When I was an undergraduate philosophy student, my plan was to do graduate study in Christian apologetics under Dr. William Lane Craig at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. However, my study of philosophy of religion and critical thinking at Sonoma State University led me to question my Christian beliefs, so I left the faith. Ever since, I have applied the concepts, skills, and tools of critical thinking, logic, and rationality to basic Christian beliefs, including and especially the resurrection of Jesus, which the apostle Paul insists is central to Christianity as he explains in 1 Corinthians 15:17–19 (NRSV Updated Edition, used throughout this article):

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. 

Thus, from a Christian point of view, the purported death of Jesus on a cross and his alleged resurrection are arguably the most important events in human history. If either Jesus did not die on the cross, or Jesus died on the cross but stayed dead, then the Christian faith is false.

In this article I examine three different cases for the resurrection of Jesus, and I will point out serious problems with each. They are from these books: Reasonable Faith (3rd edition, hereafter: RF3) by William Lane Craig, Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, and The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona.

William Lane Craig’s Case for the Resurrection  

Dr. Craig is a smart and highly respected Christian philosopher who has conducted serious study of the New Testament. If anyone can make a strong and solid case for the resurrection of Jesus, Craig would clearly be able to do so, and he has worked for decades developing his case. In my analysis, Craig’s case has at least five serious problems. 

Although Craig concludes that God raised Jesus from the dead, unlike most Christian apologists, Craig does not try to prove this conclusion or to show that this conclusion is a historical fact, and instead makes the more modest claim that “the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is such that a well-informed investigator ought to agree that it is more likely than not to have occurred.” Craig argues that, “the hypothesis ‘God raised Jesus from the dead’ furnishes the best explanation of the historical data relevant to Jesus’s final fate” (RF3, 360). This argument is grounded in three key historical claims:

1. Jesus’s tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers on the first day of the week following his crucifixion.
2. Beginning on the first day of the week following Jesus’s crucifixion, various individuals and groups experienced on different occasions and under varying circumstances appearances of Jesus alive.
3. The first disciples of Jesus came to sincerely believe in Jesus’s resurrection.

Craig’s argument for the main assumption of his case is stated this way (RF3, 361):

If these three facts can be established and no plausible natural explanation can account for them as well as the resurrection hypothesis, then one is justified in inferring Jesus’s resurrection as the most plausible explanation of the data. 

Craig’s case can be summarized briefly: Craig’s three historical claims are considered to be historical facts. The most plausible explanation for these three facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead. Thus, the best explanation of the historical facts relevant to the final fate of Jesus is that God raised Jesus from the dead. That means it is more likely than not that this explanation is true.

If either Jesus did not die on the cross, or Jesus died on the cross but stayed dead, then the Christian faith is false.

This conclusion, however, does not follow. First, suppose these probabilities of the competing hypotheses about Jesus’s final fate compared to Craig’s conclusion:

• .30 God raised Jesus from the dead.
• .25 Some disciples of Jesus lied about him rising from the dead.
• .25 Somebody moved Jesus’s body but didn’t tell his disciples.
• .20 Jesus appeared to die on the cross, but he was still alive when removed.

On this scenario, the resurrection hypothesis would be more probable and more plausible than any of the alternative hypotheses, based on the relevant historical data, but the probability of the resurrection hypothesis being true at only .30 means that it would have a probability far less than Craig’s .50 (“more likely than not” translates to the “preponderance of evidence” argument in court, which amounts to .50 + a feather). 

Now suppose these probabilities for 9 alternative hypotheses compared to Craig’s conclusion:

• .15 God raised Jesus from the dead.
• .10 One disciple of Jesus lied about seeing him risen.
• .10 Two or three disciples of Jesus lied about seeing him risen.
• .10 Four or more disciples of Jesus lied about seeing him risen.
• .10 Somebody moved Jesus’s body but didn’t tell the disciples.
• .10 Jesus only appeared to die on the cross because he fainted.
• .10 Jesus only appeared to die on the cross because he was in a coma.
• .10 Jesus was clinically dead but did not actually die on the cross.
• .10 Jesus was drugged on the cross and appeared to die but didn’t.
• .05 Jesus pretended to be dead on the cross.

In this scenario, even though the resurrection hypothesis would be more probable than any of the alternatives, its likelihood would only be .15, and thus although it would be the best explanation of the relevant historical facts, it would not be “more likely than not” that the resurrection happened. Adding up the probabilities that these other possibilities are true is .85 in this scenario, compared to only .15 for the truth of the resurrection.

A second serious problem with Craig’s case is his equation of the resurrection as “the most plausible explanation” for his three historical facts with it as “the best explanation” of all the relevant facts. There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of historical facts that are “relevant to Jesus’s final fate,” but it is illogical and unreasonable to infer that a hypothesis that provides the most plausible explanation of three hand-selected historical facts must also be the best explanation of all the relevant facts about Jesus’s final fate. 

An analogy: suppose we are evaluating different models of SUV to purchase and are given only three facts about the vehicle—price, horsepower, and fuel efficiency—while ignoring dozens of additional facts, such as, performance, handling, safety, reliability, comfort, maintenance cost, warranty, resale value, etc. Craig’s focus on just three specific historical facts in order to make a comparative evaluation of various hypotheses about the final fate of Jesus is just as unreasonable as evaluating SUVs on the basis of just three relevant facts as opposed to using dozens of relevant facts for the comparative evaluation.

Furthermore, since Craig is a professional Christian apologist, it is not unreasonable to suspect that he might be selective in choosing certain historical facts that support his belief, while ignoring other facts that do not fit the resurrection hypothesis, a classic case of confirmation bias. Having studied the resurrection for years, I can think of at least seven historical facts that cast doubt on, or run contrary to, the resurrection hypothesis:

1. People who were crucified by the Romans would usually hang on the cross for at least two or three days before dying.
2. The authors of the Gospels claim that Jesus was removed from the cross after hanging on the cross for less than half of a day (i.e., for somewhere between 2 hours and 10 hours).
3. The Jewish historian Josephus reports that a person he knew was crucified by the Romans, was later removed from the cross, and survived the ordeal.
4. There are several different medical theories about how Roman crucifixion caused people to die; medical experts do not agree on which theory is correct.
5. Victims of Roman crucifixion were usually buried in shallow graves or left to rot on their crosses and were not permitted to have an honorable burial. 
6. The authors of the gospels Mark and Matthew believed that the first appearances of the allegedly risen Jesus to his male disciples took place in Galilee about a week or more after Jesus was crucified. 
7. The authors of the gospels Luke and John claimed that the first appearances of the allegedly risen Jesus to his male disciples took place in Jerusalem about 48 hours after Jesus had been crucified and buried. 

Tellingly, not one of these historical facts is included in Craig’s analysis of the resurrection.

A third serious problem with Craig’s case is his contrasting natural with supernatural explanations. In his reasoning, if you can eliminate the natural explanations (e.g., he fainted, was drugged, or otherwise didn’t actually die on the cross), then the supernatural explanation that God raised Jesus from the dead must be true. There are dozens of different possible supernatural explanations concerning Jesus’s final fate, but Craig considers and evaluates only the one (preferred) supernatural hypothesis of God resurrecting Jesus. Thus, Craig’s either/or assumption is false, and Craig has failed to give us a good reason to believe that the most plausible explanation of his three key historical facts is the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.

A fourth serious problem with Craig’s case involves his key historical claims being asserted to be historical facts, the most important being his second key historical claim:

Beginning on the first day of the week following Jesus’s crucifixion, various individuals and groups experienced on different occasions and under varying circumstances appearances of Jesus alive.

Craig supports this claim primarily on the basis of six alleged appearances of the risen Jesus beginning on the first day of the week following the crucifixion to: Peter, the twelve, five hundred brethren, James (Jesus’s brother), “all the apostles,” and Saul of Tarsus (Paul).

Let’s begin with what Craig says is “the best-attested resurrection appearance of Jesus,” namely that in Jerusalem to “the Twelve” disciples (minus Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus), as noted in the gospels of Luke (24:36–42) and John (20:19–20). The problem is that these appearance stories are probably fictional. 

The gospels of Mark and Matthew clearly imply that the first appearance of the risen Jesus to his disciples took place in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. Because Galilee was several days journey on foot from Jerusalem, the first appearance of Jesus to his disciples would have taken place a week or more after his crucifixion, not on Sunday about 48 hours after he was crucified. Because the gospel of John is historically unreliable, what the other gospels say on this matter is more significant. Mark is the earliest written gospel, so its account is to be preferred over the appearance story in Luke. Therefore, it is probable that the stories of a Jerusalem appearance of Jesus on Easter Sunday to his disciples are fictional.

The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Peter also fails to support Craig’s most important historical claim. Craig himself admits that “We have no story in the Gospels telling of Jesus’s appearance to Peter” and that “we have no detailed story of this appearance …” (RF3, 378). That means that we don’t know when or where this alleged appearance to Peter occurred, and we don’t know anything about the circumstances surrounding it. Therefore, the alleged appearance to Peter cannot be used to show that experiences of appearances of a risen Jesus occurred “on different occasions and under varying circumstances” as Craig’s historical claim asserts.

Paul never set eyes on the flesh-and-blood Jesus, so he had no idea what the man looked like.

The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to “five hundred brethren” is mentioned by Paul in Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, but Craig admits that “we have no mention whatsoever of this appearance elsewhere in the New Testament” (RF3, 378). This example is thus based on shaky historical evidence. Furthermore, the only thing Paul says about this alleged appearance is in 1 Corinthians 15:6: “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.” We don’t know when or where this allegedly happened, and we have no idea what circumstances surrounded it. Thus, this example is just as irrelevant as the example of the alleged appearance to Peter. The same problem exists with the purported appearances to Jesus’s brother James and to “all the apostles.” 

That leaves two alleged appearances: to the Twelve and to Saul of Tarsus (Paul). But we have seen that “the Twelve” appearance story is based on those recounted in Luke and John that, again, are probably fictional, which leaves just the account about the appearance to Saul, supported by both the book of Acts and by Paul’s own statements. So, it seems reasonable to grant that Saul/Paul did have some sort of experience that he took to be an experience of the risen Jesus.  

However, there are at least two serious problems with this example. First, there are clear indications that this experience was subjective in nature, and thus could have been either a hallucination or a dream or a vision. Second, Paul never set eyes on the flesh-and-blood Jesus, so he had no idea what the man looked like. Thus, even if a living and embodied Jesus stood right in front of him, Paul would not have been able to identify that person as being Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, Paul’s claim to have seen Jesus after the crucifixion is highly dubious. 

Thus, the most important historical claim in Craig’s case has not been shown to be a historical fact. None of the six main examples of alleged appearances of the risen Jesus put forward by Craig provides significant evidence that Craig’s historical claim about appearances of the risen Jesus is a historical fact. 

A fifth serious problem with Craig’s case is that he left out a crucial historical claim. Even if we granted, for the sake of argument, that his three key historical claims were facts, there is a crucial historical claim that is missing: Jesus died on the cross.

Unlike other Christian philosophers and apologists, Craig fails to understand that this historical claim is crucial to any case for the resurrection. For example, the Christian philosophers and apologists Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks understand how crucial this historical claim is to making a case for the resurrection:

Before we can show that Jesus rose from the dead, we need to show that He really did die. The Koran claims that Jesus only pretended to be dead (Surah IV:157), and many skeptics have said that He appeared to be dead, possibly being drugged, but revived while in the tomb. It is no miracle for a live man to walk out of a tomb. For the Resurrection to have any significance, Jesus had to be dead first.

The Christian apologists Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, who are leading proponents of the resurrection of Jesus, agree with Geisler and Brooks on this point, and their case is based on five historical claims, starting with the claim that Jesus died by crucifixion. Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell are two well-known Christian apologists, and although they do not limit their case for the resurrection to just a small handful of historical claims (the way that Habermas, Licona, and Craig do), it is clear that they view the death of Jesus on the cross as crucial to their case for the resurrection:

So in this chapter, we will look at the events surrounding the death of Christ and special precautions taken by those who crucified him to ensure that his death was accomplished. As we will see, ascertaining the historical fact of his death is a prerequisite to our conviction about his resurrection.

Nevertheless, William Lane Craig does not seem to understand this central point, and in conjunction with the other four serious problems in his case, we can conclude that his case for the resurrection fails.

The Case by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli 

In Chapter 8 of their Handbook of Christian Apologetics (hereafter: HCA), the Christian philosophers Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli attempt to prove that God raised Jesus from the dead, not through positive evidence in favor of the resurrection as Craig did (the empty tomb, post-crucifixion appearances, beliefs of the disciples), but through negative evidence against alternative explanations for the purported miracle. The four alternative skeptical explanations they claim to refute are: the Swoon Theory, the Hallucination Theory, the Conspiracy Theory, and the Myth Theory. They claim to have proven that these four alternative theories are wrong, therefore the resurrection of Jesus is true. 

The first problem with this line of reasoning is that their assumption that there are only those four alternative theories is false. There are many alternative theories, including: Wrong Tomb, Someone Else Moved the Body from the Tomb, Unknown Tomb, Legend, Delusions, Objective Visions, Spiritual Resurrection, Mistaken Identity, and Substitution. I have found there are dozens of different alternative explanations of how belief in the resurrection of Jesus could have developed among the earliest followers of Jesus.

Furthermore, their four alternative theories are actually just specific examples of more general categories of skeptical theories. 

Swoon Theory. According to this theory, Jesus was still alive when he was removed from the cross but had swooned (i.e., fainted) and the Roman soldiers mistakenly judged him to be dead. Sometime after being removed from the cross, Jesus became conscious again and thus he survived the crucifixion. Of course, there are other ways besides fainting that Jesus could have appeared to be dead: he went into a coma, he was given a drug that made him appear to be dead, he pretended to be dead, or even that he experienced clinical death but was revived shortly after being removed from the cross. The Swoon Theory is just one of at least five Apparent Death Theories.

Scientific medicine did not exist two thousand years ago, and even highly trained modern medical doctors sometimes mistakenly diagnose a patient to be dead when the patient is actually still alive.

Survival Theories. The point of Jesus appearing to die while on the cross is to explain why the Roman soldiers might have removed him while he was still alive. But there are various possible explanations of why that might have happened, in a general group of skeptical theories that we could call Survival Theories. These include: The soldiers were bribed, threatened, deceived, or drugged; the soldiers’ superior officer ordered them to do this; the soldiers were followers of Jesus so they removed him from the cross while he was alive; the soldiers fell asleep, so some followers of Jesus were able to remove Jesus from the cross while he was alive. 

The second serious problem with the case by Kreeft and Tacelli concerns their claim to have proven the four alternative theories to be wrong. Not so. Let’s examine their nine objections against the Swoon Theory: 

1. Deadliness of Roman Crucifixion
2. Break their Legs
3. Blood and Water
4. Winding Sheets and Entombment
5. The Sickly Jesus Objection
6. Who Overpowered the Guards?
7. Who Moved the Stone?
8. Where did Jesus Go?
9. Swoon Theory implies False Theories

Deadliness of Roman Crucifixion. Kreeft and Tacelli claim that Jesus could not have survived the crucifixion; in fact, crucifixion is not as deadly as some other forms of execution, such as beheading. People can be hung on a cross and stay alive for days. Since Jesus was hanging on his cross for only a matter of hours, it is not unreasonable to suggest that he wasn’t actually dead when he was taken down. There is historical precedence for such survival:

• The Jewish historian Josephus writes about a person who survived Roman crucifixion in the first century.
• In 1815, a missionary named Felix Carey, reported an incident in Burma where four people had been crucified, and he stated, “Those which I saw, were liberated at the end of three or four days,” implying at least two of those four people survived crucifixion.
• In 1943, an Australian soldier in WWII named Herbert James “Ringer” Edwards was crucified by the Japanese military for 63 hours, but he survived.
• In 2014, ISIS nailed a man to a cross in Syria for eight hours and the man survived.

Kreeft and Tacelli claim that no Roman soldier ever bungled a crucifixion, but historically there were tens of thousands of crucifixions conducted by Roman soldiers over a period of about 850 years, from the start of the Roman Republic (in 509 BCE) to the outlawing of crucifixion in the Roman Empire (in 337 CE). Because many crucified people have remained alive on a cross for days, and because a few people have survived crucifixion, it is reasonable to conclude that several of these tens of thousands of crucified people survived, and because Jesus was hanging on the cross for only a few hours, there is good reason to think that Jesus could have survived his crucifixion.

Broken Legs. Kreeft and Tacelli assert that the Roman soldiers were sure Jesus was dead while he was still on the cross. But Roman soldiers were not medical experts. Scientific medicine did not exist two thousand years ago, and even highly trained modern medical doctors sometimes mistakenly diagnose a patient to be dead when the patient is actually still alive. Therefore, there is good reason to doubt the “diagnosis” of the death of Jesus by Roman soldiers.

The authors claim that the Roman soldiers broke the legs of the other two crucified criminals next to Jesus while they were still on their crosses, but they did not break Jesus’s legs. The assertion is that the soldiers did not bother to break Jesus’s legs because they believed Jesus was already dead. However, the soldiers might have despised Jesus and decided not to break his legs so that Jesus would suffer longer on the cross. In that case, their failure to break his legs did not mean they believed Jesus was already dead.

The historical claims in this objection depend on an unstated assumption that the Gospel of John provides a historically reliable account of the life of Jesus, including his crucifixion (John 19:31–34). No other Gospel makes these historical claims about the breaking of the legs of the other crucified men. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that John provides a historically unreliable account of the life of Jesus, including his crucifixion.

Jesus scholars in general, in fact, do not view any of the four Gospels as providing historically reliable accounts of the life of Jesus, but John is viewed as much less reliable than the other three Gospels. In short, this objection is based on questionable historical claims and dubious inferences from those historical claims, so this second objection against the Swoon Theory fails.

Since Jesus was hanging on his cross for only a matter of hours, it is not unreasonable to suggest that he wasn’t actually dead when he was taken down.

Blood and Water. Blood and water allegedly leaked out of Jesus’s body immediately after one of the Roman soldiers pierced his side with a spear. According to Kreeft and Tacelli, this shows that Jesus died of asphyxiation while he was still on the cross, and that means the Swoon Theory is false.

This spear-wound event is probably fictional because it appears in the gospel of John, which is a historically unreliable account of the life, teachings, and crucifixion of Jesus, none of the other Gospels corroborate any aspect of the spear-wound story, and this story fulfilled an Old Testament prophecy according to the author of John (John 19:36–37), which indicates the story might well have been created based on that Old Testament passage. 

The view that Jesus died from asphyxiation is probably false because medical experts disagree about what caused Jesus’s death, and because the Asphyxiation Theory about how crucifixion causes death is probably false: “Ancient literature, including the Gospels, also reveal that victims could talk, spit, or yell out from the cross, even at the moment of death. A suffocation victim cannot do that.”

Because this objection is based on dubious historical claims and on a dubious medical theory about the cause of Jesus’s death, the third objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Winding Sheets and Entombment. Kreeft and Tacelli object that Jesus’s body was wrapped in a burial cloth and placed into a stone tomb after his crucifixion, ensuring that Jesus would quickly die in the tomb, if he had somehow survived the crucifixion. I believe they were persuaded of this by another Christian apologist named Josh McDowell, who argues that if Jesus was still alive after his crucifixion he would have either quickly suffocated as a result of being wrapped in a burial cloth that included 100-plus pounds of spices and a gummy substance, or he would have quickly died as a result of the cold damp air in the tomb.

However, McDowell’s claim that 100-plus pounds of spices and gummy substance was included in Jesus’s burial cloth is false or very unlikely, and his assumption that the tomb was cold enough and damp enough to cause Jesus to die in a matter of a few hours very dubious. Thus, this objection against the Swoon Theory fails.

Sickly Jesus Objection. Christian apologists love what I call the Sickly Jesus Objection. The idea is that if Jesus had survived crucifixion, the physical abuse and wounds he received from the Roman soldiers, from being scourged, from the crown of thorns, from his crucifixion, and from the spear wound to his side, would have left him weak, bruised, bloody, limping, and nearly dead. So, if he then contacted his disciples, he would have been so weak and sickly in appearance and demeanor that nobody would have believed that God had miraculously raised him from the dead. There are at least two serious problems with this objection.  

First, Christian apologists assume a worst-case-scenario in terms of the abuse and wounds of Jesus, but none of these are a historical fact. Each of the wounds and injuries that Christians traditionally believe were inflicted upon Jesus are subject to significant historical doubt. They are possible, but most are dubious, none rise to the level of historical fact, and each is subject to reasonable doubt, including multiple lacerations to Jesus’s scalp from the Crown of Thorns, the nailing of Jesus’s hands, wrists, feet, or ankles to the cross, and the spear wound to Jesus’s side.

Christian apologists don’t feel a need to justify these beliefs because paintings, sculptures, sermons, books, and movies have been filled with images and descriptions of Jesus experiencing a worst-case scenario of violent abuse, wounds, and injuries. Yet, the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion do not provide details that would indicate the severity of these wounds. So, not only is there is uncertainty about which, if any, of the alleged wounds and injuries of Jesus actually occurred, there is also uncertainty about the severity of each of the alleged wounds or injuries of Jesus. For these reasons, we cannot be confident that Jesus would have been in terrible physical condition in the days immediately after his crucifixion, if he had survived the crucifixion. 

A second serious problem with this objection is that it assumes that Jesus first appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem about 48 hours after his crucifixion in Jerusalem on the first Easter Sunday (i.e., Luke 24:36–42 and John 20:19–20). Those stories, however, are probably fictional, as noted earlier in the consideration of William Lane Craig’s case. It is more likely that the first appearance of Jesus to his disciples after his crucifixion took place in Galilee a week or more after he had been crucified. If so, then the wounds and injuries of Jesus would have had significantly more time to heal than just the 48 hours that Christian apologists assume.

