Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Most of us probably see Christian doctrine as a monolithic set of ideas that emerged within a few decades of the purported death of Jesus. “Common wisdom” also maintains that Christianity transformed the world for the better, spreading a message of tolerance and love soon after the Roman emperor Constantine began promoting the new religion early in the fourth century A.D. Both of these views are exposed as myths in Catherine Nixey‘s new book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (2024; the book appears to be called Heresy in the UK).
This is Nixey’s second book, following the successful The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, a bestseller that was translated into quite a few languages. Like Darkening Age, which I haven’t yet read, this one dispels myths about Christianity. Wikipedia describes The Darkening Age‘s thesis this way:
In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge
Heretic has had mixed reviews, both glowing ones (e.g., here, here, and here), and critical ones (e.g., here and here). The critical reviews often argue that what Nixey says is well known, so she’s simply reiterating the accepted history of early Christianity while pretending she’s forged a new thesis. That doesn’t bother me too much, as I was unfamiliar with this history and thought it eye-opening regardless of its novelty. I found Andrew Copson’s review pretty fair; here’s the ending (Copson is head of Humanists UK):
In a way the strange thing is how novel the premise of the book might seem to its readers. Classicists have always known that the mediterranean world was full of god-men, miracles, and magic so why should it be shocking to read this now? A lot is down to a conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a ‘gentleman’s agreement’) between theologians and classicists or ancient historians is real. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. ‘That’s myth – not history’, was his view. You might as well investigate whether Vespasian rose to the heavens as an eagle. But he never said that in print to my knowledge and certainly not in his lectures. Nixey’s book breaks an important taboo in a well-crafted and eminently readable combination of scholarship and polemic.
The book describes the many competing sects of early Christianity, some of which saw Jesus as either a magician or sorcerer (sometimes with a wand!), or a figure of fun, and followed alternative scriptures that were very different from the canonical texts we know today. In some, God is depicted as of uncertain sex (sometimes suckling Jesus), female, or even as more than one figure. Creation stories differ, and accounts about how Jesus’s mother got pregnant vary wildly.
What happened over time, as Nixey argues, is that Christianity coalesced around the present version, discarding other “noncanonical” gospels for various reasons. She argues further that there’s been a tacit agreement among Christians and theologians to downplay or erase these earlier versions, pretending that the current version of Christianity emerged sui generis as a monolith after Jesus’s death.
Now we already know that earlier gospels existed (Elaine Pagels has written at length about them), so perhaps there’s some justice in the criticism that Nixey is reiterating what’s already known. But for those of us who don’t know the history of Christianity (and that includes most Christians!), it’s worthwhile to discover how the diversity of Christian faiths has been pruned away to its present form.
Nixey’s other thesis is that the idea that earlier faiths of the Romans and others repressed the rise of Christianity is misguided and wrong. In fact, she says, it’s the reverse. Nixey gives many examples of how Christians themselves repressed other faiths, including torturing and killing their adherents and burning their books. And some sects of Christianity repressed others. Far from Christianity coming to the fore because of its message of love, it dominated via repression and the sword. I’m not a historian, so insofar as what Nixey says is true, I was edified, even if she reprised what’s already known.
One of the best aspects of Heretic is Nixey’s lively and informal prose, something unusual in books of this type. She’s an engaging writer, and I’ll give two examples. The first is in a discussion about how early Christians opposed the idea of a spherical Earth, claiming that people would have fallen off the part that was upside down (p. 246):
. . . However, the idea that a spherical earth is somehow ‘pagan’, and its opponents Christian, crops up in several other authors, too. The fourth-century Christian author Lactantius—a man whose intellect and education were rated highly enough that he was appointed as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine—also considered the idea of a spherical earth to be pagan bunk. In a typically zesty passage, after Lacantius has laid into Socrates (‘ many of his actions are not only undeserving of praise, but also most deserving of censure’) and had a good go at Plato (his arguments are ‘impossible’ and ‘unjust’), Lactantius turns his attention to the idea of a spherical world.
And from the Epilogue (p. 279):
This is a story about how ideas are born, and how they die. It is also a story about how they survive. It is about how ancient stories linger, and divine whispers persist. It is about how religions change and change again, as they travel, and age, and spread into other lands, and other ages. It is about how long memory is, and how short. It is about what was, and what might have been. It is also about what is. And it is about why, when midwinter falls, and cribs are set out, an ox and an ass stand and watch over the baby Jesus in the manger. (p. 279).
