General
As a subscriber to Free Inquiry for some years now, I have been bothered by the lexicon and what I consider overly academic and professional English in which most articles are written. In many issues of FI, I read exhortations for secular organizations and publishers to form a stronger, more united front against religious efforts to perpetuate the religious mental dysfunction affecting our country and much of the world in our efforts to bring adherents to our way of thinking so as to elucidate more of our population.
The problem I find is that by writing in such high fluted English as most articles are written in, you are turning away many people who would otherwise wholeheartedly agree with the content but, in many cases, lack the understanding to fully absorb it.
If you want to attract the common reader, such as myself, you have to write in common English, which is comprehensible to the vast majority of readers. Otherwise your magazine becomes a voice for the academic and highly educated MBAs of top universities in the country with no hope of reaching the common guy.
Martin Larios
Portland, Oregon
Enlightenment
I hope you don’t need to publish this response to James A. Haught’s Op-Ed in the February/March 2021 issue “Is Zen Enlightenment Real?” because it will mean that someone more knowledgeable has come forward with a reply. But in case they don’t, I would point out that the fact that some Buddhist gurus have done terrible things should only be slightly less surprising than the knowledge that the Catholic Church is the world’s largest organization for the protection of child sex abusers. Nothing in the meditation practice espoused by Sam Harris involves believing in Buddhism’s irrationalities or endorsing any of its famous or infamous adherents. Meditation is mental exercise like walking is physical exercise; both are designed as ways to promote good health. I really don’t know if it necessarily leads to spiritual enlightenment—in fact I’m not even sure what those words mean—but the fact that it may not shouldn’t put you off trying, any more than the fact that you are never going to be a world-class athlete should stop you from going for a walk.
Martin Stubbs
London, United Kingdom
The article on Zen Enlightenment was, well, unenlightening!
The writer should be aware that although meditation is closely held by Buddhists, meditation itself is not really connected to religion at all, if indeed, that is the writer’s concern. In fact, secular meditation is more prevalent in the United States (and Canada, where I reside) than meditation practiced by Buddhists. It’s called “mindfulness” meditation and is simply to practice cultivating the quality and power of the mind, to be aware of what is happening, without judgement and without interference.
This does align with Buddhist thought in that to be a Buddhist means you are willing to actually use your mind to develop your inherent potential to manifest wisdom and compassion.
Wow, actually using your mind! That sounds good to me. Sounds like something freethinkers do!
Mr. Haught seems to have trouble staying awake when he has tried to meditate. Maybe that’s his “enlightened” mind trying to tell him he needs a nap! And that’s OK.
Gary D. Ward
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
I laughed at the story of Zen in your February/March issue and the author’s inability to become enlightened by meditating as written by James A. Haught. He is typically one of those Americans who expects instant results and immediate satisfaction and gratification. As the Buddha taught us, it takes years of work and sometimes many lifetimes to attain true enlightenment. An enlightened person, or an “Awakened One,” is a person who has awakened from the sleep of ignorance and sees things as they really are.
As I consider a solution to Mr. Haught’s dilemma, I am reminded of the Buddha’s final attainment of enlightenment. History tells us that it all suddenly came to him while he was sitting under a Bodhi tree after years of searching, which brings us to the great Sir Isaac Newton who has a great story of his discovery of gravity. It all happened when an apple fell out of a tree that he was sitting under and hit him on the head while he was inventing calculus. I just wish he hadn’t bothered inventing calculus. It was undoubtedly the toughest course I ever took on the way to an engineering degree.
So I think we have found a solution to Mr. Haught’s search. Find a tree, sit under it, and meditate. After many years and several lifetimes of meditation, enlightenment will come to you as a blow to the head and you can write another article and tell us about it.
By the way, Tibetan Buddhism has nothing to do with Zen. But that will come to you when you become enlightened.
Art Edwards
Placerville, California
Religion as Clinical Delusion
I read Robert Cirillo’s article “Is Religion a Clinical Delusion” (Free Inquiry, February/March 2021). I have held a similar opinion and written about it for a long time. We have evolved with a tendency to be delusional, which probably has been a positive force in our evolutionary past. The degree of delusion, just like intelligence, varies from person to person.
