Friday, 5 August 2022

Yet more on the struggle for the "empire of God"

Primeval tech of the "lowly" sponge

Complex Specified Information in the Lowly Sponge

David Coppedge

Sponges are outliers in biology’s big bang, the Cambrian explosion. Their embryos appear in Precambrian strata, leading some to consider them primitive. That’s an illusion. New studies of how they construct their skeletons with silica “spicules” have revealed design principles remarkable enough to inspire biomimicry.

The punch line first — here’s how a news item from Current Biology concludes:

“This work not only sheds new light on skeleton formation of animals, but also might inspire interdisciplinary studies in fields such as theoretical biology, bioengineering, robotics, and architectural engineering, utilizing mechanisms of self-constructing architectures that self-adjust to their environments, including remote environments such as the deep sea or space,” the researchers write. [Emphasis added.]

Goodness! What are these simple animals doing to arouse such commotion? Just watch the video clip in the article of sponge cells at work. Then, look at the Graphical Abstract in the source paper and see the steps diagrammed in well-organized stages: (1) spicules are manufactured in specialized cells, then transported to the construction site; (2) the silica spicules pierce the epithelial tissue; (3) they are then raised up into position; (4) the bases are cemented by collagen provided by basal epithelial cells.

This simple animal knows, in short, how to build a house with pole-and-beam architecture in a way that self-adjusts to its environment.

That’s Pretty Impressive

Sponge skeletons, with their unique spicules, have been studied for a long time, but the manner of construction has been a mystery till now. What’s new, according to the Japanese researchers, is the identification of specialized “transport cells” that carry and finally push the spicules through the epithelia, and cementer cells that fasten them in place like poles. The process reveals division of labor and an overall plan.

Here we report a newly discovered mode of skeleton formation: assembly of sponges’ mineralized skeletal elements (spicules) in locations distant from where they were produced. Although it was known that internal skeletons of sponges consist of spicules assembled into large pole-and-beam structures with a variety of morphologies, the spicule assembly process (i.e., how spicules become held up and connected basically in staggered tandem) and what types of cells act in this process remained unexplored. Here we found that mature spicules are dynamically transported from where they were produced and then pierce through outer epithelia, and their basal ends become fixed to substrate or connected with such fixed spicules. Newly discovered “transport cells” mediate spicule movement and the “pierce” step, and collagen-secreting basal-epithelial cells fix spicules to the substratum, suggesting that the processes of spiculous skeleton construction are mediated separately by specialized cells. Division of labor by manufacturer, transporter, and cementer cells, and iteration of the sequential mechanical reactions of “transport,” “pierce,” “raise up,” and “cementation,” allows construction of the spiculous skeleton spicule by spicule as a self-organized biological structure, with the great plasticity in size and shape required for indeterminate growth, and generating the great morphological diversity of individual sponges.

Inspiring Architects

This method of skeleton construction differs greatly from arthropods and vertebrates. It doesn’t appear to follow a set of rules or a preordained pattern, but it is very effective for sponges, “whose growth is plastic (i.e. largely depends on their microenvironment) and indeterminate, with great morphological variations among individuals.” Nevertheless, design and coordination is evident in the division of labor, the specialization of cells, and the end result that is good enough to inspire architects. If it were so simple, the authors would not have left many questions unanswered:

Many precise cellular and molecular mechanisms still remain to be elucidated, such as how transport cells can carry spicules, or how one end of pierced spicules is raised up. Additionally, one of the further questions that need to be answered is how sponges fine-tune their skeleton construction according to conditions of their microenvironment, such as water flow or stiffness of the substratum, since it is reported that the growth form of marine sponges changes according to the water movement of their environment.

Design is also evident in the self-organizational principles encoded in sponge DNA that make these results successful. Human intelligent designers would like to benefit from this knowledge. The authors conclude, repeating the “punch line”:

Intriguingly, our study revealed that the spiculous skeleton of sponges is a self-organized biological structure constructed by collective behaviors of individual cells. A chain of simple and mechanical reactions, “transport-pierce (by transport cells)-raise up (by yet unknown cells and/or mechanisms)-cementation (using collagenous matrix secreted by basopinacocytes and possibly by spicule-coating cells),” adds a spicule to the skeleton, and as a result of the iteration of these sequential behaviors of cells, the spiculous skeleton expands. As far as we know, this is the first report of collective behaviors of individual cells building a self-organized biological structure using non-cellular materials, like the collective behaviors of individual termites building mounds. Thus, our work not only sheds new light on skeleton formation in animals but also might inspire interdisciplinary studies in fields such as theoretical biology, bioengineering, robotics, and architectural engineering, utilizing mechanisms of self-constructing architectures that self-adjust to their environments, including remote environments such as the deep sea or space.

The reference to termite mounds is apt. The journal Science has described how these mounds, built by hundreds of individual termites, are able to “breathe” like an “external lung”:

Here’s how it works: Inside the hill is a large central chimney connected to a system of conduits located in the mound’s thin, flutelike buttresses. During the day, the air in the thin buttresses warms more quickly than the air in the insulated chimney. As a result, the warm air rises, whereas the cooler, chimney air sinks — creating a closed convection cell that drives circulation, not external pressure from wind as had been hypothesized. At night, however, the ventilation system reverses, as the air in the buttresses cools quickly, falling to a temperature below that of the central chimney. The reversal in air flow, in turn, expels the carbon dioxide-rich air — a result of the termites’ metabolism — that builds up in the subterranean nest over the course of the day, the researchers report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We know that some caves “breathe” as the temperature changes, but this is different. Termites construct their mounds for a purpose: to control the temperature and remove carbon dioxide for their health. It’s a bit like active transport in cells that draws in what the cell needs and removes what it doesn’t need, using machines that work against natural concentration gradients.

Intelligent Self-Organization

We all know that some beautiful things can self-organize without programming (snowflakes are a prime example). What we see here, though, are systems working from genetic programs for a purpose. In the case of sponges, its specialized cells cooperate in a plan to build a skeleton that adapts to the environment. In the case of termites, each individual insect’s genetic program makes it behave in a cooperative enterprise to build an air-conditioned mound. Such things do not arise by unguided natural forces.

If functional self-organization were simple, why did five European countries take years “working to design the European Union’s first autonomously deployed space and terrestrial habitat”? The effort, called the “Self-deployable Habitat for Extreme Environments” (SHEE) project, has a goal of programming elements for “autonomous construction” of housing for astronauts on Mars or other hostile locales. It took years of work in design, prototyping, construction, and optimization to get these buildings to “self-deploy” with no humans in the loop.

So when a sponge can do it, we should see intelligent design behind the scenes — not the sponge’s intelligence, which admittedly is minuscule, but intelligence as a cause for the genetic information that allows the sponge to run a program that leads to a functional result.

Those of us who appreciate the spectacular genetic programs that built the Cambrian animals should take note of the level of complex specified information in the lowly sponge. We can also notice that the sponge’s mode of construction bears no evolutionary ancestral relationship with the diverse, complex body plans that exploded into existence in the Cambrian strata. Sponges did well. They’re still with us.

This article was originally published in 2015.

Emperor Darwin's new clothes?

Darwin, Group Think, and Confirmation Bias

Neil Thomas

Yesterday I wrote about Charles Darwin and the British secularist tradition. The latter is the subject of a great volume of material discovered by Timothy Larsen, author of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England. Larsen’s book provides a clue (as I read matters) that might be used to resolve what I in the company of many others find to be one of the greatest historical cruxes of 19th-century history. I refer here to the matter of how Darwinian theory, despite its lack of empirical support or even semblance of verisimilitude, was able to advance to its present position of orthodoxy. Since I suspect that the answer to this conundrum is most likely to be found in the area of group psychology, I would beg leave to make a small detour here to consider the issue of what we now term “confirmation bias” as that theme was treated by one of history’s most perceptive analysts of human nature, William Shakespeare.

Those acquainted with his drama Othello will know that Shakespeare’s psychological insight is nowhere more apparent than in his depiction of the negative dynamic between the eponymous hero and his villainous lieutenant, Iago. Although the exact motivation(s) behind Iago’s resentment of his military superior still remain a matter of critical debate, the reason for Othello’s unfounded jealousy of Michael Cassio for supposedly having committed adultery with Othello’s wife, Desdemona, is all too clear. Much in the play is made to hinge on the notorious prop of Desdemona’s handkerchief which Iago had contrived to misappropriate and plant in Cassio’s rooms and which Othello is duped into taking as “ocular proof” of Desdemona’s adultery. Iago’s malign stratagem works perfectly. As he had predicted, his chosen mark proved to be “as easily led by the nose as asses are.” Othello, witnessing the handkerchief, tragically succumbs to his own paranoid insecurities, and jumps to the wholly erroneous conclusion that his wife must be an adulteress with the colorful ladies’ man Cassio. Iago, in what is surely a particularly spot-on description of such confirmation bias, soliloquizes in an aside audible only to the audience,

I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin

And let him [Othello] find it. Trifles light as air

Are to the jealous confirmations strong

As proofs of holy writ.

OTHELLO, ACT 3, SCENE TWO, LINES 373-6

“Trifles light as air/Are to the jealous confirmations strong/as proofs of holy writ”: in other words, once some particular thought, however poorly substantiated, has for whatever reason become lodged in our minds, it tends to develop into a Freudian idée fixe and all our future perceptions are somehow made to be congruent with that original idea. It is precisely for that reason in modern jurisprudence any information leading towards possible confirmation bias must be withheld from a jury to prevent it from jumping to conclusions.

Othello’s sexual insecurities were to have, mutatis mutandis, something of a 19th-century correlative in the insecurities and loss of nerve in matters of faith which were developing in a significant number of Victoria’s subjects in the first half of that century. All this was of course well before publication of the Origin, so that Darwin’s magnum opus will have served only to confirm and strengthen their mood of skepticism in a way comparable to that in which Desdemona’s handkerchief served to convince her husband (wrongly) of her infidelity. The empirically demonstrable truth-value of the Origin might have been negligible (in Shakespearean terms, a “trifle light as air”) but that mattered not a jot to persons already primed by their prior ideological formation to accept Darwin’s argument as a form of secular gospel. The Origin will have come together with their prior misgivings to create a “resultant of forces” precipitating an even greater degree of secularist thinking in many who had in any case all but bidden adieu to the religion of their youth. There is, however, some firm historical evidence that some of the more self-critical secularists were to experience a light-bulb moment in later life which prompted them to reassess their previous stance.

Reconversions

The secularists chosen for study by Larsen all eventually returned either to the faith they had initially rejected or to some other form of spiritual orientation. Typically, they would find over time that secularism offered no positive program for people to live by. Gordon came to refer to secularism as “just what you like-ism” which he took to be a recipe for immoral self-indulgence. William Hone came to realize that materialism could not account for the totality of human experience — there must be a power behind matter. There was a general feeling amongst the reconverts that their erstwhile skepticism might have been the result of “a procrustean system of logic, an oppressively narrow definition of reason. They came to believe that human beings knew more than could be proven by such a method.”1 Notably, the reconverts were also prompted by dint of lived experience and maturer reflection to revisit what seems to have been a very basic unexamined assumption amongst their number with the result that they now at long last “reassessed their assumption that the cause of radical politics and the working classes naturally led to an opposition to Christianity.”2

Not all returned to orthodox Christian forms of worship. Some “were led away from materialism by reengaging with the realm of spirit in a form decoupled from Christianity.”3 In this they made common cause with other, more famous secularists of the age such as Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh’s close ally, who went as far as crossing the floor from secularism to Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy. One may also think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose hero, Sherlock Holmes, was the very apotheosis of dry secularism but whose author, although he had lost his faith in earlier years, was eventually to turn to spiritualism. Or in more recent memory there is the example of that later scion of the Huxley dynasty, Aldous, who turned in later years from a form of positivist philosophy to embrace Eastern mysticism and the so-called perennial philosophy.4

In a more minor key we can trace a comparable development in the rise in popularity of the English ghost story in the second half of the 19th century. This may in good part be understood as an imaginative protest against the growing desacralization of the world brought about by the burgeoning age of science. As Julia Briggs pointed out, the ghost story was in a superficial sense designed to scare readers but at a profounder level it supplied them with the comfort of a deeper spiritual reassurance:

For it [the ghost story] seemed at the outset to invite the reader’s modern cynicism, only to vanquish it with a reassertion of older and more spiritual values. Even amongst its superficial terrors it might provide subtle reassurances.5

Larsen, dissociating himself from the kind of “God’s funeral” historiography practiced by such writers such as Basil Willey, A. O. J. Cockshut, and A. N. Wilson,6 interprets such reversions as symbolizing a victory of the spiritual over the exclusively material worldview and goes so far as to claim that the reconverts “serve to orientate us toward the intellectual strength of the Christian tradition in nineteenth century tradition.”7 Whether such a large historical revision is warranted by the statistically limited sample of persons he adduces in his book may be open to question. What is not in question, however, is the service he has rendered in going beyond the top-down historiography practiced by many other historians of ideas. Instead, he has revealed a largely unsuspected but quite sizeable demographic of self-educated people who, although they were far distant from the major levers and megaphones of power, exerted a considerable influence in shaping ordinary people’s attitudes to fundamental existential issues.

