I took the opportunity to refine the first edition with some revisions, so some of the delay will be my fault.

Meanwhile the sabotage continues on other fronts: PRweb has pulled a fast one, demanding (twice) revision of my press release. After six weeks wasted, I got the message: withdraw the press realease. There are other companies, and, anyway, who needs a stupid and stilted press release? The book will adverstise itself.

Get the message, the Darwin paradigm is over, but the estab doesn’t want you to know.

http://www.zuccottiparkpress.com/contact.html

Adelante Alliance 405 61st Brooklyn, NY 11220

The book is currently discounted, but with a long wait. Amazon’s delay here is unfortunate. The gap has been used in any case to produce a first revision of the text. The book should be readily available very soon.

http://www.prometheus-journal.com/2009/02/morality-rationality-and-freedom-kant%E2%80%99s-argument-for-free-will/

In this paper, I discuss Kant’s main argument for free will from morality. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct his argument as found mainly in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Concisely put, he argues that we can and even must admit free will in order for morality, which we intuitively accept, to be meaningful at all. As preliminaries to the main argument, I begin with a brief introduction to Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, as well as his conception of free will. Following this, I explore his main argument for free will, which relies on the thesis that morality reciprocally implies free will. I break this argument into two steps. First, I discuss how Kant shows that morality implies rationality. Second, I discuss how Kant shows that rationality, in turn, implies free will. Before concluding, I review Kant’s position on the apparent incompatibility between free will and determinism.

I start with a brief introduction to Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology to establish the kind of knowledge about free will Kant thinks we can maintain. He details this-what we can know and how we can know it-in the Critique of Pure Reason. His metaphysics details what we can know by distinguishing between two worlds, the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. While the phenomenal world is the empirical world in which we experience objects as they appear to us, the noumenal world is the rational world in which we conceive of things-in-themselves. In other words, the phenomenal world is concerned with appearances, while the noumenal world is concerned with things as they actually are. Although Kant does not explicitly state how we are to conceive of these worlds, we can conceive of them as either two ontologically distinct worlds (two world interpretation) or two aspects of the same world (two aspect interpretation). As far as this discussion is concerned, I do not adopt one interpretation or another, as each has its merits. Notwithstanding this, an important consequence of Kant’s metaphysics is that whatever knowledge we can claim about the noumenal world is different not only in degree but in kind to whatever knowledge we can claim about the phenomenal world.

In turn, Kant’s epistemology explains how we can know what we know. For the present purpose, the most relevant way we can acquire knowledge is through reason, which can be either pure or practical. While pure reason is primarily concerned with theoretical or speculative claims, practical reason is primarily concerned with moral claims. However, pure reason and practical reason are not, strictly speaking, different kinds of reason, as they “are differentiated solely in their application” (391). Broadly construed, Kant grounds metaphysics on epistemology: that is, he limits what we can consider real to what we can know about what is real. It follows that although we can claim knowledge of the phenomenal world, any claim to knowledge of the noumenal world oversteps the bounds of pure reason. So as a matter of pure reason, we can neither prove nor disprove claims about the noumenal world. Perhaps in a most restrictive manner, pure reason alone forbids us from resolving the three most pressing issues of free will, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. So if we are to claim any knowledge of free will at all, it must be as a matter of practical reason. Indeed, Kant suggests that we posit free will as a postulate of pure practical reason, which is simply practical reason that is concerned with the noumenal world. Specifically, we postulate the idea of freedom as a transcendental idea, a “concept of pure reason” that is representative of, but not ultimately grounded in the phenomenal world. As a transcendental idea, the postulate of free will makes a claim about the noumenal world, but is not itself noumenally known or even knowable as a matter of pure reason.

