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 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 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.

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.

America as the Creedal Nation: A Response to Paul Gottfried

A few days ago, I wrote a response to Mark Brennan's essay in Chronicles Magazine arguing that the idea of America as a "Creedal Nation" is a "myth," because anyone who knows anything about American history knows that America has always been identified by its "Anglo-Protestant culture."  Yesterday, Paul Gottfried, the editor-in-chief of Chronicles, responded to my post by defending Brennan's claim as a "self-evident" truth about American history.

So what historical evidence does Gottfried cite to support his belief that, of course, America has always been culturally homogeneous in its identity as an "Anglo-Protestant" nation that does not depend on any affirmation of the Lockean liberal ideas of the Declaration of Independence?

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

To prove that "there was a long-time Protestant dominance over American religious and moral life," Gottfried cites this passage from Michael McClymond's chapter in The Cambridge History of Religions in America:

Statistics tell a story. The newly formed United States of America included roughly 300,000 Protestant Christians in the year 1800. Yet by the year 1950, this number had grown to 43 million. This is a 143-fold increase, or a growth of 14,300 percent. The figure becomes more striking when one considers that the population of the nation, according to the United States Census, increased during the same period by the order of 28.4 times, from 5.3 million to 150.7 million. The increase in Protestant Christian affiliation during this period was 5.0 times the rate of the general population increase. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that “the most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth.” The overall rate of religious adherence in the U.S. population steadily climbed from 17 percent in 1776, to 34 percent in 1850, 45 percent in 1890, 56 percent in 1926, 59 percent in 1952, and 62 percent in 1980.

There are three interesting points here that Gottfried doesn't notice.  First, I fail to see how "17 percent in 1776" shows "Protestant dominance."  Indeed, the conclusion that McClymond draws from this (in a passage not quoted by Gottfried) is that "it is a mistake to think that there was a Christian golden age in the United States during the colonial era," because "the period of lowest religious affiliation in American history occurred around 1800 when there were much lower levels of church membership than at the present."

Second, when we speak about the growing numbers of "Protestant Christians," what kind of Protestantism are we talking about?  Is it the illiberal Protestantism of John Winthrop or the liberal Protestantism of Roger Williams?  In my post, I argued the Protestant liberalism of Williams--based on the liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty--eventually prevailed over Winthrop's illiberal theocratic principles.  I also pointed to the Constitution of 1789 as manifesting William's liberalism: the "no religious test" clause, the "no establishment of religion clause," and the absence of any reference to God or Jesus Christ made it clear that the Constitution did not establish America as a Protestant Christian Nation.  Brennan and Gottfried are silent about all of this.

Third, notice the title of the book from which Gottfried quoted: The Cambridge History of Religions in America:  "religions" is plural because this three-volume book is all about the religious pluralism of American history.  There are chapters on over two dozen religious traditions:  native American religion, Catholicism (actually a half dozen different traditions of Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, African religions, Islam, and many more.  In the Introduction to the book, the editor states the conclusion that emerges from the book:  "The net result of this historical development in North America is a rich religious culture that includes representatives of most of the world's religions. . . . One result of the religious freedom mandated by the Constitution was the dramatic expansion of the religious diversity in the new nation."  Gottfried is silent about this.

BRITISH AMERICA?

First of all, let's remember that the American Revolution was to a large degree a civil war fought over the question of whether America's national identity was fundamentally British.  The American Patriots (or Whigs) said no.  The American Loyalists (or Tories) said yes.  That's why the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of the separation of the American People from the British People, and the statement of Lockean liberal principles in the Declaration was the justification for that separation.  By claiming that American national identity is necessarily British, Brennan and Gottfried take the losing side in the American Revolutionary War.  (They also take the losing side in America's second civil war--another war in which the Lockean Whigs defeated the Filmerian Tories.)

Like Brennan, Gottfried cites David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed as confirming America's British identity.  But like Brennan, Gottfried is silent about my reference to Fischer's African Founders as showing how African folkways were mixed with British folkways to create a new American culture. 

Brennan and Gottfried are also silent about this passage from Gordon Wood's essay:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

And notice that this 60% English ancestry would be even lower if one counted the African Americans.