This finding is particularly significant since it throws light on the major historical crux mentioned above relating to how Darwin was able to “palm off” an empirically unattested theory on so many of his countrymen and women. We already know from Ellegård’s classic study of British press reactions to Darwin in the latter half of the 19th century that some sections of society simply resisted and disbelieved Darwin.8 Larsen’s researches, on the other hand, indicate that Darwin had a more forgiving and considerably less critical constituency of honest doubters and militant secularists to rely on. For that group Darwin’s work came to confirm what they had either already been persuaded of or else begun to figure out for themselves on other grounds. They were willing to give his theory a pass because it suggested an atheistic conclusion they had already arrived at by an alternative route. It was not Darwinism that they endorsed so much as the ideological direction in which his Origin of Species was thought to point, and so, like Thomas Huxley, they were more than willing to give Darwin their enthusiastic support.

packaging

One final, seemingly superficial but in practice rather significant point to be made in the matter of Darwin’s appeal to the secularist demographic is that his Origin will have made agreeable and accessible reading for this group of politically but not biologically informed individuals.9 It is attractively presented in a volume free of scientific jargon, and has often been lauded as the last specialist work fully intelligible to the man or woman in the street. It also comes laced with just the right amount of gentlemanly hesitancy to endear it to a British audience which might have been deterred by a showier or overly “intellectual” mode of presentation. Surely few other writers would have been minded to flag up their reservations about their own material in the same manner as Darwin who remarkably devoted a small chapter to “Difficulties on (sic) the Theory.”

By implicitly disclaiming airs of omniscience, Darwin avoided the vice most disliked by English readers: that of trying to appear “too clever.”10 As one 20th-century intellectual historian observed apropos of this strange national quirk, “People were as delighted with Darwin’s apparent lack of cleverness in youth as they were in 1940 with Mr. Churchill’s inability to learn Latin verbs at Harrow.”11 In reality, as we know, Darwin’s claims to discovery were every bit as trenchant as the literary detections shortly to be achieved by the abrasive fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes. However, to continue the Conan Doyle analogy, Darwin’s method of “packaging” those claims seemed more like an adumbration of the self-effacing manner later to be adopted by Holmes’s fictional foil, Dr. Watson. His readers will doubtless have concluded that the author of the Origin must surely be a regular sort of guy — “one of us” deep down despite his being, from their perspective, a toff.

References

Larsen, Crisis of Doubt, p. 242.

Larsen, Crisis of Doubt, p. 243.

Larsen, Crisis of Doubt, p. 242.

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy [1944] (New York: HarperCollins, 2009) contains a valuable later essay written by Huxley in the 1950s (Appendix, pp. 6-22) with an account of a spiritual odyssey not dissimilar to that of some of the “reconverts” considered above.

Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 17.

Basil Willey, More Nineteenth-Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963). A. O. J. Cockshut, The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought 1840-1890 (London: Collins, 1964); A. N Wilson, God’s Funeral (London: John Murray, 1999).

Larsen, Crisis of Doubt, p. 253.

Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press 1859-72[1958] (repr. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990).

People in all ages have recognized how important it is for a writer to win the good will of his or her audience. Medieval rhetoricians had a ready formulation of this PR tactic in the term captatio benevolentiae (getting one’s readers on side).

Darwin’s diffidence was real enough, as is evidenced in the no fewer than five emended editions of the Origin which followed in quick succession in the decade following the first edition of 1859 in which he was able to interpolate his responses to critical objections to his work.

A. O. J. Cockshut, The Unbelievers, p. 176.

Finetuning: Multiple dice or a singular intellect?

Generic Intelligent Design, the Multiverse, or One God?

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a new episode of ID the Future, Stephen Meyer takes a close look at the case not only for intelligent design, but also for a designer of the cosmos who is immaterial, eternal, transcendent, and involved. Meyer draws on evidence for design at the origin of life, in the origin of plants and animals, and from the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of chemistry and the initial conditions of the universe. He connects all this to the scientific evidence that the universe is not eternal but had a beginning — the Big Bang.

What about the main materialistic alternative for explaining this suite of evidence — the idea that there is a multiverse with our universe just being one of the lucky universes with just the right conditions to allow for advanced life? In step-by-step fashion, Meyer examines the multiverse theory and why it fails to explain away the insistent evidence of a cosmic designer. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Tuesday, 19 July 2022

Chance : Darwin's God of the gaps?

The Art of Concealment: Darwin and Chance

Neil Thomas

For the first decades of Victoria’s reign, any scientific theory dependent on the postulation of chance would by definition have condemned itself as being oxymoronic and as an irredeemable contradiction in terms. The common opinion of the leading men of science in the first half of the 19th century tended towards an unobtrusive form of deism, for educated opinion by the 1830s had become comfortable with a remote God acting indirectly in nature through designed laws. Against the backdrop of that comfortable consensus, Darwin’s unheralded announcement of a process of “natural selection” working on random variations/mutations to create the whole panoply of terrestrial life must have come as a very counterintuitive claim indeed. Victorians certainly found it difficult to envisage the supremely intricate organic order having emerged from a process so heavily dependent on chance, for they will have noted in Darwin’s exposition that natural selection must necessarily always depend for its operations on prior, chance variations having already occurred.

Darwin’s Desperate Idea

The idea that purely random variations lay at the root of a process that subsequently gave rise to design (either real or, as is habitually alleged, “apparent”) was so sharply opposed to mainstream scientific thinking that it is unsurprising that eminent figures such as William Whewell and Sir John Herschel immediately rejected the idea of chance playing any causative role. Darwin therefore knew that he would have an uphill battle to convince people of the key role chance played in his theory, a fear amply confirmed by reviews of the first edition of his Origin of Species in late 1859. His British nemesis, St. George Mivart, and many others now proceeded to criticize Darwin’s dependence on what Mivart termed “mere fortuity.”¹

How then could Darwin get an idea offensive to accepted scientific tenets under the wire and into the safe space of public acceptance or at least acquiescence? Desperate, or perhaps more accurately, cunning measures seemed to be called for, as Curtis Johnson makes clear in an exceptionally close look at Darwin’s private notebooks and letters on the subject of chance. These writings reveal that Darwin — once bitten, twice shy, so to speak — became now increasingly concerned to “massage” his material rather than lay it out in a neutral and disinterested way for all subsequent editions of the Origin (of which there were five).² Collectively, Darwin’s modifications to the way he presented his material were in effect to become part of an activist campaign in the interests of promoting his ideas.

A Cunning Plan

Mivart’s criticism had served to forewarn and forearm Darwin. Thus from 1860 onwards he “adapted a variety of rhetorical strategies that added up to a deliberate campaign to retain chance as a central element while making it appear to most readers that he did not.”³ In other words, Darwin became steadily convinced of the necessity to insinuate his dangerous idea into the consciousness of his peers by any such means of verbal dexterity he was capable of devising. In short, he felt he must smuggle his idea into Victorian England by somehow contriving to bypass his peers’ critical antennae in a subtle (and arguably somewhat unscrupulous) campaign of trompe-l’oeil.

The Darwin who had once termed himself a “master wriggler” (verbally) would now double down on those of his expository arts which a recent biographer, A. N. Wilson, rightly termed “slithery.”⁴ Accordingly, from this point forward he strove to downplay the idea of chance for all readers of later editions of Origin, and by the fifth edition references to chance or accident had almost disappeared even though they were integral to his theory. To cover his tracks he now introduced the deliberately vague euphemisms of “spontaneous generation” and “laws of growth” (although one may doubt that the ploy could have been effective with more discerning readers capable of seeing through such semantic legerdemain).⁵ In this way he hoped that the criticism of his theory from “chance” might go away with the expurgation of the word, a hope that his then comrade-in-arms Alfred Russel Wallace appeared to share when he advised Darwin to delete the word “accident” and replace it with some such bland circumlocution as “variations of every kind are always occurring in every part of every species.”⁶ That these careful locutions were to become part and parcel of a studied policy of obfuscation is confirmed by further reference to his notebooks where Johnson records how Darwin would for instance confess to glossing over his true views on religion to the larger public and abstain from using the term “materialism” with approbation — even whilst privately admitting that this term described his own beliefs most accurately.⁷

Giving the Game Away

Darwin’s least successful ploy to get his readers on board was the habit emerging in his correspondence, and later finding expression in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), of glossing natural selection by introducing the metaphor of an architect. This was in the mistaken thought that he would make natural selection clearer to his readers. However, as Sir Charles Lyell warned him, the architect metaphor worked at cross-purposes with his messaging intentions since an architect is manifestly intelligent, in contradistinction to natural selection. To make matters worse, the image had been employed for centuries (in such locutions as a “cosmic architect”) to refer to the very deity Darwin wished to exclude.⁸

What is telling about the unfortunate choice of the architect image is that Darwin’s metaphors are sometimes more eloquent of what their author was really thinking than his formal statements, an issue I have discussed before (here and here). The ostensible take-away message from his writings foregrounded the “dangerous idea” of the purely chance origin and evolution of life on this planet. On that reading, God had been shown the door as being superfluous to proceedings said to be unfolding autonomously. Yet Johnson observes that in notes not for public consumption, Darwin asked himself, “Do these views make me an atheist?”, whereupon he responds with a vehement “NO”! In later notes he describes himself variously as theistic or agnostic (he was ever a Hamlet figure!). Both terms, though, “preserve the possibility, even the likelihood, of a Creator who designed a world in the beginning that would operate in definite and predictable ways.”⁹ This would imply that Darwin in his heart may in reality have been tempted to return to the status quo ante, that is, to the common deistic prepossessions of the scientific community in the first half of the 19th century. Apparently his still small voice was apt to whisper to him that his life’s work had been built on a foundation of false assumptions — which would account for some of his more tormented lucubrations in the decade preceding his death, especially those concerning his riven attitude to the Christian faith in which he had been reared.

Of Algorithms and Waving Marble Statues

But where Darwin was moved to harbor honest doubts about the role of chance in evolution, many of his 20th-century legatees have shown themselves remarkably free of such reservations. Here is Daniel Dennett expounding with unruffled finality what he terms his “algorithmic” ideas about natural selection:

Can the biosphere really be the outcome of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance? And if so, who designed that cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind algorithmic process.¹⁰

An equally remarkable computation of the power of chance can be found in Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker where, in the context of assessing whether certain phenomena might be adjudged impossible or merely improbable, Dawkins seriously moots the possibility (albeit remote) of a marble statue moving its arm:

In the case of the marble statue, molecules in solid marble are continuously jostling against one another in random directions. The jostlings of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the whole hand of the statue stays still. But if, by sheer coincidence, all the molecules just happened to move in the same direction at the same moment, the hand would move. If they then all reversed direction at the same moment the hand would move back. In this way it is possible for a marble statue to wave at us. It could happen.¹¹

I confess that on first reading that paragraph I did not know whether to laugh out loud or question my own sanity. The latter worry was in fact only finally allayed when I came across the volume entitled Answering the New Atheism which allowed me to discover with some relief that it “was not just me.” The two authors of that volume, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, also quote the same paragraph because, as they explain, “if we merely reported it, no sane person would believe that Dawkins had written it.” They continue:

Our concern for now is whether Dawkins’ unconquerable faith in the powers of chance is rational. For Dawkins, whatever God could do, chance could do better, and that means that any event, no matter how seemingly miraculous, can be explained as good luck…. And if such impossible things are possible, why isn’t it possible that it was indeed a miraculous occurrence? Why isn’t the miraculous itself a possibility.¹²

Wiker and Hahn are to be commended for pointing out what the professional reviewers of Dawkins’s volume made no mention of. One can only suppose that that group’s uncritical genuflection was motivated partly by materialist confirmation bias and partly by a form of intellectual doffing of the cap to an Oxbridge grandee. Effectively it is as if the reviewers had been caught in the headlights of a car which froze their critical faculties and rendered them incapable of delivering an honest verdict on what appears to me to be the sheer illogic behind such a candidly professed faith in the purportedly limitless powers of chance.