Having briefly introduced Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, I now outline his conception of freedom and its relation to the will. In the most general sense, freedom is a property of the will. The will is a causality that is characteristic of, and therefore presupposed, of any rational being. In particular, the will is the capacity to act in accordance with reason alone, independently of external causes from the phenomenal world. Further, the will acts by acting on the basis of maxims, which have the form “Perform action A in circumstance C for the end E.” In contrast then, a non-rational being, which does not have such a will, is only determined by external causes. On this reading of Kant, a rational being is a rational being insofar as it has a will, which is precisely the capacity to act in accordance with reason alone. Since freedom is a property of the will and a rational being is the only kind of being that has a will, it follows that a rational being is the only kind of being that can have freedom. Of course, Kant allows for the will to be unfree. But the will’s lack of freedom is meaningful insofar as it has the capacity to be free and yet is not actually free.

There are, in particular, several distinct but related types of freedom. Transcendental freedom, for one, corresponds well to our intuitive conception of freedom as the will’s capacity to be a “first” cause. As a “first” or “absolutely spontaneous” cause, the will is transcendentally free insofar as it is free to be a first cause in the noumenal world, the effect of which takes place in the phenomenal world. Crucially, such a cause must be itself uncaused and undetermined by any external cause in the phenomenal world. It is as such transcendentally ideal, not transcendentally real, since it is in principle unverifiable in the phenomenal world. Transcendental freedom means that I act in a certain way because I myself want to. To use a more concrete example, it means that I do my logic homework because I want to, rather than because I act merely in response to an external cause. This relates transcendental freedom with practical freedom in both the negative sense and the positive sense. While negative freedom is the will’s freedom from any external cause such as desire and inclination, positive freedom is the will’s freedom to both determine and obey its own laws. Indeed, positive freedom implies negative freedom, since the will is free to determine and obey its own laws only if it is free from any external cause. In fact, so important is practical freedom that Kant identifies the autonomous will as the will that is determined by reason alone in this way. In contrast then, the heteronomous will is the will that is not determined by reason as such. To sum, the free and autonomous will is transcendentally free in that it is itself an effective cause, and practically free in that it determines and obeys its own laws. I return to this conception of freedom later in the discussion to explore them in more detail.

Now that we have at least a general understanding of Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, as well as his conception of free will, we are ready to tackle Kant’s main argument for free will from morality. To do so, I adopt what Henry Allison calls the Reciprocity Thesis, the thesis that morality reciprocally implies free will. In particular, I adopt the proposition that (1) morality reciprocally implies rationality, and also that (2) rationality reciprocally implies free will. It is this second proposition that I will examine in greater detail. Given these propositions, my reconstruction of Kant’s main argument is as follows:
■(Ax. 1) We accept morality on intuitive grounds.
■(P1) Morality implies rationality.
■(P2) Rationality implies free will.
■(C) From (Ax. 1), (P1), and (P2), we conclude free will.

As this reconstruction of the main argument suggests, the main motivation is to ground morality on a solid foundation. But morality depends on rationality, which in turn depends on free will. So in order to maintain morality, we must maintain free will.

The main argument begins with the axiom of morality, an assumption Kant takes us to intuitively accept as a “fact of… reason” (136). This acceptance of the axiom of morality (Ax. 1) affirms the antecedent of (P1). According to our intuitive conception of morality, morality has several characteristics. First, morality involves a law-a moral law-that commands me to act in a certain way. Second, this moral law is universal in that we conceive of it as binding on everyone without exception. Since the moral law binds everyone, I cannot, or at least ought not to, excuse myself or a friend for any crime. Evidently then, morality as a moral law, and indeed, the moral law, is an imperative in that it demands something of every person, and in particular, each person’s will. But what kind of imperative is the moral law? Based on our reflections on morality, Kant argues that the moral law is a categorical imperative, rather than a hypothetical imperative (106-107). Crucially, our reflections suggest that morality binds the will independently of the will’s desire or inclination. I cannot exempt myself from moral requirements simply because I feel like they do not apply to me. So the moral law cannot be a hypothetical imperative of the form “Do X if Y” (where X is an action and Y is an end that X can help bring about), since such an imperative is dependent upon subjective desire or inclination. Instead, the moral law must be a categorical imperative of the form “Do X” (where X is an action) in that it is absolutely and unconditionally binding on every will, regardless of subjective desire or inclination. But the moral law can only bind the will in such a way because it consists in reason, and the will is precisely the capacity to act in accordance with reason. It is clear then that morality, which consists in the universal moral law expressed as a categorical imperative, and in fact the categorical imperative, depends on reason alone (Preface). This first step of the argument establishes (P1), that morality implies rationality.