The IQ Bell Curve is well known. It illustrates that the distribution of IQ in the human population measures from zero to 130, with the bulk in the middle. I suggest that we could compare this with a bell curve where the distribution goes from totally “skeptic” to maximum “clinically delusional.” The bulk of the humanist population would be somewhere in the middle. These bell curves are totally independent, and there is no correlation between the two. The independence of these bell curves might help to explain why there are highly intelligent persons who are still highly religious and can never believe in secular humanism as well as lower IQ individuals who are skeptical about religion.
If this is the case, then Cirillo’s conclusion that “In the long run, peaceful coexistence with religion is not possible because the religious will always want to wipe out secular humanism” does not bode well for the future, because there always will be a portion of the human population trying to hang on to religion.
Benjamin Vande Weerdhof Andrews, OCT
Barrie, Ontario, Canada
Robert Cirillo raises an interesting question. The designation of us humans as Homo sapiens is clearly self-congratulatory: “We are the most wonderful creatures on Earth, and since we all agree it must be true.” We are in fact the one creature that threatens to render the Earth uninhabitable, hardly a qualification for the name sapiens. I propose instead of homo religiosus the alternative homo rapiens, or destructive man.
Thomas F. Higby, MD
Fowlerville, Michigan
Yesterday, the latest edition arrived, and I was very eager to read Cirillo’s piece, but upon having done so, I found myself miffed, especially regarding his upper-middle-class prof-privilege point of view in light of a life like my mother’s: She grew up in the Great Depression, taught in a country school, to which she walked to start a fire, carry water, etc. She married a poor, honorable man; they had five kids, and he died when the eldest was ten and the youngest two years old. As is so often the case, the poor live with inadequate nutrition and inadequately heated homes, and for several years she was a borderline tuberculosis case. On one occasion when it was active, the kids ended up in an orphanage and on another, in foster homes, in which case the Catholic Church (Catholic Charities) did come through for her. I might argue that such a difficult life would not have been possible without the “delusion/comfort” of religion. While I can’t endorse it, I can’t condemn it either, though the problem seems to be more capitalism than religion. My parents were decent, honorable souls, who needed religion, but don’t ask me to account for those fat-cat, pseudoreligious types sitting in legislatures around this country denying abortions to poor women who desperately need them. That seems more outright evil than delusional. Perhaps having lived on both sides of this divide I see it as a more nuanced question than Prof. Cirillo.
Keyron McDermott
via email
The cardinal feature of our species is our imagination, and it will not be stilled. It produces some ideas that are frivolous and others that are eminently useful. Religion falls into the second category.
Delusion or not, we will not be able to get rid of religion because it is so helpful. Man does not live by bread alone, nor does he want to. Religion provides a recreational addition to the mundane everyday world. It is a communal game of make believe.
Religion assuages life’s inevitable hardships and griefs. It is useful to reinforce and sanctify a moral code previously developed as a practical necessity for social living. Given an alleged divine origin, the code cannot be questioned or disobeyed. People look for a helpmate or protector in life’s vicissitudes whether it be a saint, guardian angel, or a god itself. Lastly, those who share the same religion, who are embedded in the same game of make believe, share a most important social bond.
There are other individual delusions that are not usually included under the aegis of religion—superstition and magic. Superstitions, which may be the remains of prior religions, are often incorporated into existing religions. The belief in magic—that some people, objects, or rituals have supernatural power to do good or evil—is also often incorporated into religion. Indeed, it is likely that superstition and magic are the major components of all popular religions. These are so deeply a part of the human psyche that it seems impossible for them to be eradicated.
Stephen E. Silver
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Robert Cirillo’s “From Homo Religiosus to Homo Sapiens: Approaching Religion as a Clinical Delusion” asks psychiatrists to counter peoples’ religious belief systems as delusional. Unfortunately, this would be as effective a strategy as emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. Psychiatry, through its controversial publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V, is already accused of pathologizing too many of peoples’ behavioral “quirks.” While I agree entirely with Cirillo’s thesis, it is the mental health professionals’ responsibility to help people who are distressed by their beliefs, not to pathologize those who are asymptomatic.