It would of course be possible to argue that both chance and the postulation of an intelligent designer are equally unverifiable, or “unfalsifiable” in Karl Popper’s term. Darwin is sometimes said to have merely replaced one form of unknown and unknowable with another form of the same since neither God nor chance is falsifiable. However, the contention that an appeal to an inscrutable divine source is as much an admission of ignorance as is an appeal to chance is surely open to serious question (even by the present writer who has been a secular humanist all his adult life). By which I mean that the postulation of chance as a predictable agency capable of producing the lawful regularities of the organic world contradicts our empirical observations of what is possible, whereas the creator hypothesis confirms our common experience of a result requiring a cause (ex nihilo nihil fit / “nothing can arise from nothing”). There can be no question of a probabilistic equivalence between the two options. God, like chance, may be beyond explanatory reach but, unlike chance, does not lie beyond logical reach. The inference to a theistic explanation certainly possesses more logical coherence than does the alternative.

Historical Perspectives

In order to judge whether deliberations on any given issue of human concern may be sensible or otherwise, it is conventional, even something of a cliché, to ask the question, “How would a Martian react to all this?” That is of course a truly imponderable question but what is not imponderable is how our ancestors in earlier epochs reacted to the same kind of debates in their own time and place because we have tangible evidence to show how they felt and thought. So, for instance luck or chance in her personified form as a female goddess revolving her infamous wheel (rota Fortunae) was often portrayed in the iconography of the medieval world as the most fickle of the divinities of the Classical pantheon, on a par with the two-faced god, Janus. Not for nothing did Geoffrey Chaucer write in his 14th-century Knight’s Tale of “Fortune and hire false wheel, / That noon estat assureth to be weel” (“Lady Luck and her untrustworthy wheel which guarantees nobody’s good fortune”) — a quotation which has stayed with me since school days since it expresses a bitter truth we have surely all been obliged to taste, and doubtless on many more occasions than we would have preferred.

It is entirely appropriate that Fortuna’s emblematic representation with her ubiquitous wheel should have gone on to become the prototype of the modern roulette wheel. But even though she was apostrophized in the Carmina Burana as Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (“Fortune the world’s empress”) she was never described as Fortuna Creatrix Mundi (“Fortune the creator of the world”). To be asked to believe that the biological equivalent of the supremely untrustworthy Lady Luck was in good part responsible for the evolution of all organic life is a very big ask and, I fancy, an idea which our medieval predecessors (not to mention current players of the National Lottery) would likely have laughed out of court.

Notes

St. George Jackson’s On the Genesis of Species (New York: Appleton, 1871) was a studied riposte to Darwin.
Curtis Johnson, Darwin’s Dice: The Idea of Chance in the Thought of Charles Darwin (Oxford: OUP, 2015).
Johnson, Darwin’s Dice, p. xvii.
A. N. Wilson, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (London: John Murray, 2017).
Johnson notes that Darwin’s “dangerous idea” concerning chance was in later years given full expression in his “Old and Useless Notes” — indicating if proof were needed that his use of circumlocution in the later editions of Origin was indeed an obfuscatory ploy. See Darwin’s Dice, p. 226.
Darwin’s Dice, pp. 138 and 156, note 12.
Darwin’s Dice, p. 114, note 11
See discussion of this point in Darwin’s Dice, pp. 136-143.
Johnson, Darwin’s Dice, p.227.
Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Allen Lane, 1995), p. 59.
The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 159-60.
Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case against God (Ohio: Emmaus Road, 2008), pp. 11-13.

Monday, 18 July 2022

Big brained/bird brained: Same difference.

Brain Size Doesn’t Determine Intelligence

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

As biologist John Timmer notes at Ars Technica, some life forms appear much more intelligent than others despite having brains of roughly the same size:

Animals with very different brains from ours — a species of octopus and various birds — engage with tools, to give just one example. It seems intuitive that a brain needs a certain level of size and sophistication to enable intelligence. But figuring out why some species seem to have intelligence while closely related ones don’t has proven difficult — so difficult that we don’t really understand it.

JOHN TIMMER, “BRAIN SIZE VS. BODY SIZE AND THE ROOTS OF INTELLIGENCE” AT ARS TECHNICA (JULY 12, 2022)

As he points out, some things we might expect to be true — puzzlingly — aren’t:

One of the simplest ideas has been that size is everything: have a big enough brain, and you at least have the potential to be smart. But lots of birds seem to be quite intelligent despite small brains—possibly because they cram more neurons into a given volume than other species. Some researchers favor the idea that intelligence comes out of having a large brain relative to your body size, but the evidence there is a bit mixed.

JOHN TIMMER, “BRAIN SIZE VS. BODY SIZE AND THE ROOTS OF INTELLIGENCE” AT ARS TECHNICA (JULY 12, 2022)

Not only that but lemurs, whose brains are 1/200th the size of chimpanzee brains, passed the same IQ test. And some life forms behave in an apparently intelligent way with no brain.

Ready to Retire

Seven years ago, London School of Economics psychology professor Nicholas Humphrey, responding to a question at Edge, “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?”, responded “the bigger an animal’s brain, the greater its intelligence.” He elaborated, admitting he had been wrong about this in the past:

In particular, you’ll find the idea repeated in every modern textbook that the brain size of different primate species is causally related to their social intelligence. I admit I’m partly responsible for this, having championed the idea back in the 1970’s. Yet, for a good many years now, I’ve had a hunch that the idea is wrong.

There are too many awkward facts that don’t fit in. For a start, we know that modern humans can be born with only two thirds the normal volume of brain tissue, and show next to no cognitive deficit as adults. We know that, during normal human brain development, the brain actually shrinks as cognitive performance improves (a notable example being changes in the “social brain” during adolescence, where the cortical grey matter decreases in volume by about 15% between age 10 and 20). And most surprising of all, we know that there are nonhuman animals, such as honey bees or parrots, that can emulate many feats of human intelligence with brains that are only a millionth (bee) or a thousandth (parrot) the size of a human’s.

Biochemist Michael Denton offers some insights in The Miracle of Man (2022). Although whales (10 kg) and elephants (6 kg) have the biggest brains, primates and monkeys have a much higher than expected number of cortical neurons relative to brain size. Humans, not surprisingly, have the highest information processing capacity of any life form.

What About Making Humans Smarter?

Neuroscience researcher Michel Hofman describes the human brain as “one of the most complex and efficient structures in the animated universe.” Denton, noting that a cubic millimetre of human brain features sixty times as many synaptic connections as a 747 jetliner has components, goes on to say,

Many authors have concluded that it may be very nearly the most intelligent/ advanced biological brain possible. That is, its information-processing capacity may be close to the maximum of any brain built on biological principles, made of neurons, axons, synapses, dendrites, etc., and nourished by glial cells and provided with oxygen via circulation. For example, Peter Cochrane and his colleagues, in a widely cited paper, conclude “that the brain of Homo sapiens is within 10–20% of its absolute maximum before we suffer anatomical and/ or mental deficiencies and disabilities. We can also conclude that the gains from any future drug enhancements and/ or genetic modification will be minimal.” Hofman concurs: “We are beginning to understand the geometric, biophysical, and energy constraints that have governed the evolution of these neuronal networks. In this review, some of the design principles and operational modes will be explored that underlie the information processing capacity of the cerebral cortex in primates, and it will be argued that with the evolution of the human brain we have nearly reached the limits of biological intelligence.”

If Hofman, Cochrane and colleagues, and Denton are right, recent proposals to produce human superintelligence “within a decade” via genetic engineering are doomed.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

The sincerest form of flattery?

If Nanomotors Are Designed, Why Not Biomotors?

David Coppedge

If engineers know how much effort goes into making an object spin that is just a few nanometers wide, one would think they would stand in awe of biomolecular machines that do much more — machines that perform functions and are linked into signal transduction pathways and can reproduce themselves. Wouldn’t it be a refreshing change to have them admit that biological motors look intelligently designed?

Watch the new nanomotor built by engineers at the University of Texas at Austin. It goes around, and around… and around.

The new motor is less than 100 nanometers wide, and it can rotate on a solid substrate under light illumination. It can serve as a fuel-free and gear-free engine to convert light into mechanical energy for various solid-state micro-/nano-electro-mechanical systems. [Emphasis added.]

ATP synthase, though, is almost an order of magnitude smaller, and it does much more than rotate. It turns a crankshaft that builds three ATP molecules per revolution, running on protons. It is anchored to the mitochondrial membrane in animals and the chloroplast membrane in plants. A plant’s “fuel free” nanomachines run on light, too. And Brownian motion doesn’t slow it down, like the UT engineers had to worry about.

“Nanomotors help us to precisely control the nanoworld and make up new things we want for our real world.” said Jingang Li, a PhD graduate from Zheng’s group and the lead author of this study.

Biological machines are part of the real world, aren’t they? Is Dr Jingang Li aware that trillions of rotary engines are spinning in his own body as he speaks? The publicist does give a little credit to biology:

The reason scientists are so enamored with creating these tiny motors is because they mimic some of the most important biological structures. In nature, these motors drive the division of cells and help them move. They combine to help organisms move.

OK. But earlier, Jinang’s associate professor said, “Life started in the water and eventually moved on land” — presumably all by itself. If the UT team really wanted to mimic biological machines, why not toss some chemical elements in water and wait for a few billion years for it to move on land?

Cheap Imitation

In New Scientist, a reporter boasts that a “Tiny nanoturbine is an autonomous machine smaller than most bacteria.” Credit is given to a rotating enzyme (presumably ATP synthase) for the inspiration:

Cees Dekker at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues created the turbine after being inspired by a rotating enzyme that helps catalyse energy-storing molecules in our cells. They wanted to build a molecular machine that could similarly do work, like adding energy to biological processes or moving other molecules, without having to be repeatedly pushed or manipulated in some way.

Their little nanoturbine, just 25 nm in diameter can extract energy from salt water and rotate at 10 rpm. The article doesn’t mention that ATP synthase is half that size and runs at up to 6,000 rpm, without the problems of random thermal fluctuations that make their nanoturbine difficult to control.

“This is not that different than an engine you have in your car,” says Dekker. “You put in gasoline, you get mechanical work. With the nanoturbine, you add the salt mixture, you get mechanical work, namely rotations.” The researchers also found that they could power the turbine by exposing it to electric voltage or having flowing water turn it much like wind turns a windmill.

These structural chemists surely know that cars are intelligently designed. Why is there hesitancy to say that superior engineering design is found in the biological motors that inspired them?

Better than Nature?

News from the University of California, Riverside, claims to have bested nature. Scientists there say that they have built “artificial photosynthesis” that could be much more efficient at improving crop yields than biological photosynthesis:

Photosynthesis has evolved in plants for millions of years to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. This process, however, is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis.

The way that’s worded, it sounds like they just stumbled on “a way” to improve on nature. A look at the Methods section of their paper in Nature Foods, though, shows a highly intricate procedure for preparing the setup: anodes, cathodes, flow electrolyzer, and other parts using multiple elements in precisely arranged ways. Even so, their system only makes acetate (C2H3O2) — a relatively simple compound — nothing like the complex carbohydrates made by plants. If certain plants can use acetate to grow their complex molecules without photosynthesis, fine; but that’s a far cry from what plants do on their own.

The researchers admit their device was “engineered.” It may find application in places where crop plants are hard to grow, such as on a spacecraft. But growing the food will require the elaborate biochemistry in plant machines; it will not work on electrolysis alone. To fulfill their boast, now let the engineers code molecules that will build their devices from soil and deliver acetate to food plants automatically and in the right proportions. Then let them engineer a way to package the code in seeds.

Information Please

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have created a “DNA Typewriter” that “taps out a record inside cells.” It allows them to store messages in DNA code.

