Did It All Start with the Big Bang? And What Difference Does That Make for the Meaning and Purpose of Our Lives?

I have written about "The Big Bang Theory"--the popular television show that ran on CBS from 2007 to 2019.  Every episode began with a clever theme song that ended with the line: "It all started with the Big Bang."

Is that true?  The brief answer is: We don't know.  

We don't know because the earliest history of the universe is beyond what we can observe.  Whatever is beyond any possible observation cannot be known to exist or not to exist.  Asserting its existence is a matter of belief or faith, not a matter of scientific knowledge.  It's an assertion of religion (or revelation) not of science (or reason).  Here I agree with physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's insistence that scientific models of reality must always be tested against observational evidence because otherwise they are just speculative stories that are more like religion than science (Hossenfelder 2022).

What difference (if any) does this make for how we think about the purpose of our lives?  The brief answer is that we must choose between at least two alternatives.  We can believe in a divinely caused Big Bang that can support a moral cosmology that gives our lives a divinely appointed purpose that might include eternal life after death.  Or we can recognize a moral anthropology that gives our lives a human purpose in satisfying our natural desires--such as the desire to understand the universe, which can be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding through Revelation or a desire for intellectual understanding through Reason.

If human beings are to be free to pursue these alternative ways of life and to debate their relative merits, people must have the religious and intellectual liberty secured in a Lockean liberal open society that allows for freedom of thought and expression.  The kind of freedom that is manifest even in some popular culture such as the "Big Bang Theory" television show.

THE BIG BANG?

Human beings wonder about their origins.  They want to know where they came from.  They ask about not only their ancestral and social origins but even about the origin of everything.  That's why every human society has stories about how all things came to be as they are.  Commonly, they are religious stories about how divine beings brought the world into existence.  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."  So declares the first verse of the King James Bible.

But what exactly does that mean?  And is it true?  Some theologians have said that God created everything ex nihilo (from nothing).  But others have said He created everything ex materia (from some preexisting material).  Some have said God created only one universe--the one that we live in.  But others have said that He might have created other universes, perhaps even an infinite number of them.

Some philosophers and scientists (like Aristotle) have said that there was no need for divine creators because the world was eternal as composed of eternal matter and thus had no beginning and no end.  But others (like Lucretius) have argued that the world has arisen spontaneously from the random motion of atoms without any need for divine intervention, and that atomic flux would eventually dissolve every world and create a new one.

Thomas Aquinas defended the orthodox Christian doctrine that God did indeed create everything from nothing.  But he admitted that this could not be scientifically demonstrated.  "It is by faith alone do we hold and not by any demonstration that can be proved, that the world did not always exist. . . that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science" (ST, I, q. 46, a. 2).

But then when Georges Lemaitre (a cosmologist who was also a Jesuit priest) first proposed a Big Bang theory of the universe, Pope Pius XIII pointed to this as a scientific demonstration of the divine creation of the universe from nothing.  Lemaitre himself, however, criticized the Pope for failing to see how this scientific theory had nothing to do with the Christian doctrine of creation, which could be believed by faith but not known by demonstration.

As I have indicated in my essays on the Big Bang, the scientific theory of the Big Bang has been invoked by some people (like William Lane Craig) to prove that God exists and by other people (like Stephen Hawking) to prove that God does not exist.  I have argued that both are mistaken.  

Craig states his argument as a syllogism:

 1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

There are good reasons to doubt that those two premises are really scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

The first premise is not "obviously true," as Craig says, because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Consequently, while the "principle of sufficient reason"--that for everything there must be a causal explanation--might hold true for our ordinary experience of how things work within the universe, this principle does not necessarily apply to what things are like outside the universe, because none of us has ever stood "outside the universe" to see if the principle of sufficient reason holds true there.  Standing "outside the universe"--experiencing the transcendent or the supernatural--is a matter of religious imagination that is beyond our empirical experience of the world and thus beyond empirical science.

Therefore, the first premise of Craig's syllogism might be a statement of religious faith, but it is not a statement of scientific truth.

The same can be said about the second premise.  "The universe began to exist."  What exactly is being stated here?  There are two possibilities.  The universe began to exist out of nothing.  Or the universe began to exist out of something. 

Craig's argument requires that he equivocate between these two different statements.  The universe began to exist out of nothing is the Christian theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo.  But, then, this would deny Craig's claim that this premise is "religiously neutral."  In fact, that the universe began to exist out of nothing is not a scientific statement at all, because there is no human observational experience of absolute "nothing" that would make the study of "nothing" part of empirical science.  I even doubt that any of us really understands what we're saying when we talk about absolute "nothing," because it's beyond ordinary human experience.

And yet scientists like Stephen Hawking do speak about how the Big Bang could have come from "nothing" without any need for God.  His explanation is that "the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics" tell us "that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang.  Nothing" (Hawking 2018, 34-35).  Far from the Big Bang proving God's existence, as Craig claimed, Hawking claimed to have shown that since nothing caused the Big Bang, God does not exist.

Hawking appeared five times on the "Big Bang Theory" show as the one scientist that Sheldon most admired.  He playfully mocked Sheldon, but he also recognized his brilliance.  Nothing was said about Hawking's atheism.

Notice that in his argument for atheism, Hawking had to assume at the origin of the universe the reality of the laws of quantum mechanics and of quantum vacuum states.  That's not nothing!  That's something!  Notice also that Hawking had no explanation for where those laws of physics came from.

Moreover, Hawking's model for the origin of the Big Bang is only one of many Big Bang models that scientists have proposed over the past 30 years.  By some counts, there are over two dozen such models (Afshordi and Halper 2025).  Some physicists say our universe is one of infinitely many universes, and each one is a bubble in a rapidly expanding quantum fuzz.  Others say the Big Bang started from the hot gas of tiny, vibrating strings.  Others say the Big Bang was a bounce of a collapsing universe into an expanding one.  Others say the universe is always in a state of eternal inflation.  In this video, Phil Harper gives the top ten answers to the question of what happened before the Big Bang:

Remarkably, in the end, it doesn't matter which model you choose because you end up with the same outcome--the universe that we live in today.  That it doesn't matter which story you believe points to a fundamental problem: there is no data to tell us which model is right.  The reason for that is that the fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

Below is a sketch of the limits on the scale of human observational experience of nature.  At the small scale, microscopes have extended our experience beyond our visual reach, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has extended our reach even deeper.  We have gone from scales of centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter.  But we have reasons to believe that the fundamental constituents of nature that string theory attempts to describe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC.  At the cosmic scale, telescopes have extended our experience of the astronomical universe; but no telescope will ever look beyond our universe's cosmic horizon and see the other universes assumed by the multiverse hypothesis.  The white area is the range of scales within human experience.  The grey area is outside that range.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Notice that the limit of the observable universe at the right end of this scale is the cosmic microwave background.

The oldest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background, emitted nearly four hundred thousand years after the hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago.  It is almost perfectly uniform, with tiny variations in temperature at 1 part in 100,000, which are shown as red (hot) and blue (cold) spots.  This is the most important store of data for early-universe cosmology.  Multiple satellites with telescopes have studied these fluctuations.  Shown here is the most recent map produced by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite probe.

This illustrates how we can make and use technical instruments (such as telescopes) to extend the range of our observational experience of nature.  But it also illustrates the limits on how far that extension can go. 

When Aristotle explained his theological cosmology of a geocentric universe in De Caelo ("On the Heavens"), he admitted that it was hard to study the heavenly bodies--the stars, the sun, the planets, and the Moon--because "we have very little to go on, and we are placed at a great distance from the phenomena that we are trying to investigate," and "very few of their attributes are perceptible by sense experience" (286a7, 292a15-b25).  

So when Galileo defended his Copernican heliocentric system, he argued that Aristotle would have been persuaded by the evidence that Galileo had gathered from his telescope because Aristotle would have welcomed the use of the telescope to extend the range of human observational experience of distant planets and stars.

In the 400 years since Galileo, telescopes have become more powerful; and sending telescopes into space has expanded the depth of their observational power.  So that now we have stunning images of deep space from the James Webb Telescope and images of the cosmic microwave background that take us back over 13 billion years into the history of the universe.  But notice that the image of the cosmic microwave background is dated at four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.  It's not clear that we will ever get any closer than that to the Big Bang, or to whatever there might have been before the Big Bang, which might forever be beyond our range of observational experience.  

Consequently, it will be impossible to test our models of the Big Bang against observational data, which will mean that our models will be little more than speculative origin myths that rest on belief or faith rather than scientific knowledge.

COSMIC PURPOSE?  HUMAN PURPOSE?

Asking about the origins of the Cosmos might seem like a very abstract kind of questioning that doesn't have much to do with ordinary human life.  But in fact it's one of the fundamental questions that we must ask as we try to make sense of our lives.

Must we believe that in the beginning God created the Universe and created man in His image if we want to give some cosmic meaning to our lives?  If this Divine Creator cares about us and for us, and if He endowed us with a knowledge of His moral law as an eternal standard of right and wrong to guide our moral life, and if He promises to help us live according to that moral law, or to save us from our sinful flaws, and then to reward those who love Him with eternal life, doesn't that give us a cosmic purpose to our lives?

But if we believe that in the beginning the universe arose through some impersonal process of natural evolution of matter and energy, and if eventually we somehow emerged as but blips of complexity in that uncaring universe, then how can we believe that our life has any meaning if there's no purpose to it?

Or should we see that even if there is no cosmic purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral cosmology of a divinely created universe, there is a natural purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral anthropology of our natural human desires?  Even if we live in an uncaring universe, we care for ourselves, and we strive to satisfy our natural desires.  Perhaps that is what makes our lives meaningful.

And so, for example, all human beings have some natural desire to understand the universe and their place in it.  This began when natural selection favored species that made correct predictions about their environment, and then organisms became increasingly better at understanding nature, until the evolution of the human cerebral cortex reached a point where human beings could understand their world by probing deeply into nature through intelligence, symbolism, and observation.

But then this natural human desire for understanding could be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding or a desire for intellectual understanding.  Human beings moved by the desire for religious understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by a supernatural Mind analogous to the human mind.  Human beings moved by the desire for intellectual understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by natural laws of evolution.  Some human beings can be theistic evolutionists who believe that God originally created the laws of nature and then allowed the universe to evolve naturally according to those laws, while occasionally intervening miraculously in that natural history to reveal Himself to human beings.

The tension between the natural desire for religious understanding and the natural desire for intellectual understanding is manifest in the Reason/Revelation Debate.

THE REASON/REVELATION DEBATE IN "THE YOUNG SHELDON"

Much of "The Big Bang Theory" revolves around Sheldon and his life story.  He grew up in East Texas in a Southern Baptist family that struggled to understand him because he was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, who used his intelligence to make scientific arguments against religious belief.

From 2017 to 2024, CBS broadcasted a spin-off prequel--"Young Sheldon"--about Sheldon's childhood in the 1980s and 1990s.  The theme of scientific cosmology as supporting atheism against religious belief continued in this show.  

Pastor Jeff is the minister of the Southern Baptist church where the Cooper family goes every Sunday.  The young Sheldon is determined to show everyone that he can use science to refute Pastor Jeff's religious beliefs by arguing that the Bible's story of Creation is denied by the evidence for the natural evolution of the universe and human life.

One example of this conflict between science and religion is the third episode of the second season (airing on October 4, 2018) entitled "A Crisis of Faith and Octopus Aliens."  This episode begins with the Cooper family attending church on a Sunday.  Pastor Jeff is delivering his sermon, and suddenly Sheldon raises his hand to ask a question.  He challenges Pastor Jeff to tell him what God would look like in an alien planet inhabited by octopuses.  Would God look like an octopus?  Jeff struggles to answer.

Then, that Sunday afternoon, Sheldon's mother Mary receives a phone call and is told that the 17-year-old daughter of her friend Stephanie Hanson had died in an accident.  Mary and her husband George go to the funeral.  Throughout the week, Mary is troubled by the question of why an all-good God would torture a good Christian like Stephanie by killing her innocent child.  She talks with Pastor Jeff, but he cannot give her a satisfactory answer.

On Saturday night, Mary takes her mother to a bar named "Lucky's Place," where they drink and play billiards.  She tells her mother about her religious struggle and how this has depressed her mood.  She is drunk, and she is driven home by her mother.  Her husband George takes her to bed.

The next day, Sunday, she does not go to church, and she does not say a prayer at the family dinner.  Her husband and children are shocked to see these signs that she is doubting her faith in God.

Later, in the evening, Sheldon comes out to the front porch of their house to talk with her and attempt to comfort her.  Here's the scene:

Notice that even though Sheldon is an atheist, he makes a scientific argument for the existence of God based on the "fine-tuning" of the universe.  The strength of gravity must be mathematically precise--neither too strong nor too weak--to make it possible for the universe to exist as a place where human life can emerge.  Isn't it unlikely that that could be just an accident?  Doesn't this logically suggest the need for God to design the precise conditions that make the universe and life possible?  Sheldon indicates that he is still an atheist, but he does see this as a scientifically logical argument for religious belief.

Mary responds by saying that her problem with God is not a matter of logic in her head but what she feels in her heart.  Sheldon then makes another argument that might appeal to her heart.  In a world of over five billion people, how likely is it that I would have the one woman who is a perfect mom for me?  Mary is moved by this, and she thanks God for giving her Sheldon as her child.  In the voice-over, the adult Sheldon tells the viewers that he didn't tell his mom that he shouldn't have to share credit with God for making the argument that comforted her.

One of the YouTube clips of this scene has a comment from "B Sharp" about Sheldon's first argument:  "I love Young Sheldon, and this is a sweet moment.  However, Sheldon is using the fine-tuning apologetics argument, which is fallacious.  The universe wasn't created for humans.  Humans evolved to exist in this universe."

One could also respond in a similar way to Sheldon's second argument.  That a son loves his mother is not an unlikely event that requires some supernatural intervention, because parent-child bonding is an evolutionary adaptation of human nature.

But then what if evolved human nature includes a natural desire for religious understanding--for transcendence and transcendent meaning?  This emotional desire is not based on pure logic, and therefore it cannot be refuted by logical argument.  And, therefore, as Rebecca Goldstein has shown, the emotional longing for religious transcendence prevails over scientific reasoning, particularly when science faces fundamental mysteries in the universe that cannot ever be explained by reason alone; and thus Revelation cannot be refuted by Reason.  Perhaps this is what Mary Cooper meant when she pointed to what she felt in her heart.

Nevertheless, the fine-tuning argument is one of the best scientific arguments for God as the Intelligent Designer of the universe.  Christian astrophysicists like Owen Gingerich and Deborah Haarsma like to invoke this argument.  And yet, I have written some posts indicating the flaws in this line of reasoning.

It is not really clear, for example, that scientific cosmology shows that the universe is precisely fine-tuned for life, and particularly human life.  Most cosmologists agree that the universe will come to an end, and that all life will be extinguished.  Consider one line in the theme song for "The Big Bang Theory":

"It's expanding ever outward, but one day it will pause and start to go the other way, collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard.  Our best and brightest future that it'll make an even bigger bang!"

Does the end of the universe in a Big Collapse mean that far from being fine-tuned for life, the universe has been fine-tuned for death?  Or should we have faith in those eschatological religions that promise us eternal life after death?

In a liberal open society, we are free to openly debate such questions--even in popular television shows--without fear of persecution.

And in that debate, one of the big questions for us will be:  Did it all start with a Big Bang?

REFERENCES

Afshordi, Niayesh, and Phil Halper. 2025. Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hossenfelder, Sabine. 2022. Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. New York: Viking.

Paul Gottfried's Esoteric Writing: He (Quietly) Scorns John Winthrop's Protestant Theocracy

Responding to those like Mark Brennan and Paul Gottfried who argue that America is defined by its Anglo-Protestant culture, I have asked: What kind of Protestant culture defines America?  Is it the illiberal Protestant theocracy first established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop?  Or is it the liberal Protestantism of religious liberty and toleration first established in Rhode Island by Roger Williams?  Was Winthrop the First Founding Father?  Or was Williams?

I have written two long essays arguing that after a 200-year-long debate (1630-1833) between these two Protestant traditions, the tradition of Williams prevailed over Winthrop's.  At the national level, the turning point came with the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which affirmed Williams' principles of "no religious test" for office, a "wall of separation" between church and state, and the religious liberty of all individuals.  At the state level, the turning point came as the states revoked their religious establishments and affirmed the individual right to religious liberty.  The last state to do this was Massachusetts in 1833, when people heard Winthrop rolling over in his grave and Williams cheering.

Gottfried has just written a second reply to my argument.  But it's hard to understand what he is saying because he continues to employ the rhetorical strategy of silence by ignoring most of what I have argued.

And yet, after three readings of his essay, I finally realized that he was engaging in the kind of esoteric writing that was once so well explained by Leo Strauss.  When an author wants to say something that he knows will anger many of his readers, he might cautiously choose to hide his true teaching from his many careless readers, while allowing his few careful readers to decipher his secret teaching.  As Editor-in-Chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, Gottfried knows that most of his readers would be angry if he openly said that Williams was right in arguing for religious liberty and toleration, and Winthrop was wrong in arguing for Protestant theocracy.  So, to avoid that provocation, he chose to write in such a way that only his very careful readers would see his agreement with Williams' liberal Protestantism.

The key to this secret teaching is a paragraph near the center of his essay:

Arnhart, in one of his commentaries, says he can't imagine how JD Vance could wish to restrict immigration to those who were culturally homogeneous when his wife is a Hindu.  Allow me to suggest some answers.  Our once-dominant Anglo-Protestant culture grew weaker over time, and what Vance wants to preserve are some of its residual characteristics: respect for constitutional law, a sense of individual responsibility, and the Protestant work ethic, but not necessarily the original religious doctrines.

Notice that he begins by directing his reader's attention to my "commentaries," which suggests to the careful reader that he needs to read my essays in order to understand what Gottfried is saying here.  The careful reader will then see that I frame the debate as a choice between Winthrop and Williams, and that America eventually moved to the side of Williams.  So now the reader is primed to ask, which side is Gottried taking?  Gottfried says nothing explicitly about either Winthrop or Williams.  But is he implicitly taking a position in this debate?

"Our once-dominant Anglo-Protestant culture grew weaker over time."  What is he implying here?  I argue that Winthrop's theocratic Protestant culture grew weaker over time as Williams' liberal Protestant culture grew stronger.  Is Gottfried agreeing with this?

What does he mean by "respect for constitutional law"?  Anyone who has read my "commentaries" will know that I show how the Constitution rejects the theocratic government of Winthrop and endorses the religious liberty and separation of church and state advocated by Williams.  Does "respect for constitutional law" require that we accept this?

What does Gottfried mean by "a sense of individual responsibility"?  Williams argued that the "individual responsibility" of every person in matters of faith required religious liberty and toleration of religious diversity.  Winthrop argued that the established church must coercively compel all individuals to believe the doctrines of the church.

So when Gottfried says that we should respect America's Protestant culture "but not necessarily the original religious doctrines," is he implying that we can rightly reject Winthrop's original theocratic doctrines?  That does seem to be what he is implying when he writes: "Since Vance is himself a convert to Catholicism and his wife is a Hindu, I don't think that either would argue that only those who are strictly Protestant should be allowed to reside here."  

Winthrop's theocratic Protestantism would have persecuted Vance for his Catholicism and Usha for her Hinduism.  But since America has long ago adopted Williams' liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration as part of the American Creed, Vance and his wife can enjoy the freedom that comes from living in an American Creedal Nation.

Bruce Springsteen, "The Streets of Minneapolis"

 

                                               Bruce Springsteen, "The Streets of Minneapolis"

The folk music of resistance to Trump's dictatorship.  Here are the lyrics:

Through the winter's ice and cold, down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice 'neath an occupier's boots
King Trump's private army from the DHS, guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law or so their story goes

Against smoke and rubber bullets, in the dawn's early light
Citizens stood for justice, their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets, Alex Pretti and Renee Good

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land and the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed in the winter of '26
We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis

Trump's federal thugs beat up on his face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots and Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead
Their claim was self-defense, sir, just don't believe your eyes
It's our blood and bones and these whistles and phones against Miller and Noem's dirty lies

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice crying through the bloody mist
We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis

Now they say they're here to uphold the law but they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown my friend you can be questioned or deported on sight
In our chants of "ICE out now!" our city's heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears on the streets of Minneapolis

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed in the winter of '26
We'll take our stand for this land and the stranger in our midst
We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis
We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis

ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out

America as the Anglo-Protestant Nation Is Unconstitutional

Recently, I wrote a long essay criticizing Mark Brennan's article in Chronicles Magazine arguing that Gordon Wood was wrong to identify America as a "creedal nation," because this would contradict the history of "America's Anglo-Protestant culture" as the real identity of the American nation.  Paul Gottfried then defended Brennan's argument against my criticism, and I wrote a response to Gottfried's defense.

If you read my original essay and Gottfried's defense of Brennan, you will notice that Gottfried is totally silent about my historical evidence.  This is strange because both Brennan and Gottfried insist that all the historical evidence is in their favor.  Most remarkable is their silence about the constitutional evidence that those who wrote and ratified the Constitution and the first ten amendments did not see America as an Anglo-Protestant nation.  But since I wrote only two paragraphs on the constitutional evidence, I decided that I should say more about this.

My main idea is that what we see in the Constitution is the influence of Roger Williams' principles of toleration, religious liberty, and a "wall of separation" between church and state.  Baptist preachers like Isaac Balbus and John Leland preserved the legacy of Williams by arguing for religious liberty in Virginia, and they were influential with Virginia political leaders like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

THE FIRST FOUNDING FATHER

Who was the First Founding Father of America?  

Some scholars say it was John Winthrop, who led the Puritan founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630--the "shining city on a hill" and all that (Bremer 2003).

Others say it was Roger Williams, who founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637 (Johnson 2015).

There is some truth in both claims.  But we should see that the Puritan theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first founding of illiberal America, while the establishment of religious liberty and separation of church and state in Providence was the first founding of liberal America.

We should also see that the liberal America of Williams eventually prevailed over the illiberal America of Winthrop.  Because while the legacy of Puritan theocracy has dwindled to almost nothing today, the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state established by Williams have been foundational for American political culture.  

When these principles are combined with freedom of speech and of the press in the First Amendment, this establishes liberal America as an open society with freedom of thought and speech that allows for the free pursuit of both philosophic or scientific understanding and religious experience, with an open debate over Reason versus Revelation. 

In his book Illiberal America, Steven Hahn rightly begins his history of illiberal America with Winthrop and the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (49-63).  But then he passes over Williams in four sentences (54, 60, 63, 70), and he does not allow his reader to see how in the debate between Winthrop's illiberal America and Williams' liberal America, Williams' arguments eventually (over 200 years) prevailed.  As one can see, for example, in the history of state-established religion in Massachusetts (Witte and Latterell 2019).

This sets the pattern for Hahn's rhetorical strategy throughout his book.  He moves through nine periods of American history from the early 17th century to the present.  For each period, he shows the emergence of some illiberal tradition of American history.  But then he obscures the fact that each of these illiberal traditions has either been utterly defeated or seriously weakened by the success of liberalism.  Hahn's deceptive rhetorical strategy then allows him to mistakenly claim that today Donald Trump and his MAGA movement manifest the triumphant convergence of all of America's illiberal traditions.

The influence of William's principles in shaping Liberal America can be seen in the text of the Constitution.

THE PREAMBLE

If the framers of the Constitution had wanted to identify America as a Christian nation, they would have done so in the Preamble.  But they did not.  

By contrast, it was common in the state constitutions to do that.  For example, the Preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 affirmed "the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the Great Legislator of the Universe," and "devoutly imploring His direction in so interesting a design."  And Article 2 declared that "it is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great creator and preserver of the universe."  But there is no language like this anywhere in the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution's silence about God provoked a debate that continues up to today.  Some of the people who want to identify America as a "Christian nation" have said that the Constitution needs a "God Amendment."  The most prominent example of this movement to put God into the Constitution was the National Reform Association that emerged during and after the American Civil War.  This was a movement of evangelical Protestant ministers, theologians, academics, lawyers, and judges, who claimed that the Civil War was God's punishment of America for having a godless Constitution, and that this showed the need for amending the Constitution.  

They proposed an amended version of the Preamble to the Constitution--with the new language in italics:

"We the People of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America" (National Reform Association 1874, p. 7).

Beginning in 1864, the NRA formally petitioned President Lincoln and the Congress of the United States to support this amendment to the Constitution.  The leaders of the NRA argued that they were not proposing an established church or a merging of church and state.  Rather, they were proposing a constitutional recognition of the fact that America was a Christian nation, and this could be done without denying religious liberty and the separation of church and state.  But they failed to persuade President Lincoln or the Congress to take their proposed amendment seriously.

OATH OR AFFIRMATION AND NO RELIGIOUS TEST

Article VI of the Constitution prescribes that all of the legislative, executive, and judicial officers of the United States and the several States "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

An oath is a solemn calling upon God as a witness.  But an affirmation does not invoke God.  Allowing people to consent to government by affirmation rather than a sacred oath followed the precedent set by Williams.  

On August 20, 1637, Williams and 12 other people who had followed him to Providence signed the "Providence Agreement":

"We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together in a Towne fellowship, and others whom they shall admit unto them only in civil things" (Lutz 1998: 162).

This is the beginning of Liberal America.  Previously, Puritan settlers in America had signed "covenants" in which they took an oath "in the presence of God and one another" to combine themselves into a civil polity "for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian Faith" (Mayflower Compact).  But notice that in this Providence Agreement, they make a "promise" rather than an oath, God is not mentioned, and they submit themselves to the political body "only in civil things"--not in spiritual things.  This was the first founding in America of government by the consent of the governed with a separation of church and state.

The "no religious test" clause was also in the tradition of Williams' liberalism.  All of the state constitutions except for Virginia and New York had religious tests for their public officers.  For example, the members of the Pennsylvania state legislature had to swear an oath: "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."

Before the adoption of the Constitution, most of the states had a religious test requiring that the officers of government be Protestant Christians, and thus excluding Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and atheists.  In some cases, even dissenting Protestants were excluded.  With the passage of Thomas Jefferson's Statute on Religious Freedom in Virginia in 1786, Virginia became the first state to protect religious liberty.  Then, in the decades after the adoption of the Constitution, all of the states dropped religious tests for office.

In the Ratification Debates, some of the Antifederalists objected to the "no religious test" clause.  For example, at the North Carolina convention, David Caldwell objected to this as "an invitation for Jews, and Pagans of every kind, to come among us," and he worried that "this might endanger the character of the United States" (Bailyn 1993, 2:908).  One speaker at the Massachusetts ratifying convention warned that no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."

This shows the primary reason why people wanted religious tests and the legal establishment of religion--without religion, there would be a "corruption of morals."  That's why any proponent of religious liberty had to argue, as Williams did, that the "civil peace" of a community could be sustained by a natural moral sense without any particular religious belief.  One can be good without God.

NO ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION

The First Amendment to the Constitution declares: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."  By directing this prohibition only against the Congress, it seemed that state governments were free to have religious establishments.  It was not until 1940 that the Supreme Court ruled that under the 14th Amendment, the "no establishment" rule applied to state governments.  But the "no establishment" principle contributed to the movement to disestablish religion in the states.

Indicating their agreement with Williams, Madison and Jefferson attacked the establishment of a state-supported church in Virginia as a violation of the unalienable natural right to religious liberty.  Their arguments were set forth in Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments" and Jefferson's "Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty."  Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" was a written petition opposing a bill introduced in the Virginia General Assembly in 1784 and 1785 that would have required the people of Virginia to pay an annual tax "for the support of the Christian religion or of some Christian church."  Jefferson first proposed his "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom" in 1779, but it was not ratified until 1786 (Johnson 2015, 273-79).

All of their arguments can be found in the writings of Williams.  For example, Madison repeated Williams' claim that the New Testament shows that the early Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not depend on the support of human laws, because the spiritual kingdom of God was separated from the earthly kingdom of the world.  Ecclesiastical establishments supported by human laws began with the Roman Emperor Constantine, over three hundred years after the first Christian churches (Madison 1973, 12).  

Madison also agreed with Williams in arguing that not only did the Christian religion not depend on the support of human laws, but the civil government did not depend on an established religion, because as Williams indicated, the "civil peace" of a political community did not depend on the "spiritual peace" of a true church.  After all, native Americans and pagans have kept the peace of their communities without belonging to the true church of God (BT, 72-73).  Here Williams agreed with Pierre Bayle that a society of atheists could live together in a peaceful social order based on their natural moral sense without any religious beliefs.

When the Virginia General Assembly ratified Jefferson's "Statute of Religious Liberty" on January 16, 1786, that effectively ended the legal establishment of religion in Virginia.

Prior to the Revolution, most of the American colonies--with the exception of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania--had established churches supported by the government with compulsory taxation and various kinds of coercive persecution of religious dissenters.  That began to change after 1776, as the states moved away from illiberal theocracy towards liberal toleration.  By 1833, none of the states had an established religion.  There were still some state laws enforcing religious belief--such as laws criminalizing blasphemy--but these laws were almost never enforced.

It is clear, then, that the "no establishment" clause denies that there is any constitutional support for the Christian Nationalism of people like House Speaker Mike Johnson.

After  Mike Johnson was reelected Speaker of the House of Representatives speaking in his acceptance speech, he summarized the major points of Donald Trump's MAGA agenda for the Congress; and in doing that, he insisted that the election of Donald Trump and the new Republican Congress was an act of divine providence.  He explained: "I don't believe in luck or coincidence.  I believe in the idea of providence."  As evidence that the belief in God's providential care for America is part of America's exceptional position in the world, he read what he identified as Thomas Jefferson's "Prayer for America," and he said that Jefferson had said this prayer each day of his eight years as president, and every day thereafter until his death.  In the video above, this comes at around 14 minutes into the speech.  You can also read the text of the speech at Johnson's congressional website.

Johnson identified Jefferson as "the primary author of the Declaration of Independence," in the context of noting that the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence would occur during the term of this 119th Congress in 2026.

Here's the prayer:

Almighty God who has given us this good land for our heritage. We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves, that people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will bless our land with honorable ministry, sound learning and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord and confusion, from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties and fashion into one united people, the multitude brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues endow with thy spirit of wisdom, those whom in thy name, we entrust the authority of government. That there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the Earth. In times of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail, of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Johnson then immediately claimed that the election of the Republican Congress was an "act of providence," and that it was "providence that spared President Trump from the assassin's bullet."  In this way, he suggested that God miraculously intervened to save Trump's life so that he could be elected president.  I have written previously about this belief that Trump is God's Chosen One--like God's choice of Cyrus as the Messiah for Israel.

But contrary to what Johnson assumes, there is no evidence that this prayer was written by Jefferson.  And Johnson has never even attempted to present such evidence.

Moreover, that Jefferson would not have written such a prayer is clear from his refusal as president to proclaim any national day of prayer for the country.  In 1808, Samuel Miller (a minister) sent a letter to Jefferson asking him if he would be receptive to a request from some ministers that he issue a presidential proclamation of a day of "fasting, humiliation, and prayer" before God.  Jefferson replied by saying that he would have to refuse such a request because it would violate the First Amendment's provision that "no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion."  He did indicate, however, that since the First Amendment applies only to the national government, a state government might have the right to issue some such proclamation of a national day of prayer.

Apparently, Jefferson believed that a presidential prayer for America like that attributed to him by Johnson would have violated what Jefferson had called the "wall of separation between church and state" in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802.  He was responding to a letter from the Danbury Baptists congratulating him on his election in 1800 and endorsing his affirmation of "religious liberty--that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals," and therefore that civil government has no rightful power prescribe religious belief.  This puts Jefferson on the side of Williams in asserting the "wall of separation" of church and state against the theocracy of Winthrop. 

FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH

The First Amendment declares: "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."  This language of "free exercise of religion" was first used in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1776.  The Convention adopted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written by George Mason.  The last section of that document affirmed religious liberty:

"That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other" (Art. 16).

Although this echoes some of the language of Williams about religious liberty, it still suggests some blending of religion and the state that Williams would have rejected.  First, it uses religious language--"our Creator" and "Christian forbearance"--that suggests a governmental endorsement of Christian theism.  Second, it does not clearly condemn the legal establishment of religion; and in fact, it was not interpreted as challenging the existence of the established church in Virginia.

James Madison was a delegate at the Virginia Convention.  And he proposed alternative language for this section on religious liberty: "all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience; and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges; nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities" (Johnson 2015, 267; Madison 1962, 1:170-75).  The Convention rejected this language, presumably because this would have abolished the legal privileges of the established church in Virginia. 

But then then Virginia Statue of Religious Liberty of 1786 affirmed religious liberty as part of the freedom of speech and thought by declaring that

. . . our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry . . . that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

The First Amendment echoes this affirmation of the natural right to "free argument and debate" in combining free exercise of religion with freedom of speech and press as expressing the freedom of the mind in thinking and speaking about all intellectual and religious questions.

THE NINTH AMENDMENT

In the Virginia Statue of Religious Liberty, Jefferson identified religious liberty as a "natural right."  The term "natural right" does not appear in the Constitution, but the existence of natural rights is clearly implied in the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."   That this idea of rights "retained by the people" pointed to natural rights in the state of nature before the establishment of government was clear in Roger Sherman's draft of the Bill of Rights: "The people have certain natural rights which are retained by them when they enter into Society."

This suggests that religious liberty could be not only an enumerated right (in the First Amendment) but also a natural right.  And therefore, there was no need for the Supreme Court to argue that the 14th Amendment had applied the First Amendment religious liberty right to state governments, because they should have said that it applied to the states insofar as it was a natural right. 

THE CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMERS WERE NOT CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS

During his first term as President, Donald Trump first attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  While there, he was photographed proudly holding up his copy of a new book by Stephen Strang--God and Donald Trump.  Strang is a leading Pentecostal evangelical who argues that Trump has been chosen by God to save America from secularism and to restore America as the Christian Nation.

He argues that the American founders established America as a Christian nation specially chosen by God to be under his providential care.  Strang refers to "Benjamin Franklin's surprising declaration during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he said famously, 'God governs in the affairs of men'" (xiv).  And Strang says that the purpose of his book in telling the story of God's intervention in the election of 2016 is to confirm this idea "that God is involved in the affairs of men" (184).

Remarkably, however, Strang is silent about the circumstances of Franklin's declaration at the Constitutional Convention.  On June 28th, 1787, the delegates appeared to be deadlocked in their debates because of the opposing interests of large States and small States. Benjamin Franklin rose to propose that the Convention invite some local minister to attend and offer daily prayers to invoke the aid of God. "If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without God's notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?" According to a popular legend, the Convention accepted Franklin's proposal, and from the moment that they had these prayers, the deadlock was broken by God's providential intervention. This story has been repeated by many American ministers as evidence that the American Constitution was divinely inspired. 

I first heard this story as a child when it was part of a sermon at the First Baptist Church of Wills Point, Texas.  But years later, as a college student in a class on the American Founding, I was shocked when I looked at James Madison's notes for the Convention as edited by Max Farrand in the Yale University Press edition (particularly 1:450-52, 3:470-73, 3:499, 3:531), and I saw that this story was false. Franklin did make his proposal for daily prayer at the Convention. But the response was silence.  Finally, Alexander Hamilton offered a quip about how they did not need "foreign aid." The motion was dropped.

This is not the action of good Christians. It is the action of men who respected religious belief, but who did not believe that God would answer their prayers and intervene to promote their political success. Since the meetings of the Convention were kept secret, they were not concerned about public appearances. If the meetings had been open to the public, they surely would have felt compelled to accept Franklin's motion.

Anyone who wants to turn the American Founders into good Christians must deny the most obvious facts about their words and deeds.  On the other hand, one could argue that at least some of the American Founders were pious Christians in the tradition of Roger Williams, who thought that New Testament Christianity requires a "wall of separation" between church and state to protect the spiritual purity of the church and the political purity of the state.  And therefore, it is blasphemy to pray for God's sanctification of a government.

The clear conclusion from all of this is that the idea that America is a Christian Nation is unconstitutional.

REFERENCES

Bremer, Francis J. 2003. John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Farrand, Max, ed. 1987. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. 4 vols. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.  Farrand's Records can be found online at the Library of Congress website.

Hahn, Steven.  2024.  Illiberal America: A History.  New York: Norton.

Johnson, Alan E. 2015. The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience. Pittsburgh, PA: Philosophia Publications.

Lutz, Donald S., ed. 1998.  Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

National Reform Association. 1874. Proceedings of the Fifth National Reform Convention To Aid in Maintaining the Christian Features of the American Government, and Securing a Religious Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Held in Pittsburg, February 4, 5, 1874, With a History of the Origin and Progress of the Movement.  Philadelphia: Christian Statesman Association.

Strang, Stephen. 2017. God and Donald Trump. Lake Mary, FL: FrontLine.

Williams, Roger. 1963. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Vol. 3: Bloody Tenent of Persecution.  Edited by Samuel L. Caldwell.  New York: Russell and Russell.

Witte, John, and Justin Latterell. 2019. "The Last American Establishment: Massachusetts, 1780-1833.  In Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hartog, eds., Religious Dissent and Disestablishment: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833, 399-424. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.

How Bird Brains Endow Corvids and Parrots with Primate-Like Intelligence

 

                                               Comparing the Brains of a Monkey and a Raven

                                                          A Diagram of the Avian Brain

"Bird brain" is a derogatory term.  But it shouldn't be.

Yes, bird brains are smaller than primate brains.  And bird brains don't seem to have a mammalian cerebral cortex or prefrontal cortex, which are largely responsible for complex cognition among mammals.  So we might not expect much from a walnut-sized bird brain.

But many of the studies of animal intelligence have shown that some birds--particularly, corvids (crows, jays, ravens, and jackdaws) and large parrots--have a complex cognitive psychology comparable to that of primates (Emery and Clayton 2004).  They use and manufacture tools.  They engage in causal reasoning.  They show flexible learning strategies.  They have some social intelligence.  They can use their imagination to form cognitive maps of their world and run simulations of future situations.

This complex cognitive functioning in corvids is controlled by the avian pallium, which corresponds to the mammalian cerebral cortex.  The pallium is the layers of grey and white matter that cover the upper surface of the cerebrum in vertebrates.  In mammals, the cortical part of the pallium forms the cerebreal cortex.  Within the avian pallium, the highest cognitive functions are controlled by the high numbers of associative neurons in the mesopallium and nidopallium, which correspond to the prefrontal region of primates (Herculano-Houzel 2020).

Using the isotropic fractionator method, Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues have shown that birds have large numbers of neurons in their whole brain, in their pallium, and in their mesopallium and nidopallium.  Among the songbirds studied, with brain mass ranging from 0.36 to 14.13 g, the total number of neurons in the brain ranges from 136 million to 2.17 billion.  In the parrots studied, brain mass ranged from 1.15 to 20.73 g, while the numbers of neurons ranged from 227 million to 3.14 billion. By comparison, a rhesus monkey brain weighing 70 g has about 1.7 billion neurons. This illustrates how neurons are more densely packed in the brains of birds than in primate brains--just as neurons are more densely packed in primate brains than in the brains of other mammals, which Herculano-Houzel calls the "primate advantage."  So here we see the "avian advantage" (Olkowicz et al. 2016).

                                                              A Blue-and-Yellow Macaw

                                                                A Bonnet Macaque Monkey

The avian pallial neurons of corvids and parrots significantly outnumber the pallial neurons of primate brains of the same mass.  For example, a raven pallium weighs about 10.20 g, and it has about 1.2 billion pallial neurons, while a capuchin monkey pallium weighing about 39.18 g has about 1.1 billion neurons.  A blue-and-yellow macaw with a pallium weighing about 14.38 g has about 1.9 neurons, while a bonnet macaque pallium weighing about 70 g has about 1.7 billion neurons.

The associative pallial neurons in the avian mesopallium and nidopallium are thought to be the functional equivalent to the mammalian prefrontal cortex, which drives flexible and complex cognitive performance.  So if we find similar or even higher numbers of neurons in associative pallial areas in corvids and parrots as in some primate species, that would help explain why these birds have primate-like intelligence.  And, indeed, some research has shown that corvid mesopallium and nidopallium combined can have between 200 and 300 million neurons per hemisphere, which is more than the estimated 68 million neurons in the prefrontal cortical region of the rhesus monkey.

But even though these large numbers of neurons in the bird brain are a major factor in explaining the complex intelligence of corvids and parrot, we should keep in mind that "complex cognitive functions obviously also depend on many other variables like cellular morphology, connectivity patterns, neurochemical properties, and cognition-related regulatory genetic sequences" (Strockens, et al. 2022, 1602).

What we see here is one of the major themes of my writing--the emergent evolution of animal minds in the brain:  differences in degree in the mental capacity of the brain can produce differences in kind when they pass over a critical threshold in the size and complexity of the brain.  That's why the approximately 16 billion neurons in the human cerebral cortex helps to explain why human beings have some mental capacities--such as language and symbolic abstraction--that other animals do not have at all.

Or should we say that the uniqueness of the human mind in its capacity for intellectually understanding the Universe can only be explained by God's miraculous creation of man in His own image by creating the human mind as the image of the Divine Mind?

One of the best arguments for theism is that this theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science. If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else. Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.

I have written a series of posts in response to this evolutionary argument against naturalism.

REFERENCES

Emery, Nathan J., and Nicola S. Clayton. 2004. "The Mentality of Crows: Convergent Evolution of Intelligence in Corvids and Apes." Science 306:1903-1907.

Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2020. "Birds Do Have a Brain Cortex--And Think." Science 369:1567-1568.

Olkowicz, Seweryn, et al. 2016. "Birds Have Primate-Like Numbers of Neurons in the Forebrain." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113:7255-7260.

Strockens, Felix, et al. 2022. "High Associative Neuron Numbers Could Drive Cognitive Performance in Corvid Species." The Journal of Comparative Neurology 530:1588-1605.