As I said in my post, this racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of America increased dramatically over the 19th century when the U.S. had a virtually open borders immigration policy.  Brennan and Gottfried say nothing about this.  Nor do they say anything about how this massive immigration favored the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In my post, I pointed out the hypocrisy of people like J D Vance and Stephen Miller who argue that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture.  I wrote: Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

Gottfried quotes this passage but he doesn't answer my charge of hypocrisy against Vance.  Gottfried does conclude his essay this way:

I agree with much of what I hear JD Vance say and would happily vote for him. I also think his wife is a much nicer person than the scowling Methodist Hillary Clinton or the goofball Lutheran Tim Walz. But we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody “our culture,” which means the one that has been obsessively vilified by our ruling class. Unfortunately, whatever has taken its place seems far, far worse.  

So it's all right for the Hindu Usha to be an American citizen because she's "nicer" than the Methodist Clinton or the Lutheran Walz?

And notice what he says in that last sentence: "we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody 'our culture.'"  So is he saying that we should not restrict immigration to those who embody our Anglo-Protestant culture, because it is "too late" to do that?

My other example of hypocrisy was Stephen Miller, whose grandparents were Russian Jews.  Brennan and Gottfried make no attempt to defend Miller on this point.  This is personal for Gottfried because he was born into a Hungarian Jewish family that immigrated to the U.S. in 1934.  Can Gottfried also be charged with hypocrisy?  He does say this: 

As everyone who knows me knows, my family came as refugees to this country long after the country was founded, and I was not born into its onetime dominant culture.  But I profoundly respect that culture and am glad to live in a country that once embraced it.

Now what is he saying here?  That America should open its borders to immigrants who do not belong to America's Anglo-Protestant culture as long as they "respect" that culture?  

And what does he mean by "onetime dominant culture"?  When did that "onetime dominant culture" cease to be dominant?  Sometime before 1934 when his parents came to America?  Sometime before the Civil War during the long period of open borders?  In 1789 with the ratification of the Constitution, which some of the Antifederalists denounced as "godless"?

Both Brennan and Gottfried are so obscure in their writing that I find it very hard to understand exactly what they are saying.

Do the Large Cetacean Brains Deny the "Human Advantage" in the Cerebral Cortex?

                                                                                      Orcas

I have agreed with Suzana Herculano-Houzel's argument that the (very rough) estimate of 16 billion neurons in the human cerebral cortex--out of the (very rough) estimate of 86 billion neurons in the whole human brain--gives us a "human advantage" that explains why we are the dominant animal on the Earth.  No other animal, she predicts, has more cortical neurons than the 16 billion in the human cerebral cortex.

But what about those animals that have brains larger than the human brain--elephants, whales, and dolphins?  Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues have reported that the African elephant brain is about three times larger than the human brain, and the elephant cerebral cortex is about twice the weight of the human cerebral cortex (Herculano-Houzel, et al. 2014).  Using the isotropic fractionator method for counting neurons, they counted an estimated 257 billion neurons in the elephant brain, which is three times more than the average human brain.  They also found that 97.5% of the neurons in the elephant brain (251 billion) are in the cerebellum.  So the elephant cerebral cortex has only about 5.6 billion neurons, which is only about one-third of the neurons in the human cerebral cortex.  This confirmed Herculano-Houzel's prediction that animals with brain larger than human brains would not have as many cortical neurons as in the human cerebral cortex.

As I have indicated in previous posts, these claims come with at least two kinds of reservations.  First, all of these numbers are only very rough estimates, because there is such a great range of variation in brains.  Second, the estimates here are based on a very small sample size--only the right half of one adult male elephant brain!  Counting the neurons in other elephant brains will result in widely varying numbers.  And there's always the problem of relying on "convenience samples": whether one has access to even one fresh elephant brain is happenstance.