While developing a new system for recording within cells, geneticist Jay Shendure and his team decided to give it a test run by using it to encode text. Since their invention relied on a nearly brand-new recording medium, DNA, they wanted to use messages that evoked a sense of historical significance.

Two choices were obvious: “What hath God wrought?,” a Biblical quote used by Samuel Morse in the first long-distance telegraph transmission, and the more mundane, “Mr. Watson, come here!” spoken by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant in the first telephone call.

A line from Dickens was also considered, but a Korean member won by using a line from a K-Pop song. The team hopes to use their technique to genetically engineer cells that can barcode individual cells and store records of the cell’s activity. But doesn’t the sequence of letters in natural DNA qualify as a text?

Rightly So

In each of these examples, molecular engineers showed great pride in their achievements, and rightly so. They considered how they might be used for the good of mankind. Not one of them made the most logical inference, though, that the very biological cells that inspired their work were also engineered by design. Maybe some day soon they will not be ashamed to say so. Many great scientists used to proclaim that without hesitation.

Saturday, 16 July 2022

The war in science?

The Gollum Effect in Science, from Tycho Brahe to Today

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid sits down with historian and philosopher of science Michael Keas to discuss a recent article at Times Higher Education, “My Precious! How Academia’s Gollums Guard Their Research Fields.” The article looks at how scientific progress is being impeded by a culture in which scientists jealously guard their research instead of sharing it. Keas says the problem seems to have gotten worse in recent years but isn’t a new one. He illustrates with the story of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.

Brahe, a 16th-century Danish astronomer, sat on his astronomical research for years, rather than sharing it with Johannes Kepler, his assistant. Kepler only got hold of it when Brahe died unexpectedly shortly after a banquet. The rumor began that perhaps Brahe had been poisoned to free up access to his research, data that eventually allowed Kepler to make his revolutionary breakthrough, his three laws of planetary motion that cinched the case for a sun-centered model of the universe.

Keas explains what a later autopsy revealed about Brahe’s cause of death. And he discusses some modern-day power plays involving evolutionists jealously guarding the Darwinian paradigm against those who would challenge it. Finally, Keas enumerates some of the virtues that can help further the progress of science, including generosity and a humble willingness to listen to criticism.

Download the podcast or listen to it here. For more surprising facts from the history of science, check out Keas’s recent book, Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion.

Friday, 15 July 2022

On the business of war.

The big apple: An architectural history.

Yet more on Darwinism as secular creation myth.

Nature Divinized: Darwin’s Goddess for All Seasons

Neil Thomas

Yesterday, I began exploring a number of Charles Darwin’s hyperbolic evocations in the Origin of Species. We saw that in his conception, the powers of “natural selection” transcend human intelligence to such a degree that he came close to imputing to “her” the capacity for intelligent design. (See, “Darwin’s Goddess: Natural Selection as ‘Divine Surrogate.’”) The capstone to this crypto-theological way of thinking appears to be laid when he contrasts the selfishness of mankind with the dispassionate care for all animal and human life shown by “natural selection.” It is difficult to gloss that thought as anything but a covert or else unacknowledged reference to the limitless goodness of the Christian God when contrasted with the sinfulness of mankind. George Levine in fact makes the significant point in this regard that “it has long been understood that Darwin was much influenced by the [Paleyan] Natural Theology that much of the Origin is devoted to replacing…yet his imagination of nature is of a designed place, and he adapts many natural theological terms, not least ‘adaptation’ and ‘contrivance,’ in his description of the way nature works.”1

Levine’s response to the text in his capacity as a literary and cultural critic leads him to corroborate Robert J. Richards’s view that Darwin did indeed have a divinized conception of nature. Nor were these two writers the first to make this connection. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in his extensive review of Origin also charged that what Darwin was really describing under the heading of natural selection was the shaping effort of a divinity (of some sort) rather than the autonomous reflexes of dumb nature.2 Darwin himself was acutely sensitive to the charge that he was “making too much of a Deus” of natural selection and was wont to reply defensively that it was difficult to avoid personifying the word nature.

By using the term “natural selection,” he explained, he had meant “only the aggregate action and product of many laws.” However, this denial is the less convincing for not being able to account for the meanings disclosed by the metaphorical terms in which he chose to clothe his thoughts. Those more oblique modes of self-disclosure provide hints of the way his mind was working at a sub-rational level, and might in modern parlance be termed a “tell.” In fact, linguistic analysis corroborates a point once made by Basil Willey in the context of his discussing what the once prominent Victorian theologian Edward Bouverie Pusey referred to as the doctrinal vagueness of Darwin’s religious views:

This same metaphysical unawareness led him also, almost without noticing it, to replace the absent God with a latent personification of Nature, or even of ‘Natural Selection’ itself. True, he catches himself out from time to time, and warns us that he is only speaking metaphorically when he talks of Natural Selection ‘observing minutely’, ‘with unerring tact discovering each improvement for further perfecting’, and so forth. But he returns so habitually to that way of speaking, that we feel Pusey to be right in accusing Darwin of having introduced, into the theological vacuum he had created, a power acting according to design.3

This inevitably brings up the subject of the possible source of Darwin’s conception: was he simply “romancing” in a purely solipsistic way or was his imagination nourished by conceptual and imaginative templates he had access to in 19th century culture? Where might Darwin’s “divinized” conception of nature have come from? An important clue to answering this question has been provided by Ronald Hutton in his newly published Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, to whose chapter on “Mother Earth” I now refer.4

The Eternal Mother Figure

The tradition of a personified Natura Creatrix has a long pedigree in Christian and pre-Christian thought in the form of the ancient Greek Physis and her Roman counterpart, Natura.5 To Aristotle, Physis was the force which generated and animated living things and embodied the elements and primary materials of the world. She was seen as a form of governess and steward to the sublunary world as opposed to that of the heavens which were envisaged as being the place of the most supreme divinity. She was sometimes assimilated to Plato’s conception of the anima mundi (world soul or spirit), an entity endowed by the creator god with the role of linking his ideal realm with the realm of material and mortal beings. Roman poets of the imperial period such as Ovid and Lucretius conceived of her as a cosmic power subordinate only to the creator himself. Claudian referred to her as Mother Nature who had produced an ordered world out of chaos.

Natura was subsequently to be inducted with some ease into the Christianized world post 400 AD and in the 12th century Bernard Silvestris portrayed her as having been created by the Christian God, tasked by him to put the finishing touches to His universe. Similar conceptions were to be expressed in the work of Alan of Lille towards the end of the 12th century when he too saluted Natura as the ruler of the world on behalf of the Christian God. Jean de Meun in the Romance of the Rose referred to her as God’s chamberlain and Chaucer depicts her essentially as God’s deputy. In sum, concludes Hutton, “the concept of a mighty female figure embodying and ruling over the terrestrial world was embedded in Christian intellectual and literary culture all through the periods in which Christianity most completely dominated Europe, the medieval and early modern”6 (i.e., until c. 1650). Thereafter she continued her reign with a now firm place in the Christian cosmological imagination.

The Mythic Universal

Turning now towards Darwin’s own day, in the later Romantic period of the 19th century, when poets like Wordsworth were exhorting readers to let nature be their teacher, Natura was eulogized as a fount of wisdom. The poet Shelley even apostrophized her as “Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth/Thou from whom whose immortal bosom/Gods and men and beasts have birth.” The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne too conceived of Nature as a mighty female deity, embodying and creating the universe itself. Hutton also points to the example of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre whose eponymous heroine, finding herself one night alone and sleeping rough on a moor, is comforted by the thought of Nature, conceived of as a maternal figure, and by that of a loving God, as Nature’s creator. In such ways did Natura remain “resiliently adaptable” up to Darwin’s day and beyond.

Thus, over countless centuries there had become established in Europe a “Christian pattern of a cosmic feminine force subject to a patriarchal deity.”7 Some modern archaeologists have even gone so far as to claim that the archetype of the Great Mother has been a mythic universal — an image inherent in the human psyche since prehistoric times. Such historical filiations of Natura and the fact that she continued to be so deeply embedded in Victorian cultural understanding make it likely that the idea was lodged in Darwin’s psyche too at some level of apprehension and that his conception of natural selection may not have been anywhere near as purely materialist as the strictly Cartesian part of his mind would have desired. Despite his rational(ist) efforts, he was never able to free himself completely from that form of Christian cosmology which enjoyed such wide currency in the ambient culture of his day. As Barbara Newman has pointed out, the 19th century was the last great age of Nature’s literary career where she was given a strong lease of life by many of the poets whom Darwin himself read, such as Wordsworth and Tennyson. There was even a tendency among some of the Romantics, Wordsworth especially, to “merge Nature with Nature’s God” (the conception first proposed by Spinoza).8

A Materialist Myth

Prosaically summarized at the purely rational level, the Origin of Species aspires to supply a fresh, materialist myth to explain the development of earth’s numerous species. In reality, however, that would-be single-minded project is compromised, even subverted, by interference from a rather insistent metaphorical subtext. Those hidden levels of meaning will doubtless have been informed by what Neal Gillespie once termed the author’s “epistemological double vision” which resulted from the fact that “early in his career Darwin largely dropped theology from his science but not from his world view.”9 That submerged stratum of meaning with its unmistakable echoes of the figure of Natura in past and present Christian cosmological thought makes its influence felt inexpugnably at many metaphorical and lexical levels. If we take into account this large imaginative dimension of the Origin it might reasonably be inferred that Darwin came closer to the spirit of Paley’s natural theology than he or many others, even to this day, would be prepared to acknowledge.

The paraphrasable content of a text, then, as I have endeavored to show, should never be the end of the story because there is often considerably more “unpacking” to do before we can really understand the deeper import of any given author’s work. But lest any reader should think that I am making the absurd claim that access to the true meaning of Darwinian postulations must necessarily be restricted to some small linguistically trained elite, I would point out that one needs no induction into the specialized skill-set of literary analysis to be able to appreciate the importance of a close and critical reading. All that is required in is an openness and independence of mind and a readiness to empathize with any given text at both a literal and an emotional level by “listening to the music behind the words,” as the colloquial saying goes.

Notes

Darwin the Writer, p. 111, note 6.

Samuel Wilberforce, Review of Origin of Species in Quartely Review [no numeration] 1860, pp.225-264.

Darwin and Butler: Two Versions of Evolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 30.

Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2022), chapter 2, pp. 41-74.

On early origins and development of the idea of nature see George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, second edition (Indiana: Notre Dame UP, 2002), especially pp. 1-27.

Queens of the Wild, p. 50.

Queens of the Wild, p. 53.

Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Visions, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2003), pp. 52, 137.

Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979), p. 125.

Ancient crocodile and Darwin's doubt.

Fossil Friday: A Croc Smile from the Cretaceous

Günter Bechly

This fossil crocodile from the Lower Cretaceous Crato Formation of northeast Brazil looks like it is smiling at us. It is a previously unpublished specimen of the duck-billed species Susisuchus anatoceps (Salisbury et al. 2003), which is closely related to modern crown-group crocodiles (Salisbury et al. 2006). I could photograph this wonderful specimen in July 2008 at the collection of the German fossil trading company MS Fossil. This specimen is of particular scientific importance, because it has perfectly preserved hind limbs, contrary to the holotypes and only published specimens of both described species of the family Susisuchidae (Salisbury et al. 2003, Fortier & Schultz 2009, Figureido et al. 2009).

The wider croc relationship (Crurotarsi) appeared abruptly in the Lower Triassic (e.g., Ctenosauriscus about 247 mya), while genuine Crocodylomorpha first appeared likewise abruptly in the lowermost Upper Triassic with gracile bipedal forms like Trialestes and Carnufex about 231 million years ago (Irmis et al. 2013, Drymala & Zanno 2016). These two events rank among the numerous abrupt appearances (“explosions“) in the Triassic, which also include the abrupt appearances of marine reptiles (15 families, including the first ichthyosaurs), gliding and flying reptiles (including the first pterosaurs), dinosaurs, turtles, lizards (Lepidosauromorpha), and even real mammals (Mammaliaformes).