Because the Sickly Jesus Objection is based on dubious historical assumptions about the extent of Jesus’s physical abuse, wounds, and injuries, and because this objection is based on the dubious historical assumption that the first appearance of Jesus to his disciples took place in Jerusalem about 48 hours after his crucifixion, this fifth objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Overpowering of the Guards. This sixth objection to the Swoon Theory makes at least two problematic assumptions. First, it assumes that a Roman guard was placed at Jesus’s tomb the day after he was buried, to make sure that nobody would take Jesus’s body from the tomb, but this story is found only in the gospel of Matthew, and many New Testament scholars view this as a fictional story, created for apologetic purposes (i.e. to respond to the skeptical view that Jesus’s disciples stole the body of Jesus from his tomb).

We have no good reason to believe that most scholars use a standard of evidence that is any stronger than “more likely than not” in making decisions about historicity of alleged events in the life of Jesus.

Second, this objection makes the false assumption that somebody or some group overpowering the guards would be the only way that Jesus would have been able to leave the tomb where he had been buried. Other ways are clearly possible; for example, the distraction, deception, bribery or drugging of the guards.

Because this sixth objection is based on a dubious historical claim, and because it is based on a false assumption about there being only one way to have managed the alleged Roman guards, this sixth objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Moving the Stone. This objection is actually an argument for the claim that an angel must have moved the stone blocking the entrance to Jesus’s tomb. The argument is that neither Jesus, nor his disciples, nor the Roman guards, nor the Jewish authorities would have moved the stone, so it must have been moved by an angel!  

Yet, how the stone got moved is irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus died on the cross or survived his crucifixion. Suppose that an angel did move the stone. It could still be the case either that Jesus died or survived his crucifixion. Thus, this seventh objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails as irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of the Swoon Theory.

Where did Jesus Go? This objection argues that Jesus could not have survived his crucifixion, because there is an absence of historical information about Jesus continuing on in his life after his crucifixion and alleged initial appearances to his disciples. However, the Swoon Theory does not imply there would be credible historical data about Jesus’s life after the few weeks of alleged appearances to his disciples. 

The Swoon Theory is compatible with scenarios where Jesus dies or disappears shortly after those alleged appearances: Jesus could have died as a result of infection of a wound from his crucifixion, or as a result of being killed by a Roman soldier who recognized Jesus, or as a result of being physically attacked by a robber. In those cases, there would be a good chance no credible historical data would exist about Jesus’s life after his initial appearances. Thus, the eighth objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails.

Swoon Theory Implies False Theories. According to Kreeft and Tacelli, the Swoon Theory implies that either (a) the Conspiracy Theory is true or (b) the Hallucination Theory is true. But they claim to have refuted those two other theories. 

According to the Swoon Theory, the disciples did actually see a living and physically embodied Jesus after his crucifixion. If actually seeing Jesus alive after his crucifixion was the main reason why the disciples believed Jesus had been raised from the dead, then it cannot also be the case that they lied about seeing Jesus alive again (i.e., the Conspiracy Theory), nor that the main reason why the disciples believed in the resurrection was because they had hallucinations about Jesus when Jesus was not actually present. 

Because the Swoon Theory rules out both the Conspiracy Theory and the Hallucination Theory, the ninth and final objection by Kreeft and Tacelli against the Swoon Theory fails, and that means their claim to have refuted all four alternative theories is false, just like the claim that there are only four alternative theories is false. Therefore, it is clear that the case for the resurrection of Jesus by Kreeft and Tacelli fails.

The Case by Habermas and Licona

Gary Habermas is a Christian philosopher who has been developing and perfecting a case for the resurrection of Jesus for decades. He is a leading defender of this Christian belief, and many view Habermas as the leading apologist on this issue. Michael Licona is a New Testament scholar who is also a leading defender of the resurrection of Jesus, and together they wrote The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (CRJ).

One way in which the case by Habermas and Licona differs from the case by Craig, is in the strength of their conclusions. For Craig, the resurrection of Jesus is more likely than not. For Habermas and Licona, the resurrection of Jesus is a “reasonable historical certainty.”

My understanding of this phrase is that they mean that the resurrection of Jesus has a probability of at least .70. That appears to be a significantly stronger claim than Craig’s “more likely than not” (50% plus a feather). Since Craig failed to show that the probability of the resurrection was greater than .50, can Habermas and Licona do any better?

First, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because Habermas and Licona are talking about the claim that Jesus died and then came back to life (i.e. Jesus rose from the dead), while Craig is clearly talking about the stronger claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. Habermas and Licona argue that historical and scientific evidence can only establish the first claim, but that the claim that God was the cause of Jesus coming back to life requires philosophical arguments. So, although Habermas and Licona make a higher probability claim, they make it about the weaker and less significant claim that Jesus rose from the dead, not about the stronger and more significant claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Whereas Craig’s case was based on three historical claims, Habermas and Licona focus on five historical claims they call “minimal facts”: 

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. Jesus’s disciples believed that he rose from the dead and appeared to them.
3. The conversion of Paul after what he believed was an experience of the risen Jesus.
4. The conversion of James (brother of Jesus) because he believed the risen Jesus appeared to him.
5. The tomb of Jesus was discovered to be empty.

In order to qualify as a “minimal fact,” a historical claim must (a) be accepted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject and, (b) be well evidenced (CRJ, 44). They summarize their case this way (CRJ, 207):

• The disciples sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead and had appeared to them.
• A number of outside evidences support the truth of their belief in his resurrection.
• Since no opposing theories can adequately account for all of the historical evidence, Jesus’s resurrection is the only plausible explanation.

The first problem for Habermas and Licona is that their case is based on the “minimal facts approach,” which is illogical and unreasonable, as in Craig’s case based on just a handful of facts while ignoring dozens of others.

A second problem is that Habermas and Licona were also influenced by confirmation bias: There is no good reason to believe that their five alleged facts are a fair and accurate representation of the dozens of historical facts that could be used to make an evaluative comparison of alternative theories, but we do have good reasons to believe that their selection of historical claims/facts is biased in favor of their deeply held belief that Jesus rose from the dead.

 A third problem is that the “minimal facts approach” leans heavily on consensus of scholars in terms of determining which historical claims constitute “facts” by means of the requirement “nearly every scholar accepts them” (CRJ, 44). By a scholar “accepting” a historical claim, they mean the claim is “considered historical” by the scholar (CRJ, 46).

But different scholars use different standards of evidence to decide whether to accept a historical claim or to decide whether an alleged event should be considered historical. If most scholars use the standard of “more likely than not,” then if we want to rely on the consensus of scholars, we cannot then judge the historical claims they “accept” to have a probability that is significantly greater than .50. 

But Habermas and Licona are trying to show that the resurrection of Jesus has “reasonable historical certainty” which, again, suggests a probability of at least .70. Habermas and Licona are suggesting that scholars require a historical claim to have “reasonable historical certainty” in order to accept a historical claim or to consider an alleged event to be historical. But they have not shown that this higher standard is used by most scholars. So, we have no good reason to believe that most scholars use a standard of evidence that is any stronger than “more likely than not” in making decisions about historicity of alleged events in the life of Jesus. Thus, the “minimal facts approach” used by Habermas and Licona is dubious.

A fourth problem with their case is that they fail to take into account the need to multiply probabilities, namely these two:

• Jesus died on the cross.
• Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks after his crucifixion.

It would be a significant accomplishment if Habermas and Licona could show that each of these claims has a probability of .70, but they would still fall short because the probabilities of the above two historical claims must be multiplied together to determine the probability of their both being true: 

.70 x .70 = .49

However, these are not independent events. If we assume that Jesus died on the cross, then that provides very powerful evidence against the claim that Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks after his crucifixion. That means the probability of both events occurring will be significantly less than .49, because the probability calculation above did not take into account the fact that the truth of the first claim impacts (significantly lowers) the probability of the second claim.

We have to determine the degree to which Jesus being alive after his crucifixion reduces the probability of Jesus having died on the cross.

To make the point, let’s reverse the order in which the two events are considered. If people saw that Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks following his crucifixion, they would reasonably assume that he didn’t actually die on the cross. So, we cannot merely multiply the probabilities of the above two events. We have to determine the degree to which Jesus being alive after his crucifixion reduces the probability of Jesus having died on the cross. 

Thus, there is no possible way that the probability of Jesus’s death on the cross could be anywhere near .70, given the assumption that Jesus was alive and walking around in the days and weeks following his crucifixion. But even if one was to estimate the probability of Jesus having died on the cross to be .50, on the assumption that he was alive after his crucifixion, the probability of both key claims being true would be significantly less than the goal of .70: 

.70 x .50 = .35

Not only is a probability of .35 lower than what Habermas and Licona imply they have shown the resurrection of Jesus to have, it also falls below the fairly low standard of evidence for any scholars who reject historical claims when the probability of the claim falls below being more likely than not (.50).

A fifth problem with the case by Habermas and Licona is their reliance on the conversions of Paul and James (Jesus’s brother) that were the result of experiences they believed to be appearances of the risen Jesus. I have already shown that these alleged appearances are dubious and problematic, in my discussion of Craig’s case for the resurrection.

A sixth problem is that, like the case made by Kreeft and Tacelli, Habermas and Licona fail to refute the Swoon Theory, which they object to as follows (CRJ, 99-103):

• Jesus was severely scourged and his hands and feet were nailed to the cross.
• The Asphyxiation Theory (of how crucifixion causes death).
• The Spear-Wound Story in the gospel of John.
• The Sickly Jesus Objection.
• The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul.

The alleged severe scourging and the alleged nailing of Jesus to the cross are not historical facts. The Asphyxiation Theory is probably false. The spear-wound story is probably fictional, as I argued in my discussion of the “Blood and Water” objection to the Swoon Theory by Kreeft and Tacelli. The Sickly Jesus Objection also fails, as I showed in my discussion of that objection put forward in the case by Kreeft and Tacelli. The alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul is dubious and problematic, as I argued in my critique of Craig’s key claim about alleged appearances of a risen Jesus. All of these objections to the Swoon Theory fail.

A seventh and final problem with the case by Habermas and Licona is that they don’t consistently follow their “minimal facts approach.” For example, the first four objections they raise against the Swoon Theory are unrelated to their “minimal facts.” Only the fifth dubious point about the alleged appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul is based on their list of “minimal facts.”  

In other words, Habermas and Licona are happy to bring in lots of dubious historical claims that are not part of their “minimal facts” whenever doing so is needed to help their case. But that just means that their case is not actually based on “minimal facts.” It is based on dozens of historical claims, many of which don’t pass the requirements for being “minimal facts.”

Based on the seven serious problems with the case by Habermas and Licona, their case for the resurrection of Jesus fails.  

Conclusion

The failure of leading Christian apologists to make a strong and solid case for the resurrection of Jesus is evidence that no such strong case can be made, and that the available historical evidence is not sufficient to allow for a strong and solid case to be made for the resurrection. Thus, it is rational to conclude that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

Contact the author for citations/sources.

In May 1957, Life magazine published a hugely popular and tremendously influential article entitled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” Written by an affluent banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson, the article narrated the journey of an intrepid explorer who forayed deep into the mountains of southern Mexico, partook of secret rituals, and became “the first White man in recorded history” to consume the sacred mushrooms that lay at the heart of ancient mysteries.

Wasson’s highly poetic account of the mushroom experience quickly inspired a generation of spiritual seekers and helped spark the massive interest in psychedelics that swept across North America and Europe during the 1960s. At the same time, Wasson and others inspired by his work began to speculate that psychedelic mushrooms lay at the foundation of other religious traditions—ranging from the Hindu Vedas to the Greek Mysteries—and perhaps even helped to catalyze human evolution and civilization itself.

While most experts today are deeply skeptical of Wasson’s work, his claims for a psychedelic origin of spiritual experience remain hugely influential and still circulate widely in popular discourse. 

In the early 2000s, scholars at Johns Hopkins and New York University resurrected research on psilocybin, fifty years after Wasson’s early publications. In 2006, Roland R. Griffiths and his colleagues published the seminal article “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” which helped spark a new wave of scientific research into psilocybin and other psychedelics. 

Over the last two decades there has been a tremendous amount of research on the potential for psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA to treat a wide range of psychological disorders, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, and substance abuse. At the same time, not surprisingly, pharmaceutical companies have begun pouring millions of dollars into psychedelic research in the hopes of discovering a revolutionary new class of drugs. Meanwhile, mushrooms, both magical and nonmagical, have also saturated popular culture through films such as Fantastic Fungi and best-selling books such as The Immortality Key. Suddenly, it seems, the fascination with the magical possibilities of mushrooms is everywhere. 

Fantastic Fungi: What are psilocybe mushrooms and what is psilocybin? 

Psilocybe is a large genus of mushrooms containing over 150 species that are scattered on every continent of the globe. The larger biological category of which Psilocybe species are a part is the kingdom of fungi—a vast realm that includes everything from yeasts and molds to fleshy, spore-bearing bodies such as mushrooms. In turn, mushrooms play several critical roles in various ecosystems. While some are parasitic, feeding on and often killing other organisms, others are mycorrhizal, growing around the roots of trees and plants in mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships. Others, including Psilocybe species, are saprobic, meaning that they feed on dead and dying organic material, helping to break down and recycle other organisms. Psilocybe species thus tend to favor and even thrive in areas that have suffered environmental damage, whether natural or human-caused, where there is a great deal of dead organic matter to break down. 

We might legitimately wonder if we human seekers of the magic mushroom are not simply helping the fungus—consciously or unconsciously—with its own reproductive work.

As such, they have tended to follow human civilization, feeding on the wood chips and debris that surround our development, as well as our destruction of the natural environment. “As humans destroy woodlands and engage in artificial construction,” Paul Stamets explains, “Psilocybes and other litter saprophytes proliferate, feeding off the surplus of wood chips and refuse, especially in interface environments, wherever humans, forests and grasslands struggle to coexist. Since human development seems inextricably associated with ecological disturbance, Psilocybe mushrooms and civilization continue to coevolve.” 

The precise role of psilocybin in the mushroom’s evolution and its place in the larger ecosystem remains a bit unclear. Some researchers have suggested that psilocybin may have served as a defense mechanism against mushroom-eating organisms, deterring them by its toxic or disorienting effects. Others have speculated that psilocybin may have actually helped the mushroom spread its spores more widely by altering the behavior of animals who came into contact with it and so expanding its potential range of distribution. 

In this sense, we might legitimately wonder if we human seekers of the magic mushroom are not simply helping the fungus—consciously or unconsciously—with its own reproductive work. By growing these mushrooms all over the world and consuming them widely in altered states, are we perhaps helping the mushroom to do precisely what it has evolved to do—that is, to spread its spores as widely as possible, if necessary, through disoriented animals, including human animals? 

In comparison to other “classical psychedelics,” psilocybin is sort of midrange in its potency among human consumers: while it is roughly ten times more potent than mescaline, it is also about one hundred times less potent than LSD. At low to moderate doses, individuals often report more intense perceptions of color, shifting visual patterns, and deeper emotional connections. At higher doses, individuals may report a more radical shift in their perception of conventional reality, seeing the world in a new way, and experiencing a sense of expanded or even boundless consciousness. More daring psychonauts recommend “heroic doses” of five grams or more for those who want to achieve what he calls “shamanic” experiences, including encounters with supernatural beings and profound insights into the nature of reality. 

However, exactly how psilocybin and other psychedelics produce their specific effects in humans remains unclear. We know that psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD seem to latch very powerfully onto a particular receptor in the brain called the 5-HT2A receptor, but beyond that, we don’t yet have a very satisfactory explanation for the specific kinds of subjective effects and alterations of consciousness that they commonly produce. While the exact cause of psychedelic sorts of experiences—the sense of interconnectivity, loss of ego, transcendence of time and space, and so on—is not well understood, some researchers have offered possible explanations. 

The British psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris suggests there is evidence that psilocybin actually reduces brain activity, particularly in one brain system known as the “default mode network” (DMN). A centrally located hub of brain activity, the DMN links parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper structures involved in memory and emotion. As such, it functions as sort of the brain’s “orchestra conductor,” capital city, or corporate executive in charge of managing the entire system. Many speculate that it is closely tied to our self-construct, or what we commonly call the “self” or “ego”: “The default mode is most active when we are engaged in higher-level ‘metacognitive’ processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (such as the self or ego), moral reasoning, and ‘theory of mind’—the ability to attribute mental states to others.” 

It should be emphasized, however, that the precise understanding of how psilocybin and other psychedelics work remains murky at best.

When psilocybin and other drugs reduce activity in this particular part of the brain, this can result in the sense of ego dissolution or transcendence of self commonly reported in psychedelic experiences—the melting away of the usual boundaries between self and world and the feeling of “Oceanic Boundlessness” or merging into some larger whole. At the same time, the DMN’s reduction may also let other brain areas become more active. No longer held in check by the DMN, other material not usually available to consciousness may float to the surface, including emotions, memories, and buried traumas. 

It should be emphasized, however, that the precise understanding of how psilocybin and other psychedelics work remains murky at best, and there are many lingering questions about the complex physical, psychological, cultural, and religious factors that help produce these experiences. More critical scholars, such as Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot, argue that the social and political setting in which the mushrooms are consumed is as important, if not more important, than the brain chemistry itself. 

Did psychedelic mushrooms play a role in the development of religion? 

For a relatively unassuming group of fungi, Psilocybe and other psychoactive mushrooms have generated intense debate over their possible role in the development of religion and of human culture more broadly. In the eyes of many mushroom enthusiasts—beginning with R. Gordon Wasson, then continuing with Terence McKenna, and resurfacing with more recent authors such as Brian C. Muraresku—psychedelic fungi lie at the very roots of religion itself, providing the chemical impetus that generated some of the earliest human mystical experiences, spiritual visions, and conceptions of the divine. 

From Wasson onward, many have identified psychedelic mushrooms as the source of mystical flights to other worlds, of the sacred beverage of the Eleusinian Mysteries, of the Vedic Soma ritual, and perhaps even of the Christian Eucharist. This idea has given birth to many best-selling books, such as Persephone’s Quest, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Food of the Gods, and more recently the aforementioned The Immortality Key. It has even resurfaced in mainstream magazines such as Popular Mechanics, which published an article on how “Magic Mushrooms May Have Shaped Our Consciousness.” 

More skeptical authors, conversely, have generally regarded these claims for the psychedelic origins of religion as fanciful, amateurish, and flawed. Most established scholars have dismissed or derided all the narratives of Wasson, McKenna, and Muraresku regarding the psychedelic origins of religion. 

The idea that there was widespread religious use of Psilocybe or other fungi outside of Mesoamerica remains an intriguing yet mostly imaginative speculation.

The historical evidence, it seems, offers a far more complicated picture than Wasson’s narrative of the ancient religious origins of mushroom use and its fortuitous rediscovery in the twentieth century. While some sort of mushrooms were clearly used in Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest, their identity is by no means clear, and (at least in the highly biased Spanish accounts) they were used as much for recreational as for “spiritual” purposes. The idea that they were a kind of “sacrament” was largely a projection of the Spanish Catholic clergy, who viewed them as a perverted form of the Christian Eucharist. 

Meanwhile, the idea that there was widespread religious use of Psilocybe or other fungi outside of Mesoamerica remains an intriguing yet mostly imaginative speculation. The evidence for a fungal basis for the soma beverage of the Vedas or the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries is indeed provocative but still contested by most Indologists and classicists today. None of this, of course, has prevented the idea of the fungal origin of religion from continuing to spread widely in popular culture and on the internet, where it remains a very common trope today. 

There is one curious and significant point about Psilocybe mushrooms that we should highlight. While psychoactive Psilocybe species are found in many regions across the globe, including North, Central, and South America; Europe; various parts of Africa; South and East Asia; and Australia, there is surprisingly little evidence that they were actually consumed by many human cultures outside of southern Mexico and a few other regions. As Erik Davis notes, “One of the curiosities about psilocybe mushrooms is that, while they are widely distributed across the planet, very few indigenous societies seemed to have been particularly interested in them.” 

In keeping with their unpredictable, spontaneous, and quite mysterious way of appearing and disappearing in nature, the presence of psychedelic mushrooms remains elusive in human history and religion. While we can perhaps catch a glimpse of them appearing in early Mesoamerica, we cannot say for certain what they were. While some were clearly used in Siberian shamanic traditions, that use—both religious and recreational—seems quite different from the ways in which they are used today. And while many authors have made claims about the religious roles of fungi in ancient India and ancient Greece, those claims seem speculative at best. At the same time, we still have to account for the fact that large swaths of human cultures, over long periods of history, appear to have ignored the many Amanitas, Psilocybes, and other psychedelic mushrooms growing all around them (and perhaps even feared and avoided them, as they did the many similar-looking poisonous species they encountered). 

Yet despite the scant and elusive nature of the existing evidence, the idea that psychedelic fungi lay at the roots of human religion and culture remains remarkably persistent. Much of this persistence is the result of popular discourses on psilocybin and other psychedelics that spread from the 1950s onward, particularly through the work of people like Wasson, Walter Pahnke, and McKenna. The psychedelic renaissance has recently revived this idea, as seen in books like The Immortality Key and others. In light of our own current fascination with magic mushrooms and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics in the twenty-first century, we probably have a strong tendency to read the historical evidence through a psychedelic lens, rather than assuming some other, nonpsychedelic basis for religious experience. 

We probably also have a strong desire to search for ancient sources of authority and legitimation for modern psychedelic use, rather than simply accepting it as “new.” These tendencies need to be subjected to some serious reflection and historical critique. 