But there is yet another reason that is important to address that adds both urgency and a degree of futility to the task Cirillo asks. Namely, the function religions played in human evolution. As the brain evolved, the ability to recognize the enormity of the universe also increased. With it, feelings of one’s impotence and insignificance became magnified. There had to be some way to feel empowered. Enter religion! What could be better than having an omnipotent and omniscient god who is totally on your side, as long as you follow his/her/its dictates and believe in the absolute correctness of the faith invested in such an entity. Ah, there is the rub.
Because other faiths challenge the beliefs held by yet others, tensions develop. There is a desperate need to be sure one’s god is the absolute correct one, bigger and better than anyone else let alone those who proceed into the dark without such protection. How dare they swivel! Now, add nuclear, biochemical, and other extremists’ weapons to this mix and watch the world go boom! So, what we may once have absolutely needed to survive and cope with vastness may be the very thing that spells our doom. This thesis is my understanding of John Shumaker’s insights in his book Wings of Illusion: The Origin, Nature, and Future of Paranormal Belief.
The better approach is through education. Gradually, God has become the “god of gaps” in knowledge. Knowledge, increased and shared, becomes the antidote to “terrifying vastness.”
Sheldon H. Kardener, MD
Santa Monica, California
In response to the article “Is Religion a Clinical Delusion?,” I thought the following definition, that I developed over the years, might be relevant.
Religion: a metaphysical system constructed on an architectural framework of superstition and myth, that attempts to explain the nature of reality, and the relationship of our species to it, which along with a body of ritual, and a static code of ethical formulation, is perpetuated via cultural transmission, for the psycho-physiological alleviation of existential angst and is epistemologically dependent on magical thinking, delusion, and confirmation bias.
I recognize that there is no possible way to reconcile science with religion, because religion, and its socio-cultural evolution and development, is itself a legitimate subject of scientific study. I have found that a Systems approach (Bertalanffy) to explaining religion has proven fruitful. As the aforementioned definition indicates, a multidisciplinary scientific examination is necessary for explaining religion, as a phenomenon.
Christina Anne Knight
Author, Why There Is No Afterlife: A Systems Perspective
Newport News, Virginia
Robert Cirillo responds:
I’d like to thank Benjamin Vande Weerdhof Andrews for his excellent idea, and to Thomas F. Higby I say touché. The fact that rapiens rhymes with sapiens makes it all the more clever. The command to “increase, multiply and subdue the earth” is about as rapiens as you can get.
I have four comments for S. Keyron McDermott: 1) I am from a stereotypical Catholic Italian-American family, with six children, a father with a low salary who needed to do a lot of moonlighting, and a mother who stayed home and raised children. I would say we were more upper lower class than upper middle class, and I don’t think my mentality has changed much, despite my education. 2) I spent five and a half years in a Catholic seminary. I never had one single bad experience in the Catholic Church. Five of my friends became priests and we are still friends. Interestingly, virtually all of my non-clerical Catholic friends are pro-choice, support same-sex marriage, and believe that non-Christians can go to heaven. A few of them are also divorced, but they still practice their faith. This shows, I think, that people will cling to religion even if they find it to be in conflict with many of their beliefs and values, which, in my opinion, only reinforces the idea of religion as delusion. 3) I realize that religion provides solace to people who suffer. I am happy that religion helped Ms. McDermott’s mother. Let me tell you about my mother. After she bore her sixth child, her doctors told her she would die if she bore a seventh. She became frighteningly suicidal because she truly believed that if she practiced birth control, she would burn in hell. What saved her? She went to see the parish priest and cried her eyes out to him. What did he tell her? “Mary, take the damned pill.” Needless to say, that man eventually left the priesthood. I wonder which nuances Ms. McDermott thinks I have missed. 4) I don’t doubt that religion helped Ms. McDermott’s family get through some terrible times. But suppose they had been atheists. Would they not have survived? Or would those fortitudinous Irish folk have made it through the rough times on their own?