Even the renowned mainstream paleontologist Peter Ward, who is strongly opposed to intelligent design, has admitted that “the diversity of Triassic animal plans is analogous to the diversity of marine body plans that resulted from the Cambrian Explosion … and, as will be shown, was as important for animal life on land as the Cambrian Explosion was for marine animal life” (Ward 2006: 160). Concerning the appearance of dinosaurs in the Triassic, a recent study in Nature Communications (Bernardi et al. 2018) commented that it was “an explosive increase in dinosaurian abundance” and that “it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.“ Such scientific sources confirm the claim of Darwin critics against those hardcore Darwinists who ignorantly maintain that we, the critics, are making this stuff up. Such ubiquitous discontinuities contradict the gradualist predictions of Darwin’s theory and thus should count as empirical falsifications of that theory (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021).

References

Bechly G 2021. Chapter 31: Does the Fossil Record Demonstrate Darwinian Evolution? Pp. 345–356 in: Dembski WA, Luskin C & Holden JM (eds). The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Eugene (OR): Harvest House.

Bechly G & Meyer SC 2017. Chapter 10. The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry. Pp. 331–361 in: Moreland JP, Meyer SC, Shaw C, Gauger AK, Grudem W (eds). Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Wheaton (IL): Crossway.

Bernardi M, Gianolla P, Petti FM, Mietto P & Benton MJ 2018. Dinosaur diversification linked with the Carnian Pluvial Episode. Nature Communications 9:1499, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03996-1.

Drymala SM & Zanno LE 2016. Osteology of Carnufex carolinensis (Archosauria: Psuedosuchia) from the Pekin Formation of North Carolina and Its Implications for Early Crocodylomorph Evolution. PLOS ONE 11(6):e0157528, 1–34. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157528

Figueiredo RG & Kellner AWA 2009. A new crocodylomorph specimen from the Araripe Basin (Crato Member, Santana Formation), northeastern Brazil. Paläontologische Zeitschrift 83(2), 323–331. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12542-009-0016-6.

Fortier DC & Schultz CL 2009. A new neosuchian crocodylomorph (Crocodyliformes, Mesoeucrocodylia) from the Early Cretaceous of north-east Brazil. Palaeontology 52(5), 991–1007. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2009.00894.x.

Irmis RB, Nesbitt SJ & Sues H-D 2013. Early Crocodylomorpha. Pp. 275–302 in: Nesbitt SJ, Desojo JB & Irmis RB (eds). Anatomy, Phylogeny and Palaeobiology of Early Archosaurs and their Kin. Geological Society of London, Special Publications 379. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/SP379.24.

Salisbury SW, Frey E, Martill DM & Buchy MC 2003. A new crocodilian from the Lower Cretaceous Crato Formation of north-eastern Brazil. Palaeontographica Abteilung A 270(1–3), 3–47. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1127/pala/270/2003/3.

Salisbury SW, Molnar RE, Frey E & Willis PMA 2006. The origin of modern crocodyliforms: new evidence from the Cretaceous of Australia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 273(1600), 2439–2448. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.3613.

Ward PD 2006. Out of Thin Air. Joseph Henry Press, Washington (DC), 282 pp.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susisuchus.

Thursday, 14 July 2022

John Calvin: A brief history.

John Calvin (/ˈkælvɪn/;[1] Middle French: Jean Cauvin; French: Jean Calvin [ʒɑ̃ kalvɛ̃]; 10 July 1509 – 27 May 1564) was a French theologian, pastor, and reformer in Geneva during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism, including its doctrines of predestination and of God's absolute sovereignty in the salvation of the human soul from death and eternal damnation. Calvinist doctrines were influenced by and elaborated upon the Augustinian and other Christian traditions. Various Congregational, Reformed and Presbyterian churches, which look to Calvin as the chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world.

Calvin was a tireless polemicist and apologetic writer who generated much controversy. He also exchanged cordial and supportive letters with many reformers, including Philipp Melanchthon and Heinrich Bullinger. In addition to his seminal Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin wrote commentaries on most books of the Bible, confessional documents, and various other theological treatises.

Calvin was originally trained as a humanist lawyer. He broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530. After religious tensions erupted in widespread deadly violence against Protestant Christians in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where in 1536 he published the first edition of the Institutes. In that same year, Calvin was recruited by Frenchman William Farel to join the Reformation in Geneva, where he regularly preached sermons throughout the week. However, the governing council of the city resisted the implementation of their ideas, and both men were expelled. At the invitation of Martin Bucer, Calvin proceeded to Strasbourg, where he became the minister of a church of French refugees. He continued to support the reform movement in Geneva, and in 1541 he was invited back to lead the church of the city.

Following his return, Calvin introduced new forms of church government and liturgy, despite opposition from several powerful families in the city who tried to curb his authority. During this period, Michael Servetus, a Spaniard regarded by both Roman Catholics and Protestants as having a heretical view of the Trinity, arrived in Geneva. He was denounced by Calvin and burned at the stake for heresy by the city council. Following an influx of supportive refugees and new elections to the city council, Calvin's opponents were forced out. Calvin spent his final years promoting the Reformation both in Geneva and throughout Europe.Early life (1509–1535)

Calvin was originally interested in the priesthood, but he changed course to study law in Orléans and Bourges. Painting titled Portrait of Young John Calvin from the collection of the Library of Geneva.

John Calvin was born as Jehan Cauvin on 10 July 1509, at Noyon, a town in Picardy, a province of the Kingdom of France.[2] He was the second of three sons who survived infancy. His mother, Jeanne le Franc, was the daughter of an innkeeper from Cambrai. She died of an unknown cause in Calvin's childhood, after having borne four more children. Calvin's father, Gérard Cauvin, had a prosperous career as the cathedral notary and registrar to the ecclesiastical court. Gérard intended his three sons—Charles, Jean, and Antoine—for the priesthood.

Young Calvin was particularly precocious. By age 12, he was employed by the bishop as a clerk and received the tonsure, cutting his hair to symbolise his dedication to the Church. He also won the patronage of an influential family, the Montmors.[3] Through their assistance, Calvin was able to attend the Collège de la Marche, Paris, where he learned Latin from one of its greatest teachers, Mathurin Cordier.[4] Once he completed the course, he entered the Collège de Montaigu as a philosophy student.[5]

In 1525 or 1526, Gérard withdrew his son from the Collège de Montaigu and enrolled him in the University of Orléans to study law. According to contemporary biographers Theodore Beza and Nicolas Colladon, Gérard believed that Calvin would earn more money as a lawyer than as a priest.[6] After a few years of quiet study, Calvin entered the University of Bourges in 1529. He was intrigued by Andreas Alciati, a humanist lawyer. Humanism was a European intellectual movement which stressed classical studies. During his 18-month stay in Bourges, Calvin learned Koine Greek, a necessity for studying the New Testament.[7]

Alternative theories have been suggested regarding the date of Calvin's religious conversion. Some have placed the date of his conversion around 1533, shortly before he resigned from his chaplaincy. In this view, his resignation is the direct evidence for his conversion to the evangelical faith. However, T. H. L. Parker argues that, although this date is a terminus for his conversion, the more likely date is in late 1529 or early 1530.[8] The main evidence for his conversion is contained in two significantly different accounts of his conversion. In the first, found in his Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Calvin portrayed his conversion as a sudden change of mind, brought about by God:

God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life. Having thus received some taste and knowledge of true godliness, I was immediately inflamed with so intense a desire to make progress therein, that although I did not altogether leave off other studies, yet I pursued them with less ardour.[9]

In the second account, Calvin wrote of a long process of inner turmoil, followed by spiritual and psychological anguish:

Being exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen, and much more at that which threatened me in view of eternal death, I, duty bound, made it my first business to betake myself to your way, condemning my past life, not without groans and tears. And now, O Lord, what remains to a wretch like me, but instead of defence, earnestly to supplicate you not to judge that fearful abandonment of your Word according to its deserts, from which in your wondrous goodness you have at last delivered me.[10]

Scholars have argued about the precise interpretation of these accounts, but most agree that his conversion corresponded with his break from the Roman Catholic Church.[11][12] The Calvin biographer Bruce Gordon has stressed that "the two accounts are not antithetical, revealing some inconsistency in Calvin's memory, but rather [are] two different ways of expressing the same reality."[13]

By 1532, Calvin received his licentiate in law and published his first book, a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia. After uneventful trips to Orléans and his hometown of Noyon, Calvin returned to Paris in October 1533. During this time, tensions rose at the Collège Royal (later to become the Collège de France) between the humanists/reformers and the conservative senior faculty members. One of the reformers, Nicolas Cop, was rector of the university. On 1 November 1533 he devoted his inaugural address to the need for reform and renewal in the Roman Catholic Church. The address provoked a strong reaction from the faculty, who denounced it as heretical, forcing Cop to flee to Basel. Calvin, a close friend of Cop, was implicated in the offence, and for the next year he was forced into hiding. He remained on the move, sheltering with his friend Louis du Tillet in Angoulême and taking refuge in Noyon and Orléans. He was finally forced to flee France during the Affair of the Placards in mid-October 1534. In that incident, unknown reformers had posted placards in various cities criticizing the Roman Catholic mass, to which adherents of the Roman Catholic church responded with violence against the would-be Reformers and their sympathizers. In January 1535, Calvin joined Cop in Basel, a city under the enduring influence of the late reformer Johannes Oecolampadius.[14]

Reform work commences (1536–1538)

In March 1536, Calvin published the first edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis or Institutes of the Christian Religion.[15] The work was an apologia or defense of his faith and a statement of the doctrinal position of the reformers. He also intended it to serve as an elementary instruction book for anyone interested in the Christian faith. The book was the first expression of his theology. Calvin updated the work and published new editions throughout his life.[16] Shortly after its publication, he left Basel for Ferrara, Italy, where he briefly served as secretary to Princess Renée of France. By June he was back in Paris with his brother Antoine, who was resolving their father's affairs. Following the Edict of Coucy, which gave a limited six-month period for heretics to reconcile with the Catholic faith, Calvin decided that there was no future for him in France. In August he set off for Strasbourg, a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire and a refuge for reformers. Due to military manoeuvres of imperial and French forces, he was forced to make a detour to the south, bringing him to Geneva. Calvin had intended to stay only a single night, but William Farel, a fellow French reformer residing in the city, implored him to stay and assist him in his work of reforming the church there. Calvin accepted his new role without any preconditions on his tasks or duties.[17] The office to which he was initially assigned is unknown. He was eventually given the title of "reader", which most likely meant that he could give expository lectures on the Bible. Sometime in 1537 he was selected to be a "pastor" although he never received any pastoral consecration.[18] For the first time, the lawyer-theologian took up pastoral duties such as baptisms, weddings, and church services.[19]

During late 1536, Farel drafted a confession of faith, and Calvin wrote separate articles on reorganizing the church in Geneva. On 16 January 1537, Farel and Calvin presented their Articles concernant l'organisation de l'église et du culte à Genève (Articles on the Organization of the Church and its Worship at Geneva) to the city council.[20] The document described the manner and frequency of their celebrations of the Eucharist, the reason for, and the method of, excommunication, the requirement to subscribe to the confession of faith, the use of congregational singing in the liturgy, and the revision of marriage laws. The council accepted the document on the same day.[21]

As the year progressed, Calvin and Farel's reputation with the council began to suffer. The council was reluctant to enforce the subscription requirement, as only a few citizens had subscribed to their confession of faith. On 26 November, the two ministers hotly debated the council over the issue. Furthermore, France was taking an interest in forming an alliance with Geneva and as the two ministers were Frenchmen, councillors had begun to question their loyalty. Finally, a major ecclesiastical-political quarrel developed when the city of Bern, Geneva's ally in the reformation of the Swiss churches, proposed to introduce uniformity in the church ceremonies. One proposal required the use of unleavened bread for the Eucharist. The two ministers were unwilling to follow Bern's lead and delayed the use of such bread until a synod in Zurich could be convened to make the final decision. The council ordered Calvin and Farel to use unleavened bread for the Easter Eucharist. In protest, they refused to administer communion during the Easter service. This caused a riot during the service. The next day, the council told Farel and Calvin to leave Geneva.[22]

Farel and Calvin then went to Bern and Zurich to plead their case. The resulting synod in Zurich placed most of the blame on Calvin for not being sympathetic enough toward the people of Geneva. It asked Bern to mediate with the aim of restoring the two ministers. The Geneva council refused to readmit the two men, who then took refuge in Basel. Subsequently, Farel received an invitation to lead the church in Neuchâtel. Calvin was invited to lead a church of French refugees in Strasbourg by that city's leading reformers, Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito. Initially, Calvin refused because Farel was not included in the invitation, but relented when Bucer appealed to him. By September 1538 Calvin had taken up his new position in Strasbourg, fully expecting that this time it would be permanent; a few months later, he applied for and was granted citizenship of the city.[23]