Now that Kant has shown that morality implies rationality, he moves onto the second major step of the argument to show that rationality, in turn, implies freedom. In terms of the argument as I have stated it, Kant now turns to (P2), the antecedent of which is affirmed by the consequent of (P1). Rationality, according to Kant, is normative in that it prescribes rules of both reason and morality. That is, thinking reasonably and living morally are the same kind of thing in that they are both prescriptions of rationality. At first, the idea that rationality prescribes morality may be a strange thought. Indeed, some philosophers, such as Hume, argue that morality is based on desire or inclination alone and thus has nothing to do with rationality. Yet let us first consider the relatively uncontroversial claim that rationality prescribes rules of logic as the rules of correct reasoning. Given “P” and “P implies Q,” the logical rule modus ponens persuades me to accept “Q.” Although I may for one reason or another reject the inference of “Q” from the given premises, I would do so in a way that is clearly contrary to rationality. Kant suggests that this violation of rationality means that the will is determined by external causes, whereas reason determines the will internally. Kant’s claim then is that just as rationality prescribes rules of reasoning, it prescribes rules of morality too. So the will that rejects the universal moral law is, in this sense, just as irrational as the will that rejects a valid inference from given premises. For the argument to work, Kant invokes the principle of “ought” implies “can.” He takes it that since the will ought to be rational, the will can be rational. This principle precludes the possibility of having any standard of rationality or morality so high that it is unattainable. In any case, the normative prescriptions of rationality, on both thought and morality, bind the will, which is by definition the capacity to act according to reason and assumed of every rational being.

As I noted earlier, the categorical imperative as an imperative of rationality gives us a command to act in a certain way. More precisely, we can use a priori reason to derive necessary actions or duties, the basis on which we are to act, from one of several formulations of the categorical imperative. Of these formulations, the one that accords best with the conception of freedom is the formula of autonomy. According to this formula, the categorical imperative commands the will to act in a way such that it both legislates laws for itself and at the same time subjects itself to those same laws. But to be sure, not just any law. The laws must conform to reason, which is universal to every rational being. When the will acts according to this formula of autonomy, it is the autonomous will. But the autonomous will is, as I mentioned even before I discussed the main argument, also the free will, in that it is practically free and (presumably) transcendentally free as well. As such, Kant’s conception of free will differs from competing conceptions in that far from being “free” from any constraints, it legislates and subjects itself to certain laws. This then establishes the connection between rationality, and through autonomy, freedom of the will. In any case, the derivation of free will from rationality and rationality from morality is now fairly clear. The good will acts according to reason as expressed in the categorical imperative. In turn, the rational will acts under normative prescriptions of rationality. Since rationality prescribes autonomy of the will, and the autonomous will is identical to the free will, the good will is at the same time both rational and free. Perhaps the only catch here is that strictly speaking, it seems that we can only derive practical freedom from morality, and not quite transcendental freedom. But if we also accept, as Kant insists we should, the postulate of free will as a transcendental idea, then we establish transcendental freedom as well. Accepting free will on this basis means that we have successfully completed the argument. Kant has shown (P2), and so we can validly infer from (Ax. 1), (P1), and (P2) that (C). This concludes Kant’s argument for free will from morality.