My reply to Stephen E. Silver’s very good comments has two parts: 1) I am not unrealistic enough to think that religion can be eradicated. I only hope that cultural evolution and improved education can drastically reduce its influence. 2) It’s interesting that he classifies religion as the product of human imagination. He is no doubt right about that. But when people use their imagination to write fantasy or science fiction, they remain aware that it is imaginary. In the case of religion, the boundary between imagination and reality becomes very blurred.
I think Sheldon H. Kardener and I agree for the most part, and I thank him for mentioning Shumaker’s book. Speaking of books, I see I will have to read Christina Anne Knight’s. She provides an excellent definition of religion.
Occult Feats
Re: “The Occult Feats of Mystics and Saints” (February/March 2021). According to Matthew 2:13–15, after Jesus’s birth, Joseph took Mary and their baby to Egypt, where they remained until the death of Herod, who had sought to kill their newborn.
However, Luke 2:21–23 tells a different story: Eight days after Jesus’s birth, his parents took him to Jerusalem, where they presented him to the Lord at the Temple.
Now, because the Bible is the infallible word of God, we don’t dare say that God lies, or is confused, or contradicts himself. And thus we have no choice but to accept that those two contradictory passages are true.
But the question that kept nagging me was: How could the holy family be in Egypt and Jerusalem at the same time?
Well, bilocation of course! Thank you, Joe Nickell, for unraveling that mystery—which, until I read your article, nearly drove me crazy.
Perhaps the simple answer, after all, is that God lies, or is confused, or contradicts himself? But … Heaven forbid! Let’s never forget that everything in the Bible is true, because it’s in the Bible.
David Quintero
Monrovia, California
Pivot Point
Over the centuries, popes have wrestled with the question of animals going to heaven: Do animals have souls or not? Popes continue to debate this animal question to this day, even though Pope Pius in 1854 declared the doctrine of papal infallibility, another joke.
To comfort a child whose dog had just died, Pope Francis declared in December 2014, “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.” Because I believe that the concept of religion was invented to control people and make them feel good (you’ll go to heaven) or bad (you’ll go to hell), Francis, in his statement, just adds to the fact that religions make this stuff up as they go along.
My take on the Pope Francis statement: If paradise is open to all of God’s creatures, then cats, all wild animals, all denizens of the deep in all the oceans and bodies of water, all insects (even mites and fruit flies)—in other words, all living creatures on earth—must go to heaven. Heaven must be one hell of a crowded place with all the quadrillions of creatures who have lived on Earth since the beginning of time now residing there.
Of course, some of them, the bad ones, must have gone to hell, especially mosquitoes and bad dogs. I hope lobsters go to heaven because they taste so good. Maybe some future pope will extend the entry into heaven to microbes, bacteria, and viruses. On second thought, they would have to go to hell because they could potentially wipe out the entire human race.
Bobby Gosh
Author, Confessions of a Marijuana Eater
Brookfield, Vermont
In Thomas Puszykowski’s Pivot Point essay “Wisdom of the Commode,” he uses the term collective unconscious. The only other time I’ve run across that term was its use by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung to explain his division of the unconscious. He called the other part of the unconscious the “personal.” The “personal” is what we as individuals bring with us from antiquity when we are born. The “collective” is what we acquire by after birth experiences. One of these terms needs an explanation of the other to have any real meaning.
I was astonished to see Puszykowski use the collective term. This tells me that he must know a lot about psychology.
Why do I consider this a serious enough topic to even mention? It is because the division of the unconscious has made a great deal of difference in my life. It even got me to write an article about how the two parts can be used as a basis for justifying the separation of church and state, with the church being more influenced by the “personal” and the state being more by the “collective.”
I’ve come to see these two parts as combating each other to win dominance over how we will live our lives. I’ve come to consider the “personal” to be the more important of the two, and hopefully I lean in its direction.
Hugh Nicholson
Madison, Alabama
The switch from Christianity to liberal atheism is really not much of a pivot. You can still have a set of unquestioned truisms and the same smug sense of moral superiority over those people who have not seen the light. What seems worse to me is that I see a lot of hatred toward political and philosophical opponents.
