the same phenomenon, although as icons and images are blasphemous in Islam, all of the instances of such “images” are of Arabic words, not pictures. Here are three more famous instances.

An Oscar fish found in an aquarium in England supposedly bears the word ‘Mohammed’ on one side and ‘Allah’ on the other.

An eggplant which was cut in half to reveal the name ‘Allah’ inside.

An egg with a series of brown ridges that appeared to spell out ‘Allah’ in Arabic, photographed in Cape Town in 1998.

How can mere individuals affect human history and world events? And how can the impact be made?

Former President Carter in the DPRK, 1994: An event that was a century in the making

This may sound like a curious way to begin a post on Reverend Billy Graham, the Baptist evangelist, and his impact on North Korea, but this thought came to me as I was idly perusing an article on the topic. Graham’s trip to North Korea in 1992 was a turning point for North Korea and paved the way for other world leaders to visit the country. Piecing together different pieces of the puzzle, I have found some fascinating historical threads that tie individuals together in the maelstrom of history.

When I speak about how individuals can impact history and human events, I’m not referring to Graham, who was probably one of the most influential people of the 20th century, and whose direct impact on human history is obvious. I’m referring instead to Reverend Eugene Bell, a Presbyterian from Kentucky who arrived in Korea in April 1895. Sent by the Southern Presbyterian Church in America to Christianize the Orient, Eugene Bell and his wife served in Korea as missionaries for several decades, along with their five children.

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Former Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers sued God last year, “seeking a permanent injunction to prevent God from committing acts of violence such as earthquakes and tornadoes.” Judge Marlon Polk threw out the suit, saying:

There was no evidence that the defendant had been served. What’s more, Polk found “there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant”…

To explain why the suit was thrown out, to file a civil claim against an individual, the plaintiff must effect notification on the defendant. To do this they must either:
1. had a party serve the defendant with the court papers; or
2. if the address of the defendant is unknown, service can be made through public notice, such as in a newspaper or on a judicial noticeboard.

Chambers argued that Polk should permit service to be process through such public notice. He cited the facts that U.S. currency says “In God We Trust,” God is invoked during oaths in court hearings, and chaplains offer prayers before legislative bodies. “If God is omnipresent,” Chambers said in that August hearing, “then he is here in Douglas County and in this courtroom.” (Chambers is an athiest.) Polk denied this motion as moot.

Sources here and here.

I was happy to see so many comments on my argument against French hypocrisy. Some agreed with my assessment; others did not, calling my reasoning “misleading” or “muddled.” I think my argument still stands when taken for what it is: an analysis of (secular) national law.

Confusion arises in this argument due its complexity: there are actually four entwined issues including personal freedom, feminism, religious freedom and religious expression. I specifically chose to make my case in terms of the first issue. Others did not appreciate my specificity. Renee summed it up by stating that the argument is not over a piece of cloth. The same tactic was used to attack PZ’s cracker analysis.

I disagree with this proposition. By making the argument bigger than than a simple “piece of cloth” secular lawmakers give validation to the status of religion in modern life. Rather, we should focus expressly on the material reality — the corporeality the cloth and crackers. Ignore religious symbols outright, sidelining the religious by giving them no room to leverage their belief system in a court of law. Personal religion as a whole cannot be outlawed because of our beliefs in liberty. However, their outward symbols can be trivialized to meaninglessness. No validation through recognition.

Does this mean we ignore religion in the public sphere? Hell no! There are many unbalanced tax and education laws, as well as warped public perception of secularism and atheism that requires the actions of rationalists and libertarians alike. Rather than keeping foreigners with long dresses outside of our borders, much work needs to be done about the laws within our borders, specifically in terms of the separation between church and state.