Reprinted with permission from Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion by Hugh B. Urban, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

For ten years, I have been a professor of philosophy at a Moroccan public university that uses English as the language of instruction and employs a liberal arts pedagogical model. One of the reasons I was hired was my expertise in the debate on Islam and modern science. The university appreciated that, in addition to offering courses on classical themes and authors, I could communicate this debate to the students, who are overwhelmingly Muslim.

By cultural and family background, I am nonreligious, though deeply invested in research about religion. About twenty years ago, after my doctorate in philosophy, in which I attempted to study some formalized theories of knowledge, I decided to devote myself to studying the debate on science and religion. I was attracted to the world of ideas as much as I was when I decided to pursue philosophical studies, but I no longer wanted to deal with abstract theories that interested only a handful of hyperspecialized scholars. I wanted to study ideas that intertwine with worldviews, choices, and the lives of people outside academia, focusing on Islam. 

Overly simplistic notions and narratives, distortions of scientific methodology and information, and the idea that scripture should have the final say on matters of science seem to prevail.

I was soon exposed to different visions—some more academic, others more popular—all aimed at demonstrating, even if by using different and often conflicting arguments, the harmony of Islam and science. I became aware of the presence, at least in certain positions, of largely pseudoscientific ideas. “Pseudoscience” was in fact the term used, informally, by some authors who criticized the very theories I was studying. Several Muslim thinkers and authors promote positions reconciling Islam and science, and some explicitly criticize the intersection of pseudoscience and Islam. These positions, however, are far from the majority. Overly simplistic notions and narratives, distortions of scientific methodology and information, and the idea that scripture should have the final say on matters of science seem to prevail. 

A clearly pseudoscientific position was, for example, that of Harun Yahya (pseudonym of Adnan Oktar). This Turkish author built his reputation on a systematic attack on evolution conveyed through countless books and articles in many languages in a form of creationism presented as Islamic but in reality based on arguments that flourished among some Christian groups. 

Some popular authors also argued that the Qur’an—the sacred text of Islam, revealed in the seventh century CE—contained precise descriptions of phenomena verified by science centuries later. The idea was that such precision could only derive from God and could therefore confirm the divine origin of the holy book. This position seemed somewhat more original, at least at first glance, but it was argued based on interpretative exaggerations. 

Double standards are ubiquitous. 

One such favorite example given by my students is the Qur’anic reference to “two seas” that do not mix, which, they claim, is a fact confirmed only by modern science. “And it is He [God] who merged the two seas; this one fresh and sweet, and that one salty and bitter; and He placed between them a barrier, and an impassable boundary.” (25:53). Another passage reads “He merged the two seas, converging together; Between them is a barrier, which they do not overrun” (55:19–20).¹

The literature on the “miraculous scientific precision” of the Qur’an elaborates on the hydrological phenomenon allegedly “predicted” in scripture and even identifies these “two seas” with specific geographical locations. According to the Islamic preacher Dr. Zakir Naik, the verses should be understood in reference to a river flowing into the ocean; fresh water homogenizes into salty water, and the “barrier” should be read as a reference to the “transitional area.” The phenomenon, he adds, can be seen by the naked eye—for example, where the Nile flows into the Mediterranean Sea.²

Obviously, this interpretation raises several questions: if the river and the ocean actually end up mixing, how accurate is the reference to an “impassable boundary”? Furthermore, if we admit the phenomenon is visibly observable, in what sense would the verse anticipate modern science? 

This approach to the Qur’an has long been criticized, even by Muslim authors,³ but it is persistent. I’ve noticed that several authors, including academics, continue to support it in a “soft” (and ultimately specious) version. At a recent academic conference on religion and science, for example, a slide highlighting Qur’anic references to meteors read: “This approach has no aim of proof, but is intended as an invitation to reflection, inspiration, and as an illustration of the absence of antagonism between science and religion.” 

Survey data indicate that Muslim views on evolution vary considerably across countries. In some countries, acceptance and rejection are nearly evenly split, while in others—such as Pakistan—only about 30 percent of Muslims say they believe that humans and other living things have evolved.⁴Only a handful of scholars and scientists, such as molecular biologist Rana Dajani, have a public and visible position that ties together Islam and evolution, including human evolution. In my conversations with students, I have noted some resistance to evolution in two ways: by emphasizing the story of Adam and Eve (which is present in the Qur’an and in Islamic tradition, with some variations from the Christian one) and by declaring that evolution is unscientific. 

This richness of human relationships offsets the inevitable frustration of dealing with pseudoscience, which constantly resurfaces in old and new forms.

I’ve noticed that these ideas are also spread by some colleagues. On one occasion, a professor encouraged an audience of students to form their own opinion on evolution. Then, he held a talk full of creationist ideas, including that believing in evolution is like believing that a tornado can build an airplane by hitting a junkyard. I asked him what he thought of those Muslim scientists who do embrace evolution. He replied that they should be “ashamed” for rushing to embrace an unsupported theory. 

I have heard other colleagues impart notions of Intelligent Design, always with an Islamic twist. An author who systematically discredits evolution through this type of argument is Jordanian pharmacology professor Eyad Qunaibi, who has a YouTube video series that combines scriptural and theological arguments with the classic anti-evolution arguments of the Western and Christian type.₅

I also realized that students have often absorbed veritable urban legends, such as the one according to which a NASA lunar mission confirmed the “splitting of the moon”—a miracle alluded to in the Qur’an and spoken of in tradition. 

One thing that strikes me about the way academic authors and opinion makers in the Muslim world attempt to defend pseudoscientific or antiscientific ideas is their inconsistency in relying on authors who would hardly approve of a worldview based on a revealed religion, much less an Islamic one. For example, I’ve heard and read David Hume’s critique of induction invoked to argue that evolution is unscientific because it is a generalization and projection of known phenomena onto past places and times that cannot be observed.⁶ Hume did question induction, but he was also the philosopher who showed the weakness of those arguments according to which the world is so harmonious that it implies a creator or architect. 

Hume also thought that analogies between nature and human artifacts were indefensible, just as he found miracles incredible. He did not teach that “anything goes,” but that some beliefs are more plausible than others based on precedent. How can one enlist a representative of philosophical skepticism like Hume in defense of Intelligent Design and a sacred text? Even granting, for the sake of argument, that evolution wasn’t “scientific” enough (ignoring that it is confirmed from ample and convergent evidence from different fields), if we embraced Hume’s skeptical ideas in an extreme and radical form, why then would we seek information on the origin of biodiversity in the highly general, allusive, and interpretable verses of a sacred text? 

Another example of Islamic creationism is the use of the current scientific debate on evolution, in which scientists place different emphasis on different evolutionary factors. I have read, and I have been lectured by colleagues, on how this scientific debate ultimately demonstrates that evolution has not been understood well. Those same colleagues fail to consider that, regardless of the specific scientific interpretation of evolution, there will be no room in it for the story of Adam and Eve miraculously created.⁷ Diversity of interpretation among scientists is overstated, and diversity of views among theologians is passed over in silence or dismissed. 

I always make sure to present students with all the options, including those I consider erroneous, explaining the potential weaknesses and challenges of each.

Similarly, I have heard Karl Popper invoked to argue that evolution is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable.⁸ Here too, not only is the fact that evolution is falsifiable ignored (for example, if we found fossil records that disproved it), but also that creationist theories and “scientific” readings of the Qur’an are often constructed in such a way as not to be falsifiable. When a critic identifies a verse or term that conflicts with science, many authors rush to point out that science is not the ultimate truth and that it can change. Yet they ignore this very idea when they want to “confirm” the Qur’an with science.⁹ So much for falsifiability. In general, notions of philosophy of science and postmodernism are invoked to downplay science, but then it is not explained why a revealed text should be embraced as the truth. Double standards are ubiquitous. 

Another element present in discussions with religious apologists is a tendency to employ sophistical arguments, with unstated premises, unexplored objections, and even attempts to embarrass the interlocutors. For example, I was once asked whether incest accompanied by contraceptives is permissible. Despite being open-minded, I was struck by the example and could not help thinking that sometimes the sexual imagination of supposedly conservative people surpasses that of those with much more liberal views. But what was the strategy behind asking such a question? 

The clarification regarding contraceptives was intended to block an objection based on genetic considerations. Had one responded with remarks even vaguely construed as favorable to incest, they would have appeared (to a religious audience) as the supporter of a relativist, morally corrupt position. Had one answered that they felt an aversion to the practice of incest, such an observation would have been used to argue that there are innate moral principles instilled by God (even in a nonbeliever) and that they demonstrate God’s existence. This type of argument ignores, for example, that there are explanations and justifications for morality and ethics that rely on evolutionary notions. Even if we admitted the existence of innate universal ethical principles, it’s simply not clear why they would demonstrate the existence of the God of a specific revelation. 

As I conclude in my book Islam and Pseudoscience (Cambridge University Press, 2025), many ideas and practices related to Islam and modern science can be called “pseudoscientific” according to one specialist description or another, but what matters, ultimately, is that they are demonstrably flawed. 

An important point to emphasize is that pseudoscience is not essentially Islamic or that Islam is not necessarily a generator or host of pseudoscience.

I always make sure to present students with all the options, including those I consider erroneous, explaining the potential weaknesses and challenges of each. This also applies to positions that I appreciate. For example, I sympathize with authors such as the molecular biologist Rana Dajani, who embraces human evolution, but I think it remains a delicate task to read the story of Adam and Eve in a way that is not hostile to evolution, and there is the theological challenge of reconciling all the death and suffering entailed by evolution with the idea of God’s goodness. 

An important point to emphasize is that pseudoscience is not essentially Islamic or that Islam is not necessarily a generator or host of pseudoscience. For example, it can be shown that various arguments typical of creationism or Intelligent Design, while being linked by Muslim authors to specific verses of the Qur’an, have been originally promoted by Christian authors. In some cases, Western–Islamic collaboration on creationism or the importation of materials and ideas has been demonstrated by historians. 

Wet cupping, a form of bloodletting performed with vacuum-filled cups, is popular among Muslims, having been recommended by the Prophet. However, it is also advocated by traditional Chinese medicine (and it is based on an outdated, erroneous understanding of human physiology). As an educator, I find it important both to show why certain ideas and practices are flawed or even dangerous, and to deconstruct the illusion of uniqueness and cultural exceptionalism they create (“my religion has a privileged relationship with science”). 

Finally, it’s important to highlight Muslim critics of pseudoscience and their arguments. For example, the astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum observes that the Prophet obviously knew and appreciated the healing practices of his times, and this shouldn’t be overstated. In other words, we now know that many herbs and practices used in the past are ineffective and sometimes also harmful, while modern pharmacology has distilled the active ingredients of yet other herbs appreciated in antiquity. There is no need to reject “modern” medicine and to consider the Prophet’s practices as binding.¹⁰

Medical matters are particularly interesting. One can see that Islam has sometimes been exploited to promote anti-science positions—for example, by rejecting vaccines because of the presence of products forbidden in Islam or by arguing, based on Qur’anic verses, that the human body was created perfect as it is (along with other arguments typical of global anti-vaxxers).¹¹ However, there are also cases of Muslim leaders who have instead urged their followers to use vaccines in line with Islamic ethics and self-care.¹²

Showcasing the plurality of critics of such ideas, including those who are Muslims like Dajani and Guessoum, defuses the approach of those who present a single reading of scripture as if it were the sole Islamic point of view and who are reluctant to explore objections to their ideas. 

Once all the critiques, interpretations, and challenges have been fully and honestly presented, the students are free to choose. I’ve noticed that this pedagogy allows for deep connections to be forged even with students who, at the end of the course, may not want to abandon creationism or other flawed ideas. This richness of human relationships offsets the inevitable frustration of dealing with pseudoscience, which constantly resurfaces in old and new forms.

A review of the 2026 satirical black comedy film Digger directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu starring Tom Cruise and John Goodman, released by Warner Bros.

The people running the world in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger have mastered everything except the job. They can command a room and invoke a higher purpose. Faced with an environmental catastrophe after an Arctic drilling accident has sent an enormous iceberg toward Europe, however, they struggle to work out what to do. The spectacle of their inadequacy makes for a wonderfully unnerving comedy: the world has assembled an extraordinary concentration of power and entrusted it to people who seem barely able to manage a meeting.

But there is much more to the film than that. Its marketing presents a comedy about an environmental disaster caused by a vain, out-of-touch billionaire. Twice, however, Digger takes a turn so ambitious and wild that revealing either would spoil the viewing experience. 

Digger reminds me of the movies I would watch as a kid with my mom in the theater. If you go the bathroom or to get soda, you’ve missed critical scenes—when you get back to your seat you ask “what happened, what did I miss?” and it’s just not possible to explain. It is a brilliant movie, and you’ll be thinking about it for a long time. Go not knowing anything about it and avoid spoilers at all costs. This review was written so as not to give away too much of what makes the film so delightful to watch on the big screen. 

For much of the film, Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an aging oil magnate whose drilling operation has unleashed a vast mass of Arctic ice the size of Maryland that threatens to collide with Western Europe in three days, causing massive tidal waves across the North Sea. His attempts to confront the crisis bring him into contact with scientific advisers, the American political establishment (notably U.S. President Compson, starring John Goodman), and a European Parliament that has considerable trouble distinguishing a persuasive speaker from a responsible one. Across these encounters, Iñárritu keeps returning to a dispiriting mismatch between the qualities that win power and those required to exercise it.

Cruise’s casting gives that mismatch a particular bite. His screen presence has so often promised that the impossible will get done. Here, the same confidence belongs to a man whose sense of his own importance has outrun his judgment. Digger can be appalling and still hold our attention; indeed, his ability to do so is central to the problem.

John Goodman is superb as U.S. President Compson, who suggests a grotesque composite of Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump. The resemblance belongs to an entire exhausted political class as much as to any individual. Goodman makes the presidency feel immense and its occupant conspicuously unequal to it—old, out of touch, and physically incapable. The scientific advisers fare little better in practice. They struggle to explain the impending danger in terms their listeners (Digger, the president, military leaders) can grasp and turn their knowledge into a course of action. Being better informed than the president proves insufficient to change anything, to say the least.

The public’s perception of the crisis seems to trouble the administration more than the crisis itself. What ought to be a search for solutions acquires the queasy logic of a public-relations meeting held during a fire—significant time is spent on managing the perception of the crisis on social media.

A hilarious scene in which Digger and his environmental scientist eat tuna brings the same instinct to the dinner table. The film punctures the mystique of organic food, with the reassuring story attached to the meal appearing to count for more than any meaningful difference in what is on the plate. Conscientious consumption becomes another way of buying a flattering picture of oneself.

Religion supplies another familiar aid to authority. The kitsch piety that adorns the highest reaches of government lends their earthly ambitions a borrowed grandeur.

The military-industrial complex, meanwhile, has little difficulty finding its way into the proceedings. Its ability to remain indispensable seems far more dependable than anyone’s ability to solve the problem. Religion supplies another familiar aid to authority. The kitsch piety that adorns the highest reaches of government lends their earthly ambitions a borrowed grandeur. There is something especially funny, and rather chilling, about the ease with which the powerful recruit God only for it to make absolutely no difference whatsoever.

The European Parliament sequence gives these failures their most concentrated expression. Its members demand explanations—from the U.S. administration, from scientific experts, even from Digger—yet seem incapable of much more than that. The U.S. Vice President and the expert are booed, while Digger gets some laughs. Indeed, the man whose business caused the catastrophe understands the room better than the people attempting to warn it. A chamber ostensibly devoted to deliberation behaves like an audience waiting for a good act. Cruise’s command of the scene (arguably the highlight of the entire film) implicates the viewer in it. We, too, can appreciate a well-delivered insult more readily than a complicated explanation.

What many of us, including our leaders, ultimately care about in difficult circumstances is not finding a solution, but placing the blame on someone else.

Digger’s charge of hypocrisy has enough force to unsettle the easy pleasure of watching a villain expose himself. He accuses Europe of regulating energy production out of its own backyard while continuing to buy the product from elsewhere. The legislators’ confidence in their safeguards runs up against a disaster that observes no borders. They can regulate what happens within their jurisdiction; the catastrophe is under no obligation to recognize it. Confronted with the consequences, they appear hopelessly ill-prepared. The scene gives Digger a damaging point and leaves his culpability intact. Someone else’s hypocrisy offers him a line of attack, rather than an alibi. It’s a meaningful scene, which shows that what many of us, including our leaders, ultimately care about in difficult circumstances is not finding a solution, but placing the blame on someone else.

The European Parliament building itself, visibly dilapidated, depicts the issue very well: An institution presuming to safeguard the future seems unable to maintain its own premises, down to a wilting flower and leaking roof. Outside, as environmental catastrophe approaches, demonstrators gather to protest… genocide. The juxtaposition is deliberately abrasive. The public, like its leaders, has trouble departing from the performance it knows.

The apparent exception is Kenny (Jesse Plemons), a technology magnate with a distinctly Palantir-like aura. He seems capable of getting something done, which gives him an almost indecent appeal in this company. His presence makes our longing for competent authority uncomfortable. After so much dithering, we may be grateful enough for efficiency to stop asking whose selfish purpose it serves—and Kenny is, indeed, the reason for much of what we see unfold in the film.

Without revealing too much about how the narrative of Digger is constructed, it’s fair to say Iñárritu repeatedly pulls back to reveal the machinery behind the spectacle. These shifts make our own behavior difficult to ignore. We enjoy the humiliations and choose our favorites, responding to matters of collective survival with partisan enthusiasm. A film that has encouraged us to recognize the incompetence of its characters starts to progressively expose our pleasure in recognizing it. When Digger dies before the audience in the film (this will make sense once you see the movie), the spectators shout “Fuck you, Digger!” in unison. Their anger registers as some sort of understanding of what just happened while giving them the comfortable sensation of having done something about it when, as the next scene reveals, they did not and could not have done absolutely anything meaningful.

The film looks and sounds magnificent. Working in the old VistaVision format (a short-lived high-resolution motion-picture film format from the 1950s), cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki gives these assemblies of powerful and ultimately powerless people a visual elegance that makes their antics all the more disconcerting. The wide-angle compositions (with a changing aspect ratio!) let us study the performers and the spaces that confer their authority. Color and light carry meaning in each scene, while metallic clangs in the sound design jolt us out of easy contemplation. Image and sound work together to give the theatrical form a wonderfully physical presence. The beauty of the spectacle helps explain why we want to keep watching, even as we come to distrust the show.

Even Digger’s devotion to his ailing cat, Maggie, is an interesting metaphor. The pet has acquired the standing of a child, and keeping her alive becomes an undertaking of extravagant expense and dubious mercy. The animal suffers without understanding the interventions meant to save her. Maggie can be read as a miniature of the public, helpless before decisions made on her behalf and oblivious to the actual machinery that determines her fate.

Digger has the openness to interpretation that gives great art its staying power. Its politics resist a single label because its scrutiny keeps moving, eventually reaching the person in the seat just before the end credits. That gives the film a life well beyond its topical targets. You may enter the theater expecting to recognize the people running the world, or a condescending diatribe about environmental disaster.

You leave having been given an unexpectedly good look at yourself.

We spent the twentieth century beating measles, polio, and newborn hepatitis B into statistical irrelevance. In 2025, the man who fought hardest against that victory was put in charge of federal vaccine policy. How did this happen? And what is going to happen now?

Vaccines have worked, spectacularly, for a hundred years. 

It’s far too easy to forget a war we won so thoroughly that most people alive today have never seen a casualty. 

Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, the disease killed an estimated 2.6 million people worldwide every year. Afterward, U.S. case counts fell more than 90 percent within five years, and by the early 1980s, they had dropped by 99 percent. This decline held even through a mid-1970s rebound when vaccination coverage briefly slipped. Smallpox, a disease that racked up a body count in the hundreds of millions in the twentieth century alone, was declared eradicated from the planet in 1980. This may be the only time in human history we have ever actually defeated a disease rather than just managing it. Polio went from paralyzing tens of thousands of American kids every year in the 1950s to hiding out in only a handful of countries because of political conflict. Globally, the WHO’s immunization program is credited with saving something on the order of 150 million lives over the last fifty years; the overwhelming majority of those were infants and children under the age of five. 

This is not a controversial scientific claim. It’s closer to the idea that infectious diseases are caused by germs rather than swamp vapors or curses. Vaccines don’t just prevent death. A much larger number of people live their lives without disability as a result. Every case of paralytic polio we didn’t get, every child who didn’t go deaf from mumps, and every baby who didn’t develop the liver damage that comes with chronic hepatitis B is a life that doesn’t show up as a morbidity statistic. When people talk about the “cost” of vaccination programs, they sometimes forget the other side of the ledger: the daily count of children who never got sick. How did we ever decide this was a bad idea? 

Andrew Wakefield 

One man, a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield, is almost single-handedly the reason “vaccines cause autism” is a sentence that exists in the English language at all. 

In 1998, Wakefield published a paper in The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in only twelve children, with no control group. Twelve. It has since been shown to be a fraud from top to bottom, including undisclosed payments from a lawyer building a case against vaccine manufacturers, manipulated case histories, and ethics violations that got Wakefield stripped of his medical license. The Lancet fully retracted the paper as “utterly false” in 2010. Most of his coauthors distanced themselves from the paper years before The Lancet retracted it. 

“Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” —Jonathan Swift 

None of this mattered, because by the time careful research had gotten around to debunking it, the story had already escaped the lab and gone feral in the press. British and Irish measles vaccination rates cratered, falling as low as 61 percent in parts of London. Inevitably, measles came roaring back hard enough that the UK lost its WHO measles-elimination status for the first time in 2018–19, just two years after finally earning it. The UK regained the status in 2021, then lost it again in January 2026—a pattern we might be seeing develop here on the other side of the Atlantic. Paul Offit, a pediatrician who has spent his career watching this unfold, put it about as bluntly as a professional can: “That paper killed children.” Children were dying of vaccine-preventable diseases because parents declined vaccination based on a fraudulent paper. That’s about as clean a causal chain as epidemiology ever hands you. 

The measles vaccine scare hit the U.S. less like a tidal wave and more like a slow-acting toxin. It fed the “vaccine court” litigation boom of the 2000s, which saw nearly 5,000 claims that vaccines caused autism. Every single case failed when the evidence was examined. It’s worth pausing to consider that: the legal system, using a lower evidentiary bar than a peer-reviewed journal, still couldn’t find a single case where this held up. It just doesn’t happen. 

A Cochrane review of roughly 14.7 million children found no connection between vaccines and autism. A Danish study followed over 650,000 kids, including those with autistic siblings who were presumably at higher risk, and found nothing. But litigation losses don’t kill beliefs; simply debunking them with evidence is not enough. As of a 2024 survey, roughly one in ten American adults still believe vaccines probably or definitely cause autism, and about a quarter of the public still doesn’t believe the CDC has ever clearly said otherwise. Twenty-eight years of unanimous negative studies, and the belief just sits there. And now it is being fed by the highest medical authority in the land—a branch of the federal government. 

RFK Jr. 

To be fair to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he did not invent vaccine skepticism. He just climbed on for the ride. For roughly twenty years before he became Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy ran an organization called Children’s Health Defense, whose entire business model was convincing people that vaccines are dangerous, that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and, memorably, that airplane contrails are a secret chemical weapons program. Scientific American ran a piece in 2017 cataloging a decade of vaccine science distortion under his byline. This is not a man who earned his way into the job with an open mind; he came in with a set of beliefs he has been spreading for years. 

Kennedy said his own kids were vaccinated, and he told the public that the MMR shot was the most effective way to stop the disease from spreading. 

Here’s the genuinely strange part, though—the part that should make anyone do a double take: during his confirmation hearings and at times during the current measles outbreak, Kennedy said his own kids were vaccinated and called the MMR shot the most effective way to stop disease spread. Officially, he offers science-backed guidelines the barest support; elsewhere, he questions them and tells people to decide for themselves. In the same news cycle, he’d write an op-ed framing vaccination as a personal choice, suggest on TV that healthy kids can’t die of an infectious disease, or praise a doctor treating measles with cod liver oil and an antibiotic that has no effect on a virus. It’s a strange rhetorical move unless your goal is plausible deniability. 

Secretary Kennedy also fired all seventeen members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the independent experts who write the actual vaccine schedule. He justified this by citing a 2009 report claiming 97 percent of its members had financial conflicts of interest. This sounds reasonable until you learn that public health officials pointed out the 97 percent figure was about missing paperwork signatures, not money, and that only one of the seventeen members had a real, disclosed conflict. Then, months after the firing, a peer-reviewed JAMA study came out showing that conflicts of interest on the committee had fallen from 42.8 percent in 2000 to about five percent by 2024. Secretary Kennedy purged the committee for alleged corruption at the exact historical moment it was cleaner than it had been in a generation. Unfortunately, several of his own hand-picked replacements turned out to be vaccine “skeptics” who were paid expert witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. 

The Purge, the Panel, and the Fictional Citation 

Once Kennedy sat behind the steering wheel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the changes came fast. The new panel’s first real act was voting to strip a preservative called thimerosal out of flu vaccines, based on a presentation from a former colleague of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group that reportedly cited a study that does not exist. Not a flawed study. Not a study since retracted. A study that, as far as anyone can determine, was never published because it was never conducted. That slide was quietly pulled before the final presentation, but the vote happened anyway, thimerosal’s actual decades of safety data notwithstanding. 

By September 2025, the panel terminated its recommendation for the combined MMRV shot in kids under four. By December, it voted to scrap the universal recommendation that newborns get a hepatitis B vaccine at birth—a policy that had driven a 99 percent drop in pediatric hepatitis B cases since 1990—replacing it with a system based on testing the mother’s infection status, a policy known to greatly decrease the uptake of the vaccine. One of the panel’s own members, who voted against the change, said the quiet part out loud: “We are doing harm by changing this, and I hope the committee accepts responsibility when that harm shows up.” 

In August 2026, the Trump administration released its own “Gold Standard” guidelines by executive order. Among other changes, it recommends splitting the MMR into separate shots to be given at separate visits, even though no single-disease vaccines for measles, mumps, or rubella are licensed in the United States and there is no scientific evidence of any benefit to splitting them. The order’s own fact sheet leans on the one argument in this whole saga that might sound reasonable to a layperson: that the U.S. recommends more vaccine doses than any peer nation. That’s true, and it’s also meaningless. The vaccine schedule is based on what diseases we are trying to protect against and how our health system works. More on that later. 

This executive order triggered an exodus among career health officials. The CDC director was ousted in August. The FDA’s top vaccine official resigned, writing that the administration wanted subservient confirmation of its preferred narrative rather than actual transparency. Nine former CDC directors, spanning both parties, wrote publicly that the agency’s shakeup was unlike anything the country had experienced. 

We can skip the theoretical debate about what happens when you weaken a vaccine schedule, because now we are running the experiment on our own children.

So far, several medical and scientific organizations have decided that it is worth taking up this fight. The American Academy of Pediatrics sued over the ACIP overhaul. In March 2026, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction, finding the government had disregarded the scientific process and undermined the integrity of its own actions. The new committee’s votes were stayed. HHS has since appealed the ruling to the First Circuit. This is an ongoing story and worth following in the news. 

Measles, Meet 2026: A Controlled Trial You Didn’t Ask For 

We can skip the theoretical debate about what happens when you weaken a vaccine schedule, because now we are running the experiment on our own children. 

The U.S. declared measles eliminated in 2000. In January 2025, an outbreak started in an under-vaccinated Mennonite community in West Texas, where kindergarten measles vaccine rates had fallen to 77 percent—well below the 95 percent needed for herd immunity against a virus this contagious. By the time Texas declared its local outbreak over in August, it had logged 762 cases. The CDC tallied 2,289 cases across 44 states and nearly 50 separate outbreaks last year, the worst record in 25 years. Three Americans died. All three were unvaccinated; two were children. So far this year (writing in September 2026), there have been 3,134 cases—the highest annual total in more than 35 years. And this time, nearly 1,000 cases in South Carolina show that it won’t be confined to one insular community. No 2026 death has been officially confirmed yet, but Pennsylvania reported two measles-associated deaths on August 25, and Reuters reported that Secretary Kennedy himself asked his own CDC director to strip any reference to them from the agency’s public case tally while their cause is “under review.” 

Secretary Kennedy’s initial public response to the first child’s death was to describe the outbreak as “not unusual,” and to claim, incorrectly, that hospitalized patients were mostly there for quarantine rather than because they were struggling to breathe. Infectious disease specialists pushed back immediately and specifically: the death was preventable, full stop. Describing a first pediatric measles death in a decade as business as usual is not a scientific position; it’s a statement of belief. Meanwhile, real children were showing up in Texas hospitals with vitamin A toxicity because their parents had been told, by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, that vitamin A was a near-miraculous measles treatment. It is not. It has a narrow, legitimate role for the rare child who is already deficient. It is not a substitute for a vaccine with decades of safety data behind it. Using it as a treatment poisoned kids who were already sick with a dangerous disease. 

Doing the Math 

Before universal hepatitis B vaccination, about 18,000 American infants and children were infected every year. The policy of giving it to all children at birth decreased this number by 99 percent between 1990 and 2019. A policy that delays this by testing the mother first sounds reasonable but runs directly into the reality that testing takes time, results get lost, and follow-through is not guaranteed. Move the vaccination rate down even modestly and you are looking at thousands of preventable chronic infections a year, each one requiring a lifetime of monitoring, potential liver disease, and costs that dwarf the price of the shot it replaced. 

Measles math is even less forgiving. The virus is one of the most contagious pathogens known to exist. Every case will infect 8 to 18 others in an unprotected population. That’s why the herd-immunity threshold—the amount of the population that needs to be vaccinated to prevent spread—sits at roughly 95 percent. Most U.S. states have now slipped below this. With a documented case-fatality rate in the 2025 outbreak of roughly one to three deaths per thousand cases, and a much greater number suffering pneumonia or encephalitis (brain infection) severe enough for hospitalization, the honest forecast isn’t one dramatic national epidemic. It’s what we’re already seeing: a steady toll of smaller, geographically scattered outbreaks, each one arriving after a community’s coverage dips below the threshold. One unsettling part of this is that tracking immunity levels is the work done by epidemiologists rather than cabinet secretaries. Many of those scientists were on the ACIP staff whose jobs were “reorganized” out of existence. 

What do other countries do? 

One of the claims of the August 2026 “Gold Standard” executive order is that other countries recommend fewer vaccines against different diseases on different schedules. 

This is based on several easy-to-understand reasons. Different countries are burdened with different diseases and have differing resources to combat them. If TB is prevalent, then the BCG vaccine is often used—not so in the U.S. In South Korea and Japan, Japanese encephalitis is common, so a vaccine against it is routine. So far, it isn’t here. 

Before the 2026 executive overhaul, the U.S. schedule recommended vaccination against 18 diseases. A STAT News analysis of 38 countries put the average at 14 diseases. Several wealthy peer nations were close behind the old U.S. number: Greece recommends 17, Germany and the Netherlands cover 14 to 15, and South Korea recommends 18. The UK, after adding rotavirus, RSV, and a combined chickenpox shot over the past two years, covers essentially the same list as the U.S. 

The “Make America Healthy Again” report was found to cite studies that don’t exist, in a pattern researchers flagged as characteristic of unedited generative-AI output.

There is exactly one wealthy country that is an outlier: Denmark, which vaccinates against 10 diseases. Curiously, one of the authors of the “Gold Standard” order is a dual U.S.-Danish citizen who trained there. Comparing a country with a population of six million, a single-payer health system, and national electronic health records to one with 343 million—including tens of millions of uninsured—is not good epidemiology. For example, Denmark can vaccinate only at-risk pregnant women against RSV rather than all children, as is the case in the United States. 

That’s the actual answer to why countries differ: not because there is any evidence that more vaccines or more diseases covered in one vaccine are dangerous. Many countries have decided that they just can’t afford vaccination against some diseases like flu and rotavirus. Every country in this comparison, Denmark included, still universally vaccinates against the diseases that actually kill and disable children at scale—measles, pertussis, and polio. Nobody is skipping those. Which answers the question of outcomes too: there are no major differences in schedule for the diseases the whole world has agreed to fight. But decreasing this schedule will matter a great deal. Kate O’Brien, WHO’s director of immunization, put it about as plainly as an international health official ever does: “When we stop using the vaccines, these diseases are coming back. There’s no ambiguity about that.” 

There’s a final irony worth reviewing. By cutting the schedule to 11 diseases to resemble a supposed international norm, the new U.S. schedule doesn’t land near that norm but drops below nearly every country in the 38-country analysis—ahead of only Denmark and Vietnam, and now behind Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, China, and Guinea-Bissau, a West African nation nowhere near the United States’ economic weight class. The U.S. didn’t converge with its peers; rather, it became the new outlier. 

An Intellectual Vaccine 

This ongoing story highlights another epidemic that I think we desperately need to be vaccinated against. News media have been infected with a “balance bias.” This is the same trap that led to the spread of the Wakefield hoax back in 1998. Back then, the media inflated a 12-person study into a national panic. Now, they are giving equal time to a fringe political point of view against the massive weight of an effective scientific consensus. An advocacy group’s talking points are given the same presentation as research-supported scientific evidence. The public is being left to “decide for themselves,” or even worse, “do their own research.” Opinions are held equal to experts. And here’s a distinctly modern wrinkle: The administration’s own “Make America Healthy Again” report was found to cite studies that don’t exist, in a pattern researchers flagged as characteristic of unedited generative-AI output, complete with a citation format traceable to a specific AI company’s tools. Wakefield only needed a fraudulent lab and a compliant journal to fake credibility. 

The Bottom Line 

There is a pattern here. Every individual decision—firing a clean committee for alleged corruption, pulling a preservative based on a nonexistent study, ending a birth-dose policy that had driven a real disease toward the vanishing point, and rewriting a federal website to say the opposite of what the evidence says—points in the same direction. We are moving away from safety. 

We achieved the eradication of smallpox and the near-elimination of measles through a slow, unglamorous accumulation of evidence, regulation, and expertise nobody paid much attention to until ignorance started dismantling it. We may be the victims of our own successes. 

♦ ♦ ♦

CODA: The Making and Unmaking of Andrew Wakefield 

Andrew Wakefield’s measles theory didn’t start with vaccines. He had been a well-known transplant surgeon when he noticed that the lesions of Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel condition, looked something like the lesions that can occur when measles infects the gut. He managed to overlook the fact that measles also causes identical lesions in the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs—tissues with nothing to do with Crohn’s disease. Rather than testing to see if the idea was wrong, he went looking for evidence it was right. 

In 1993, he claimed to find measles virus in 13 of 15 gut samples, confirming his hunch. However, no other lab has ever replicated this finding, including, notably, a molecular biologist inside Wakefield’s own research group who used more sensitive, specific methods and found nothing. The original result is now understood to have come from antibodies that weren’t actually measles-specific—a false positive dressed up as a discovery. 

Two years later, he extended the claim from finding wild measles virus in the gut to finding the vaccine strain itself. This led him erroneously to think that if the natural virus could harm the gut, perhaps the weakened version in the live MMR vaccine could too. 

In 1996, he filed a patent for a laboratory test to detect the virus—wild or vaccine strain—in bowel tissue as a diagnostic for Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. The test had no value unless doctors came to accept that a vaccine-derived measles virus persisting in the gut was real and worth testing for. He filed the application from his home address rather than his university’s. 

In February 1996, a lawyer named Richard Barr was constructing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers on behalf of parents who believed the vaccine had harmed their children. He hired Wakefield on retainer at £150 an hour. Wakefield ultimately collected £435,643 plus expenses—close to $900,000 today—for research to support that litigation. He disclosed this to neither The Lancet nor his own coauthors. 

Describing a first pediatric measles death in a decade as business as usual is not a scientific position; it’s a statement of belief.

At that time, Wakefield extended his claims that the measles vaccine was the cause of Crohn’s disease to also assert that it was responsible for the increasing incidence of autism. To justify his hypothesis connecting gut damage to the brain, he promoted a long-simmering theory of “alternative” medicine known as the “leaky gut” hypothesis: that inflamed intestines “leak” undigested proteins into the bloodstream that cross into the brain and trigger developmental regression. This hypothesis, the one piece of the theory trying to link the vaccine to autism, has never been demonstrated at any point, before or after. 

When he applied for funding for the study that was ultimately published in The Lancet, he already asserted the conclusion: “The evidence is undeniably in favour of a specific vaccine induced pathology.” The children in the study weren’t an ordinary clinical sample. Journalist Brian Deer later established that eleven of the twelve had been steered to Wakefield through anti-MMR campaign groups tied to Barr’s lawsuit. Several had documented developmental problems prior to their vaccination, contradicting the paper’s claim that they’d been developing normally until the shot. 

Slowly, as is often the case with good research, each hypothetical link in this causal chain was tested and found to be broken. No measles virus in Crohn’s tissue, no measles virus in the guts of autistic children, and no leaky-gut pathway to the brain that anyone could show. Wakefield’s patented measles gut test hadn’t followed from evidence that vaccines were dangerous. It had preceded the evidence—which he then spent the next decade trying, and failing, to manufacture. 

None of this surfaced for years. The Lancet’s reviewers missed it. The press ran the story exactly as pitched: a lone doctor blowing the whistle on a vaccine cover-up. It took The Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer, digging on his own initiative from 2003 onward, to track down medical records, court filings, and funding documents Wakefield never intended to surface. Deer’s first exposé ran in February 2004; ten of Wakefield’s twelve coauthors formally retracted the paper’s interpretation within weeks. Wakefield did not. 

The official reckoning took six more years. Britain’s General Medical Council opened its investigation in 2007 and ran the longest fitness-to-practice hearing in its history. It concluded in January 2010, finding against Wakefield on more than 30 charges, including dishonesty and a dozen counts of “callous disregard” for the children. This included: general anesthesia, colonoscopies, lumbar punctures, and barium X-rays that weren’t clinically indicated. The Lancet fully retracted the paper, and Wakefield’s license to practice was revoked. 

He has never been criminally charged. A regulatory fraud finding isn’t a conviction, and losing his license didn’t stop him from working. He relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2001, years ahead of the GMC’s ruling, and ran a clinic there treating children for his invented diagnosis until he resigned in 2010. He went on to write and direct the anti-vaccine documentary Vaxxed, which Robert De Niro initially programmed into the Tribeca Film Festival. Nearly three decades after the paper, he remains a headline draw on the anti-vaccine conference circuit—not as a discredited researcher in exile, but as the founding martyr of a movement his own fraud helped create.

Recent surveys, followed by extensive media coverage of their findings, show that American liberals—and liberal young women in particular—are more likely than conservatives to self-identify as having struggled with anxiety and depression. What isn’t clear is why.

A 2022 paper titled “The Politics of Depression” reported that liberal girls self-reported a higher depressive affect score than liberal boys, conservative girls, and conservative boys, with liberal boys reporting the second highest score. The same trends hold when it comes to negative self-esteem and self-derogation. These scores remained true across multiple demographics, including income, education, race, and age. Conservatives with a postgraduate education were the happiest, and conservatives making only $30,000 a year or less were still as happy as liberals who made six-figure incomes. It’s also worth noting that in terms of personality traits, “[the] politically liberal tend to be higher on openness to experience (complexity of mental life) and neuroticism (negative emotionality),” two of the Big Five personality dimensions (the others being conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness). 

Mental health conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.) lack the kind of direct, observer-independent biomarkers that define diabetes (fasting glucose, HbA1c, oral glucose tolerance test) and other physical conditions. Diagnosis and population statistics measuring mental health therefore lean heavily on self-report instruments or clinician interviews that still depend on the patient’s description of internal states. Because of that reliance, group differences (sex, culture, cohort, socioeconomic status) are always ambiguous: they could reflect differences in underlying neurobiology/functioning, differences in willingness or ability to report distress, differences in interpretive frameworks (“what counts as low mood”), or some mixture. This is a real and well-recognized limitation in psychiatric epidemiology. In other words, a flaw in relying on self-reports is that we’re less sure if the difference in health is objectively accurate or if a difference in the perception of health is driving the difference.

Mental health conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.) lack the kind of direct, observer-independent biomarkers that define diabetes (fasting glucose, HbA1c, oral glucose tolerance test) and other physical conditions.

A study by Brian F. Schaffner et al. proposed, “One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term.” Schaffner added that “under a conservative ideology that emphasizes stability, security and personal agency, the thought of mental illness may invite thoughts of the unknown, or appear as a threat to their security,” pointing to the fact that when they substituted the term “overall mood” for “mental health,” the gap they originally found in their study disappeared.

Conservatives do score higher than liberals on the personality trait conscientiousness, which is defined as socialized impulse control, which would lend itself more to avoiding stigmatizing issues. Several studies back up the theory that conservative ideologies are more stigmatizing of mental illness because conservatives are more likely to view the mentally ill as a threat or weakness. Other studies have found that Republicans are less likely to seek mental health help and are less likely to trust the institutions providing mental health information. 

Given this research, I would like to suggest that it is possible that conservatives’ view of mental health and associated institutions may skew data to make it seem as if conservatives are mentally healthier than liberals, who are comparatively more accepting of the terminology around mental health and mental illness. However, this isn’t fully explanatory because it wouldn’t account for the connection between liberalism and neuroticism or some of the data from the “Politics of Depression” paper on less jargon-laden terms, such as self-esteem.

Another possible explanation is that liberals are more likely to consider struggles to be an illness due to a broader conception of harm. Dr. Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, said, “There is a fairly strong relationship between having a more progressive liberal political ideology and having a broader concept of harm,” referring to the concept creep of terms describing harm, such as “trauma.”

When filling out mental health questionnaires, participants can fairly easily understand what their scores will come out as, and if they’re more likely to see themselves as having a clinical problem, they may be more likely to skew their answers toward that result. Importantly, this does not require participants to be lying or intentionally exaggerating. When a mental health assessment question asks, “How often do you feel down? Never, occasionally, often, or nearly all of the time,” it is a highly subjective question. If I felt “down,” whatever my interpretation of that term is, on and off for about six days out of the last 14, is that occasionally or often? If I wanted my pain validated and treated because I felt it was problematic, I’d be more likely to put “often,” but if I did not perceive myself as having a clinical problem, I may call it “occasional.” 

There is a gap between what liberals and conservatives consider clinical depression, and liberals will be more likely to explain that gap by citing data that concludes conservatives support stigmatization.

Similarly, participants might weigh thoughts differently depending on the lens they’re looking through. If, while driving, they have the thought that they could easily decide to drive off the road and crash their car, someone who thinks of themselves as healthy is likely to dismiss that thought as a random human impulse that’s quickly forgotten. Someone who’s worried and neurotic may remember that thought when asked about suicidality and say they occasionally think about it, rather than never.

Like the claim that conservatives are inflating their mental health scores, the claim that liberals and progressives are deflating them due to the concept creep of psychological terms is possible, but it’s hardly provable how much of the observed difference in mental health outcomes can be attributed to this factor versus competing explanations.