Modern liberalism and therefore your magazine seems to offer opinions on all kinds of issues as if they were commonly known facts that do not require any argument to back them up. I do not see any acknowledgment of possible undesirable tradeoffs in the various positions taken. There is no sense that you have weighed the benefits and negatives of various alternatives.
I see liberalism as a pseudoreligion, and if hatred is a part of secular humanism, it is not for me. I am happy to simply be an atheist without the attached baggage.
Charles Hanson
Mountain View, Hawaii
Darwin
Re: “Getting It Right: Darwin and Human Evoluation, Part II” (FI, February/March 2021). Darwinism is not simply evolution theory but all of reality. Darwinism is a concept of continuous evolution toward perfection. It engulfs all aspects of our lives and expectations: science, religion, truth, and error, just to name a few. To limit the scope of Darwinism is a mistake. It can be applied to all facets of humanity, even politics. It is a philosophy that should govern our every thought about reality.
Edward Fisher
Chalmers, Indiana
Adam Neiblum’s article, “Getting It Right: Darwin and Human Evolution, Part II” is very thought provoking. Neiblum is on point on just about everything in the article, but I question this claim of his: “Evolution is the term used to describe a continuous biological process whereby species adapt, changing in a nonlinear, non-directional manner, in response to their specific environmental context.” I believe that that statement is incorrect or at least incomplete. Isn’t it the case that organisms mutate, and if they’re lucky, they thrive in the environment in which they find themselves because they have a competitive advantage as a result of their mutated change? They don’t change in response to environmental stimuli.
Richard Sutherland
Winter Haven, Florida
In his article, “Getting It Right: Darwin and Human Evolution, Part II,” Adam Neiblum begins by telling us humans should not think of themselves as the pinnacle of evolutionary processes. Evolution recognizes no “pinnacles” and is a constant process of change. But later on, the author repeatedly refers to our human species as “unique,” with “uniquely learning-capable brains.” I challenge this. The experience and observations of animals in the wild by expert naturalists and me attest to their learning-capable brains. Well-known examples are orcas, elephants, and chimps. It stands to reason that higher organisms must learn both from personal experience and others to survive by adapting and adjusting to their particular environments and circumstances.
We are not only animals that plan, create, solve problems (and, it seems, imagine), and try to read the minds and intents of others. And yet there still remains that domination mindset, the human exaltation of superiority over nature, even though we are only part of the tree of life-forms and not the ultimate result of evolutionary “progress.” Nature is not a hierarchy.
I will propose several reasons we are where we are for consideration, based on evolutionary principles and conjectures. First, we breed all year long; our generations accumulate exponentially, thus it may be that our brains, as well as our bodies, have the benefit of a “speeded-up” evolution, so to speak. By sheer numbers, we have been able to out-produce, out-think, and out-advance other organisms. Out of millions of humans, statistically speaking, there will arise a very few geniuses, inventors, discoverers, and thinkers who will be responsible for the major progress of humankind. Someday this breeding advantage may lead to our eventual Malthusian assured destruction.
It seems there may be other things to make us “unique,” such as hope. We can’t imagine other animals hoping, which is often our drive to prove ourselves, to solve and prevail—against insurmountable odds. The invention of an afterlife is faith in hope. Plus, humans, naturally, hate to be bored. (Although I’ve met fundamentalists who seem to have an infinite capacity for boredom.) And we keep making life comfortable enough so that, instead of having to be constantly preoccupied with surviving, we have leisure in which to plan, imagine, invent, and discover. If only these things could be available to every person on Earth, then all of us might be contented enough to use our learning-capable brains to realize our most positive capacities.
Carl Scheiman
Walpole, Maine
First, I am honored that my Pivot Point submission was ultimately accepted and published in the latest issue of Free Inquiry. I just wanted to point out that in the article “Getting It Right,” the captions for the images on the opening page got it wrong: Tiktaalik was the bottom image, not the top right in the first block of images. Otherwise it was an excellent article.