As a final word, there is one difficulty I want to mention before concluding. A source of tension lies in that while we are causally determined, we are also a first or spontaneous cause. It is not obvious how we can at once be determined by natural laws, just as rocks and trees are, and at the same time be a first cause whose effect takes place in the phenomenal world. So there seems to a sense in which causal determinism is compatible with freedom, yet Kant explicitly denies this possibility. Kant is an incompatibilist in that he thinks free will and determinism cannot both hold of the same world. Calvin Normore suggests that we can plausibly resolve this tension by postulating free will and determinism as holding at different moments in time in the same world (2008). For example, we can conceivably maintain that free will but not determinism holds from time t1 to t5, and also that determinism but not free will holds from time t6 to t10. Nonetheless, Kant seems to argue for a stronger conclusion that relies crucially on his distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. Simply put, he argues for a dualistic conception of us as being simultaneously present in both worlds. This way, we can maintain that while we are causally determined in the phenomenal world and subject to the laws of nature, we are also at the same time free in the noumenal world and subject to the laws of reason. Accordingly, the recognition of this dual presence in both worlds solves the tension between free will and causal determinism.

To conclude, I have shown Kant’s argument for free will from morality by appealing to the reciprocity thesis. Specifically, I reconstructed Kant’s argument as showing how the intuitive acceptance of morality implies rationality, and how rationality in turn implies free will. Following this, I mentioned the difficulty in conceiving ourselves as being both an effect of external causes and yet ourselves a first cause. Kant holds that while free will and determinism cannot both be true in the same world, the solution is to understand ourselves as being dually present in both the phenomenal world and the noumenal world.

Works Cited

Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Experience of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Johnson, Robert. “Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ (accessed November 23, 2008).

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

-. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. 3. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993.

-. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Third Edition. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1993.

-. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics. 5. Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.

Normore, Calvin. “PHIL 301.” Montreal: McGill University, Fall 2008.

Pistorius, Hermann Andreas. “Rezension der Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.” In Materialien zu Kants “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, by Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer, 175. 1974.

Endnotes

Kant outlines the tension between free will and determinism in the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason (484-489).

It is helpful to conceive of the postulate of free will as one analogous to the postulate of causality or the postulate of teleology in natural science. Just as the scientist examines the natural world as though causality and teleology were true, rational beings live as though free will were true. In both cases, the rejection of a postulate results in a kind of practical inconceivability: that is, the project in mind (of science or of ethical living) is impossible without first postulating the validity of some law, even if such a law is unknown and even unknowable.

However, the precise nature of this relationship is not entirely clear. Henry Allison takes a closer look at this relationship in chapter 3 of Kant’s Theory of Freedom (54-70).

Kant assumes that we do in fact accept morality on an intuitive basis. So he does not attempt to convince the moral skeptic. He only wants to ground our intuitions.

Kant’s conception of free will is thus similar to the modern conception of freedom in political philosophy. A free state is often conceived of as one that is free from some influences but not others. Most importantly, it is free from external causes, but at the same time free to legislate and subject itself to laws in accordance with its constitution.

One critic notes: “I readily confess that this double character of man, these two I’s in the single subject, are for me, in spite of all the explanations which Kant himself and his students have given it, particularly with the well known antinomy of freedom, the most obscure and incomprehensible in the entire critical philosophy” (Pistorius 1974).

Andy Yu (’11) is a Philosophy and Economics major at McGill University

Humans kept Red Junglefowl as livestock about 8000 years ago. Evolutionarily speaking, the sudden emergence of an enormous variety of domestic fowl of different colours, shapes and sizes has occurred in record time. The traditional Darwinian explanation is that over thousands of years, people have bred properties that have arisen through random, spontaneous mutations in the chickens’ genes.

Linköping zoologists, with Daniel Nätt and Per Jensen at the forefront, demonstrate in their study that so-called epigenetic factors play a greater role than previously thought. The study was published in the journal BMC Genomics.

They studied how individual patterns of gene activity in the brain were different for modern laying chickens than the original form of the species, the red jungle fowl. Furthermore they discovered hundreds of genes in which the activity was markedly different.