But now if you look at Wikipedia's "List of Animals by Neuron Count," you will see (at the end of the article) the highest estimated numbers of cortical neurons.  And while humans rank near the top--with Herculano-Houzel's estimate of 16 billion--you will also see the Orca (Orcinus orca), or killer whale, has 43.1 billion cortical neurons (Ridgway et al. 2019), about two and a half times more than in the human brain.  You will also see estimates of 37.2 billion cortical neurons for the long-finned pilot whale (Mortensen et al. 2014), 12.8 billion for the common Minke whale (Eriksen and Pakkenberg 2007), and 11.8 billion for the short-finned pilot whale (Avelino-de-Souza 2018).  So here we have two cetacean species with many more cortical neurons in their brains than in the human brain, and two cetacean species whose number of cortical neurons are very close to the number in the human brain.

These data seem to falsify Herculano-Houzel's prediction in 2016 that the number of cortical neurons in the cetacean cerebral cortex would always be much lower than the 16 billion neurons in the human cerebral cortex (Herculano-Houzel 2016, 103-107).  But if you look more carefully at the various reports of neuron counts for cetacean brains, it's not so clear that her prediction has failed.

Eriksen and Pakkenberg (2007) reported using the stereological technique in counting 12.8 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex of the Northern common minke whale based on averaging the counts for five brains.  But Kamilla Avelino-de-Souza, Nina Patzke, Karl Karlsson, Paul R. Manger, and Suzanna Herculano-Houzel (2025) have recently reported using the isotropic fractionator technique in counting 3.2 billion neurons in the Northern minke whale based on a count for one adult male brain.

Why was the stereological estimate so much higher than the isotropic fractionator estimate?  Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues argue that the stereological technique suffers from undersampling.  Eriksen and Pakkenberg (2007, 87-88) report that they sampled only 12-13 sections out of over 3000 sections of the Northern minke whale cerebral cortex, counting only up to 215 neurons per brain.  Sampling from so few and minute sites creates undersampling because the neuronal densities in different areas of the brain are highly variable.  By contrast, the isotropic fractionator method eliminates undersampling by collecting samples from the brain structure of interest only after it has been homogenized into a soup in which the neuronal cell nuclei are evenly distributed (Avelino-de-Souza et al. 2025, 17; Herculano-Houzel 2016, 25-26, 28-34, 104-105).

Previously, in 2018, in her dissertation at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Avelino-de-Souza had reported using the isotropic fractionator technique to calculate that the Minke whale's cerebral cortex had 3.1 billion neurons--virtually the same number as in her recent report.  But in her dissertation, she also reported 11.8 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex of the short-finned pilot whale.  That's the number given in the Wikipedia list.  And it contradicts what Herculano-Houzel had predicted in 2016--that the number of cortical neurons in the pilot whale would be around 3 billion cortical neurons (Herculano-Houzel 2016, 104).  

I asked Herculano-Houzel about this, and she responded (in an email message):

In my recollection, the pilot whale [in Avelino-de-Souza's study] was a VERY old specimen--old in the sense that it had been sitting in fixative for a very, very long time, contrary to the minke whale we reported, which was freshly caught.  The nuclei still had detectable DNA, but were very autofluorescent.  Those counts were therefore an estimate based on total numbers of nuclei, but we cannot be really certain of what fraction were neurons.  We have a better specimen of a beluga whale now that we can work on and get a proper estimate for an odontocete.

I told her that I will be happy to see the numbers for that beluga whale.

Herculano-Houzel still has to explain the 43.1 billion count for the cortical neurons of the Orca (Ridgway et al. 2019) and the 37.2 billion count for the cortical neurons of the long-finned pilot whale (Mortensen et al. 2014).  Presumably, she will argue that these calculations suffer from the undersampling problem of the stereological technique.  But if some study using the isotropic fractionator technique were to confirm these counts for these cetaceans, that would falsify her predictions.

REFERENCES

Avelino de Souza, Kamilla. 2018. "Analysis of the Cellular Composition of the Cetacean Brain."  Ph.D. Dissertation. Program in Morphological Sciences. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Avelino-de-Souza, Kamilla, Nina Patzke, Karl Karlsson, Paul R. Manger, and Suzana Herculano-Houzel. 2025. "Cellular Composition of the Brain of a Northern Minke Whale." Journal of Comparative Neurology 533:e70089.