Larry Glisan
via email
Re: “Getting It Right: Darwin and Human Evolution, [Part I] Part II” (FI, February/March 2021). Throughout his essay, Adam Neiblum expounds at length on the common biological characteristics of humans and other animals evolved over eons from related organisms in multiple changing environments by a process Darwin masterfully described as “means of natural selection.” By virtue of this exercise, Neiblum would show that there is little difference between humans and other animals and certainly no credible reason for believing in “human exceptionalism.” Perhaps holding out hope for the illusion of a qualified transition to a concluding homily, Neiblum equivocates to the point of contradiction and clearly articulates the linguistic-cognitive powers and practices unique to the human species that have transformed the world for better and worse.
Homo sapiens alone have produced the worldwide physical infrastructure (and pollution) of civilizations developed over the past 6,000 years fashioned using cumulative knowledge by what Daniel Dennett called “human intelligent design,” a deliberate, purposeful capability absent in even the “smartest” of non-human species. Almost defying imagination, human cultural evolution facilitated by encroaching overpopulation has displaced natural evolution over mere centuries as the dominant force for future change in global environments. Religious origin myths notwithstanding, evolution happened to turn out a lone exceptional animal on this planet: human beings.
Jim Valentine
Woodland Hills, California
Adam Neiblum responds:
I am afraid that, though Mr. Fisher and I are both obviously fans of Charles Darwin, we would appear to disagree on several points. Evolutionary theory applies to biology and all known life-forms but does not have the universal applicability that Mr. Fisher appears to be suggesting. The argument that we can or should apply Darwinism to “all of reality” is highly problematic, to say the least. Darwin’s thoughts on natural selection and evolution would not help us in any way to make sense of plate tectonics, quantum theory, or mathematics. “Darwinism” is not relevant to building rockets, parenting, or cooking.
Additionally, I disagree with the claim that “Darwinism is a concept of continuous evolution toward perfection.” The process of evolution is not progressive. It does tend toward increasing complexity, but complexity is not synonymous with progress.
Mr. Sutherland and I would appear to be in complete agreement, and I thank him for his excellent observations. I stand corrected. The deeply contextualized nature of evolutionary change is accurate, and importantly distinguishes the biological process of evolution from the cultural phenomenon of goal-directed progress. It is important to make this distinction. But my description of this process was incomplete, as Mr. Sutherland rightly observes. I failed to acknowledge the essential role of genetics, which is a glaring oversight indeed.
It would have been far more complete, and accurate, to say: Evolution is the term used to describe a continuous biological process whereby random genetic mutations initiate changes in an organism, changes that are significant enough to have an impact upon its interactions within the context of its current environment and that have some impact, either positive or negative, upon that organism’s ability to survive and reproduce successfully.
I thank both Mr. Scheiman and Mr. Valentine for challenging me to strive for greater clarity as regards this most important topic. I see that they appreciated the difficulties inherent to addressing a nuanced, multi-faceted subject such as human exceptionalism.
Merely stating that our particular species is or is not “exceptional” is really not the point, as asserting such alone truly says very little. What we want to get at is what being exceptional means: In what sense are we, or are we not, exceptional? What does it mean to describe us as such? Is it synonymous with “unique”? Does it have a value-laden connotation, as in “superior” or “more advanced”?
Clearly there is an important sense in which we are exceptional. Our intelligence is our most singular, defining trait, in particular our capacity for applying cumulative and shared knowledge. This clearly sets us apart. And yet, it also unites us with the rest of nature. No doubt it is such claims that perturb Messrs. Scheiman and Valentine. Many other evolved beings possess not only intelligence, but even the specifically accretive and mutualistic form which so defines us.
Charles Darwin has helped us to understand how even this apparently singular capacity itself is in fact a trait common to other species and serves to demonstrate our interconnectivity within the natural order. Intelligence is not the result of a special act of divine creation but just another evolved trait of a biological organism, within a lengthy, vastly diverse, yet single evolutionary tree of life-forms, upon which we are, precisely as all of the others, merely another branching twig. I join Mr. Valentine in singing the praises of non-human animal intelligence, be it the pods of Orca that learn and share team-working skills or the social and emotional intelligence of elephants. Numerous examples abound, clearly demonstrating that we both are, yet are not, exceptional.
In spite of 160 years of living with the knowledge of evolutionary theory, we continue to cultivate an arrogant, pseudoscientific understanding of ourselves as exceptional, superior, and separate from nature. As I argue in “Getting It Right,” misinterpretations of Darwin’s work itself perpetuate this problematic exceptionalism even beyond the demise of Abrahamic religious traditions. This mindset keeps us from cultivating a more sustainable, accurate, and humble worldview, a worldview we will need to develop in order to survive and thrive going forward, into the future.
Euclid
Re: “Euclid: The Man Who Showed Us How to Think, Part II” (D. Asoka Mendis, February/March 2021). In this article, the author states that “Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BCE), who knew π was not a rational number, sought to find an approximate value by noting that π would be greater than the area of any regular polygon inscribed within a circle of diameter 1, and less than the area of any regular polygon that circumscribes it.”
Should not the diameter of the circle be “2” not “1” (i.e. radius = 1)?
John Gabrielson
Seattle, Washington
While reading the fascinating article “Euclid: The Man Who Showed Us How to Think, Part 1” in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Free Inquiry, I noticed the sentence “Thus, N is by definition a prime” on the third line from the bottom of the first column on page 49. This sentence is incorrect as can be seen in the following two examples: N13 = 2*3*5*7*11*13 = 30,031 = 59 * 509 (although 30,031 isn’t a prime number 59 and 509 are) and N17 = 2*3*5*7*11*13 17 = 510,511 = 19 * 97 * 277 (although 510,511 isn’t a prime number 19, 97, and 277 are).
Because neither 59 nor 509 are divisible by any prime less than or equal 13 (the presumed largest prime)—and similarly 19, 97, and 277 are all larger than 17—each of these examples nonetheless proves the proposition, “the number of primes is infinite” by reductio ad absurdum.
Bob Eramia
via email
Asoka Mendis responds:
My thanks to the writers of the letters for their constructive criticism and corrections. While several were minor corrections, there was one substantial issue pointed out pertaining to Euclid’s reducto ad absurdum proof of an infinity of prime numbers (p.41, pt.1). They both stated that, contrary to my assertion, the number N = (2x3x5 . . . x L) + 1 need not be a prime. They are right; my proof was incomplete.
Following is the complete proof: Clearly N cannot be divided by any of the primes within the parentheses. So either it in itself is a prime, contradicting the assertion that L is the largest prime, or there must be some other prime, p, that divides N. If such exists, it clearly has to be outside the set of primes included within parenthesis, which once again contradicts the assertion that L is the largest prime. Consequently, the number of primes must be infinite.
Both the above writers provided examples wherein N is not a prime. In these cases, the prime divisors of N are larger than L, which should be as stated above.
David Hume Tower
Daniel Sharp’s account of the “Quiet Erasure of David Hume Tower” (February/March 2021) is evidence of the insanity and inanity of the authoritarian left, which is not only confined to the university campus. I wonder how much longer the statue of Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile will be allowed to stand. It would be comforting to think of the woke as a well-intentioned, if misguided, minority, but Hume said himself, “Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.” Unless opposed, the rulers of cancel culture will continue until, as Orwell wrote in 1984, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed.”
Martin Stubbs
London, United Kingdom
Blip Review
Tom Flynn’s altogether depressing review of the altogether depressing book Blip is spot on. I am a retired exploration geologist who spent much of my life traveling the planet in search of raw materials for mining and energy companies. And I can assure you learned readers of this fine magazine: you have absolutely no idea how efficient my ilk have been in decimating the mineral resources of our little planet. Over half a century ago, I asked M. King Hubbert—he of “Peak Oil” fame and chief among us explorationists—if he thought it was too late to avoid a collapse of planetary societies due to overpopulation and resource depletion. His answer was an unequivocal “Yes, it’s too late. The collapse has begun and it can’t be stopped.” That was over half a century ago; things have only gotten worse (the current pandemic being one manifestation). And Tom Flynn is absolutely spot on: this collapse is being driven ultimately by human overpopulation.
C. Gibson
Irvine, California