Degrees of a kind of epigenetic modification, DNA methylation, were measured in several thousand genes. This is a chemical alteration of the DNA molecule that can affect gene expression, but unlike a mutation it does not appear in the DNA structure. The results show clear differences in hundreds of genes.

Researchers also examined whether the epigenetic differences were hereditary. The answer was yes; the chickens inherited both methylation and gene activity from their parentages. After eight generations of cross breeding the two types of chickens, the differences were still evident.

The results suggest that domestication has led to epigenetic changes. For more than 70 % of the genes, domesticated chickens retained a higher degree of methylation. Since methylation is a much faster process than random mutations, and may occur as a result of stress and other experiences, this may explain how variation within a species can increase so dramatically in just a short time.

Nätt and Jensen’s research may lead to a review of the important foundations for the theory of evolution.

The most painful passages come in the books of Joshua and Judges, which Jenkins describes as an “orgy of militarism, enslavement, and race war.” The Israelites, emerging from the desert after their escape from Egypt, attack Canaanite cities, whose people are described by the biblical narrator as very wicked. God commands the Israelites to exterminate the inhabitants—men, women, children, and animals alike, until nothing is left alive. Likewise in the Book of Samuel, King Saul eventually loses God’s favor not for his bloodthirstiness in war but for his restraint—he fails to annihilate his enemies. The prophet Samuel denounces him for sparing some of the Amalekites, takes up a sword, and personally hacks the captive King Agag to pieces. To make matters worse, says Jenkins, God sometimes deliberately “hardens the hearts” of other peoples, using them to chastise the sinful Hebrews. Then He raises up Judges, righteous Israelites, to smite and destroy them in turn. It’s almost as if He wanted the highest possible body count.

Jenkins offers a useful thought experiment, asking readers to view these stories through the eyes of the Canaanites themselves. To them, the Israelites would seem as terrifying as the Janjaweed militia of Darfur in our own day, or as the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, whose leader, Joseph Kony, has justified the mass torture and killing of men, women, and children in God’s name.

For centuries Jews and Christians have struggled to come to terms with these stories. One option was always to take them at face value and act accordingly. Crusaders in the Middle Ages, militant Christians on both sides during the wars of religion that followed the Reformation, and extremist Zionists in Israel today have taken the stories as evidence that killing your enemy without mercy is exactly what God wants. Sometimes, in their view, we must accept that God’s purposes are inscrutable but nevertheless just and righteous.

Similarly, the genocidal passages settled the consciences of European empire-builders between 1500 and 1900. They attributed “Canaanite” wickedness to their American, African, and Asian enemies, then exterminated them, noting that in doing so they had emulated God’s chosen conqueror, Joshua. One of the difficulties of becoming Christian for Native Americans and Africans since then has been God’s apparent willingness to victimize people like themselves en masse.

Another common approach has been to overlook or exclude these genocidal texts. In the Revised Common Lectionary, published in 1994 and now used by a wide array of Protestant and Catholic churches in America, the biblical readings recommended for every Sunday of the year carefully omit all the warlike texts while emphasizing the most benevolent themes in the Old Testament that prefigure Jesus’ message of peace, love, and social justice. “Modern preachers,” notes Jenkins, “regularly proclaim the confrontational and challenging character of the Old Testament, by which they mean the social radicalism of Amos, or the withering critiques of war and injustice in prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Yet few indeed are the sermons that explore the injunction to leave nothing that breathes, or condemn those who fail to kill the last victim.” He speculates about what would happen if a typical suburban minister were compelled, one Sunday, to preach on the text from Deuteronomy 7: “You must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.”

Early figures in Christian history approached the genocidal passages in different ways. Marcion, leader of a highly influential Christian movement of the second century AD, argued that the God of the Old Testament, capricious, brutal, and violent, was the antithesis of the God of Jesus in the New Testament. His own proposed version of the Bible omitted the Old Testament completely. So, a century later, did that of Mani, founder of the Manicheans, who thought of divine history as a great battle between light and darkness and denied that the New Testament fulfilled prophecies made in the Old.