Some conservative commentators have been quick to use the studies about mental health to their ideological advantage. One take, especially popular among conservatives and Christians (and conservative Christians), is that liberal women lack emphasis on family and faith, which bolsters mental health by providing regular social connection, a sense of community, and duty to others. Social psychologist Jaime Napier said:

One of the biggest correlates with happiness in our surveys was the belief of a meritocracy, which is the belief that anybody who works hard can make it. That was the biggest predictor of happiness. That was also one of the biggest predictors of political ideology. So, the conservatives were much higher on these meritocratic beliefs than liberals were. 

Another writer for the conservative-leaning Washington Times, quoting a Skeptic Research Center survey, argued that misunderstanding statistics such as overestimating the rate of Black Americans murdered by the police by several orders of magnitude could lead to a bleaker view of the world, and thus, impact mental health.

The liberal response is that liberals correctly perceive injustices like racism, climate change, and the polycrisis: see phrases like “If you aren’t angry, you’re not paying attention.” Liberals are also more likely than conservatives to seek out mental health evaluations and help.

There isn’t even consensus among mental health professionals about how wide or narrow the definition of depression should be.

Then there are possible third factors. Jonathan Haidt has been a proponent of the theory that social media is the cause of the mental health crisis among younger generations. Liberal Democrats are more likely to use social media for civic activities, and most social media websites (other than 𝕏) lean Democratic. If Democrats and liberals use social media more on average, it could be one of the factors negatively affecting mental health. Haidt argues that it’s not just the amount of time spent on social media, but it’s that the messages targeted toward teenage girls are disempowering and lead them to an external locus of control. A Monitoring the Future survey found that over 30 percent of liberal twelfth-grade girls agreed that “whenever I try and get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” The number was just under 30 percent for conservative boys and below 20 percent for liberal boys and conservative girls. 

An often-neglected factor is that conservatives also rate higher on physical health, which could affect mental health outcomes, considering that mental and physical health are closely tied to each other.

The general findings are also corroborated through the comparison method used by social scientists to check their findings with those in other countries. Similar findings about those with worse overall health being more likely to identify and vote for the left and better overall health being more likely to support the right were replicated in Europe, Japan, Germany, and England and Wales. This extends to depression. A cross-sectional analysis shows that the mainstream right has lower self-rated depression than the mainstream left in Western Europe. 

It’s not as if we can section out stigma versus an expanding definition of harm and test it against depressed patients.

So, are conservatives inflating their health, are liberals expanding their concept of harm, or does the divide reflect a real difference that stems from ideological beliefs or lifestyle factors that correlate with political views? Even if we designed a study that controlled for third factors like physical fitness, social media use, family status, and religiosity, it’s not as if we can section out stigma versus an expanding definition of harm and test it against depressed patients. 

There is a gap between what liberals and conservatives consider clinical depression, and liberals will be more likely to explain that gap by citing data that concludes conservatives support stigmatization. Conservatives will explain the gap by saying liberals have expanded the definition so much they’ve begun to medicalize and treat normal human conditions—in fact, many books in the last decade have argued this premise, such as Saving Normal, The Age of Diagnosis, and Bad Therapy. 

And so it goes. In fact, there isn’t even consensus among mental health professionals about how wide or narrow the definition of depression should be. In the United States, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is meant to be a unified definition of disorders like depression, but the manual itself is subject to continuous change, with each new edition redefining diagnostic criteria, often significantly.

The bottom line is that suffering people deserve care, and there are pros and cons to both medicalization and less formal, more holistic models such as physical exercise and community support. Seeing both as socially acceptable depending on the patient’s needs allows us to address that suffering by putting aside the unanswerable question of “Who has it statistically and objectively worse?” and meeting the person in front of us with the options available to them.

This is a reply to Gary J. Whittenberger’s response to my article entitled “The Hard Problem of Consciousness Is an Insoluble One.”

In August of 2026 I stayed at the Hilton Waikaloa Village on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii and participated in the hotel’s Dolphin Quest experience of swimming with dolphins. These are highly trained, well-tended cetaceans swimming about a large, sand-bottomed saltwater lagoon that is constantly monitored and separate from the open ocean, and although we all had to sign pages of a waiver obviously drafted by a team of lawyers, we never once worried for our safety. Thus, we could relax and enjoy the experience of touching, stroking, holding, and grabbing on to the dorsal fin of a dolphin to let it take us for a ride. In my case, I also imagined what it would be like to be one of those dolphins.

Instead of being a bipedal primate, I fantasized about having a fusiform body that enables these ~500-pound swimming machines to propel through the dense medium of salt water, a blowhole that allows them to breathe out of the top of their head, a dorsal fin on the back for stability, pectoral fins (flippers) on the sides for steering and stopping, and two huge flukes (lobes) on the tail that move up and down to drive the dolphin through the water. Instead of my human skin, as I stroked our dolphin, Malu, I thought about what it would be like to have a smooth, rubbery, and hairless covering that is 15–20 times thicker than my skin, with an underlying blubber layer for thermoregulation and energy storage (and we were instructed not to touch around the dolphin’s eyes and face because the skin is extra sensitive). Finally, although I enjoy sushi, I tried to picture what it would be like to eat raw fish over and over and over all day. It was a challenging task, to say the least. Here is how I described it in my chapter on consciousness in my book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Still Matters:

But the only way to have the full-on qualitative experience of dolphin-ness is to actually be a dolphin with all that entails anatomically, physiologically, neurologically, and cognitively. In that case, then, I would no longer be a human wondering what it’s like to be a dolphin. I’d just be a dolphin, and very likely not asking what it’s like to be a human. This is what is called the hard problem of consciousness.

This chapter, in fact, falls in Part III of the book, “Known Unknowables,” for a reason. I contend that the hard problem of consciousness may very well be an insoluble one, that is, we not only know that consciousness is presently an unknown problem, the way that it is configured very likely makes it unknowable. What’s it like to be a dolphin (or a bat or you)? How should I know?

I can imagine what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin or you, but that final step of transporting into the inner sanctum of another being’s private and subjective experience is not possible.

We do not know—and cannot know—what it is like to be something other than what we are. That is, our internal states (consciousness) are private and subjective … by definition. I can imagine what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin or you, but that final step of transporting into the inner sanctum of another being’s private and subjective experience is not possible. Thus, although there are nearly two dozen officially registered theories to explain the hard problem of consciousness, and many variations on each of these theories, I suspect that the problem is presented in a way that cannot, ultimately, be resolved. 

Of course, I could be wrong. This is why I chose for the epigraph of Part III of my book a quote from Robert Ingersoll:

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men.

I do not know what it’s like to be another being’s subjective self, but perhaps one day this will be possible through something like Gary Whittenberger’s proposed brainscope; who knows, maybe Elon Musk’s Neuralink company (or the technology from Synchron, Paradromics, Blackrock Neurotech, or Merge Labs) will enable my metaphorical homunculus to transport from my skull into that of another sentient being and actually experience what it is like to be in that skull. 

Maybe. 

But if so, I’m not even sure I would want to know what other beings are actually thinking. And if that does happen, ethical privacy concerns will have to be sorted out by lawyers and regulatory agencies. In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy my private consciousness even while enjoying the fantasy of imagining what it’s like to be something (or someone) else.

I’m grateful to Skeptic for publishing my article “The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a Soluble One,” alongside Michael Shermer’s article “The Hard Problem of Consciousness Is an Insoluble One” (September 2026). Michael and I agree on many points but differ in a few key areas.

First, we agree on what consciousness is and that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, a dolphin, or any other animal. We cannot have the consciousness of another animal or even of another person, although we might imagine to some extent what it would be like. And I mostly agree with Michael here: “the problem is trying to explain how we are able to experience the world from inside a wet neurochemical brain machine … The hard problem is explaining how it is that we can experience ‘redness.’”

But there is a sense in which we are the machine rather than being inside the machine. I think we would know how we experience “redness” when we identify the neuronal activity pattern present when we do experience it. However, in my article I suggested that finding precise experiential-neuronal correlates will probably require vast improvements in our monitoring of the brain. We need some kind of “brainscope.” For this I envision billions of nanobots that attach themselves to neurons and send wireless signals whenever the neurons fire, but there could be other ways to do it.

Michael seems to agree with Thomas Nagel who reflected, “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.” I disagree with Nagel and Shermer on this point. I don’t think it is hopeless. I think we are finally cracking the problem. For example, Michael quotes Christof Koch: “How can activity in the brain trigger feelings? … Putting it more generally, how can anything physical give rise to something nonphysical, to subjective states?”

There is a sense in which we are the machine rather than being inside the machine.

I think the answer to Koch is “It just does! It is a brute fact.” I believe that when a sufficient number of neurons are “wired” in a certain way, they just give rise to consciousness. In other words, although brain and mental processes are ontologically different, mental processes naturally emerge from and are totally dependent on brain processes. I believe this emergence could not have been different from what it is, and thus there is no explanation of why it is the case. There is some point at which explanation just ends. I think another example of this kind of “end of explanation” is to say “The universe just exists. It could not have been otherwise. There is no explanation for it.”

Michael said “I put it [the hard problem] into the category of a known unknowable because it is logically impossible to solve for the simple reason that it would violate Aristotle’s Law of Identity—A is A. Thus: A cannot also be non-A.” I think the solution here is that mental (M) and brain (B) processes are ontologically different. M is M, and B is B, but M is not B. Mind emerges from and is totally dependent on Brain. I believe that’s just the way it is, and it could not have been otherwise. I could be mistaken, but that is my current view. Can I prove this? No, not now, but I think my view is coherent and consistent and is supported by much evidence. The proof will need to wait on the invention of the equivalent of a “brainscope.”

In my assessment of the hard problem, consciousness is knowable and partly known, and we are on the road to knowing much more about it.

Michael writes: “Understanding how the brain machinery works is different from experiencing the brain machinery itself.” I mostly agree. However, I think the brain machinery produces a flow of mental contents of which we are aware.

Descartes believed there were two substances, mental and physical. I think he was mistaken on this point. I believe that there is one substance, the physical, and two processes, the physical (neuronal) and the mental, and the latter is fully dependent on the former. 

Michael refers to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (from person to cockroach). I don’t think the mind of one human being could be transferred to the brain of a cockroach or could be separated from the brain of that same human being. However, I think that it might be possible, in theory at least, to transfer the brain and mind of one human being into the skull of another human being.

Michael quotes Paul Bloom who says “Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. It might ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, go off into some sort of parallel world, or occupy some other body, human or animal. Even those of us who do not hold such views have no problems understanding them …” I think the best definition of a “soul” is “a hypothetical mind which is not dependent on a brain, which is inserted in a brain at birth and removed from a brain at death, and which then exists on its own in some unknown realm after death.” Although the idea of the soul has been around a long time, at least since Plato, there is just no good evidence that a soul exists. The idea is probably a product of wishful thinking.

Michael says “Dualists believe that we consist of two substances—body and soul, brain and mind (called “substance dualism”). Monists contend that there is just one substance—a body and a brain—from which consciousness is an emergent property.” But I am a different kind of Dualist! I believe that there is one substance, i.e. energy-matter, represented here by the brain, and two processes, i.e. the neuronal and the mental. But yes, consciousness naturally emerges from the brain.

I agree with Paul Bloom that we are “natural-born dualists.” However, in my view we think that way because we are that way! The dualism is real!

Cartesian Dualists believe that when the brain dies the soul is released and continues to exist. However, we Brain Dependent Dualists do not engage in this wishful thinking. We believe that when the brain dies, mental life and consciousness end. In my opinion, beliefs in souls, afterlives, resurrections, reincarnations, heaven, and hell are all superstitions.

I agree with Paul Bloom that we are “natural-born dualists.” However, in my view we think that way because we are that way! The dualism is real! The error which many people make, however, is to think that there is a soul, i.e. a mind which can exist independently of a brain. Just because we can imagine a soul is no guarantee that it actually exists. 

In his article Michael presents a brief but useful discussion of “The Weak Consciousness Principle vs. the Strong Consciousness Principle.” On the topic he cites Deepak Chopra who said “Consciousness is fundamental and without cause. It is the ground state of existence. As conscious beings, humans cannot experience, measure, or conceive of a reality devoid of consciousness.” I think Deepak is about half right here. In my view, energy-matter is the “ground state of existence,” but some brains, which consist of energy-matter, of sufficient size, complexity, and arrangement naturally produce consciousness. Thus, I think the Weak Consciousness Principle is correct, and the Strong Consciousness Principle is incorrect. The best evidence from neuroscience finds a strong correlation of brain and mind states.

However, Michael goes too far when he says “In other words, brain activity = conscious experience.” I disagree. I think the relation is “produces,” not “is equal to.” Later he says “In other words, neural activity = qualia.” Once again, I disagree. I think the relation is “produces,” not “is equal to.” But however one phrases it, I agree with Shermer and Steven Pinker (from his book Enlightenment Now) that brain processes produce mental processes. That’s just the way it is. It’s a brute fact. It could not have been otherwise. Explanation stops here. 

In conclusion, Michael opines “In my assessment of the hard problem, then, consciousness is a known unknown that is very likely unknowable, at least as the concept is conceived of at present.” However, in my assessment of the hard problem, consciousness is knowable and partly known, and we are on the road to knowing much more about it.

Read Michael Shermer’s response to this essay.

Modern life makes it easy to forget the world in which we evolved (the EEA—Environment of our Evolutionary Adaptedness). Most people in developed societies live at a considerable distance from predation, starvation, and violent death. We can simply buy food without giving much thought to the possibility of starvation, let alone the struggle required to stay alive through most of human history. The institutions that protect us from once-routine dangers work so well that we can lose sight of why we need them. From this comfortable distance, it is tempting to regard competition or scarcity as artificial products of defective social systems. If only society were organized more rationally or compassionately, perhaps these disagreeable features of existence could finally be eliminated.

Anyone who has seriously studied the natural world knows otherwise. Life is a continuing contest for limited resources. Organisms compete for resources such as food, water, territory, shelter, and status, as well as mates and opportunities to reproduce. Predation is routine and disease pervasive. Death is one of the defining features of the natural order, and most organisms that have lived left no descendants. That, of course, does not mean that nature supplies a moral code. Disease, for example, is natural, yet we devote enormous effort to preventing and treating it. The same distinction applies to social life: recognizing that competition is part of our evolutionary inheritance does not oblige us to celebrate its cruelties. It does, however, mean that political institutions must be designed for the organisms we actually are.

Yet competition presents an apparent evolutionary puzzle. Human beings do not merely compete. We also cooperate, on a scale unmatched by any other animal. In today’s world, millions of strangers collaborate every day without meeting, speaking, or even knowing of one another’s existence. Are we therefore self-centered or cooperative? The research suggests that the question poses a false choice.

Why We Cooperate 

Humans possess both cooperative and self-protective dispositions. We can display generosity, loyalty, and a willingness to punish unfairness, although such displays may also serve strategic purposes. In The Prince, Machiavelli famously observed that appearing merciful and upright can be politically useful even when those appearances do not fully reflect a person’s conduct. More generally, human behavior is sensitive to many incentives and expectations, reputational pressures, one’s group membership, and even the conduct of other people. A small number of defectors, for example, can induce conditional cooperators to withdraw, while a visible core of reliable cooperators can sometimes move a group in the opposite direction.^1, 2 Human beings are capable of genuine attachment and sacrifice, but these capacities arose within an evolutionary process governed by survival and reproductive success. We are not unconditionally altruistic; we are conditionally and strategically cooperative. 

Cooperation evolved within competition because, under the right conditions, cooperators can outperform individuals who act alone. Natural selection favors strategies that improve survival and reproduction. Cooperation can be one of those strategies, but it requires an explanation: an organism that pays a cost to help another risks exploitation by an organism that accepts the benefit without returning it. Harvard biologist Martin Nowak has summarized five broad mechanisms through which cooperation can evolve: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and competition among groups.³

Kin selection helps explain sacrifices for relatives who are likely to carry copies of the same genes. Parents care for children, siblings assist one another, and social insects perform extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice within colonies of close genetic relatives. Kinship, however, cannot fully explain human cooperation. People routinely assist friends, associates, customers, employers, employees, and strangers with whom they share no close genetic relationship. Robert Trivers supplied one of the most important explanations in his 1971 theory of reciprocal altruism,⁴ under which an individual provides a benefit when there is a sufficient probability that the recipient will return a benefit later. The exchange need not be immediate or exactly equal. One person may provide food today, information next month, protection during a crisis, or support years later. Cooperators must distinguish reliable partners from opportunists. They must reward reciprocity, distrust cheaters, punish exploitation, and sometimes forgive defectors who return to cooperation. 

Conditional Cooperation 

Psychologist Leda Cosmides and anthropologist John Tooby, pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, argued that social exchange repeatedly confronted ancestral humans with a specific adaptive problem: how to obtain the gains from cooperation without being systematically exploited by cheaters.⁵ Human reasoning is especially alert to violations of conditional rules when benefits are taken without required costs. We do not merely calculate material outcomes; we track who has fulfilled the terms of an exchange. We build and value reputations and are often willing to incur personal costs to punish those who claim benefits without contributing. In fact, tolerating a free rider threatens the credibility of the entire cooperative arrangement.

In the early 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod and biologist W.D. Hamilton, renowned for his work on kin selection and inclusive fitness (widely considered one of the 20th century’s most important evolutionary theorists), demonstrated how reciprocal cooperation could emerge in the absence of central authority.⁶ Their work drew on the Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments, a game in which two players independently choose whether to cooperate or cheat. Both earn points if they cooperate, but a player can earn more by cheating while the other cooperates, leaving the cooperative player with the lowest payoff. If both cheat, both do worse than if they had cooperated. In a single encounter, cheating earns a player more points regardless of what the other does. But when the same players meet repeatedly, cheating can cost them the benefits of cooperation in future encounters. Axelrod’s famous computer tournaments showed the power of strategies that begin cooperatively, respond to defection, and restore cooperation when the other player returns to it.⁷

This “shadow of the future” is absolutely crucial in the real world. Reputation allows reliable workers and firms to attract better partners, while trust lowers the cost of monitoring every transaction, and the prospect of future exchange makes a short-term act of exploitation expensive. When costs can be shifted indefinitely to strangers or rescue is guaranteed—incentives to defect become stronger.

We are not unconditionally altruistic; we are conditionally and strategically cooperative.

Recent research also cautions against treating repeated interaction as a complete explanation. A 2024 study combining evolutionary models with behavioral evidence found that repeated interaction alone and competition among groups alone did not reliably sustain cooperation across a broad range of strategies. Cooperation became much more robust when reciprocity within groups operated together with competition among groups.⁸ People cooperate internally, while the resulting groups compete externally.

That pattern is visible throughout modern society. For example, scientists cooperate within research teams while competing for discoveries and recognition, and athletes cooperate with teammates while competing against other teams. Nations depend on internal cooperation while competing economically, technologically, and sometimes militarily. This demonstrates that properly structured competition can discipline cooperation by requiring cooperative groups to produce results.

The problem, however, is even more complicated.

Hierarchy, Dominance, and Prestige

Human societies also form hierarchies. Human social groups repeatedly organize themselves according to differences in power, seniority, knowledge, skill, and reputation. Societies differ enormously in the form, permeability, and legitimacy of their hierarchies, but no large society has eliminated hierarchy itself.

Status can arise through at least two routes. Dominance obtains deference through control, intimidation, or the power to impose costs. Prestige attracts voluntarily conferred deference because others value a person’s knowledge, skill, judgment, generosity, or accomplishments. Anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White argued that prestige evolved partly because social learners benefited by identifying and copying successful individuals.⁹ A healthy society should restrain coercive dominance and encourage earned prestige. 

No system, no matter how fairly or thoughtfully designed, can entirely abolish social strata because individuals are not interchangeable. People differ in intelligence, health and physical capacity, creativity, social skills, risk tolerance, or even willingness to delay gratification. Men and women also differ on average in some physical, behavioral, and reproductive characteristics, even though their distributions overlap and group averages never determine the abilities of every individual.

The existence of differences, importantly, does not make every hierarchy just. Hierarchies can be distorted by many factors, including discrimination, corruption, fraud, or even simple luck. People can and do acquire wealth or status without creating corresponding value. The (political) challenge is therefore to be able to distinguish productive hierarchy from predatory hierarchy: prestige from dominance, contribution from extraction, and earned reward from political privilege. When economic competition is suppressed by the design of a political system, hierarchy does not disappear. It migrates into the state. People then compete for bureaucratic rank, party membership, favored occupations, access to planners, and influence over the distribution of resources such as licenses or housing allocations. In other words, society may compress visible differences in income while creating enormous differences in political power.

The Role of Choice 

Reciprocal cooperation depends upon the ability to choose interactive partners—personal, professional, or otherwise. People reward reliable associates and avoid unreliable ones. Employers select workers; workers choose employers; customers choose producers; lenders choose borrowers; friends withdraw from exploitative relationships; and communities exclude persistent cheaters. Recent research shows that mobility across group boundaries can extend cooperation. A 2025 experiment, for example, found that even limited freedom to move between groups helped participants reward cooperators, avoid free riders, and promote cooperation beyond their original group.¹⁰ Mobility did not abolish group loyalties, but it gave individuals a way to select better relationships. 

Freedom of exit—the ability of a skilled worker to seek a better employer or a dissatisfied customer to seek a better supplier—is one of the principal mechanisms through which reciprocal cooperation is enforced. When the state controls domains such as employment, housing, finance, or production, the citizen cannot easily choose another partner. Instead of being able to leave an unsatisfactory relationship, she must petition the same institution that created it, creating a vicious negative cycle. 