Minister in Strasbourg (1538–1541)

During his time in Strasbourg, Calvin was not attached to one particular church, but held his office successively in the Saint-Nicolas Church, the Sainte-Madeleine Church and the former Dominican Church, renamed the Temple Neuf.[24] (All of these churches still exist, but none are in the architectural state of Calvin's days.) Calvin ministered to 400–500 members in his church. He preached or lectured every day, with two sermons on Sunday. Communion was celebrated monthly and congregational singing of the psalms was encouraged.[25] He also worked on the second edition of the Institutes. Calvin was dissatisfied with its original structure as a catechism, a primer for young Christians.[26]

For the second edition, published in 1539, Calvin dropped this format in favour of systematically presenting the main doctrines from the Bible. In the process, the book was enlarged from six chapters to seventeen.[26] He concurrently worked on another book, the Commentary on Romans, which was published in March 1540. The book was a model for his later commentaries: it included his own Latin translation from the Greek rather than the Latin Vulgate, an exegesis, and an exposition.[27] In the dedicatory letter, Calvin praised the work of his predecessors Philipp Melanchthon, Heinrich Bullinger, and Martin Bucer, but he also took care to distinguish his own work from theirs and to criticise some of their shortcomings.[28]

Calvin's friends urged him to marry. Calvin took a prosaic view, writing to one correspondent:

I, who have the air of being so hostile to celibacy, I am still not married and do not know whether I will ever be. If I take a wife it will be because, being better freed from numerous worries, I can devote myself to the Lord.[29]

Several candidates were presented to him including one young woman from a noble family. Reluctantly, Calvin agreed to the marriage, on the condition that she would learn French. Although a wedding date was planned for March 1540, he remained reluctant and the wedding never took place. He later wrote that he would never think of marrying her, "unless the Lord had entirely bereft me of my wits".[30] Instead, in August of that year, he married Idelette de Bure, a widow who had two children from her first marriage.[31]

Geneva reconsidered its expulsion of Calvin. Church attendance had dwindled and the political climate had changed; as Bern and Geneva quarrelled over land, their alliance frayed. When Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto wrote a letter to the city council inviting Geneva to return to the Catholic faith, the council searched for an ecclesiastical authority to respond to him. At first Pierre Viret was consulted, but when he refused, the council asked Calvin. He agreed and his Responsio ad Sadoletum (Letter to Sadoleto) strongly defended Geneva's position concerning reforms in the church.[32] On 21 September 1540 the council commissioned one of its members, Ami Perrin, to find a way to recall Calvin. An embassy reached Calvin while he was at a colloquy, a conference to settle religious disputes, in Worms. His reaction to the suggestion was one of horror in which he wrote, "Rather would I submit to death a hundred times than to that cross on which I had to perish daily a thousand times over."[33]

Calvin also wrote that he was prepared to follow the Lord's calling. A plan was drawn up in which Viret would be appointed to take temporary charge in Geneva for six months while Bucer and Calvin would visit the city to determine the next steps. The city council pressed for the immediate appointment of Calvin in Geneva. By mid-1541, Strasbourg decided to lend Calvin to Geneva for six months. Calvin returned on 13 September 1541 with an official escort and a wagon for his family.[34]

Reform in Geneva (1541–1549)

Further information: Hymnody of continental Europe § Reformed Church, and Regulative principle of worship § John Calvin's Liturgy

In supporting Calvin's proposals for reforms, the council of Geneva passed the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques (Ecclesiastical Ordinances) on 20 November 1541. The ordinances defined four orders of ministerial function: pastors to preach and to administer the sacraments; doctors to instruct believers in the faith; elders to provide discipline; and deacons to care for the poor and needy.[35] They also called for the creation of the Consistoire (Consistory), an ecclesiastical court composed of the elders and the ministers. The city government retained the power to summon persons before the court, and the Consistory could judge only ecclesiastical matters having no civil jurisdiction. Originally, the court had the power to mete out sentences, with excommunication as its most severe penalty. The government contested this power and on 19 March 1543 the council decided that all sentencing would be carried out by the government.[36]

In 1542, Calvin adapted a service book used in Strasbourg, publishing La Forme des Prières et Chants Ecclésiastiques (The Form of Prayers and Church Hymns). Calvin recognised the power of music and he intended that it be used to support scripture readings. The original Strasbourg psalter contained twelve psalms by Clément Marot and Calvin added several more hymns of his own composition in the Geneva version. At the end of 1542, Marot became a refugee in Geneva and contributed nineteen more psalms. Louis Bourgeois, also a refugee, lived and taught music in Geneva for sixteen years and Calvin took the opportunity to add his hymns, the most famous being the Old Hundredth.[37]

In the same year of 1542, Calvin published Catéchisme de l'Eglise de Genève (Catechism of the Church of Geneva), which was inspired by Bucer's Kurze Schrifftliche Erklärung of 1534. Calvin had written an earlier catechism during his first stay in Geneva which was largely based on Martin Luther's Large Catechism. The first version was arranged pedagogically, describing Law, Faith, and Prayer. The 1542 version was rearranged for theological reasons, covering Faith first, then Law and Prayer.[38]

Historians debate the extent to which Geneva was a theocracy. On the one hand, Calvin's theology clearly called for separation between church and state. Other historians have stressed the enormous political power wielded on a daily basis by the clerics.[39][40]

During his ministry in Geneva, Calvin preached over two thousand sermons. Initially he preached twice on Sunday and three times during the week. This proved to be too heavy a burden and late in 1542 the council allowed him to preach only once on Sunday. In October 1549, he was again required to preach twice on Sundays and, in addition, every weekday of alternate weeks. His sermons lasted more than an hour and he did not use notes. An occasional secretary tried to record his sermons, but very little of his preaching was preserved before 1549. In that year, professional scribe Denis Raguenier, who had learned or developed a system of shorthand, was assigned to record all of Calvin's sermons. An analysis of his sermons by T. H. L. Parker suggests that Calvin was a consistent preacher and his style changed very little over the years.[41][42] John Calvin was also known for his thorough manner of working his way through the Bible in consecutive sermons. From March 1555 to July 1556, Calvin delivered two hundred sermons on Deuteronomy.[43]

Voltaire wrote about Calvin, Luther and Zwingli, "If they condemned celibacy in the priests, and opened the gates of the convents, it was only to turn all society into a convent. Shows and entertainments were expressly forbidden by their religion; and for more than two hundred years there was not a single musical instrument allowed in the city of Geneva. They condemned auricular confession, but they enjoined a public one; and in Switzerland, Scotland, and Geneva it was performed the same as penance."[44]

Very little is known about Calvin's personal life in Geneva. His house and furniture were owned by the council. The house was big enough to accommodate his family as well as Antoine's family and some servants. On 28 July 1542, Idelette gave birth to a son, Jacques, but he was born prematurely and survived only briefly. Idelette fell ill in 1545 and died on 29 March 1549. Calvin never married again. He expressed his sorrow in a letter to Viret:

I have been bereaved of the best friend of my life, of one who, if it has been so ordained, would willingly have shared not only my poverty but also my death. During her life she was the faithful helper of my ministry. From her I never experienced the slightest hindrance.[45]

Throughout the rest of his life in Geneva, he maintained several friendships from his early years including Montmor, Cordier, Cop, Farel, Melanchthon and Bullinger.[46]

Discipline and opposition (1546–1553)

Calvin encountered bitter opposition to his work in Geneva. Around 1546, the uncoordinated forces coalesced into an identifiable group whom he referred to as the libertines, but who preferred to be called either Spirituels or Patriots.[47][48] According to Calvin, these were people who felt that after being liberated through grace, they were exempted from both ecclesiastical and civil law. The group consisted of wealthy, politically powerful, and interrelated families of Geneva.[49] At the end of January 1546, Pierre Ameaux, a maker of playing cards who had already been in conflict with the Consistory, attacked Calvin by calling him a "Picard", an epithet denoting anti-French sentiment, and accused him of false doctrine. Ameaux was punished by the council and forced to make expiation by parading through the city and begging God for forgiveness.[50] A few months later Ami Perrin, the man who had brought Calvin to Geneva, moved into open opposition. Perrin had married Françoise Favre, daughter of François Favre, a well-established Genevan merchant. Both Perrin's wife and father-in-law had previous conflicts with the Consistory. The court noted that many of Geneva's notables, including Perrin, had breached a law against dancing. Initially, Perrin ignored the court when he was summoned, but after receiving a letter from Calvin, he appeared before the Consistory.[51]

By 1547, opposition to Calvin and other French refugee ministers had grown to constitute the majority of the syndics, the civil magistrates of Geneva. On 27 June an unsigned threatening letter in Genevan dialect was found at the pulpit of St. Pierre Cathedral where Calvin preached. Suspecting a plot against both the church and the state, the council appointed a commission to investigate. Jacques Gruet, a Genevan member of Favre's group, was arrested and incriminating evidence was found when his house was searched. Under torture, he confessed to several crimes including writing the letter left in the pulpit which threatened the church leaders. A civil court condemned Gruet to death and he was beheaded on 26 July. Calvin was not opposed to the civil court's decision.[52]

The libertines continued organizing opposition, insulting the appointed ministers, and challenging the authority of the Consistory. The council straddled both sides of the conflict, alternately admonishing and upholding Calvin. When Perrin was elected first syndic in February 1552, Calvin's authority appeared to be at its lowest point. After some losses before the council, Calvin believed he was defeated; on 24 July 1553 he asked the council to allow him to resign. Although the libertines controlled the council, his request was refused. The opposition realised that they could curb Calvin's authority, but they did not have enough power to banish him.[53]

Michael Servetus (1553)

Michael Servetus exchanged many letters with Calvin until he was denounced by Calvin and executed.

The turning point in Calvin's fortunes occurred when Michael Servetus, a brilliant Spanish polymath who introduced the Islamic idea[54] of Pulmonary circulation to Europe, and a fugitive from ecclesiastical authorities, appeared in Geneva on 13 August 1553. Servetus was a fugitive on the run after he published The Restoration of Christianity (1553), Calvin scholar Bruce Gordon commented "Among its offenses were a denial of original sin and a bizarre and hardly comprehensible view of the Trinity."[55][56]

Decades earlier, in July 1530 he disputed with Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel and was eventually expelled. He went to Strasbourg, where he published a pamphlet against the Trinity. Bucer publicly refuted it and asked Servetus to leave. After returning to Basel, Servetus published Two Books of Dialogues on the Trinity (Latin: Dialogorum de Trinitate libri duo) which caused a sensation among Reformers and Catholics alike. When John Calvin alerted the Inquisition in Spain about this publication, an order was issued for Servetus's arrest.[57]

Calvin and Servetus were first brought into contact in 1546 through a common acquaintance, Jean Frellon of Lyon; they exchanged letters debating doctrine; Calvin used a pseudonym as Charles d' Espeville and Servetus used the moniker Michel de Villeneuve.[55] Eventually, Calvin lost patience and refused to respond; by this time Servetus had written around thirty letters to Calvin. Calvin was particularly outraged when Servetus sent him a copy of the Institutes of the Christian Religion heavily annotated with arguments pointing to errors in the book. When Servetus mentioned that he would come to Geneva, "Espeville" (Calvin) wrote a letter to Farel on 13 February 1546 noting that if Servetus were to come, he would not assure him safe conduct: "for if he came, as far as my authority goes, I would not let him leave alive."[58]

In 1553 Servetus published Christianismi Restitutio (English: The Restoration of Christianity), in which he rejected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the concept of predestination. In the same year, Calvin's representative, Guillaume de Trie, sent letters alerting the French Inquisition to Servetus.[59] Calling him a "Spanish-Portuguese", suspecting and accusing him[60] of his recently proved Jewish converso origin.[61][62][63] De Trie wrote down that "his proper name is Michael Servetus, but he currently calls himself Villeneuve, practising medicine. He stayed for some time in Lyon, and now he is living in Vienne."[64] When the inquisitor-general of France learned that Servetus was hiding in Vienne, according to Calvin under an assumed name, he contacted Cardinal François de Tournon, the secretary of the archbishop of Lyon, to take up the matter. Servetus was arrested and taken in for questioning. His letters to Calvin were presented as evidence of heresy, but he denied having written them, and later said he was not sure it was his handwriting. He said, after swearing before the holy gospel, that "he was Michel De Villeneuve Doctor in Medicine about 42 years old, native of Tudela of the kingdom of Navarre, a city under the obedience to the Emperor".[65] The following day he said: "..although he was not Servetus he assumed the person of Servet for debating with Calvin".[66] He managed to escape from prison, and the Catholic authorities sentenced him in absentia to death by slow burning.[67]