Arguing against the Marcionites and the Manicheans, some of the Church Fathers, including Origen and Augustine, denied that the genocidal passages should be taken literally. In Origen’s view they should be read metaphorically or spiritually so that the Canaanites or Amalekites were not actual groups of people, deserving of death, but the tendency to sin in every human heart, against which we should make perpetual war. At one point in the book of Joshua, for example, five kings hide in a cave until the Israelites find and kill them. To Origen this story meant not that the Israelites were murderers but that the five senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste) are always at work in the “cave” of the human mind, always offering temptation, but that a truly religious man, with the help of Jesus, will overcome them.

Not until the Enlightenment did significant numbers of European intellectuals begin to use the genocidal passages to argue against religion itself. Some, like Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and a hero of the American Revolution, regarded the God disclosed by these passages as so morally inferior that no civilized people should accept him. In The Age of Reason he described the Old Testament as “a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.” Paine became a radiant figure for skeptics through the 19th and 20th centuries. His most recent heirs include our own era’s leading atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

Scholars of historical criticism offered yet another approach to the Bible. Starting in Germany and gradually coming to dominate the academic study of scripture, they recognized that the canonical books of the Old Testament were written in different times and places by different authors with different intentions. By now, biblical scholars are largely in agreement about the existence of four main traditions woven together in the Old Testament: the Yahwistic, the Elohistic, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomic. They have also shown that the familiar order of the Old Testament books is not the order in which they were written. On the contrary, Joshua and Deuteronomy, whose historical passages deal with events in about the 12th century BC, were almost certainly written 500 or 600 years later, at about the same time as the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Amos, whose peaceful and universalistic message appears to contradict them. In other words, the genocidal actions were attributed by much later writers, to men who had lived as remote from them in time as Christopher Columbus is from us.

Jenkins believes that these much later writers attributed to Joshua actions that never happened. Their motive was to exhort their own contemporaries to live up to the rigors of monotheism and not to let their attention be drawn away by the multitude of other gods, from the surrounding empires and societies, competing for their loyalty. He admits that praising their forefathers for genocide implies that they were familiar with the concept, but takes consolation from the fact that the pitiless massacres in question almost certainly did not take place.

Scholarly evidence now supports the idea that the Hebrews coexisted with many other peoples in the Canaan of the 12th century B.C. Archaeologists in particular cast doubt on the claim that a new group of marauders came out of the desert and annihilated pre-existing cities and peoples; the evidence of such massacres simply is not there. What really happened, Jenkins argues, is that the Deuteronomic writers, concerned about dangerous political and religious conditions, were “telling a story and at every possible stage heightening the degree of contrast and separation between Israel and those other nations,” not for the sake of historical accuracy but to send a spiritual message to their own people. “Israel had to kill its inner Canaanite,” so “perhaps the later commentators, Jewish and Christian, were not that misguided in seeing the massacres in allegorical terms.”

What does all this imply for practicing Christians today? In Jenkins’ view, ministers and worshipers should face up to the genocidal texts because they are an integral part of the Bible, whose Old and New Testaments, he believes, depend on one another. He invokes the authority of Martin Luther, who reminded the excitable first generation of Protestant Bible readers not to take any passage out of context, always to think of the overall meaning of a book, and to be attentive to the setting and specifics of a passage. Deuteronomy 7, for example, can then be understood not as a claim that it’s right for Christians to massacre their enemies but as “a call to absolute dedication.” If we continue to ignore or deny these texts rather than face up to them in their proper context, we will be taken by surprise when another fanatic uses them to justify murder.