The breezy prose does not denote a lack of scholarship: the book is heavily documented and footnoted.
I’d recommend Heretic for its combination of history and fine writing. You can find the Amazon site by clicking on the cover below. (The title, by the way, refers to the way that the dominant form of Christianity prevailed by deeming adherent to other faith as heretics.)
Here’s Nixey in 2018. She was the daughter of a monk and a nun:
The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded today, which reminded me to recommend two good novels that I’ve recently finished. One is a short book while the other is quite long, but both are excellent and well worth reading.
First, the short one: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, her first book. It’s recent (published in 2025), short (285 small pages), and was issued by my own publisher, Penguin Random House. You can access the Amazon site by clicking on the cover image below.
It’s about the only “epistolary novel” I’ve ever read, which means it consists solely of a series of letters—written by and sent to one Sybil van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her late seventies who lives in Annapolis, Maryland. van Antwerp is insistent that letters are the most efficient ways of expressing her thoughts and feelings, and she’ll write emails only when pressed. At this late stage of her life, she’s writing to her family (partly estranged), to an unknown troll her hates her, to her friends, and to writers like Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry, who answer her letters. (The correspondence, of course, is all made up.)
On starting the book one gets the sense of an honest, upright woman with strong feelings but also substantial empathy for others. Over the course of the correspondence, however, this image erodes as one becomes aware that Sybil has had immense trouble in her life and uses letters as a way to assuage it. As the book proceeds, her life become more cluttered, but in a good way: she takes in a troubled adolescent, gets involved with two men, and finds a long-lost relative using a DNA ancestry company. All the while she engages in writing a single continuous letter, one she never sends, to someone about whom she feels guilty.
The book is superb though not a classic: the task one faces is to figure out what Sybil is really like from her letters; and that impression changes over the course of the book. I won’t give any spoilers here, but if you’re in the mood for a relatively short and engrossing read, The Correspondent is a book you should consider.
Mating, by Norman Rush, is a much more complex and ambitious affair. It came out in 1991 (published by Granta Books and now Vintage) and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that same year, so I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it. Unusually, though the author is a man, the narrative comes from a woman—a strong-willed and opinionated (an unnamed) graduate student in her thirties, who abandons her work in Botswana because her field, anthropology, seems passé. Instead of doing her work, she accumulates experience, particularly with men. (This is a book about a woman’s experience written by a man, which may explain some of her authoritarian ideas and feelings. I doubt whether, given the disparity of sex between author and narrator, the book could be published today.)
The unnamed narrator becomes fixated on a male scholar, Nelson Denoon, who has founded a female-run utopian community in the Kalahari desert, a community so isolated that the narrator has to trek to it in an arduous weeklong journey through the wilderness with two donkeys. She finds Nelson in a small town with intricate rules designed to promote harmony. But the narrator can’t quite fit in, and spends a lot of time not only pondering how to act among a group of African women who jointly run the town as a commune, but also pondering her growing romance with Denoon. There is endless agonizing about the nature of their relationship, with the narrator constantly wondering whether her actions are fostering or eroding intimacy. While some might consider this a fault, it’s my experience that women analyze their relationships far more thoroughly than do men, particularly when talking to others of their own sex.
I won’t give away the plot or the ending beyond that. Although the book is nearly 500 pages long, I looked forward to reading thirty or forty pages of it each night, and again recommend it highly. At least start the book and see if the momentum carries you through it.
You can go to its Amazon page by clicking the link below. And, as always, let us know what you’re reading and what you’re liking—or not liking.
Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is the supposed ability of people who can’t speak and are severely handicapped to “communicate” by having a “helper” guide them in pointing out letters or words. Wikipedia describes it this way:
Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique which claims to allow non-verbal people, such as those with autism, to communicate. The technique involves a facilitator guiding the disabled person’s arm or hand in an attempt to help them type on a keyboard or other such device that they are unable to properly use if unfacilitated.
There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board and dowsing rods. Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object). In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.
James Todd called facilitated communication “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities.”
And indeed, I thought FC had been discredited a long time ago. (I posted about it here in 2017 when the idea was used as an excuse for sexual assault.) But no, it’s reemerged with the publication of new bestselling novel, Upward Bound, touted by, among others, the New York Times, which lately has a real penchant for woo. The novel (#305 on the Amazon overall list today) has drawn huge attention because the author, 28 year old Woody Brown, is severely autistic and cannot speak. Yet he got a degree in English from UCLA followed by an MFA degree at Columbia, doing all assignments through a facilitator—his mother Mary. She herself worked as a “story analyst for Hollywood studios.”