On his way to Italy, Servetus stopped in Geneva to visit "d'Espeville", where he was recognized and arrested. Calvin's secretary, Nicholas de la Fontaine, composed a list of accusations that was submitted before the court. The prosecutor was Philibert Berthelier, a member of a libertine family and son of a famous Geneva patriot, and the sessions were led by Pierre Tissot, Perrin's brother-in-law. The libertines allowed the trial to drag on in an attempt to harass Calvin. The difficulty in using Servetus as a weapon against Calvin was that the heretical reputation of Servetus was widespread and most of the cities in Europe were observing and awaiting the outcome of the trial. This posed a dilemma for the libertines, so on 21 August the council decided to write to other Swiss cities for their opinions, thus mitigating their own responsibility for the final decision.[68] While waiting for the responses, the council also asked Servetus if he preferred to be judged in Vienne or in Geneva. He begged to stay in Geneva. On 20 October the replies from Zurich, Basel, Bern, and Schaffhausen were read and the council condemned Servetus as a heretic. The following day he was sentenced to burning at the stake, the same sentence as in Vienne. Some scholars claim that Calvin and other ministers asked that he be beheaded instead of burnt, knowing that burning at the stake was the only legal recourse.[69] This plea was refused and on 27 October, Servetus was burnt alive at the Plateau of Champel at the edge of Geneva.[70]

Securing the Protestant Reformation (1553–1555)

After the death of Servetus, Calvin was acclaimed a defender of Christianity, but his ultimate triumph over the libertines was still two years away. He had always insisted that the Consistory retain the power of excommunication, despite the council's past decision to take it away. During Servetus's trial, Philibert Berthelier asked the council for permission to take communion, as he had been excommunicated the previous year for insulting a minister. Calvin protested that the council did not have the legal authority to overturn Berthelier's excommunication. Unsure of how the council would rule, he hinted in a sermon on 3 September 1553 that he might be dismissed by the authorities. The council decided to re-examine the Ordonnances and on 18 September it voted in support of Calvin—excommunication was within the jurisdiction of the Consistory. Berthelier applied for reinstatement to another Genevan administrative assembly, the Deux Cents (Two Hundred), in November. This body reversed the council's decision and stated that the final arbiter concerning excommunication should be the council. The ministers continued to protest, and as in the case of Servetus, the opinions of the Swiss churches were sought. The affair dragged on through 1554. Finally, on 22 January 1555, the council announced the decision of the Swiss churches: the original Ordonnances were to be kept and the Consistory was to regain its official powers.[71]

The libertines' downfall began with the February 1555 elections. By then, many of the French refugees had been granted citizenship and with their support, Calvin's partisans elected the majority of the syndics and the councillors. On 16 May the libertines took to the streets in a drunken protest and attempted to burn down a house that was supposedly full of Frenchmen. The syndic Henri Aulbert tried to intervene, carrying with him the baton of office that symbolised his power. Perrin seized the baton and waved it over the crowd, which gave the appearance that he was taking power and initiating a coup d'état. The insurrection was soon over when another syndic appeared and ordered Perrin to go with him to the town hall. Perrin and other leaders were forced to flee the city. With the approval of Calvin, the other plotters who remained in the city were found and executed. The opposition to Calvin's church polity came to an end.[72]

Final years (1555–1564)

Calvin's authority was practically uncontested during his final years, and he enjoyed an international reputation as a reformer distinct from Martin Luther.[73] Initially, Luther and Calvin had mutual respect for each other. A doctrinal conflict had developed between Luther and Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli on the interpretation of the eucharist. Calvin's opinion on the issue forced Luther to place him in Zwingli's camp. Calvin actively participated in the polemics that were exchanged between the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the Reformation movement.[74] At the same time, Calvin was dismayed by the lack of unity among the reformers. He took steps toward rapprochement with Bullinger by signing the Consensus Tigurinus, a concordat between the Zurich and Geneva churches. He reached out to England when Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer called for an ecumenical synod of all the evangelical churches. Calvin praised the idea, but ultimately Cranmer was unable to bring it to fruition.[75]

Calvin sheltered Marian exiles (those who fled the reign of Catholic Mary Tudor in England) in Geneva starting in 1555. Under the city's protection, they were able to form their own reformed church under John Knox and William Whittingham and eventually carried Calvin's ideas on doctrine and polity back to England and Scotland.[76]

Within Geneva, Calvin's main concern was the creation of a collège, an institute for the education of children. A site for the school was selected on 25 March 1558 and it opened the following year on 5 June 1559. Although the school was a single institution, it was divided into two parts: a grammar school called the collège or schola privata and an advanced school called the académie or schola publica. Calvin tried to recruit two professors for the institute, Mathurin Cordier, his old friend and Latin scholar who was now based in Lausanne, and Emmanuel Tremellius, the former Regius professor of Hebrew in Cambridge. Neither was available, but he succeeded in obtaining Theodore Beza as rector. Within five years there were 1,200 students in the grammar school and 300 in the advanced school. The collège eventually became the Collège Calvin, one of the college preparatory schools of Geneva; the académie became the University of Geneva.[77]

Impact on France

Calvin was deeply committed to reforming his homeland, France. The Protestant movement had been energetic, but lacked central organizational direction. With financial support from the church in Geneva, Calvin turned his enormous energies toward uplifting the French Protestant cause. As one historian explains:

He supplied the dogma, the liturgy, and the moral ideas of the new religion, and he also created ecclesiastical, political, and social institutions in harmony with it. A born leader, he followed up his work with personal appeals. His vast correspondence with French Protestants shows not only much zeal but infinite pains and considerable tact and driving home the lessons of his printed treatises.[78] Between 1555 and 1562, more than 100 ministers were sent to France. Nevertheless French King Henry II severely persecuted Protestants under the Edict of Chateaubriand and when the French authorities complained about the missionary activities, the city fathers of Geneva disclaimed official responsibility.[79]

Last illness

Traditional grave of Calvin in the Cimetière de Plainpalais in Geneva; the exact location of his grave is unknown.

In late 1558, Calvin became ill with a fever. Since he was afraid that he might die before completing the final revision of the Institutes, he forced himself to work. The final edition was greatly expanded to the extent that Calvin referred to it as a new work. The expansion from the 21 chapters of the previous edition to 80 was due to the extended treatment of existing material rather than the addition of new topics.[80] Shortly after he recovered, he strained his voice while preaching, which brought on a violent fit of coughing. He burst a blood-vessel in his lungs, and his health steadily declined. He preached his final sermon in St. Pierre on 6 February 1564. On 25 April, he made his will, in which he left small sums to his family and to the collège. A few days later, the ministers of the church came to visit him, and he bade his final farewell, which was recorded in Discours d'adieu aux ministres. He recounted his life in Geneva, sometimes recalling bitterly some of the hardships he had suffered. Calvin died on 27 May 1564 aged 54. At first his body lay in state, but since so many people came to see it, the reformers were afraid that they would be accused of fostering a new saint's cult. On the following day, he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Cimetière des Rois.[81] The exact location of the grave is unknown; a stone was added in the 19th century to mark a grave traditionally thought to be Calvin's.[82]

Main article: Theology of John Calvin

See also: Calvin's view of Scripture, Augustine's influence on John Calvin, and Covenant theology

Calvin developed his theology in his biblical commentaries as well as his sermons and treatises, but the most comprehensive expression of his views is found in his magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. He intended that the book be used as a summary of his views on Christian theology and that it be read in conjunction with his commentaries.[83] The various editions of that work spanned nearly his entire career as a reformer, and the successive revisions of the book show that his theology changed very little from his youth to his death.[84] The first edition from 1536 consisted of only six chapters. The second edition, published in 1539, was three times as long because he added chapters on subjects that appear in Melanchthon's Loci Communes. In 1543, he again added new material and expanded a chapter on the Apostles' Creed. The final edition of the Institutes appeared in 1559. By then, the work consisted of four books of eighty chapters, and each book was named after statements from the creed: Book 1 on God the Creator, Book 2 on the Redeemer in Christ, Book 3 on receiving the Grace of Christ through the Holy Spirit, and Book 4 on the Society of Christ or the Church.[85]

Title page from the final edition of Calvin's magnum opus, Institutio Christiane Religionis, which summarises his theology.

The first statement in the Institutes acknowledges its central theme. It states that the sum of human wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.[86] Calvin argues that the knowledge of God is not inherent in humanity nor can it be discovered by observing this world. The only way to obtain it is to study scripture. Calvin writes, "For anyone to arrive at God the Creator he needs Scripture as his Guide and Teacher."[87] He does not try to prove the authority of scripture but rather describes it as autopiston or self-authenticating. He defends the trinitarian view of God and, in a strong polemical stand against the Catholic Church, argues that images of God lead to idolatry.[88] John Calvin famously said "the human heart is a perpetual idol factory".[89] At the end of the first book, he offers his views on providence, writing, "By his Power God cherishes and guards the World which he made and by his Providence rules its individual Parts."[90] Humans are unable to fully comprehend why God performs any particular action, but whatever good or evil people may practise, their efforts always result in the execution of God's will and judgments.[91]

The second book includes several essays on original sin and the fall of man, which directly refer to Augustine, who developed these doctrines. He often cited the Church Fathers in order to defend the reformed cause against the charge that the reformers were creating new theology.[92] In Calvin's view, sin began with the fall of Adam and propagated to all of humanity. The domination of sin is complete to the point that people are driven to evil.[93] Thus fallen humanity is in need of the redemption that can be found in Christ. But before Calvin expounded on this doctrine, he described the special situation of the Jews who lived during the time of the Old Testament. God made a covenant with Abraham, promising the coming of Christ. Hence, the Old Covenant was not in opposition to Christ, but was rather a continuation of God's promise. Calvin then describes the New Covenant using the passage from the Apostles' Creed that describes Christ's suffering under Pontius Pilate and his return to judge the living and the dead. For Calvin, the whole course of Christ's obedience to the Father removed the discord between humanity and God.[94]

In the third book, Calvin describes how the spiritual union of Christ and humanity is achieved. He first defines faith as the firm and certain knowledge of God in Christ. The immediate effects of faith are repentance and the remission of sin. This is followed by spiritual regeneration, which returns the believer to the state of holiness before Adam's transgression. Complete perfection is unattainable in this life, and the believer should expect a continual struggle against sin.[95] Several chapters are then devoted to the subject of justification by faith alone. He defined justification as "the acceptance by which God regards us as righteous whom he has received into grace."[96] In this definition, it is clear that it is God who initiates and carries through the action and that people play no role; God is completely sovereign in salvation.[97] Near the end of the book, Calvin describes and defends the doctrine of predestination, a doctrine advanced by Augustine in opposition to the teachings of Pelagius. Fellow theologians who followed the Augustinian tradition on this point included Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther,[98] though Calvin's formulation of the doctrine went further than the tradition that went before him.[99] The principle, in Calvin's words, is that "All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death."[100] Calvin believed that God's absolute decree was double predestination, but he also confessed that this was a horrible decree: "The decree is dreadful indeed, I confess. (latin. "Decretum quidem horribile, fateor."; French. "Je confesse que ce decret nous doit epouvanter.")[101]

The final book describes what he considers to be the true Church and its ministry, authority, and sacraments. He denied the papal claim to primacy and the accusation that the reformers were schismatic. For Calvin, the Church was defined as the body of believers who placed Christ at its head. By definition, there was only one "catholic" or "universal" Church. Hence, he argued that the reformers "had to leave them in order that we might come to Christ."[102] The ministers of the Church are described from a passage from Ephesians, and they consisted of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and doctors. Calvin regarded the first three offices as temporary, limited in their existence to the time of the New Testament. The latter two offices were established in the church in Geneva. Although Calvin respected the work of the ecumenical councils, he considered them to be subject to God's Word found in scripture. He also believed that the civil and church authorities were separate and should not interfere with each other.[103]

Calvin defined a sacrament as an earthly sign associated with a promise from God. He accepted only two sacraments as valid under the new covenant: baptism and the Lord's Supper (in opposition to the Catholic acceptance of seven sacraments). He completely rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the treatment of the Supper as a sacrifice. He also could not accept the Lutheran doctrine of sacramental union in which Christ was "in, with and under" the elements. His own view was close to Zwingli's symbolic view, but it was not identical. Rather than holding a purely symbolic view, Calvin noted that with the participation of the Holy Spirit, faith was nourished and strengthened by the sacrament. In his words, the eucharistic rite was "a secret too sublime for my mind to understand or words to express. I experience it rather than understand it."[104]

Controversies

Joachim Westphal disagreed with Calvin's theology on the eucharist.