Years ago, when I was conducting research in the Soviet Union, I sometimes felt that the relationship between producer and consumer had been completely reversed. The employees did not work for the customer—the customer worked for the employees! On one occasion, I attempted to purchase an airline ticket from Moscow to Kamchatka, where I conducted my field work. The process required three separate lines: (1) an employee checked my identification; (2) another employee booked the flight; (3) a separate employee accepted payment. It was about an hour in each line.

From the customer’s perspective, the arrangement was absurd. One transaction that could have been completed at a single counter consumed much of a day. Yet the procedure made sense from the standpoint of the organization. It created several positions, divided responsibility into narrow tasks, and required each employee to perform only a small administrative function. The passenger’s time was treated as though it had no value. Such an arrangement was compatible with a Soviet system that promised employment to virtually everyone and measured success partly by maintaining jobs rather than by minimizing the customer’s time or improving the quality of service. 

In a competitive market, producers generally must accommodate consumers because dissatisfied consumers can leave.

The institution had no compelling reason to redesign the process around the traveler. It had been optimized for the bureaucracy rather than for the person the bureaucracy ostensibly served. In a competitive market, producers generally must accommodate consumers because dissatisfied consumers can leave. In a state monopoly, consumers must accommodate producers because they have nowhere else to go. In contrast, a queue in a market is usually information. It tells potential suppliers that demand exceeds available supply or that the transaction is poorly organized. The supplier who adds capacity or consolidates procedures to shorten the wait may profit. A bureaucracy is more likely to treat the same queue as an administrative condition: something to number, monitor, regulate, and distribute fairly.

Markets, obviously, do not eliminate every queue. People still wait at airports, hospitals, and popular sporting or music events, and monopolies and regulation can limit the market’s response. But competitive markets give businesses a continuing incentive to recognize waiting time as a cost and find ways to reduce it.

Who Supplies the Bread? 

Economist Paul Seabright famously recounted a revealing conversation that occurred approximately two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was speaking with a senior Russian official who had been responsible for directing bread production in St. Petersburg. The official wanted to understand the mechanics of a market economy and asked a simple question: Who was in charge of supplying bread to London?¹¹ The answer was that nobody was in overall charge.

Thousands of people—farmers, millers, bakers, truck drivers, warehouse operators, shop owners, and customers—coordinated their behavior without a single administrator directing the complete process. Each participant possessed only a fragment of the required knowledge. Yet Londoners could ordinarily purchase bread without waiting for a government office to calculate how many loaves the city should receive. 

Importantly, markets are not devoid of planning. Every actor—from farmers to households—makes plans. What markets lack is a single comprehensive plan. Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek noted that the knowledge required to coordinate an economy is, in a sense, unknowable to a single institution or individual. It is dispersed (among many people and geographies), incomplete, temporary, and often tacit. It cannot simply be collected by a central authority because much of it emerges only through “experimentation,” i.e., decisions, successes, and failures.¹² Prices, for example, help communicate these changing conditions. Rising prices can signal scarcity or greater demand; falling prices can signal abundance or declining interest. Profit attracts resources toward arrangements customers value. Loss warns that labor, materials, and capital are being used in ways that do not justify their cost.

Prices are not perfect. People can be manipulated, poorly informed, or simply constrained by poverty. External costs such as pollution may not be captured without law or regulation. But prices supply feedback that a comprehensive central plan cannot duplicate.

Capitalism as Spontaneous Cooperation 

Capitalism is often described as a celebration of selfishness. That description misses its most extraordinary feature: a functioning market economy is a system of cooperation among strangers. Nearly every object in a modern household exists because thousands of people coordinated their activities. They may live on different continents, speak different languages, practice different religions, and disagree on nearly every political question. They need not love one another! They need only identify a mutually beneficial exchange in which the buyer prefers to have the product and the seller the money. Both expect to gain.

This is reciprocal cooperation extended beyond intimate personal loyalty. Money, enforceable contracts, property rights, and the rule of law allow people to cooperate far beyond the small circles of kin and acquaintances for which much of human psychology originally evolved. Government has an essential role in maintaining those institutions, but the expectation of a future remains essential. Sellers, for example, depend on repeat business and reputation, while buyers depend on warranties and the prospect that suppliers will still exist tomorrow. Markets work best when neither side expects the transaction to be a final opportunity for exploitation.

Communism requires something fundamentally different. If private production and exchange are prohibited or severely restricted, an authority must decide what will be produced, in what quantities, by whom, with which resources, at what locations, for which recipients, and according to what priorities. The absence of markets transfers allocation to administrators. When official prices, production targets, and distribution rules fail to reflect actual supply and demand, black markets predictably emerge to satisfy needs that the formal system leaves unmet. 

This produces a paradox: Socialism often promises to transfer power from owners to the people, yet extensive central planning necessarily transfers immediate decisions to government officials. The more comprehensive the plan (someone must rank competing needs, distribute scarce goods, set wages, approve investments, etc.), the more domains of life become dependent upon administrative permission. Power is shifted away from voluntary relationships and toward the institutions that control allocation—the very concentration of power socialism claims to overcome. 

Nor does socialism eliminate competition. People continue to compete, but the object of competition changes: they compete for political influence (instead of competing for customers), persuade planners (in place of persuading consumers), and cultivate relationships with the officials who distribute resources. Economic competition shifts toward political competition.

Socialism and the Free-Rider Problem 

Public-goods experiments repeatedly find that cooperation is vulnerable to free riding. A 2023 meta-analysis covering more than 48,000 observations from 20 different studies of centralized public-goods experiments found that punishment was the only mechanism that reliably sustained cooperation over time—otherwise, regardless of hierarchy that could conceivably enforce sustained cooperation by its mere presence, contributions inevitably decay over time.¹³ The result underscores a recurring socialist dilemma. If voluntary effort declines, the state must monitor, compel, or punish. In other words, a system that begins with the promise of universal cooperation becomes increasingly dependent upon administrative enforcement. 

Socialism often promises to transfer power from owners to the people, yet extensive central planning necessarily transfers immediate decisions to government officials.

In my own Soviet experience, the cash rewards attached to very different kinds of work often appeared surprisingly compressed. Women sweeping streets and highly trained researchers could seem separated by much less pay than their differences in education, responsibility, and potential contribution would suggest. That observation should not be converted into the inaccurate claim that all Soviet workers earned the same wage. The Soviet system did contain wage differentials, status hierarchies, bonuses such as special housing or access to scarce goods, and other noncash privileges. The more defensible point is that administratively compressed wage structures weakened returns to education and shifted rewards into political and organizational channels. Indeed, economic research using Soviet household data found positive returns to education, but those returns were very low by comparison with many market economies and were intertwined with nonmonetary advantages.¹⁴ When material rewards do not adequately track training, effort, responsibility, and results, institutions must rely more heavily on prestige, privilege, and ideological duty. Yes, markets also misprice work and sometimes lavish wealth on activities of dubious social value, but the evolutionary point is narrower: persistent separation between contribution and reward weakens the expectation of reciprocity. 

Punishing defectors creates a second-order free-rider problem. Enforcement is itself costly. Who monitors the workers? Who pays the monitors? Who ensures that the monitors are performing their duties? Who prevents them from using authority against personal or political enemies? Soviet authorities often relied upon informants and workplace surveillance to identify ideological or administrative violations. The Australian historian of the Soviet Union, Sheila Fitzpatrick, described how official complaint systems and political surveillance in Stalinism would often become entangled with neighborhood resentments, workplace conflicts, patronage, and personal grievances.¹⁵ Naturally, not every Soviet citizen envied every successful neighbor, but success and nonconformity were politically vulnerable when allocation and advancement depended upon administrative judgment. 

Competition was not eliminated. Instead of gaining by producing something others voluntarily valued, an individual could gain by demonstrating loyalty, exposing a rival, or securing favor from those who controlled scarce opportunities. Every new layer of enforcement generated another principal-agent problem. 

China’s Hybrid Experiment 

China is an interesting case study that illustrates the tension between rewarding political loyalty and cultivating the expertise needed to compete with the rest of the world. Its claims to meritocracy have clear political limits: advancement can, and often does, depend on ideological conformity and obedience to state authority. Yet its leaders recognize that success in scientific and technological competition requires technical competence, whatever the prevailing political doctrine. China subordinates intellectual freedom to political control while treating technical competence as more important than demographic representation or ideological aspiration. Its 2024–2035 education strategy emphasizes identifying exceptional talent, the training of elite engineers and scientists, technological innovation, and evaluating performance according to quality, effectiveness, and contribution.¹⁶

The relevant lesson here for Western countries is that a society engaged in serious international competition cannot afford to subordinate demonstrable competence to ideological symbolism. We should be radically inclusive in discovering talent and uncompromisingly meritocratic when assigning responsibility. Inclusion enlarges the competition. Equity, when defined as predetermined equality of group outcomes, attempts to determine the result before the competition occurs. 

Importantly, China’s enormous economic expansion followed the market-oriented reforms which begun in 1978: decentralization, greater reliance on prices as economic signals, expansion of non-state enterprise, opening to foreign investment and trade, and greater freedom for producers to retain gains from their work. Indeed, China did not become prosperous by perfecting Maoist central planning but by retreating from it.¹⁷ Yet the Communist Party retained much control, by means of state ownership in strategic sectors and the power to direct investment toward political priorities. The resulting hybrid can be extraordinarily productive where markets, entrepreneurship, and competition are permitted. It can also generate massive distortions where political incentives override consumer demand and the discipline of loss. 

A successful society should channel the struggle for status away from coercive dominance and toward prestige earned through competence and contribution.

China’s housing sector provides a striking example. Popular accounts often refer to vast ghost cities and tens of thousands of empty buildings. For obvious reasons, precise national vacancy estimates are difficult to obtain, but completely abandoned cities are only the most spectacular part of the problem. Underutilized developments are more common and more measurable. A 2025 study published in Nature Cities, a peer-reviewed Springer Nature journal devoted to urban research, estimated that housing-utilization efficiency in 108 Chinese cities fell from approximately 84 percent in 2010 to 78 percent in 2020.¹⁸ Official Chinese figures reported 766.32 million square meters of commercial property awaiting sale at the end of 2025, including 402.36 million square meters of residential property; residential sales had also continued to decline.¹⁹ These figures have limitations (e.g., they do not count every privately owned but vacant apartment), but they document extraordinary unsold inventory. Compare the roughly 22 percent underutilization in China with the fact that in the U.S. and Western Europe those markets typically run with low single-digit vacancy rates and face the opposite problem (undersupply). 

The outcome did not result from a single national command to build empty apartments; private developers, investors, banks, and even local governments all participated. But their choices operated within a politicized system. This is not unlike a larger version of the three Soviet airline lines I discussed earlier. Both arrangements made sense for the institutions administering them while imposing costs on their supposed beneficiaries.

Why Socialism Keeps Returning 

History has shown us the results of the failure to understand how cooperation actually works. The twentieth century produced abundant evidence of the failures of centralized communist systems. Yet socialism continually returns as though it were a new idea. Historical memory fades, while the moral aspiration remains attractive. In 2022, Pew found that younger adults were more likely to hold favorable views of socialism and less favorable views of capitalism than older adults.²⁰ In 2025, Gallup reported that capitalism remained more popular overall, but its favorable rating had declined to 54 percent, while socialism was viewed favorably by 39 percent.²¹

These polls require caution. Some respondents use socialism to mean Soviet central planning while others mean universal health insurance, higher taxes, public education, or Scandinavian social democracy. Many people who express approval of socialism also approve of entrepreneurs, small businesses, and free enterprise. Socialism also benefits from an asymmetry in judgment. Capitalism is compared with its actual outcomes: inequality, recessions, unaffordable housing, or even corporate misconduct such as environmental pollution. By contrast, socialism is compared with its aspirations: equality, dignity, solidarity, security, and universal provision. When socialist institutions fail, advocates often attribute the result to insufficient socialism, bad leadership, foreign interference, historical conditions, or the claim that the system was never truly socialist. Then, definitions shift: The Soviet Union was authoritarian rather than socialist, China is capitalist because it permits markets, and Venezuela failed because of dependence on oil and corruption. Meanwhile, Scandinavia is described as socialist even though it preserves competition, bankruptcy, private property, and market prices. 

The argument I wish to make here concerns centralized socialism: extensive political control over production, investment, prices, employment, and allocation, combined with substantial weakening of private ownership, competition, and exit. Voluntary cooperatives, local mutual-aid associations, particular public services, welfare programs, and regulated market economies raise different questions and should not be dismissed by changing labels. 

The Strongest Counterargument: Successful Commons 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that communities can sometimes manage common resources without either complete privatization or centralized state control.^22, 23 Her work is often presented as a rebuttal to the claim that shared resources inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons. But Ostrom’s successful cases did not abolish the game-theoretic problem; rather, they solved it! Successful commons usually had identifiable participants, clear boundaries, locally accepted rules, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and the authority to exclude persistent defectors. They were decentralized, adapted to local knowledge, and governed by people who interacted repeatedly. 

These are precisely the conditions under which evolutionary theory predicts that cooperation can survive! A family can share resources because its members know one another, monitor behavior, interact repeatedly, and maintain powerful emotional commitments. Likewise, a worker cooperative can function because participants are identifiable and can link rules and rewards to contribution. None of these examples demonstrate that the same arrangement can expand without limit to millions of anonymous citizens who cannot select one another, directly observe contributions, or withdraw from the system. 

Conclusion 

Human civilization is one of evolution’s greatest cooperative achievements. It emerged because social and economic institutions allowed individuals to advance their own interests by helping others. Reciprocal altruism turned assistance into an advantageous long-term strategy. Reputation allowed cooperators to find one another. Moral emotions helped detect and punish cheaters. Partner choice allowed people to leave exploitative relationships. Competition among groups rewarded forms of internal cooperation that produced better results. Markets extend these mechanisms across enormous populations. 

Centrally planned socialism works against these mechanisms when it separates contribution from reward, weakens partner choice, obscures responsibility, protects organizations from failure, and replaces horizontal exchange with vertical administration. Its central problem is that human cooperation is conditional. A successful society should channel the struggle for status away from coercive dominance and toward prestige earned through competence and contribution. It should widen participation while preserving standards, protect the vulnerable without rewarding avoidable defection, and prevent both public and private institutions from transferring the costs of failure to others. 

Markets are by no means morally perfect. They can and do generate inequality, instability, environmental damage, exploitation, and fraud. The alternative to socialism is not indifference toward misfortune, nor is it the belief that every existing distribution of wealth is deserved. The objective that can increase human flourishing should be an inclusive market society that protects people from catastrophe, develops human capabilities, maintains open competition, prevents political privilege, and—in line with the facts outlined here—preserves the connection between contribution and reward.

Suppose you are shown a shadow moving across a wall. You can measure its length. You can watch its direction change. You can record its speed. With enough observations, you may even predict what it will do next. But how much do you actually know about the object casting it?

The shadow may preserve some information about its source, but it also destroys information. Different objects can cast similar shadows. The same object can cast radically different shadows under different conditions. And a convincing shadow might even be generated without the object you imagined being there at all.

That simple problem offers a useful skeptical rule for an age of UAP videos, ghost photographs, sensor anomalies, eyewitness testimony, and AI-generated media: Never attribute more structure to a hidden source than the evidence can carry.

Anomalous evidence is almost always a projection of some sort. A blurry light in the sky, an infrared signature, a photograph of an apparent figure, or a short video clip is a representation produced by an instrument, a witness, an algorithm, or some combination of them. A witness may even report an experience with extraordinary clarity and sincerity. Those facts can be real facts about the evidence without settling what caused it.

Consider a UAP video. The observation may justify a modest claim: something appears in the recording that the observer cannot presently identify. That is already interesting. But “unidentified” does not necessarily mean “extraterrestrial,” just as “anomalous” does not entail “supernatural.” The evidence may establish that there is an unresolved observation, but it does not automatically establish the ontology of whatever produced it.

The skeptical task is not to ban possibilities; it is to prevent possibility from masquerading as probability or evidence.

Whenever we encounter exaggerated inference about anomalous evidence (pretty much any time the topic is brought up in the media, podcasts, or conversations on social media), a useful way to discipline our reasoning is to pass the claims through five thresholds:

1. What was actually observed? Describe the evidence without smuggling the explanation into the description. “A bright object crossed the frame” is an observation. “An alien craft crossed the frame” is already an interpretation.

2. What must be true for this evidence to exist? This is the realm of necessary inference. A digital image requires some causal history. A radar trace requires a signal-processing event. A reported experience requires an experiencer and a memory report. But necessity usually takes us much less far than we want.

3. What remains underdetermined? Could multiple causes produce the same observation? Almost always, yes. Atmospheric effects, aircraft, sensor artifacts, perspective, misperception, hoaxes, classified technology, software processing, or genuinely unknown phenomena may overlap at the level of the evidence.

This is where the shadow analogy is most useful. A two-dimensional projection may be compatible with many three-dimensional sources. If several hidden structures could produce the same visible pattern, the visible pattern cannot by itself tell us which hidden structure is real.

4. What is merely possible? Possibility matters, but it is cheap. Aliens are possible. Unknown atmospheric phenomena are possible. Unknown technologies are possible. A supernatural explanation can be stated as a possibility too. The skeptical task is not to ban possibilities; it is to prevent possibility from masquerading as probability or evidence.

A realistic image or video can now function like a shadow cast by no corresponding event at all.

5. Where does inference become metaphysics? This is the boundary we cross when we begin describing the hidden source in detail even though the observation does not uniquely support that description. At that point we are no longer reading information from the evidence but adding information to it.

AI-generated media makes this problem even sharper. For most of photographic history, an image at least carried a default assumption that some external scene stood in a causal relationship to the picture, even if the scene was staged, misleading, or manipulated. Generative AI weakens that assumption. A realistic image or video can now function like a shadow cast by no corresponding event at all. We may now first have to ask, “Was there an object or event of this kind behind the image in the first place?”

Obviously, this does not mean that every extraordinary image is fake and every witness mistaken, or that every UAP is mundane. It means that extraordinary claims increasingly arrive through layers of mediation: cameras, compression, sensors, software, and now generative AI models. Each layer can distort or even manufacture patterns that invite fallacious or misguided interpretation.

The deeper lesson here is about how human beings reason whenever we are trapped on one side of an informational boundary. We see effects and infer causes. When we see outputs, we infer systems. To refer back to our analogy, when we see shadows, we tend to imagine the objects that cast them.

The error lies in forgetting when inference has outrun the information available.

Often, that is exactly how knowledge advances. Science routinely infers unobservable structures from observable effects. But, good inference earns each step by showing why the proposed hidden structure explains the evidence better than its alternatives and by generating tests that could prove it wrong.

So the next time a strange video, anomalous sensor trace, ghost image, or AI clip appears on your screen, try a simple question before asking what it “really is”: What can this shadow actually tell me about the thing—if any—that casts it? Then ask the harder question: At exactly which step did I stop observing the evidence and start supplying the hidden world myself? That boundary may be the most important thing in the picture.

In the foreword to Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith, Richard Dawkins invites us to take an imaginative journey back thousands of years in human history, to a moment in Africa when we are a small hunter-gatherer hominin wandering in search of food. Suddenly, he hears a noise in the tall grass around him. That ancestor of ours faced at least two possibilities: the wind moved the branches and caused the sound, or the rustling in the brush meant a large-fanged predator was lurking nearby. If our ancestor fled assuming a predator when it was only the wind, the cost was low—some wasted energy and a little embarrassment. But if our ancestor stayed put and there really was a big cat, the cost could be death.

In short, the human mind tends to over-detect agency.¹ Wind is an inanimate force with no intention behind it, while a predator does have intention. This logic helps explain why the human brain may be predisposed to attribute intention or presence to ambiguous phenomena—a tendency that can, in turn, feed belief in invisible agents.

Those early humans began attributing intentionality to everything around them—in other words, they began to think that everything was alive, even things that were invisible. This gave rise to what is sometimes called the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD): a mechanism describing the mind’s tendency to detect agency from minimal information and to imagine invisible agents, laying the groundwork for animism and theism—that is, belief in gods or spirits.² If a Homo atheus ever existed, it evidently did not thrive against the Homo religiosus that emerged from this mechanism of attributing human-like intentionality to the natural world. In Darwinian terms, we are the descendants of those who fled the rustling grass, whether or not they guessed its cause correctly.

That human beings came to believe in one or several gods is perfectly understandable … their minds were already primed to detect agents.

Evolutionary psychology does not claim that humans began believing in gods all at once, nor that a “religion gene” exists. The most robust thesis holds that human beings inherited mental mechanisms useful for survival—agency detection, intention inference, the search for protection, the search for purpose, a tendency to remember striking narratives, and the cohesion produced by rituals—with ideas about spirits or gods emerging as a by-product of these mechanisms, later selected for culturally. Or, as anthropologist Pascal Boyer puts it,³ having a human brain does not mean “having religion,” but it does mean being able to acquire certain kinds of religious notions with relative ease. From there, mistaking a shadow for a burglar, attributing intention to the wind or a storm, or believing that an invisible agent can influence our lives and must be prayed to, can all be explained by the same underlying mental mechanisms.

A widespread quality found in the notion of deities is their strategic agency, which draws on theory of mind. Just as it is useful, when dealing with other humans, to attribute intentions, plans, and knowledge to them, it is easy to imagine that invisible agents like gods know, strategically and privately, what we do: who stole, who lied, who deserves punishment, who deserves protection. This makes them relevant to our moral systems and helps explain why so many religions end up linking gods, ancestors, and spirits with morality. Seen this way, morality does not originate in religion; and as has been demonstrated experimentally,⁴ priming (i.e., pre-activating linked mental associations) religious concepts can increase prosocial behavior in anonymous economic games—a finding that supports the idea that a watching god can function as a psychological mechanism of moral surveillance.

Another evolutionary pathway shaping our tendency to believe in one or several gods is the attachment system. Human infants depend on caregiving figures, and seeking the protection of a stronger figure is a basic adaptive mechanism. Believing in a divine attachment figure—invisible, protective, available, and onto whom early emotions of dependency, comfort, and security-seeking are transferred—is therefore an expected outcome. Not all gods are loving or protective, but it is common for them to take the form of a “father” or “mother” figure, which in a sense are natural templates for representing deities as attachment figures.⁵

The human mind tends to over-detect agency … a tendency that can, in turn, feed belief in invisible agents. 

And what about rituals? Evolutionary psychology has studied their role in belief in deities and in the intensity that religious experience can take on. One dimension of rituals is that they function as costly, hard-to-fake signals of commitment to the group—fasting, sacrifice, physically painful initiations, exhausting dances, or monetary donations—through which the group strengthens its cohesion.^6, 7 Additionally, our brains become highly activated by the excitement that typically accompanies religious rituals involving music, dance, cooperation, physical contact, trust, meditation, and heightened emotional arousal. Religious rites can activate reward pathways (dopamine), attachment and trust pathways (oxytocin), calm (serotonin), alertness (norepinephrine/adrenaline), and euphoria and analgesia (endorphins)—a combination that helps explain why rituals feel so intense and engage body, emotion, group, and brain all at once.^8, 9

That human beings came to believe in one or several gods is perfectly understandable from this view: our minds were already primed to detect agents, attribute intentions, seek protection, perceive purpose, imagine minds separate from bodies, remember mildly supernatural stories, and use rituals to bind groups together. It was a gradual process—as evolution always is—that led ordinary cognitive mechanisms to produce extraordinary concepts, such as the existence of one or several beings with divine characteristics.

So, where does spirituality come from?

Skeptic recently published “God Isn’t Dead: The World Is Becoming More Religious,”¹⁰ which showed that, globally, religious affiliation is projected to keep growing overall—driven not by conversion but by demographics, particularly higher fertility rates and younger median ages among Muslim and Christian populations, especially in Africa. That picture is accurate, and it is a useful corrective to Northern Hemisphere assumptions about religion’s terminal decline. But it describes a different phenomenon from the one this article is concerned with. The demographic story is about population-level growth in affiliation worldwide; what follows here is about individual-level psychology within the specific populations—chiefly the United States and Western Europe—where formal religious affiliation is, in fact, declining. The two pictures are not in tension: a population can be religiously non-affiliated in growing numbers in the West while religious affiliation still grows globally in absolute terms, driven by fertility elsewhere. The question this section asks is narrower and more psychological: among the people who are leaving organized religion, what happens to the cognitive machinery that evolutionary psychology has just described?

The same cognitive mechanisms that lead to belief in God(s) can also produce a “spirituality without gods.”

Just as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience (neurotheology) explain religion and belief in God(s), they can also shed light on “secular spirituality.” Several U.S. surveys show shifts in how people experience their spiritual lives. The Pew Research Center study “Spirituality Among Americans”¹¹ finds that 70 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves “spiritual” in some sense, while 22 percent identify as “spiritual but not religious,” 48 percent as both religious and spiritual, and 21 percent as neither. The share identifying as “spiritual but not religious” rose 8 percentage points over five years. In addition, the share of adults with no religious affiliation reaches 28 percent overall and 43 percent among adults under 30. Furthermore, 88 percent of those who are “spiritual but not religious” believe something spiritual exists beyond the natural world, even if they cannot see it, and 42 percent say religion causes division and intolerance.

Gallup’s “Religion and Social Trends” survey finds that just under half of U.S. adults describe themselves as religious, while 33 percent say they are spiritual but not religious, and 18 percent say neither—alongside a historic low of 20 percent of Americans who now say they believe the Bible is literally true.

A final data point, from the Springtide Research Institute,¹² focuses specifically on young people: 71 percent identify as at least somewhat religious and 79 percent as spiritual; three-quarters claim a specific religion, tradition, or worldview, including “spiritual but not religious,” while a quarter identify as atheist, agnostic, or “none.” 

The same cognitive mechanisms that lead to belief in God(s) can also produce a “spirituality without gods.” That is, HADD, theory of mind, attachment systems, and ritual do not disappear when religious affiliation declines—they simply find expression in activities such as yoga, meditation, contact with nature, or a felt connection to “energy” or “the universe.” In this sense, the demographic decline of organized religion in the West and the persistence—even growth—of secular spirituality are not contradictory trends; they are two faces of the same evolved psychology, one losing its traditional object of belief while the underlying mechanisms remain fully active.

We’re human. Not believing in God(s), not living a spiritual life, or not taking part in religious rites is, considering the evidence, something extraordinarily difficult to stop from happening—even when the god is gone.

Consciousness is often defined as “what it’s like to be something,” inspired by the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1974 classic paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” As he explained the problem: “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something that it is like for the organism.”¹ Let’s make dolphins our subject of inquiry. If I added echolocation to my sensory systems, perhaps I would be able to “see” the shapes of things with sound waves, and that would nudge me a bit closer to dolphin-ness. Strapping on one of those giant monofins to my feet to serve as a tail would allow me to feel what it’s like to power through a viscous aquatic medium, which would be made all the smoother if I donned one of those rubbery Olympic full-body swimsuits to mimic the dolphin’s sleek, smooth, rubbery skin texture. Adding a snorkel that serves as a blowhole for breathing, an appetite for squid (sushi, anyone?), and the ability to make clicks and whistle sounds might nudge me further along the dolphin-ness scale.

But the only way to have the full-on qualitative experience of dolphin-ness is to actually be a dolphin with all that entails anatomically, physiologically, neurologically, and cognitively. In that case, then, I would no longer be a human wondering what it’s like to be a dolphin. I’d just be a dolphin, and very likely not asking what it’s like to be a human. This is what is called the hard problem of consciousness. 

As first proposed by the philosopher David Chalmers, the problem is trying to explain how we are able to experience the world from inside a wet neurochemical brain machine.² The easy problem of consciousness would be to explain how, for example, the color red is processed in the retina of the eye and then transduced into neurochemical processes back to the visual cortex of the brain. The hard problem is explaining how it is that we can experience “redness.” 

That qualitative experience is called qualia, and in the history of philosophy, this is also known as the mind-body problem—how nonmaterial mind emerges from material body. As Nagel reflected, “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”³ The neuroscientist Christof Koch put it this way: 

How can activity in the brain trigger feelings? It’s just squishy stuff. How can mere meat, as cyberpunk novels dismissively refer to the body, engender sentience? Putting it more generally, how can anything physical give rise to something nonphysical, to subjective states?⁴

The hard problem is not only hard for all these anatomical, physiological, neurological, and cognitive reasons, I put it into the category of a known unknowable because it is logically impossible to solve for the simple reason that it would violate Aristotle’s Law of Identity—A is A. Thus: A cannot also be non-A. 

You cannot at one and the same time be one thing (a human) and another thing (a dolphin). If I were able to shape-shift from human to dolphin, I would not retain my humanness while inside the body and brain of a dolphin. I would just be a dolphin, full stop. Put another way, asking what it’s like to be one thing precludes one from knowing what it’s like to be a different thing. It’s conceptually contradictory. Understanding how the brain machinery works is different from experiencing the brain machinery itself. 

The hard problem’s thought experiment of wondering what it’s like to be something is also conceptually flawed in that it implies a form of dualism, in which my soul or homunculus or mini-me transports into the body of a dolphin to experience its physical and mental state of being. This is not possible because there is no ghost in the machine, no soul in the body, and no mind in the brain, as if these are different entities that can separate and travel elsewhere. 

This essentialism about the self, as it is called, leads us to intuitively feel like we have a soul or mind, separate from the body and brain. So we get the humor of films like All of Me, in which the gendered soul of Steve Martin’s character switches places with that of Lili Tomlin so that each knows what it’s like to be the other sex (with all the gender bending comedy that follows), or the film Freaky Friday, in which the teenage essence of Lindsay Lohan swaps places with the middle-aged mom essence of Jamie Lee Curtis, and hilarity ensues as the middle-aged mom is suddenly filled with teenage angst mingling with her youthful peers, and the immature teenager suddenly finds herself in adult situations for which she is ill-equipped. 

Novelists have explored similar themes. In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a man falls asleep and wakes up as a cockroach, while his human personality remains intact inside the insect. But that is not what would happen. After the metamorphosis from human to arthropod, the essence of humanness would simply dissolve away while the essence of cockroach takes its place. Yet, such Gedankenexperiments fill us with imaginative worlds we can never experience in real life. Here is how the psychologist Paul Bloom explains the process: 

In fact most people around the world believe that an even more radical transformation actually takes place. Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. It might ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, go off into some sort of parallel world, or occupy some other body, human or animal. Even those of us who do not hold such views have no problems understanding them. But they are only coherent if we see people as separate from their bodies.⁵

Here, the distinction in worldviews is that between dualism and monism. Dualists believe that we consist of two substances—body and soul, brain and mind (called “substance dualism”). Monists contend that there is just one substance—a body and a brain—from which consciousness is an emergent property; “mind” is just the term we use to describe what the brain is doing, and the soul is just the pattern of information that represents our thoughts, memories, and personalities. 

As such, monists hold that the death of the body—the disintegration of the material body and the degradation of memory patterns in the brain—means the death of the soul. By contrast, dualists assert that the soul, like the mind, is a separate entity from the body, so even after the death of the body, our sense is that the soul will continue. 

Most people are dualists because dualism is intuitive—it just feels like there is something else inside of us, in the same way that the thoughts floating around up there in our skulls feel like our mind is separate from our brain. Thus, Bloom calls us “natural-born dualists,” as reflected in our language when we use phrases such as “my body aches” (rather than “I ache”) or “my mind is muddled” (rather than “I am muddled”), as if “my” and “body” and “mind” are separate things.⁶

Understanding how the brain machinery works is different from experiencing the brain machinery itself.

Not everyone agrees that the hard problem of consciousness is an insoluble one, and there are at present at least 22 theories of consciousness as documented by Anil Seth and Tim Bayne in their review article of the subject, including (to name but a few): 

Higher-order theory (HOT), Self-organizing meta-representational theory, Global workspace theories (GWTs), Integrated information theory (IIT), Information closure theory, Dynamic core theory, Neural Darwinism, Predictive processing, Neuro-representationalism, Active inference, Attention schema theory, Electromagnetic field theory, Orchestrated objective reduction theory.⁷

The psychiatrist Ralph Lewis has pruned the 22 theories of consciousness down to four he thinks have the best chance of succeeding: 

Higher-Order Theories (HOT): thoughts become conscious when basic perceptions (“lower-order” representations) become re-represented as higher-order representations at higher levels of the brain, specifically in the prefrontal cortex. 

Global Workspace Theories (GWT): perceptions, thoughts, emotions, etc. become conscious when they gain access to a “workspace,” or to apply another analogy, when they make it into the “spotlight”—as if the mind were a theater where conscious thought is the activity in the spotlight on the stage at a given moment. 

Integrated Information Theory (IIT): how parts of a brain interact to create a unified experience. Consciousness is theorized to be related to how much information is integrated among the different parts of the brain. IIT tries to mathematically measure this. The more information that is connected and integrated, the more conscious the system is thought to be. The theory suggests that not just brains but any complex system with the right level of interconnectedness and integration of information could exhibit consciousness, with simpler systems manifesting only an insignificant modicum of consciousness. IIT attempts to explain the quality of conscious experience, suggesting that the unique pattern of relationships between the elements of the system is what defines a particular conscious experience. 

Re-Entry and Predictive Processing Theories: conscious mental states are associated with top-down signaling. Top-down signaling refers to the process by which higher-level brain regions send information, expectations, or context to lower-level brain regions. This communication helps shape how the brain perceives and interprets bottom-up information received via its sense organs from the world around it.⁸

Which of the 22 (or 4) theories are likeliest to be true? Lewis cautions that “it would be unrealistic for us to expect to have been completely solved at this early stage in the still-young science of consciousness,” and he may be right. Then again, Lewis identifies a conceptual problem in the entire enterprise, that is, a problem with the concept of consciousness itself, when he notes that “as soon as the first cell evolved there was an inside and an outside, and therefore the beginnings of a subjective-objective divide between the body and the outside world.”⁹ That is, how can something or someone outside of something or someone know what it’s like inside that system? 

The Weak Consciousness Principle vs. the Strong Consciousness Principle 

Here is how Deepak Chopra described consciousness in his 2017 book You Are the Universe: 

Consciousness is fundamental and without cause. It is the ground state of existence. As conscious beings, humans cannot experience, measure, or conceive of a reality devoid of consciousness.¹⁰

Since you have to be conscious to experience anything, when Chopra proposes that consciousness and the universe are equivalent, in the sense that it is an “undeniable fact that any universe is only knowable through the human mind’s ability to perceive reality,” he is stating the obvious. Call this the Weak Consciousness Principle (WCP): you have to be conscious to experience consciousness. 

But Deepak goes further than this when he says, “if all human knowledge is rooted in consciousness, perhaps we are viewing not the real universe based on limitations of the brain” and “that the apparent evolution of the cosmos since the Big Bang has been totally dependent upon human consciousness.” That’s reversing the causal arrow, from perception to determination, from being consciously aware of the universe and trying to understand it, to our own consciousness bringing about the universe. Call this the Strong Consciousness Principle (SCP). Which one is right? 

In my understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness, the hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness has vastly more evidence for it than the hypothesis that consciousness creates the brain. Damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, for example, causes prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and stimulation of this same area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Stroke-caused damage to the visual cortex region called V1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception. Changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by fMRI, EEG, and single-neuron recordings. Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain scan activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct on a computer screen what someone is seeing.¹¹

In other words, brain activity = conscious experience. 

Thousands of lab experiments, in conjunction with naturally occurring experiments in the form of brain tumors, strokes, accidents, and injuries, confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences. 

In other words, neural activity = qualia. 

In the end, I agree with Steven Pinker’s final assessment of the hard problem of consciousness, which he articulated in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now: 

Our best science tells us that consciousness consists of a global workspace representing our current goals, memories, and surroundings, implemented in synchronized neural firing in fronto-parietal circuitry. But the last dollop in the theory—that it subjectively feels like something to be such circuitry—may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops.¹²

With all these facts in mind—themselves part of the answer to the easy problem of consciousness, for which neuroscientists have made great progress—the hard problem is asking us a question that is impossible to answer: what’s it like to be the neural wiring? That is, what’s it like to be you? How should I know? I’m not you and never can be. I can imagine what it’s like to be you, and I can apply the Copernican Principle that we’re not special to myself—I’m not special and reasonably infer that your internal states are similar to mine if I see in your actions and emotions patterns similar to those that I express. But the final step of knowing what it’s actually like to be you—or a dolphin or bat or anything is one thought too many. Only you can experience you. A is A. 

In my assessment of the hard problem, then, consciousness is a known unknown that is very likely unknowable, at least as the concept is conceived of at present.

It has now been over 30 years since Australian philosopher David Chalmers posed the “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” one that has intrigued philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and psychologists ever since.¹ The problem can be summarized in three “what, how, and why” questions:

1. What is consciousness? 
2. How does the brain give rise to or produce consciousness?
3. Why does consciousness exist? 

In this brief article, I will suggest answers to these questions. 

What is consciousness? 

Here are some of the great minds of our time defining consciousness: 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel: “An organism is conscious if there is something that it is liketo be that organism.”²

Neuroscientist Christof Koch: “Consciousness is experience … Collectively taken, consciousness is lived reality. It is the feeling of life itself. Consciousness is the way the world appears and feels to me.”³

Philosopher Daniel Dennett: “Wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view. This is one of the most fundamental ideas we have about minds-or about consciousness. A conscious mind is an observer, who takes in a limited subset of all the information there is.”⁴

Philosopher David Chalmers: “When I talk about consciousness, I am talking only about the subjective quality of experience: what it is like to be a cognitive agent.”⁵

My own definition aligns with the views of these experts. I think “consciousness” has two meanings: 

1. A mental state of awareness, alertness, and receptivity. “John became conscious again two hours after the auto accident.” 
2. A mental state with a first-person or subjective point of view. “Only John was conscious of the pain in his belly.” 

These two meanings may be combined into one definition: Consciousness is the subjective feeling associated with the real-time collection of information by the brain in the state of awareness, alertness, wakefulness, or receptivity. 

When a person goes to sleep at night and is not dreaming, he is unconscious, and when he awakens in the morning, he is conscious. But when he is conscious, it is a subjective and (so far) private state. Consciousness becomes operative in the human organism when the brain reaches a certain size and complexity, approximately 24 weeks after conception.⁶ Over the past two decades, there has been a convergence to consensus on the definition of “consciousness,” and so I think we have a good answer to the first question relevant to Chalmers’s Hard Problem. 

When we talk about the brain-and about consciousness or the mind-we use two different vocabularies. Regarding the brain, for example, we use words like “neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, axons, dendrites, action potentials, ion channels, electrical-chemical transmission, brain waves, neural fibers, sensory organs, and neuromuscular junction.” In regard to consciousness or the mind, we use words like “sights, sounds, feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, memories, dreams, and qualia.” 

It’s as if we live in two separate worlds, an objective one and a subjective one. Perhaps René Descartes was pointing in the right direction after all with his notion of dualism.⁷ More on this below. 

How does the brain give rise to or produce consciousness? 

This question presumes materialism, at least to some extent. There are many people, even intelligent and educated ones, who do not believe that the brain gives rise to or produces consciousness. They believe that something outside the brain-perhaps a force of nature, a universal mind, some unspecified deity, or even the Judeo-Christian God-is the source of our consciousness. I think their view is severely undermined by all the research showing the correlations of mental states with brain states. 

Damage to specific areas of the brain often produces specific mental deficits or problems. (Note the famous case of Phineas Gage,⁸ but there are thousands of others.) The use of medications, psychedelics, and alcohol frequently produce definite alterations in mental states. The states of sleep, coma, dreams, and hallucinations have correlates in brain waves measured from groups of neurons. The evidence for materialism in the undergirding of the relation of the experiential to the neuronal is just too strong to take the spiritual, religious, or nonmaterial advocates seriously. 

It is probably the case that for every event in consciousness-e.g., the sound of a train passing by, the image of an apple, the sweet smell of a rose, or a covert sentence-there is some corresponding specific event in the brain that gives rise to the former. We do not yet know what those events in the brain are. They could be events in the microtubules of neurons, as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have speculated.⁹ Or they could be events at neuronal synapses, or the movements of neurotransmitters. There are over a dozen theories of consciousness in the modern debate on the hard problem. 

But I suspect that the relevant events are the firings of specific neurons connected in a specific way, a kind of circuit. The verification of this one-to-one relationship between conscious events and neuronal events will probably require a breakthrough in brain monitoring and mapping technology. Imagine a “brainscope” that detected the state of firing (on or off) of all 85 billion neurons in the brain at the same time and delivered all of this information to a powerful AI. For any given person, we could instruct them to think or feel a thousand different things in their minds, repeatedly, and then let the brainscope and AI identify the relevant neuronal patterns that were consistently associated with or gave rise to those mental contents. I think the experts in biophysics will eventually invent something like a brainscope, which we will need to verify the material basis of our mental lives. 

On the other hand, could the panpsychists be right? They are also materialists, but they have a rather odd view of the relation of consciousness to matter. The philosopher Phillip Goff¹⁰ and others in this camp believe that every physical thing-even stones, planets, chairs, bacteria, trees, lobsters, amoebas, electrons, and quarks-has some consciousness-it’s just a matter of degree. 

When a person says that by a force of their consciousness they moved their arm, they are mistaken. Brain processes moved their arm, and their consciousness merely reflects the actions of those brain processes. 

I suppose their idea that consciousness is ubiquitous could be correct, but it seems improbable. What is the primary unit of consciousness, and how can it be identified? What is the threshold for the quantity of consciousness in an object such that we can clearly conclude that the object is conscious in the ways that we deem humans to be conscious? The panpsychists have a lot of work to do to make their theory testable, falsifiable, and probable. 

In my view, there is probably a number of physical units, like neurons, connected and interacting in a particular way, that gives rise to or produces consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just call this hypothetical set “the consciousness network.” Progress in neuroscience and philosophy of mind will depend on doing careful, systematic, and rational research on the correlations of behaviors, internal structures, arrangements, processes, and mental events, starting with humans and working in the direction of less complex organisms. 

Given the excellent track record of science, I believe we will discover something like a “consciousness network“ that will tell us which organisms have it and which don’t, and that, based on this knowledge, we may even build electronic or robotic “persons” who will be conscious! I suggest increased research on consciousness in the following areas: blindsight, sleep, coma, hallucinogens, hypnosis, anesthesia, brain-mind correlates, lucid dreaming, brain stimulation, and psychophysics. 

Why does consciousness exist? 

A useful model for consciousness is the experience of pain. Imagine that you damage an index finger, perhaps by burning it on a stove, cutting it with a sharp knife, or smashing it with a hammer. Most of us have had one or more of these experiences. I have had all three. What usually happens? You quickly recoil or retract the finger. You scream or yell, sometimes accompanied by profanities. Natural processes in your body kick in to reduce or heal the damage to the finger. You remember the experience, learn from it, and devise ways to avoid it in the future. 

But there is something else that inevitably occurs-you feel pain. This is the nature of your consciousness in the moment. Does the pain cause you to retract your finger, does the retraction of your finger cause your pain, or do these two processes occur in parallel? I think the evidence mostly supports the latter view, with the retraction perhaps occurring slightly before the pain. 

It is easy to see how the first four reactions-recoil, screaming, natural healing processes, and enhanced learning-have survival value and probably resulted from mutations and natural selection; in short, evolution. But what about the pain? Does it have survival value above and beyond what the other four reactions provide? This doesn’t seem to be the case. Pain seems like an unnecessary add-on. Perhaps mutations occurred that produced a “pain circuit,” one kind of consciousness network, and this circuit neither enhanced nor impaired survival, made survival neither more likely nor less likely. The pain circuit may be a kind of accidental byproduct, and maybe all of consciousness is like that. The “right” material just happened to come together during the history of life on Earth, enabling consciousness in some animals, especially humans. 

I suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of the consciousness network, a special arrangement of energy-matter or material stuff, which I described earlier. There is a sense in which Descartes’s dualism is correct, but more ways in which it is incorrect. On the one hand, consciousness seems to be a different kind of thing from energy-matter, but it emerges from energy-matter under the right conditions. There is nothing mystical, magical, spiritual, or supernatural about this. It’s just a natural phenomenon, even though nature seems to have two aspects in special circumstances. 

Patterns in the brain simply give rise to patterns in the mind.

On the other hand, contrary to Descartes’s view, there is no interaction of the physical and the mental. The mental has no causal influence on the physical; the mental is merely epiphenomenal. Patterns in the brain simply give rise to patterns in the mind. If dualism is true, then it is likely that consciousness represents or reflects what is happening in the brain. When a person says that by a force of their consciousness they moved their arm, they are mistaken. Brain processes moved their arm, and their consciousness merely reflects the actions of those brain processes. 

Another important inference from the model I am proposing here is that because consciousness is completely dependent on the brain, when the brain dies, the consciousness of the person is extinguished. No matter how much we wish there were an afterlife, there isn’t one. Dead is dead! No good evidence of an afterlife has ever been presented. In support of this view, physicist Sean Carroll has strongly asserted: 

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.¹¹

♦ ♦ ♦

The components of this model are not new. They have been proposed before. I have just assembled the puzzle so that we can more easily see the whole picture. I hope others will come up with a better name, but for now, let’s call this model “Brain Dependent Dualism“ in homage to Descartes and to the hundreds of neuroscientists of the modern era who have demonstrated how consciousness is dependent on the brain. 

Here are the main assumptions of Brain Dependent Dualism: 

1. Reality is bifurcated into the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective, energy-matter and consciousness. 
2. Consciousness is an emergent property of brains and is completely dependent on or contingent on brains. 
3. There is some arrangement of physical units, probably neurons, which gives rise to consciousness, here called “the consciousness network.” 
4. Some living organisms are conscious, but others are not. 
5. Every content of consciousness is associated with, representative of, and produced by events in the brain, probably a spiking pattern of neurons. 
6. Consciousness does not survive the death of the brain. 

Much research is needed to flesh out, operationalize, and test this model, but we are on the way to substantiating it.

Following a public lecture I gave in 2005 at the L.A. Public Library, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11.

“You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. 

“Who is they?” I queried. 

“The government,” he whispered, as if they might be listening at that very moment. 

At this point in the conversation I declined to be interviewed, knowing precisely where the dialogue was going next: 

• the Pentagon was hit by a missile,
• Air Force jets were ordered to “stand down” and not intercept Flights 11 and 175 that struck the twin towers, 
• which themselves were razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the planes, 
• a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania,
• New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved), 
• that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA in order to implement their plan for global domination and a New World Order, to be launched by a Pearl Harbor-like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war. 

The 9/11 Truther movement began in 2002, when the noted French left-wing activist Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11 conspiracy book, L’Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Deception) became a bestseller in France, then soon made its way across the Atlantic, resulting in such books as Inside Job by Jim Marrs, The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, and 9/11: The Great Illusion by George Humphrey.

Let’s begin with where many 9/11 Truthers start: the melting point of steel. According to the website 911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. Therefore explosive devices must have been used.

Wrong. 

In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, M.I.T. engineering professor Dr. Thomas Eagar explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture, and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and spreading the fire throughout the building; temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag, straining and then breaking the angle clips that held them to the vertical columns; once one truss failed, others failed, and when one floor collapsed (along with the ten stories above it) onto the next floor below, that floor then gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered the 500,000-ton building to collapse. 

For the special issue of Skeptic on 9/11 we consulted a demolition expert named Brent Blanchard, who is Director of Field Operations for Protec Documentation Services, a company that documents the work of building demolition contractors. Since the rise in popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories, he too has been inundated with requests to explain why the buildings appeared to have “collapsed as if by a controlled demolition.”

Blanchard and his team of experts at Protec have worked with all major American demolition companies and many foreign ones to study the controlled demolition of over 1,000 of some of the largest and tallest buildings around the world. Their duties include engineering studies, structural analysis, vibration/air overpressure monitoring and photographic services. On September 11, 2001, Protec had portable field seismic monitoring systems operating at other sites in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Demolition specialists were hired to clean up Ground Zero and remove the remaining damaged structures, and these experts called on Blanchard’s company to document both the deconstruction and the debris removal. Here are nine of the best arguments made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists and their rebuttal by Protec:

Claim #1: The collapse of the towers looked exactly like controlled demolitions.

Answer: No, they did not. The key to any demolition investigation is in finding out the “where”—the actual point at which the building failed. All photographic evidence shows World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2 failed at the point of impact. Actual implosion demolitions always start with the bottom floors. Photo evidence shows the lower floors of WTC 1 and 2 were intact until destroyed from above. If you search “building demolition” on YouTube you will find hundreds of video clips of buildings collapsing by controlled demolition. I could not find one that collapsed from the top down, as did the World Trade Center buildings, including building 7. Instead, what you see is what demolition experts tell us is how it is done: the charges are set to explode from the bottom up.

Claim #2: The World Trade Center buildings fell right down into their own footprint.

Answer: Not exactly. They followed the path of least resistance and there was a lot of resistance. Buildings of 20 stories or more do not topple over like trees or reinforced towers or smokestacks, primarily because they are mostly empty space within designed for office space with 95 percent of the structure’s interior consisting of nothing but air. Imploding demolitions fall into a footprint because lower stories are removed first. WTC debris was forced out away from the building as the falling mass encountered intact floors. As well, the collapse began on the side where the planes impacted, and so were tilted slightly toward that weakened collapse point, which you can clearly see in the numerous videos of the collapsing buildings.

Claim #3: Explosive charges are seen shooting out of windows from several floors just prior to collapse.

Answer: Air and debris can be seen being violently ejected from the building but not because of explosive charges but as a natural and predictable effect of rapid structure collapse of the upper floors on the lower floors thereby pushing out the smoke from the burning fires. As well, the impact and explosion of the airplane crashes into the buildings knocked off most of the fireproofing drywall material surrounding the steel beams, considerably increasing their vulnerability to flames.

Claim #4: Witnesses heard explosions.

Answer: All Seismic evidence from many independent sources on 9/11 showed none of the sudden vibration spikes that result from explosive detonations. What people might have heard are common office items that explode in massive fires, such as cleaning supplies, CRT TVs and computer monitors, large motors with an oil reservoir for lube, like in elevator lift motors, tires in vehicles in the parking structure, and propane tanks.

Claim #5: A heat-generating explosive (thermite?) melted steel at Ground Zero.

Answer: No demolition workers report encountering molten steel, cut beams, or any evidence whatsoever of explosions or explosive charges.

Claim #6: Ground Zero debris—particularly the large steel columns from towers 1 and 2—were quickly shipped overseas to prevent scrutiny.

Answer: Not according to those who handled the steel. The chain of custody is clearly documented, first at Ground Zero by Protec and later at the Fresh Kills site by Yannuzzi Demolition. The time frame (months) before it was shipped to China was normal.

Claim #7: WTC Building 7 was intentionally “pulled down” with explosives. The building owner himself was quoted as saying he decided to “pull it.”

Answer: Building owners do not have authority over emergency personnel at a disaster scene. We have never heard “pull it” used to refer to an explosive demolition. Demolition explosive experts anticipated the collapse of WTC7, and also witnessed it from a few hundred feet away and no one heard detonations.

Claim #8: Steel-frame buildings do not collapse due to fire.

Answer: Many steel-framed buildings have collapsed due to fire. For example, on May 13, 2008, a large part of the tall concrete-reinforced steel architecture tower at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands caught on fire and burned, and shortly thereafter collapsed nearly straight-down, almost precisely into its own footprint.

Claim #9: Anyone who denies that explosives were used is ignoring evidence.

Answer: Most of our comments apply to the differences between what people actually saw on 9/11 and what they should have seen had explosives been present. The hundreds of men and women who worked to remove debris from Ground Zero were some of the country’s most experienced and respected demolition veterans. They of all people possessed the experience and expertise to recognize evidence of controlled demolition if it existed. None of these people has come forward with suspicions that explosives were used.

The collapse of World Trade Center building 7 has grown in importance to conspiracy theorists, especially since standard non-conspiracy explanations for the demise of WTC buildings 1 and 2 became accepted. Since building 7 was not struck by a plane, and it did not collapse until 5:20pm on 9/11, hours after the twin towers collapsed, the cause of its collapse, say the conspiracists, must be different from that of WTC 1 and 2. According to wtc7.net, for example, “fires were observed in Building 7 prior to its collapse, but they were isolated in small parts of the building, and were puny by comparison to other building fires,” and that any damage from falling debris from WTC 1 and WTC 2 would have needed to be symmetrical to trigger the pancaking collapse of WTC 7. 

In point of fact, the fires burning in building 7 were extensive, not isolated. 9/11 conspiracy theorists tend to only show the north side of WTC 7, which does not look nearly as damaged as the other side. As the building burned all day, emergency response workers realized that collapse was imminent, and at 3pm that day they began evacuation of all emergency personnel. In fact, according to FDNY fire Chief Daniel Nigro, he and his firefighters noticed structural deformations of Building 7 hours before its collapse, and he said later, “I feared a collapse of Building 7 (as did many on my staff).” When the building did collapse, it went first on the south side of the building, which is where the most extensive damage was from the falling debris of the WTC 1 and 2 buildings. 

For my money, the oddest of all the 9/11 conspiracy theory claims involves the Pentagon. The idea, first floated in Thierry Meyssan’s book, was that the Pentagon was struck by a missile because the damage was too narrow and limited to be the result of an impact from a Boeing 757. In the 9/11 conspiracy film, Loose Change, dramatic reenactments are presented, arguing that the hole in the Pentagon was too small to have been made by American Airlines Flight 77. 

First, how would any of us know how big a hole a plane should make colliding with a massive building like the Pentagon? These conspiracists are talking through their hats.

All of the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted.

Second, according to a structural engineer named Allyn E. Kilsheimer, who arrived on the scene shortly after the impact: “I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box.” Kilsheimer’s eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. Kilsheimer adds: “I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?”

All of the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted. On the Pentagon “missile strike,” for example, I queried my documentary antagonist I mentioned at the start of this chapter about what happened to Flight 77, which disappeared at the same time as the Pentagon was struck. “The plane was destroyed and the passengers were murdered by Bush operatives,” he solemnly revealed. “Do you mean to tell me,” I retorted, “that not one of the thousands of conspirators needed to pull all this off is a whistle-blower who would go on TV or write a tell-all book?” 

Think about all the examples of disgruntled government bureaucrats and ex-politicians who can’t wait to go public with their insider information that we tax payers will presumably want to know about. Not one of these 9/11 insiders, witness to what is arguably the greatest conspiracy and cover-up in the history of the United States, if not all of Western civilization, wants to go on CNN or 60 Minutes to reveal their secret? Not one of them wants to cash in what could very well be one of the bestselling books of the year, if not the decade? Not one of them, after a couple of drinks and a twinge or two of guilt, has leaked to a friend (or a friend of a friend) their deep secret? Not one? 

The ultimate failure of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists is their inability to explain away the overwhelming evidence of the real conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Then there is the conspiracy theory that NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) supposedly told fighter jets to “stand down” and let the commercial jets reach their targets, thereby implicating the U.S. military in the conspiracy. In point of fact, in a special issue of Popular Mechanics on 9/11 the editors report:

On 9/11 there were only 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous 48 states. No computer network or alarm automatically alerted the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) of missing planes. And NORAD’s sophisticated radar … ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward.

Remember the Hindsight Bias: after the fact it seems obvious what should have been done. Before 9/11, hijackers of planes typically demanded ransom or some political action be taken, then they would land the plane at some pre-determined destination. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building was something new that almost no one anticipated. Also, on 9/11 the hijackers disabled the onboard radar transponders, making it much harder to track. Without that, NORAD would have had to search 4500 identical radar blips on its screens, not knowing precisely which ones were hijacked planes. 

Another conspiracy claim is that there was a suspiciously high volume of “put” trading of airline stocks in the days just before 9/11. A “put” trade is a bet that the price of a stock will decrease, which is why this is sometimes called “selling short” a stock. Conspiracists think that a lot of trading “insiders” knew the attacks were coming on 9/11 so they bet the airline stocks would decline after. In fact, the level of put trading in the days before 9/11 was not so different from other peaks earlier in the year, plus American Airlines had just recently released a report predicting possible losses in the coming quarter, and when that happens put traders increase their trading activity.

Then there’s the matter of cell phone calls made from the planes, which conspiracists claim could not have happened in 2001, given the technology of the day. First, some passengers used the in-flight cell phones available on seat-backs. Second, cell phones in 2001 could be made from high-altitude flights, albeit the coverage was spotty as the plane moved through tower cells. According to Paul Guckian, vice president of engineering for cell-phone maker Qualcomm, “at the altitude for commercial airliners, around 30,000 or 35,000 feet, phones would still get a signal.”

By definition, then, 19 members of al-Qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings without telling us constitutes a conspiracy.

Dozens more 9/11 conspiracy claims go on and on in this vein of anomaly hunting, all grounded in the argument from personal incredulity—if I can’t think of an explanation for anomaly X besides a conspiracy, then that proves there is a conspiracy. No, it doesn’t. It just means you can’t think of an explanation.

So, all that said, I ask again, was 9/11 a conspiracy? Well, yes, it was. Say what?

In my book Conspiracy, I defined a conspiracy as two or more people or a group plotting or acting in secret to gain an advantage or harm others immorally or illegally. By definition, then, 19 members of al-Qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings without telling us constitutes a conspiracy. The ultimate failure of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists is their inability to explain away the overwhelming evidence of the real conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. For example:

• The 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon by a radical Hezbollah faction. 
• The 1993 truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center.
• The 1995 attempt to blow up 12 planes heading from the Philippines to the U.S. 
• The 1995 bombings of U.S. Embassy buildings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 12 Americans and 200 Kenyans and Tanzanians.
• The 1996 attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. military personnel.
• The 1999 failed attempt to attack Los Angeles International airport by Ahmed Ressam.
• The 2000 suicide boat attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 sailors and injured 39 others.
• The well-documented evidence that Osama Bin Laden is a major financier for and the leader of al-Qaeda. 
• The 1996 fatwa by Bin Laden that officially declared a jihad against the United States.
• The 1998 fatwa calling on his followers “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military is an individual duty for any Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Given this background, since Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have officially claimed responsibility for the attacks of 9/11, we should take them at their word that they did it.

Stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and something happens in your chest that a photograph can never capture. See a celebrity in person and they seem lit from within, even when you know better. Fall in love and the other person briefly stops being a person and becomes a kind of doorway. Walk into an old cathedral, or a stadium before kickoff, and the atmosphere seems to change.

We reach for tired words to describe this phenomenon: Awe. Magic. Aura. The sacred. None of them quite lands, because none names the thing precisely—the sense that a particular person, place, or object carries a special weight, a significance that seems to radiate from it, as if it contained something the ordinary world does not.

The claim worth examining is that the weight is not out there. It is in us. It is a response the brain generates and then projects onto the object, in a manner so convincing that we experience it as a property of the thing itself.

There is now a candidate word for this: hagioptasia, from the Greek for “sacred appearance.” It is not yet an established term in psychology, and the theory behind it is young. But it names something real, and once you have the word, you begin to see the thing everywhere—including in places that are actively lying to you.

The Same Organ, Elaborated

The framing we find most useful comes from evolutionary biology. Our brains were assembled by natural selection for life in small foraging bands, and a great deal of what confuses us about modern life follows from running that old equipment in an environment it was never designed for. Hagioptasia is a good example, and possibly a very old one.

The claim worth examining is that the weight is not out there. It is in us.

Consider the eye, which varies across species not merely in sophistication but in the specific adaptive problem it evolved to solve, while remaining recognizably the same organ from a scallop to a hawk. Hagioptasia may work the same way. The primitive version would be a differential response to certain stimuli as though they carry a weight out of all proportion to their physical substance—a peahen transfixed by a tail that does nothing but exist, a bowerbird drawn to a bachelor's carefully arranged pile of blue, or a dog gazing up at its owner with what looks like reverence. The human version layers culture, narrative, and self-awareness on top of that same basic mechanism, and out come glamour, holy sites, romantic idealization, the mystique of art, or the seductive notion of glory in war. The same organ, at vastly different levels of elaboration.

If that is right, hagioptasia is something selection has been building on for a very long time—which would help explain why the experience feels so deep and timeless when it arrives, and why it precedes and outruns our capacity to reason about it. The feeling comes first. The explanation, when we bother to supply one, arrives afterward and tends to ratify whatever the feeling already decided.

This is where a skeptic should apply the appropriate caution. Adaptationist stories are easy to tell and hard to test; the literature is littered with plausible narratives that dissolved under scrutiny. Hagioptasia is presently a hypothesis with a measurement instrument attached, not a settled finding. What makes it more than armchair speculation is that its originators did the unglamorous next step: they tried to measure it.

Origin of the Hagioptasia Idea 

Hagioptasia was developed by Daniel Laidler, in England, who worked out the theory while holding down a day job in a factory—with no academic post and no institutional backing. The idea eventually reached John A. Johnson, an evolutionary psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Penn State, who took it seriously enough to help give it empirical legs. Together they constructed a scale to measure individual differences in the disposition and published the initial validation in 2020.¹ Laidler first presented the theory at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society’s annual conference in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2024, and in October 2025 was invited by Constantine Sedikides to present it to his research group at the University of Southampton, where the core reasoning held up under detailed questioning. The concept has drawn further engagement—Rory Sutherland, the famed British advertising executive and author, has been an active correspondent.

The feeling comes first. The explanation, when we bother to supply one, arrives afterward and tends to ratify whatever the feeling already decided.

We mention the provenance partly because it is a good story and partly because it is on-theme. The instinct to trust an idea only once it arrives wearing the right robes—a title, an affiliation, a prestigious address—is itself a mild case of hagioptasia. We let the aura of the institution stand in for the quality of the argument. Laidler’s idea had to travel from a factory floor to a professor’s desk before most people would give it a hearing, though the idea itself did not change. The small resistance a reader may feel toward an unaffiliated theorist is precisely the mechanism under discussion, operating in real time.

None of which makes the theory correct. It makes it testable, which is the only thing that ultimately matters.

The Counterfeit

Hagioptasia activates in the presence of real things: genuine natural grandeur, genuine social rank, a genuine mate. But the mechanism of activation cannot tell you whether the weight it assigns is earned. It simply activates, and we experience the result as a property of the object. That gap—between the feeling of significance and the actual worth of the thing—is a door exploited by advertising.

Advertising is hagioptasia for hire. A luxury brand sells aura—the implied promise that specialness will transfer from the object to the owner. Celebrity culture is an industrial-scale apparatus for manufacturing that inner glow and then charging admission to stand near it. The glow is real, in the sense that people genuinely feel it. It is false, in the sense that there need be nothing behind it—and even where there is something, a genuinely great musician, a genuinely beautiful place, the glow is not that merit. It is a separate signal, and it fires as readily for the empty as for the earned. The luminous quality you perceive in the famous face is your own response, sold back to you, rather than something inherently true about that person.

The machinery has since been automated. Recommendation algorithms discovered that human attention snags on the glamorous and the sacred-seeming. They now serve a diet optimized to keep the response firing. Politics runs on the same current: the leader who seems to carry a light, the movement that feels like a cause larger than the self.

Advertising is hagioptasia for hire.

There is a further implication that should interest anyone tracking the sociology of secularization. As traditional religion recedes across the developed world, the machinery for perceiving the sacred does not recede with it. If hagioptasia is a stable feature of the evolved mind, the response remains, still active, still scanning for something worthy of reverence. When the old altar empties, the mechanism looks for a new object and attaches to whatever is available: a brand, a politician, a celebrity, an ideology, a wellness regimen, a fandom. This is a testable prediction, not merely a rhetorical flourish—it implies measurable displacement of hagioptasic response from declining religious contexts toward secular ones.

Use of the Word and Concept

No one stands outside of such concepts. I feel the pull at monuments and inside cathedrals I do not believe in, and, more embarrassingly, in proximity to fame. Knowing the name of the mechanism confers no immunity from it; that is not how the mind works. What knowing the word and understanding the concept offers is a beat of delay: a moment, when the weight descends, in which it becomes possible to ask a question that was previously unavailable.

Is this significance coming from the object, or from the observer—and who benefits if one fails to tell the difference?

The response is old—older than language, older than religion, older than reason. What is new is a marketplace full of people who understand it better than we do, and who aim it, on purpose, at whatever they would prefer we revere or fear next. A word for the mechanism will not disarm it. But you cannot examine what you cannot name, and a skeptic's first loyalty is to seeing the machinery clearly, including the machinery running such concepts.

Hagioptasia was originated by Daniel Laidler and validated empirically in collaboration with John A. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Penn State, with whom he co-authored the 2020 paper establishing a measurement scale for it. This article was a collaboration among the three authors.