That’s asking a lot of ordinary Christians because only sustained study in the historical-critical method can lead them to understand and share his conclusions. Jenkins must know he’s aiming far higher than most congregations are willing to stretch. As I reached the last chapter of Laying Down the Sword, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand this book is a wonderful example of the kind of rigorous work Christians must do if they are to retain intellectual credibility—Jenkins is doing just what Mark Noll asked for in his 1995 manifesto The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. He’s also right to show the unreasonableness of thinking that Islam is essentially a religion of violence and war and Christianity a religion of peace. On the other hand it’s hard to escape the feeling that he is making excuses for the biblical authors. Perhaps it is true that they used the language of genocide only figuratively, but in doing so they gave warrants to people who not only committed actual genocide but claimed God’s blessing for it into the bargain.

Let me end with another paradox about which I would have liked to hear Jenkins’s thoughts. He encourages us to look at historical events from the vantage point of the weaker party, and he tells us that we need to reincorporate the genocidal passages into our understanding and worship. That got me thinking about another biblical genocide—Noah’s flood. We are all familiar with pictures of the animals lining up two-by-two and parading into the ark; these plucky survivors have become a staple subject for greeting-card artists, songwriters, cartoonists, even environmentalists. What we are not used to thinking about is the fact that God Himself in this story is committing genocide, killing everyone in the world except for the members of a single family. It’s a horrifying tale but one that our culture treats as colorful and uplifting, a prelude to the first rainbow. I’ve never heard a sermon on it as an act of divine rage and apocalyptic destruction. Perhaps that just confirms Jenkins’ general point that we should be a lot more self-aware and self-critical when we think about our religion and a lot slower to condemn the violent tendencies in the religions of others.

Patrick Allitt is a professor of history at Emory University and author of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History and Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985.

Jim Carter’s “circlons” (Photo by Linda Carter)
By Sam Kean
http://theamericanscholar.org/fields-apart/

The Infinity Puzzle, By Frank Close, Basic Books, 435 pp., $28.99

Physics on the Fringe, By Margaret Wertheim, Walker, 323 pp., $27

“Shut up and calculate!” As physics became more mathematical and abstract during the past century, that phrase—first uttered by physicist David Mermin—became its mantra. Indeed, the more that physicists stopped worrying about what their complicated equations meant and simply ran the numbers, the more progress they made. Some of their predictions have now been confirmed by experiments to 10 decimal places or more— the most accurate predictions in history. But the cost of this progress was striking: physics became more and more alienating as fewer and fewer people understood it.

As Frank Close explains in The Infinity Puzzle, for a long time even physicists felt discontent at this state of affairs. The book brims with charming anecdotes about particle physics between the 1950s and 1980s, when breakthroughs came almost too fast to be comprehended and every scientist seemed to be maneuvering (and occasionally begging) for Nobel prizes. But the book also plumbs the origins of modern physics, especially troubles with the concept of infinity.

Real objects cannot have infinite charge or mass or whatever. But when scientists in the 1950s started calculating those quantities with their latest and fanciest theories, infinities kept sprouting up and ruining things. Rather than abandon the theories, though, a few persistent scientists realized that they could do away with the infinities through mathematical prestidigitation. (Basically, they started calculating with and canceling out infinity like a regular old number, normally a big no-no.)

No one liked this fudging, but because it led to such stunningly accurate answers, scientists couldn’t dismiss it. In fact, the reigning paradigm in physics today—which describes the workings of invisible “fields” (similar to magnetic fields)— would not exist without this hand waving. And now physics is stuck with fields: they’ve become more fundamental to understanding the universe than mass or charge. Fields have become the very fabric of reality—even if our understanding of them relies on some unrealistic assumptions. Close explains how and why physicists resigned themselves to this tension and came to trust— even celebrate—how much smarter their equa- tions were than they were.

Nevertheless, despite the imprimatur of scientists, some laypeople look at modern science and have a fit. Indeed, as Margaret Wertheim explains in her delightful Physics on the Fringe, some laypeople simply cannot stand the idea that the average person is shut out from grasping the deep nature of reality.