Eriksen, Nina, and Bente Pakkenberg. 2007. "Total Neocortical Cell Number in the Mysticete Brain." The Anatomical Record 290:83-95.

Herculano-Houzel, Suzana, Kamilla Avelino-de-Souza, Leber Neves, Jairo Porfirio, Debora Messeder, Larissa Mattos Feijo, Jose, Maldonado, and Paul R. Manger. 2014. "The Elephant Brain in Numbers." Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 8: Article 46.

Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mortensen, Heidi S., Bente Pakkenberg, Maria Dam, Rune Dietz, Christian Sonne, Bjami Mikkelsen, and Nina Eriksen. 2014. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 8: article 132.

Ridgway, Sam H., Robert H. Brownson, Kaitlin R. Van Alstyne, and Robert A. Hauser. 2019. "Higher Neuron Densities in the Cerebral Cortex and Larger Cerebellums May Limit Dive Times of Delphinids Compared to Deep-Diving Toothed Whales." PLoS ONE 14 (12): e0226206.

The History of America Makes It a Creedal Nation

Now that we are in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, there is debate over the significance of that document.  For Gordon Wood, the distinguished historian of the American Founding, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Declaration helps Americans understand who they are, because it states those truths that Americans must hold to be self-evident--the truths of equal liberty--that make America a "creedal nation" rather than a nation defined by race, ethnicity, and religion.  But for Mark Brennan, writing in the January 2026 issue of Chronicles Magazine, Wood's creedal nation is a myth that contradicts the history of "America's Anglo-Protestant culture" as the real identity of the American nation (quoting from Samuel Huntington's Who We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity).

Notice the contradiction in what people like Huntington and Brennan say.  They claim to be defending America's unique identity.  But the idea that national identity depends on race, ethnicity, and religion is a foreign idea imported from Europe and elsewhere outside America.  By contrast, America as a creedal nation as declared in the Declaration of Independence makes America uniquely American, unlike all the other nations.  Before 1776, no nation had ever had anything like the Declaration of Independence.

If you read Brennan's essay, you should notice that he arrogantly asserts that Wood is somehow ignorant of American history as showing that America has been always an Anglo-Protestant culture.  But he never presents even a brief summary of this history--as if it should be obvious.

Brennan does invoke David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America as showing that "the legacy of the four British folkways remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today."  But Brennan is silent about Fischer's more recent book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, in which he shows how slaves from different regions of Africa interacted with European colonists to create new regional cultures in the United States.  The mixing of African folkways and British folkways created a new American culture.

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

So what about Brennan's insistence on America's Protestant culture?  Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians cannot be real Americans?  And certainly Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious traditions would have to be excluded.  Think about what that means.  

As I have indicated previously, it has become common for nationalist conservatives like J. D. Vance to say that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture: if America had open borders, it would cease to exist as nation because it would have no distinctive social identity.

But remember that JD's wife Usha was born in 1986 in California to Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, who are both Telugu Indian immigrants, speaking the Telugu language, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from Andhra Pradesh, which is a state on the east coast of southern India.  Usha met JD at Yale Law School.  They married in 2014 in an interfaith marriage ceremony: Usha is a practicing Hindu, while JD was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Catholicism in 2019.  They have three children.

Hmm.  Sounds like a heck of a lot of cultural diversity to me.  Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

Similarly, consider the strange case of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who wants to deport those immigrants who might threaten the cultural homogeneity of America.  As has been noted in a recent article in The New Republic, Miller's ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903 when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser landed at Ellis Island, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in czarist Russia.  Glosser then began sending money back to relatives in Russia and helped them immigrate to the U.S.  But that was stopped by the Immigration Act of 1924 that shut down immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, because so many Americans thought they had to protect the purity of white, Christian, and western European culture.  Miller says he wants to restore something like the 1924 Act.  Does that mean that he and his family should be deported?  After all, his ancestry is neither Protestant nor English.  Of course, like Vance, Miller doesn't really believe what he says.

But let's go back to the beginning--to the earliest European immigrant settlers in North America in the seventeenth century.  What do we see?  Brennan would say: they were almost all Protestants!  Well, but what kind of Protestantism?

From 1607, the Virginia Colony had established Anglican churches in each county with taxpayer support.  But the Anglican Church was weaker in the other colonies, particularly in Puritan New England. In 1779, the Anglican Church was disestablished in Virginia; and in 1786, the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty separated church and state.  By 1833, all the states had abolished the state funding of established churches.

This vindicated Roger Williams in his defense of religious liberty against the Puritan theocracy that John Winthrop had established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  When Williams was banished from Massachusetts, he founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637.  Williams thus became the first Founding Father of America by promoting the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state that became a critical part of the American Creed of cultural pluralism.

Moreover, we should realize that Williams extended the principle of freedom of conscience to support toleration of not just all Protestants, but also Catholics, Muslims, pagans, and even atheists.  That broad principle of toleration is evident in the Constitution of 1789--particularly, in the "no religious test" clause, the no "establishment of religion" clause, and the Constitution's silence about God, which provoked some critics into denouncing the Constitution as "godless."  Thus, America's national identity was tied not to any particular religious tradition but to the creedal commitment to religious liberty and freedom of conscience, which protects Catholics like Vance and Jews like Miller from being persecuted.  This American history of toleration and pluralism denies Brennan's claim that the American nation must be Protestant.

ANGLO AMERICA?

Similarly, the American history of immigration denies Brennan's claim that American national identity depends on English ancestry.  Wood writes:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

Brennan is silent about this.  He is also silent about the massive immigration into America during the long period of almost completely open borders from 1789 to 1921.  Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

This immigration altered the cultural and political history of the United States.  The most dramatic illustration of this is the American Civil War.  From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration helped to decide the outcome of the Civil War.  

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.  What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field.

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them.

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

But once Trump and the MAGA Republicans are out of power, we can work to restore the promise of America as a creedal nation dedicated to that "electric cord" in the Declaration of Independence "that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."

"Absolute Immunity" for Trump's Paramilitary ICE Agents Murdering Americans

 

  ICE Officer Jonathan Ross Murders 37-Year-Old Renee Good in Minneapolis

Last August, I predicted that Trump could use the "absolute immunity" granted to him by the Supreme Court to use his paramilitary federal officers to murder Americans.  Now that has started.  After ICE officer Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis, J. D. Vance spoke at a press conference where he said: "That guy is protected by absolute immunity.  He was doing his job."

Some MAGA politicians are predicting that ICE agents will be murdering more Americans.  Randy Fine, a MAGA Republican congressman from Florida, has said: "If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders from our country, you get what's coming to you.  I do not feel bad for the woman who was involved."

The Very Rough Estimate of 86 Billion Neurons in the Human Brain--Or At Least in the Brains of Four Men--Explains Our Human Nature

As I said a few years ago, I have been persuaded by Suzana Herculano-Houzel's argument that the number and distribution of neurons in our brain largely explain why we have become the dominant animal on planet Earth (Herculano-Houzel 2016).  The brain is the organ that organizes our thinking and our behavior.  Of the three main components of the brain--neurons, glial cells, and vasculature--neurons are the functional units that integrate synaptic activity and then pass it on.  We can infer, therefore, she argues, that the ultimate causes for the flexibility and complexity of cognition and behavior arise from the numbers of neurons in well-defined circuits in the brain.  

But now, after reading Alain Goriely's recent article in Brain (2025) criticizing Herculano-Houzel's claim that she has correctly counted the number of neurons in the human brain, I have been reconsidering her whole argument.

Let's begin by reexamining the techniques for counting neurons in the brain.

THE ANSWER IS IN THE BRAIN SOUP

How many neurons are in the human brain?  For many years, the answer from many scientists was 100 billion.  But, surprisingly, when Herculano-Houzel began some years ago looking for the original scientific research that provided evidence for this number, she found nothing.  She discovered that neuroscientists had repeated this number over and over again without realizing that there was no scientific verification for it (Bartheld, Bahney, and Herculano-Houzel 2016). 

Moreover, she discovered that scientists had no reliable method for counting brain cells.  The most common method for attempting to do this was stereology: virtual three-dimensional probes are placed throughout thin slices of brain tissue from some part of the brain, then the number of cells within the probes are counted, and finally this is extrapolated to the total number of cells in the entire tissue volume.  The problem is that this works only for tissues with a relatively homogeneous distribution of cells.  In fact, the highly variable density of neurons across different structures of the brain, and even within a single structure, makes stereology impractical for counting the cells in whole brains.

Herculano-Houzel developed a new technique for counting neurons that starts with creating brain soup.  She dissects the brain into its anatomically distinct parts--such as the cerebral cortex, the cerebellum, and the olfactory bulbs.  She then slices and dices each part into smaller portions.  Next, she puts each small part in a tube and uses a detergent that dissolves the cell membranes but leaves the cell nuclei intact.  By sliding a piston up and down in the tube, she homogenizes this brain tissue into a soup in which the nuclei are evenly distributed.  She stains all the cell nuclei blue so that she can count them under a fluorescent microscope.  She then adds an antibody labeled red that binds specifically to a protein expressed in all neuronal cell nuclei, which distinguishes them from other cell nuclei such as glial cells.  Going back to the microscope, she can then determine what percentage of all nuclei (stained blue) belong to neurons (now stained red).  Finally, she can estimate the number of neurons for each structure of the brain.  She has done this in studying the brains of many mammalian animals.

Now she can tell us that the total number of neurons in the whole human brain is not 100 billion but about 86 billion.  Of that total, about 16 billion are in the cerebral cortex, which includes about 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  The cerebral cortex is the outer covering of the surfaces of the cerebral hemispheres.  The prefrontal cortex covers the front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex located behind the forehead.  

Other animals with larger brains--like elephants, whales, and dolphins--have larger brains with more neurons.  But what makes the human brain unique is the large number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for the highest levels of cognition--such as self-consciousness, abstract thinking, social engagement, language, memory, and emotion.

8 BILLION HUMAN BRAINS AND NO TWO ARE THE SAME

Notice that in stating the numbers of neurons, the numbers are qualified by the word "about."  That points to the problem identified by Goriely, a mathematician at Oxford University who has noted that if you look at the research of Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues, you will see that the average numbers they give are only rough estimates with a wide range of variation based on a small sample of human brains.  

There are two main papers--Von Bartheld et al. (2009) and Andrade-Moraes et al. (2013).  The 2009 paper reports an analysis of the brains from four deceased males aged 50, 51, 54, and 71, who had no cognitive impairment when they died.  The authors declare that the adult male brain contains an average of 86 billion neurons.  But if you look at the numbers for the four brains, you will see that 86 billion is the average of 78.82, 79.72, 90.30, and 95.40 billion.  This is a wide range--from 79 billion to 95 billion--and it's based on only four data points.

The 2013 paper reports a counting of the neurons in the brains of five elderly females--between the ages of 71 and 84--who died of non-neurological causes.  The numbers for these five brains were 62.1, 63.3, 67.3, 72, and 72.06 billion.  This is a wide range, and it's well below the range for the 2009 paper.  The average for these women was 67 billion, as opposed to 86 billion for the men.

Goriely suggests that the only statements we can make about these two studies are rather weak:

(i) Experiments have shown variations between 62 and 95 bn neurons in the human brain (n = 9).

(ii) An experimental study on the number of neurons suggests an average between 79 and 95 bn neurons in the healthy male brain (n = 4).

(iii) An experimental study on the number of neurons suggests an average between 62 and 72 bn neurons in the healthy female human brain (n = 5).

Clearly, none of these statements is satisfactory or as catchy as "the human brain has 86 billion neurons" (Goriely 2025, 691).

Notice that depending upon how you aggregate these nine data points, you could have three different averages.  If you average the four data points for the males, the average is 86 billion.  If you average the five data points for the females, the average is 67 billion.  If you average all nine data points, the average is 76 billion. 

In a response to Goriely, Christopher von Bartheld (2025) has conceded that, of course, it would be absurd to say that all human brains contain exactly 86 billion neurons.  About 8 billion human brains are currently operating in the world today, and because of the biological variability of those individuals, no two brains are exactly alike.  But it is still justifiable to look for rough estimates and approximate ranges for the number of neurons in the human brain.

We can expect that the number of neurons in different brains will vary according to the effects of gender, age, brain mass, and variation in life history.  For example, people with Down syndrome are thought to have perhaps 40% fewer neurons than a normal brain.  People with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease have fewer neurons in some part of the brain.  Malnutrition both in utero and after birth can impede the growth of neurons.  Some of the women in the 2013 study were born in World War II or shortly thereafter, and it's possible that they suffered from the malnutrition caused by the war.  That or other factors related to their life history might explain why the five women had a lower average number of neurons than the four men.

Actually, the brains of the five women in the 2013 study were used as "controls" in comparison with the brains of five other women with dementia from Alzheimer's disease, and with four women with the neural plaques and neurofibrillary tangles associated with Alzheimer's but without dementia.  The study concluded that the five women with dementia had suffered a loss of neurons, while the other nine women had not shown any dementia from loss of neurons.

For a long time it was assumed that dementia and severe mental decline were the inevitable consequence of a normal process of aging with the loss of neurons.  What this and other studies have shown is that loss of neurons is not part of the normal aging process, and therefore the neurogenerative diseases of the elderly come from an abnormal loss of neurons.

Hey, this is great news for us old folks--the rotting of our brains is not an unavoidable consequence of our aging!

So what does all of this mean for assessing Herculano-Houzel's argument?  This does not refute her claim that she can estimate the number of neurons in human brains.  But this does suggest that she needs to qualify her claim by stressing that these numbers are only very rough estimates within wide ranges created by the biological variability in individual brains--with a range between 62 and 95 billion for normal brains, and an even wider range for abnormal brains.  She should also admit that the average of 86 billion is only for the four adult male brains in the 2009 paper.  Perhaps she should put into italics this sentence from her 2009 paper: "Exact numbers are probably highly variable among humans, particularly given the variation of over 50% in the number of cortical neurons among individuals of the same sex described recently in the literature."  But she should drop the word "probably"--exact numbers are highly variable among humans!

She also needs to make a second qualification that has not been brought up by critics like Goriely:  although the sheer number of neurons in the human brain is surely a critical factor in explaining the power of the human brain, we also need to recognize the importance of the structural organization of those neurons into complex circuits.  Actually, Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues point to this when they stress the importance of how those 86 billion neurons are organized in the human brain, and particularly having 16 billion neurons organized into the circuitry of the neocortex, of which 1.3 billion are in the prefrontal cortex.

Although Herculano-Houzel's main argument is that large numbers of neurons in the neocortex are a key component of complex cognition, she recognizes that, of course, many other factors are also important--such as "cellular morphology, connectivity patterns, neurochemical properties, and cognition-related regulatory genetic sequences" (Strockens et al. 2021, 1602).

At this point, many of you are thinking of questions that I haven't answered.  What about those huge cetacean brains?  And what about those really smart bird brains that don't even have a cerebral cortex?  I'll take up those questions in my next posts.

REFERENCES

Andrade-Moraes, Carlos Humberto, et al. 2013. "Cell Number Changes in Alzheimer's Disease Relate to Dementia, Not to Plaques and Tangles." Brain 136: 3738-3752.

Azevedo, Frederico A. C., et al. 2009. "Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Nonneural Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-Up Primate Brain." The Journal of Comparative Neurology 513: 532-541.

Goriely, Alain. 2025. "Eighty-Six Billion and Counting: Do We Know the Number of Neurons in the Human Brain?" Brain 148: 689-691.

Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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

von Bartheld, Christopher S. 2025. "Understanding and Misunderstanding Cell Counts of the Human Brain: The Crux of Biological Variation." Brain 148: e72-e74.

von Bartheld, Christopher, Jami Bahney, and Suzana Herculano-Houzel. 2016. "The Search for True Numbers of Neurons and Glial Cells in the Human Brain: A Review of 150 Years of Cell Counting." The Journal of Comparative Neurology 524: 3865-3895.