I’ve put a video below showing Brown “writing” by pointing at a letter board held by his mother, who then interprets the pointing. It’s not convincing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel is below (screenshot goes to publisher).
And yes, the NYT appears to have bought the whole thing, assuming that Woody actually wrote the novel. Read their article by clicking below, or finding the piece archived here).
A couple of excerpts from the NYT:
Woody Brown knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 8 years old. Around that age, he made up stories about his alter ego, Cop Woody, a hero who went around saving people.
The tales stunned his mother, Mary Brown. She’d been reading to him since he was a baby, but never imagined that he could create his own elaborate plots.
As a toddler, Woody was diagnosed with severe autism. Doctors concluded he couldn’t process language, and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. Whenever Woody spoke, it sounded like shrieks and gibberish.
But Mary came to realize that her son understood more than he appeared to. He would become hysterical if they deviated from their daily routine, but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at McDonalds, he would calmly follow her into the store. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at letters to spell out words, using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary’s questions, first with single-word answers, and later with short sentences. When he started spelling out his Cop Woody stories, Mary recognized some of the plots, which were lifted from the headlines. Woody had been following the news on the TV and radio.
“That’s how Mom figured out that I was listening to everything,” Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents’ home in Monrovia, Calif., where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his finger taps and repeated the words aloud.
When he learned to communicate by spelling, it felt like an escape hatch had opened, Woody explained.
“Miraculous discovery,” he spelled. “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open — left ajar, not flung wide, because the majority of people still doubted me.”
. . .While not strictly autobiographical, the stories in “Upward Bound” are shaped by Woody’s experience. He describes the agony of being unable to share his thoughts or control his verbal and physical tics, and the frustration of being underestimated by people who look at him and see an uncomprehending, mentally disabled person.
“I wanted to reach neurotypical readers, the well intentioned people who don’t realize that we are the same inside,” Woody explained. “I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person. I just present a little differently.”
The author of the piece, Alexandra Alter, visited Woody and his mom, and describes the interview as if Woody himself were answering her questions by pointing at the letterboard. The only reference to the possibility that it’s Mary rather than Woody who is speaking is this:
Some of the communication methods Mukhopadhyay teaches have drawn criticism from language experts who argue that the person holding the board might be influencing or misinterpreting comments from a disabled person. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association doesn’t recommend the method, and put out a statement in 2019 warning that the resulting words might not reflect the disabled person’s intentions.
There are also skeptics who doubt someone as severely autistic as Woody can form and express sophisticated thoughts, much less write a novel.
Mary said she isn’t surprised some people question Woody’s abilities — it took her years to recognize what he was capable of. But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.
“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.
Mary has also faced questions over whether she’s influencing or shaping Woody’s writing, which she insists she isn’t. When Woody is conversing, his finger flies across the board, but when he’s writing, Mary makes him spell out each word slowly. He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys, and the time spent fixing typos makes him lose focus.
That’s the only reference in this long, glowing article to the possibility of facilitated communication, and there is no reference to the long, sad history of FC—a history that has made investigators almost universally say that it’s the facilitator and not the disabled person who is doing the “speaking.” (For a free Frontline documentary showing this, go here.)
Now it’s time for you to see Woody communicate. This video comes from NBC’s Today show, and Woody’s novel is breathlessly pronounced “deeply heartfelt and moving” and “authentic” by Jenna Bush Hager (W.’s daughter). Pay attention to the pointing by Woody and interpretation by Mary. Seriously, I cannot see at all a string of meaningful words.
As one correspondent wrote, “[Woody] is frequently not looking at the board while pointing, AND, when they show what he’s pointing to, it doesn’t correspond at all to actual words. I’m actually blown away that they showed this so clearly.” Indeed! Didn’t NBC get a bit dubious about this, much less the NYT, whose reporter saw the same thing? All I can say is that if this is really facilitated communication from Woody, it would be the first real facilitated communication ever documented. But it wasn’t tested, as they did no test on Woody. (They could, example, test his abilities by having Mary interpret things that only Woody knows, or using another facilitator.) Has Jenna even heard of facilitated communication?
Now I’m not ruling this out as authentic communication, but the demonstration above doesn’t increase my priors. Shame on the NBC for buying this without doubts.