These “outsider scientists” are not Luddites who reject the very idea of science. Instead, they care almost too much: they love science but feel it has strayed. And rather than just bellyache, outsiders often channel their discontent into creating their own, independent theories of physics, rewriting Newton and Einstein from top to bottom. These theories—hubristic, baroque, often incoherent—defy concise summary: every fringe theorist has his (they’re virtually all men) own obsessions and invents his own idiosyncratic reality.

Wertheim became a connoisseur of alternative realities by accident. As a physics writer, she kept getting treatises, unbidden, in her mailbox from fringe physicists. Some were even written in verse, or as fairy tales. She discovered that legitimate physicists worldwide are similarly inundated with manuscripts. Every last treatise promises to overthrow quantum mechanics or relativity or field the- ory, and many empha- size their salient points by stamping them in bold, underlining them, or SHOUTING THEM IN ALL CAPS.

Wertheim pokes fun at these typographical foibles, among other oddities. But she does so gently, not with the dis- dain that most physicists feel. And while she rejects their science, she sympa- thizes with outsiders as people. In their refusal to kowtow to scientific fashions, she compares them to the “outsider artists” who have become trendy in the art world. She also explodes the stereotype of unwashed, unemployed loners scribbling away in poorly lit apartments. A few fringe physicists are millionaires, and one helped edit American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and the Godfather movies.

The book’s star, its driving personality, is Jim Carter, who manages a ramshackle trailer park in Washington state. (Some tenants used to barter guns for rent.) Carter is a genius with his hands—he can fix any car—and runs a booming side business that helps people salvage wreckage from the ocean. And this mechanical aptitude in turn informs his physics. Carter rejects field theory outright, preferring a mechanical universe based on particles he calls “circlons.” Circlons look like long springs coiled into a donut, and he has reimagined everything from the big bang to the periodic table in terms of them.

Heavy stuff, but Wertheim notes that Carter is an outsider even among outsiders in that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. In one capti- vating scene, Carter transforms a few trashcans and a smoke machine into a device that makes giant smoke rings. Carter believes that smoke rings behave as circlons do at a microscopic level, and the device will allow him to test a few ideas rattling his brain. But instead of getting down to business, he regales his neighbors by puffing rings across his yard all afternoon.

Wertheim uses the scene to make a discomfiting point. It turns out that Carter’s smoke-ring experiments mirror almost exactly some experiments in the 1860s by William Thompson. One of the most establishment scientists of all time, Thompson, known as Lord Kelvin, did fundamental work in thermodynamics. But he also championed the idea that atoms behave like convoluted smoke rings on a microscopic level. And like Carter, Kelvin frittered away many happy hours with smoke machines, an aspect of his work that scientists today conveniently ignore.

Indeed, Wertheim believes that mainstream physicists today have more in common with fringers than they acknowledge. Most obviously, she notes that string theory, while daz- zling, has outrun any conceivable experiment that could verify it—there’s zero proof that it describes how nature works. Yet, like some out- siders, string theorists labor away year after year, happily unencumbered by reality. What’s more, the grumbling of other scientists about the shortcomings of string theory sounds more and more like the complaints of other fringers about physics losing its way.

In the end, both books left me feeling pangs, but different pangs. Scientists have built multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators to probe the limits of field theory, but many of the thousands of physicists working at accelerators have, sadly, become technical bureaucrats, with little autonomy or independence. However misguided, the characters in Physics on the Fringe are their own men, doing their own work, like Newton, Faraday, and other past heroes. In some ways, Wertheim’s book is a paean to small science.

The pangs in The Infinity Puzzle were fewer and farther between: the book is tough going at some points, fairly technical. But when the science does click in your brain—when you catch a glimpse of the deep nature of reality—it’s so elegant and somehow harmonious that you can forgive any hand waving necessary to achieve it. At times I almost felt sorry for the outsiders who cannot see how lovely theoretical physics can be. It made me question whether, beyond their divergent appetites for mathematics and willingness to shut up and calculate, physicists and fringers might be separated by something else quite basic—a different appreciation for what counts as beautiful.

Sam Kean is the author of The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements.