Christianity Used to be Interesting

I was an active fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), and went to their national meetings whenever I could, mostly in the 1990s. This organization consists of evangelical Christians who are in the sciences and who get together to exercise their brains to try to figure out possible answers to important questions about faith, science, and reason. At every meeting, you would find scholars, many from Christian colleges, struggling with questions about what God wants us to do in the world with regard to scientific topics. Just a few examples that come to mind are: What does it mean to be in the image of God, when we are biological animals? What does it mean to be created, when we clearly evolved? What should a Christian response be to the threat of nuclear war? This was a big topic at the 1988 meetings, when Richard Bube condemned nuclear war but David Siemens said, if you have nothing to die for, you have nothing to live for, as if that was relevant to the topic. What about advances in biotechnology, or to the stewardship of creation? What can we learn from the new physics about what God is doing today in sustaining the creation moment by moment? This was an important topic in the New York Metropolitan section of the ASA in 1989. I can still remember David Wilcox visibly struggling with what to believe about Adam and Eve. He was trying very hard to say that Adam was the first evolutionarily modern Homo sapiens, the primate into which God poured His spirit, but the evidence simply did not support this belief.

What the ASA focused on, very passionately, was, what would Jesus do?

And this was also the focus of many evangelical churches as well. I remember many very intellectually challenging sermons in evangelical churches in the 1980s.

That’s all gone. Instead of What would Jesus do, the only question of interest to evangelical Christians is, What would Trump do? To them, Trump is the very presence of God upon the surface of this planet. Every question has a simple answer: whatever Trump says the answer is.

This is why you never hear very much about creationism anymore, or about evangelicals attacking global warming science. Because evidence doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is Trump.

For the time being, a few evangelical Christian leaders are questioning Trump. You can read about a few of them here. One example is Mike Pence. But Pence, along with all other Republican candidates, have promised to support the eventual nominee, who will probably be Trump. Nothing else matters now. Pence will fall in line and say Yes, Lord, to Trump. In the end, the few evangelicals who oppose Trump will be silenced.

Evangelical Christianity has not only become blasphemous, but also boring. There are no more complex and challenging questions for evangelical Christian intellectuals.

The Climate Has Changed Before, so Don't Worry?

Nearly everyone now knows that climate change is real, and that humans are either causing it or making it worse. So I don’t discuss it with anyone anymore. I had a contract to write Encyclopedia of Global Warming for Facts on File but they discontinued the project. Fortunately I got paid an advance for just writing a headword list.

Now the fossil fuel protagonist argument is, “The climate has changed before, so don’t worry about it. Just keep buying our oil and gas, and let us make our money, and quit whining.” This is a really bad argument. The reason is that, yes, the climate has changed, even within the past millennium, but it has had disastrous effects on societies. So the argument that we don’t need to take any action to prevent climate change is like saying, “The Black Death didn’t kill everyone, therefore we do not need medicine and public health.”

About 800 years ago, a great civilization collapsed. It was the Misssissippian culture, which covered most of eastern North America, centered in what is now Cahokia, Illinois. Never heard of it? That’s because most pre-contact Native American history has been erased from our national consciousness.

Cahokia was one of the biggest cities in the world at that time. The only way it could support the number of people that it did was because of intensive agriculture, mostly corn, squash, and beans. This civilization collapsed because of political unrest but also because of a drought. If the Natives had lived off of hunting and gathering, the way most people think they did, then the drought would have had little effect. But the drought caused the collapse of their intensive agriculture. This is an example of how climate disruption (in this case, a natural one) caused the collapse of a civilization, as explained in this Scientific American article. I will also write about this in Chapter 2 of my upcoming book.

Society enables a stability that allows humans to survive natural disasters. But sometimes these disasters can exceed the capacity of society to rescue the humans. The Mississippian civilization is an example. Most of the people survived, and they continued planting fields (just not as many), and the trade networks survived.

This is all that remains of Cahokia. We can only hope that our modern civilization does not disappear the way theirs did.

Thomas Gilcrease: Master of Altruism

As described in Connie Cronley’s masterful and readable biography of the Oklahoma progressive crusader Kate Barnard, young Native men and women who had oil rights on their Oklahoma allotment properties were frequently the targets of white grafters who would stop at almost nothing to get the oil rights of those properties. This would include a kind of gentle kidnapping known as “spiriting away.” The young Natives, usually from the Muskogee Creek Nation, were invited on trips and given a good time. Alcohol was usually involved. The young Natives were kept under constant supervision, and once they were good and drunk, they were asked to sign a contract giving one of the Tulsa oil magnates the rights to their oil. One young woman was taken on a hog-shooting trip, beered up, and told to sign a contract. She said that she had been threatened with jail if she did not sign.

Yes, this happened in the United States, early in the twentieth century. It happened in Oklahoma after statehood. In one case, the oil multimillionaire was Thomas Gilcrease.

I will quote from Cronley’s book (p. 159):

Usually, the minors were taken to neighboring states—Texas, Missouri, or Arkansas—but the case of a Creek minor named Marcus Covey was remarkable for the distance he was taken. Marcus disappeared in late 1911, just as oil was discovered near his allotments. His parents…were frantic to find him. His mother contacted the secretary of the interior, and his father, a member of the Masonic fraternal organization, asked the Masons’ help in finding the boy. The Secret Service searched for four months and finally found Marcus in Southampton, England. “He was sent there by one Thomas Gilcrease,” the Secret Service agent reported, and was found “in company with a hired lieutenant of Mr. Gilcrease’s.”

Nobody in Tulsa, where I live, would fail to recognize the name. Thomas Gilcrease became one of the most famous philanthropists in Tulsa. His money was the basis for what is popularly known as the Gilcrease Museum, which is a museum and historical society of world renown. It even publishes its own journal. Its major emphasis is Native American history and culture. I have attended Native American displays and events at “the Gilcrease.”

Now that your mind has had a chance to process this breathtaking story, let me break it down a little further in terms of evolutionary theory. Thomas Gilcrease was a master of altruism, that is, of doing good things in the service of his own resources and power. In this, he is no different from thousands of other rich people. It’s just the astonishing hypocrisy that makes this story stand out.

In evolutionary theory, there are three levels of altruism, and each of them confers an evolutionary advantage that far outweighs the cost of the good deeds themselves, as I described in my Encyclopedia of Evolution.

• Kin selection. A rich person can invest in his offspring, or his extended family, which are the only way that his genes can get passed into future generations. Gilcrease certainly made his family rich.
• Direct reciprocity. Do something generous for me, and I might do something generous for you. You can’t be sure, but it usually works. Gilcrease was good to his friends, and undoubtedly received favors from them in return.
• Indirect reciprocity. By being generous, a rich person can buy a reputation for generosity. This will make society in general trust him more, which will cause him to get even richer. A good reputation can be worth more than money in the bank. The generosity has to be, however, very conspicuous. Gilcrease raked in the benefits of adoration bestowed upon him by Tulsans. Gilcrease got rich partly by kidnapping a young Native man and stealing his oil, and this allowed him to endow a museum that is a world leader in promoting Native studies.

Gilcrease could have helped the Creek tribe (he was himself one-eighth Creek) more by simply not kidnapping young Marcus than by stealing his oil money and then giving it back to the Creek tribe indirectly through his museum. But it was a lot more fun this way. If he had simply not stolen the oil, who would know it? To Gilcrease, the adulation he got from Tulsans, including Creeks, was a thousand times more satisfying than the quiet knowledge that he simply did not kidnap the young Creek man. Oh, and I bet there were tax breaks for his generosity also.

Thomas Gilcrease ruthlessly stole money then leveraged it to buy admiration. This is the highest expression of the evolution of altruism.