Fortunately, at least two people wonder if Woody’s novel is his own composition or Mary’s. The first is Daniel Engber at the Atlantic, who wrote the critical article below (archived here if it’s paywalled).
Engber watched the NBC clip, and says this:
But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.
Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”
On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”
Of course there is a strong desire by Mary, and all facilitated communicators, to believe that they’re merely translating someone else’s thoughts—all the more reason to do appropriate tests and controls.
More from Engber
I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:
It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.
Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.
By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.
But wait, another fan of pseudoscience likes it! Yep, it’s RFK, Jr.:
ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.
Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.
Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”
. . . The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA’s statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”
It’s always unwise to take something on faith, particularly something that has been previously discredited and whose present instantiation can be tested but wasn’t. Although Engber likes the book and recommends it, he’s dubious about authorship. Likewise, I am not willing to accept Woody Brown as the author.
Neither is Freddie deBoer in the article he recently put up. Its title tells the tale (click to read):
deBoer is even more skeptical than Engber:
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novelUpward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.
The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests…. This is the inconvenient, damning reality.
So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling,” which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.
The Times article never grapples with the evidence. Instead, it substitutes anecdote for science: the mother “realized” her son understood more than expected; the facilitator “saw tension evaporate.” But these are precisely the kinds of subjective impressions that controlled studies were designed to test and, where appropriate, falsify. The best we get from the review’s author, Alexandra Alter, as far as an acknowledgement of FC’s discredited reality lies in these paragraphs:
It goes on, but you get the points: Woody is likely not composing anything himself, the writing is probably due to his mother, the NYT and NBC are uber-credulous, and the buying public, eager to embrace woo and a feel-good story, is making the book a best seller. Oh, and this credulous acceptance of a method discredited for years is harmful to autistic people, to science, and to reason as a whole.’
deBoer spends a lot of space attacking the NYT, as he’s done in the past, but he does give some insight into why the paper is touting FC so hard:
As with so many recent bad publicshing decisions, rehabilitating FC reflects the paper’s increasing dependence on a subscriber-driven business model, where maintaining the sensibilities and emotional investments of its core readership – affluent brownstone liberals who would prefer the pleasant version of reality, thanks – often takes precedence over adversarial truth-telling. In an earlier era, when advertising and broad retail circulation were more central to its finances, the Times had greater latitude to challenge its most dedicated audience. Today, with digital subscribers a) the dominant revenue base and b) heavily drawn from demographics that are highly educated, high income, and progressive-leaning, there’s a clear incentive not to alienate a readership that is drawn to narratives of underdog triumphs and redemptive uplift. Facilitated communication fits neatly into that worldview, offering a reassuring story about disability that flatters the moral intuitions of well-meaning readers while sidestepping the far more difficult reality. The result is a kind of audience capture that encourages credulity precisely where skepticism is most needed. Who wants to read a downer story about genuinely non-verbal, deeply disabled people on their phone while they ride the 4 train uptown to take Kayleigh to her $20,000/year dance lessons?
This may well explain the Times‘s recent touting of religion, whose factual claims could also be seen as pseudoscientific (indeed, Ross Douthat’s evidence for God, presented in the NYT, is based on science). It does no harm to criticize religion, for the NYT subscribers are likely soft on it. If they’re not believers, they’re “believers in belief”: people who aren’t themselves religious but see faith as an essential social glue essential for “the little people” who hold society together.But Ceiling Cat help you if you promote nonbelief!
h/t: Greg
Addendum by Greg Mayer
The Times just went deeper into the FC morass. The columnist Frank Bruni, who should know better– he’s a professor at Duke, fer chrissakes– just went all in on the dubious book:
Let’s leave readers with a happier thought. I’m reading a novel, “Upward Bound,” written by a young man named Woody Brown who was diagnosed with severe autism as a child and thought to be incapable of sophisticated communication. He still struggles with speech, as our Times colleague Alexandra Alter explained in an excellent recent profile of him. But he’s an effective writer, complaining in “Upward Bound” about caretakers’ tendency to let their autistic charges idle “as if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.” His book takes readers inside the thoughts of someone like him. And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. Tapping letters on a board to spell out his answers to Alexandra’s questions, he told her: “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open.” Now he’s free — and he’s flying.
It’s in his weekly dialogue with Bret Stephens. While Stephens didn’t endorse FC, any sane journalist would have pushed back, so his silence on it in the column is a black mark on him, as well. If you want to see how FC works, watch the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence” (available free here), which thoroughly debunked FC– in 1992! When I taught a course on “Science & Pseudoscience”, I used to show this to the class, because it shows how pseudosciences work, how they are evangelized, how their proponents reject criticism by employing well-known hedges and dodges, and the harm they can do.
I would have missed this video had reader Doug not called my attention to it. It’s a very good half-hour discussion by evolutionary biologist Zach B. Hancock, a professor at Augusta University, in which he recommends the the top ten most influential books in evolutionary biology. Since Hancock is a population geneticist, the books deal largely with evolutionary genetics, but not all of them.
I slipped in at #10 with my book on Speciation with Allen Orr, but I won’t be too humble to claim our book wasn’t influential, for, as Hancock notes, it’s the only comprehensive book on the origin of species around. (Darwin’s big 1859 book was about the origin of adaptations, and had little that was useful about the origin of species.) Hancock regrets that Allen and I aren’t going to do a second edition, but Allen refuses to, and I don’t have the spoons (I do have 200 pages of notes on relevant papers that appeared after our book came out, but that will go nowhere.)
The rest of the list is stellar, and shows a keen judgement about the field. I’m not sure I would have put Lack’s book on the Galápagos finches in there, as it’s pretty much out of date. It should be replaced by a very important book by Ernst Mayr, his Systematics and the Origin of Species or the updated version in 1963, Animal Species and Evolution. It was Mayr who codified the Biological Species Concept and paved the way for experimental and observational studies of speciation, and hence my book with Orr.
I’d expect every graduate student in evolutionary genetics to have read most of these books by the time they get their Ph.D. In fact, when I was on prelim hearings, judging whether students could be admitted to candidacy after a year or two, I and my colleague Doug Schemske made a habit of asking students to name the major accomplishments of several of the authors listed below. My impression is that the history of the field is not given so much weight now, so I wonder if students could still explain the major accomplishments of say, Theodosius Dobzhansky or Ronald Fisher. The books are of more than historical interest, for they raise questions that are still relevant. (I spent a lot of my career trying to understand the phenomenon of “Haldane’s Rule,” explained by J.B.S. Haldane in 1922. The paper was completely neglected until I read it in the early eighties and started a cottage industry of explanations [my own was largely wrong]).
Hancock’s explication of each book is excellent. If you’re an academic teaching evolutionary biology, you might see how many of these books your students have read.
One commenter on YouTube gave the list and the time points in the video where each is discussed (the links go to those time point).
2:26 #10 Speciation – Jerry Coyne & Allen Orr 4:50 #9 Darwin’s Finches – David Lack 6:59#8 Evolution: The Modern Synthesis – Julian Huxley 9:15 #7 The Origins Of Genome Architecture – Michael Lynch 11:23 #6 Chance & Necessity – Jacques Monod 13:26 #5 The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins 16:54 #4 The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution – Motoo Kimura 19:34 #3 Genetics and the Origin of Species – Theodosius Dobzhansky 22:20 #2 The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection – Ronald Fisher 26:35 #1 On The Origin Of Species – Charles Darwin
Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Alex Byrne (a professor at MIT who works in part on gender and sex), has written a tale of rejection that’s both amusing (in how it’s written) and depressing (in what it says).
Alex was invited to write a book review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an online site that publishes only reviews of philosophy books. Because reviews are invited (sometimes after a prospective reviewer offers to write one), they are rarely if ever rejected.
But not so with Byrne. Because he wrote a critical but not nasty review of a book on gender by a trans-identified male, Alex’s contribution was rejected—without the site even giving him an explanation.
Click the screenshot below to read Alex’s sad tale. Actually, it’s not really sad because his review will be published elsewhere, and this rejection does him no profesional damage. But the way he was treated reflects yet another academic taboo like the one I discussed in the last post. In this case, the taboo involves saying anything critical about gender science or, in this case, philosophy, particularly about a book written by a trans person.
Some excerpts:
last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 bookTrouble with Gender and other places.
Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.
I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.
By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:
Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.
To which she replied:
Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.
As I said, Alex’s review was not nasty but it was critical (there’s a link below), and he found a number of simple errors that Cosker-Rowland made. Here’s one:
I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):
Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).
I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”
Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.
He found other errors that he didn’t mention in the review but gives in this piece (you can see his entire review here, in Philosophy & Public Affairs). Here’s Byrne’s summing up given in the last two sentences of his review:
Back in the day, we knew what it was to be transsexual. Transsexuality’s contemporary descendant, being transgender, is decidedly more nebulous and deserves an explanation. Gender identity as Cosker-Rowland conceives of it is of no help, and neither is obstetrical paperwork.
Some weeks after submitting the review to Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Byrne got a rejection that said only that the journal site was “not moving forward” with publication. No reasons were given. Alex wrote back to the editor asking if they would be so kind as to answer two questions:
1. Who was the board member who initially vetted my review? This is not blind reviewing, I take it. The board member knew who wrote the review. Seems only fair that I should know the identity of the board member. If the board member had reasonable concerns, then there should be no objection to making everything transparent.
2. What, exactly, was the reason why you have decided not to publish the review?
Well, reviewers aren’t always entitled to the names of those who vetted a review, but certainly reasons should be given for a rejection. None were, except that one board member declined to vet Alex’s piece and the other “recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” That was the only feedback he got. Byrne isn’t moaning about this, but his essay does have a serious point about the infection of the publication process in his field by ideology:
The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.
Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission). I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:
At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company. Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes? I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure. I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:
Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”. After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe. My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon. The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.
In truth, I can see no other explanation. The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear. If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.
I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)
Originally I was going to call this post “The New York Times coddles faith again,” but there is not all that much coddling in this review of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I am not an Atheist.
What puzzles me is that the review is on the cover of the NYT’s latest Sunday book section. That position is usually reserved for important or notable books, but Timothy Egan’s review doesn’t make the book seem that interesting. Could it be that the cover slot came from the book being about . . . . God? At any rate, given that Beha’s book came out February 17, the fact that its Amazon ranking is only 1,562 (very low for a new book on the benefits of faith), and there are only 8 reviews (all 5-star reviews, of course), is not a sign that this is a barn-burner that will fill the God-shaped lacuna in the public soul.
Beha has previously given an excerpt of his book in the NYer, which I discussed in my recent post “A New Yorker writer loses faith in atheism.” I found Beha’s arguments lame, and I summarized the book this way, as well as provided information on the author. From my post:
Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive, which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortened to simply this:
“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning. This is why I became a theist.”
So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could? But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism. The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.
Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book
You can read the Sunday NYT review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.
Here’s the cover highlighting the book (thanks to Greg for sending me a photo of the paper version he gets). Stuff like this roils my kishkes:
Reviewer Tinothy Egan is somewhat lukewarm about the book, even though he avers that he is a believer and had his own search for faith as well as an inexplicable faith epiphany. The NYT identifies him this way:
So both author and reviewer, as well as the MSM (including the NYT), are rife these days with either promotions of religious books or softball reviews of them. And all this manages to center on the search for meaning in these dire times, a search for meaning that always winds up filling the “God-shaped hole” in our being. That is something Egan apparently documents in his own book and is, of course, the subject of Beha’s book.
As I noted when reviewing Beha’s New Yorker piece, he went back and forth from a youthful Catholicism to a materialistic atheism and then found his way back to God again, always tormented by the fact that he saw an angel who spoke to him when he was 15. As reviewer Egan says:
As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”
Not to worry! That statement alone speaks volumes. But Egan continues:
In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.
This tells you two things: the reviewer is soft on spiritual experiences, since he himself had one (see the link three paragraphs back), and that the author bashes the New Atheism as being “passé”, a cheap shot which doesn’t at all give New Atheism credit for pushing along the rise of the “nones” and making criticism of religion an acceptable thing to discuss.
But Beha is still somewhat critical of the scholastic tenor of the book, so it’s not a totally glowing review:
Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.
He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”
But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)
But as for the things I highlighted in my own take on Beha’s NYer article—things like the “faith in science” that we supposedly have, and the “romantic idealism” that is coequal to science in its inability to apprehend universal truths—of these things Egan says nothing. Nor does he point out that many people (I’m one) have found satisfaction without God, though many of us don’t have a God-shaped hole nor are actively looking for meaning. Instead, Egan’s take is anodyne, for one simply cannot get away with pushing nonbelief in the New York Times. What you can do is bash atheism in general and New Atheism in particular.
Egan:
Ultimately, atheism failed [Beha], as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?
I have to interject here to note that “nonreligion”—atheism—is not religion, in the same way that not drinking is a form of alcoholism. The trope that atheists have “faith” is simply ridiculous. What they have is a failure to be convinced of a phenomenon when there is no evidence for it. But I digress. Egan continues his review’s peroration:
Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.
If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.
“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”