Calvin's theology caused controversy. Pierre Caroli, a Protestant minister in Lausanne, accused Calvin, as well as Viret and Farel, of Arianism in 1536. Calvin defended his beliefs on the Trinity in Confessio de Trinitate propter calumnias P. Caroli.[105] In 1551 Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, a physician in Geneva, attacked Calvin's doctrine of predestination and accused him of making God the author of sin. Bolsec was banished from the city, and after Calvin's death, he wrote a biography which severely maligned Calvin's character.[106] In the following year, Joachim Westphal, a Gnesio-Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, condemned Calvin and Zwingli as heretics in denying the eucharistic doctrine of the union of Christ's body with the elements. Calvin's Defensio sanae et orthodoxae doctrinae de sacramentis (A Defence of the Sober and Orthodox Doctrine of the Sacrament) was his response in 1555.[107] In 1556 Justus Velsius, a Dutch dissident, held a public disputation with Calvin during his visit to Frankfurt, in which Velsius defended free will against Calvin's doctrine of predestination. Following the execution of Servetus, a close associate of Calvin, Sebastian Castellio, broke with him on the issue of the treatment of heretics. In Castellio's Treatise on Heretics (1554), he argued for a focus on Christ's moral teachings in place of the vanity of theology,[108] and he afterward developed a theory of tolerance based on biblical principles.[109]

Calvin and the Jews

Scholars have debated Calvin's view of the Jews and Judaism. Some have argued that Calvin was the least anti-semitic among all the major reformers of his time, especially in comparison to Martin Luther.[110] Others have argued that Calvin was firmly within the anti-semitic camp.[111] Scholars agree that it is important to distinguish between Calvin's views toward the biblical Jews and his attitude toward contemporary Jews. In his theology, Calvin does not differentiate between God's covenant with Israel and the New Covenant. He stated, "all the children of the promise, reborn of God, who have obeyed the commands by faith working through love, have belonged to the New Covenant since the world began."[112] Nevertheless, he was a covenant theologian and argued that the Jews are a rejected people who must embrace Jesus to re-enter the covenant.[113]

Most of Calvin's statements on the Jewry of his era were polemical. For example, Calvin once wrote, "I have had much conversation with many Jews: I have never seen either a drop of piety or a grain of truth or ingenuousness—nay, I have never found common sense in any Jew."[114] In this respect, he differed little from other Protestant and Catholic theologians of his day.[115] Among his extant writings, Calvin only dealt explicitly with issues of contemporary Jews and Judaism in one treatise,[116] Response to Questions and Objections of a Certain Jew.[117] In it, he argued that Jews misread their own scriptures because they miss the unity of the Old and New Testaments.[118]

Political thought

The aim of Calvin's political theory was to safeguard the rights and freedoms of ordinary people. Although he was convinced that the Bible contained no blueprint for a certain form of government, Calvin favored a combination of democracy and aristocracy (mixed government). He appreciated the advantages of democracy.[119] To further minimize the misuse of political power, Calvin proposed to divide it among several political institutions like the aristocracy, lower estates, or magistrates in a system of checks and balances (separation of powers). Finally, Calvin taught that if rulers rise up against God they lose their divine right and must be deposed.[120][121] State and church are separate, though they have to cooperate to the benefit of the people. Christian magistrates have to make sure that the church can fulfill its duties in freedom. In extreme cases, the magistrates have to expel or execute dangerous heretics, but nobody can be forced to become a Protestant.[122][123]

Calvin thought that agriculture and the traditional crafts were normal human activities. With regard to trade and the financial world, he was more liberal than Luther, but both were strictly opposed to usury. Calvin allowed the charging of modest interest rates on loans. Like the other Reformers, Calvin understood work as a means through which the believers expressed their gratitude to God for their redemption in Christ and as a service to their neighbors. Everybody was obliged to work; loafing and begging were rejected. The idea that economic success was a visible sign of God's grace played only a minor role in Calvin's thinking. It became more important in later, partly secularized forms of Calvinism and became the starting-point of Max Weber's theory about the rise of capitalism.[121]

Selected works

Main article: John Calvin bibliography

Calvin's first published work was a commentary of Seneca the Younger's De Clementia. Published at his own expense in 1532, it showed that he was a humanist in the tradition of Erasmus with a thorough understanding of classical scholarship.[124] His first theological work, the Psychopannychia, attempted to refute the doctrine of soul sleep as promulgated by the Anabaptists. Calvin probably wrote it during the period following Cop's speech, but it was not published until 1542 in Strasbourg.[125]

Calvin wrote many letters to religious and political leaders throughout Europe, including this one sent to Edward VI of England.

Calvin produced commentaries on most of the books of the Bible. His first commentary on Romans was published in 1540, and he planned to write commentaries on the entire New Testament. Six years passed before he wrote his second, a commentary on First Epistle to the Corinthians, but after that he devoted more attention to reaching his goal. Within four years he had published commentaries on all the Pauline epistles, and he also revised the commentary on Romans. He then turned his attention to the general epistles, dedicating them to Edward VI of England. By 1555 he had completed his work on the New Testament, finishing with the Acts and the Gospels (he omitted only the brief second and third Epistles of John and the Book of Revelation). For the Old Testament, he wrote commentaries on Isaiah, the books of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and Joshua. The material for the commentaries often originated from lectures to students and ministers that he reworked for publication. From 1557 onwards, he could not find the time to continue this method, and he gave permission for his lectures to be published from stenographers' notes. These Praelectiones covered the minor prophets, Daniel, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and part of Ezekiel.[126]

Calvin also wrote many letters and treatises. Following the Responsio ad Sadoletum, Calvin wrote an open letter at the request of Bucer to Charles V in 1543, Supplex exhortatio ad Caesarem, defending the reformed faith. This was followed by an open letter to the pope (Admonitio paterna Pauli III) in 1544, in which Calvin admonished Paul III for depriving the reformers of any prospect of rapprochement. The pope proceeded to open the Council of Trent, which resulted in decrees against the reformers. Calvin refuted the decrees by producing the Acta synodi Tridentinae cum Antidoto in 1547. When Charles tried to find a compromise solution with the Augsburg Interim, Bucer and Bullinger urged Calvin to respond. He wrote the treatise, Vera Christianae pacificationis et Ecclesiae reformandae ratio in 1549, in which he described the doctrines that should be upheld, including justification by faith.[127]

Calvin provided many of the foundational documents for reformed churches, including documents on the catechism, the liturgy, and church governance. He also produced several confessions of faith in order to unite the churches. In 1559, he drafted the French confession of faith, the Gallic Confession, and the synod in Paris accepted it with few changes. The Belgic Confession of 1561, a Dutch confession of faith, was partly based on the Gallic Confession.[128]

Legacy

After the deaths of Calvin and his successor, Beza, the Geneva city council gradually gained control over areas of life that were previously in the ecclesiastical domain. Increasing secularisation was accompanied by the decline of the church. Even the Geneva académie was eclipsed by universities in Leiden and Heidelberg, which became the new strongholds of Calvin's ideas, first identified as "Calvinism" by Joachim Westphal in 1552. By 1585, Geneva, once the wellspring of the reform movement, had become merely its symbol.[129] Calvin had always warned against describing him as an "idol" and Geneva as a new "Jerusalem". He encouraged people to adapt to the environments in which they found themselves. Even during his polemical exchange with Westphal, he advised a group of French-speaking refugees, who had settled in Wesel, Germany, to integrate with the local Lutheran churches. Despite his differences with the Lutherans, he did not deny that they were members of the true Church. Calvin's recognition of the need to adapt to local conditions became an important characteristic of the reformation movement as it spread across Europe.[130]

The last moments of Calvin (Barcelona: Montaner y Simón, 1880–1883)

Due to Calvin's missionary work in France, his programme of reform eventually reached the French-speaking provinces of the Netherlands. Calvinism was adopted in the Electorate of the Palatinate under Frederick III, which led to the formulation of the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563. This and the Belgic Confession were adopted as confessional standards in the first synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1571. Several leading divines, either Calvinist or those sympathetic to Calvinism, settled in England (Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Jan Laski) and Scotland (John Knox). During the English Civil War, the Calvinistic Puritans produced the Westminster Confession, which became the confessional standard for Presbyterians in the English-speaking world. As the Ottoman Empire did not force Muslim conversion on its conquered western territories, reformed ideas were quickly adopted in the two-thirds of Hungary they occupied (the Habsburg-ruled third part of Hungary remained Catholic). A Reformed Constitutional Synod was held in 1567 in Debrecen, the main hub of Hungarian Calvinism, where the Second Helvetic Confession was adopted as the official confession of Hungarian Calvinists. Having established itself in Europe, the movement continued to spread to other parts of the world including North America, South Africa, and Korea.[131]

Calvin did not live to see the foundation of his work grow into an international movement; but his death allowed his ideas to break out of their city of origin, to succeed far beyond their borders, and to establish their own distinct character.[132]

Calvin is recognized as a Renewer of the Church in Lutheran churches commemorated on 26 May,[133] and on 28 May by the Episcopal Church (USA).[134]

John is remembered in the Church of England with a commemoration on 26 May.[135]

See also

Theology of John Calvin

Corpus Reformatorum

Franciscus Junius (the elder)

Genevan psalter

History of Protestantism

Immanuel Tremellius

John Calvin's views on Mary

Otto Zeinenger

Swiss Reformation

Theodore Beza

Wilhelm Heinrich Neuser

Criticism of Protestantism

Notes

"Calvin" Archived 21 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

Robert Dean Linder, The Reformation Era, (Greenwood Press, 2008), 139.

Cottret 2000, pp. 8–12; Parker 2006, pp. 17–20

Ganoczy 2004, pp. 3–4; Cottret 2000, pp. 12–16; Parker 2006, p. 21. McGrath 1990, pp. 22–27 states that Nicolas Colladon was the source that he attended Collège de la Marche which McGrath disputes.

Cottret 2000, pp. 17–18; Parker 2006, pp. 22–23

Parker 1975, p. 15. According to Cottret 2000, p. 20, there may have been a family conflict with the clergy in Noyon.

Cottret 2000, pp. 20–24; Parker 1975, pp. 22–25

Parker, T. H. L, John Calvin: a Biography, Louisville, KY (Westminster John Knox: 2006), 199–203.

J. Calvin, preface to Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), pp. xl–xli as quoted in Cottret 2000, p. 67. The translation by Anderson is available at "The Author's Preface", Commentary on Psalms, vol. 1 See also Parker 2006, p. 200.

from: Bruce Gordon, Calvin, New Haven; London 2009, p. 34.

Ganoczy 2004, pp. 9–10; Cottret 2000, pp. 65–70; Parker 2006, pp. 199–203; McGrath 1990, pp. 69–72

According to Cottret 2000, pp. 68–70, Ganoczy in his book Le Jeune Calvin. Genèse et evolution de sa vocation réformatrice, Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1966 p. 302, argues that Calvin conversion took place over several years and that it was not a biographical or chronological event. Cottret quotes Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la Parole. Essai de rhétorique réformée, Paris: H. Champion 1992 p. 522, noting a typological rather than a biographical perspective of the account of his conversion. The biographical argument is promoted by D. Fischer, "Conversion de Calvin", Etudes Theéologiques et Religieuses 58 (1983) pp. 203–220. According to Parker 1975, pp. 192–196 Parker is in sympathy with Ganoczy's view, but in his investigations, he concluded that a certain period for his conversion could be determined.

Bruce Gordon, Calvin, New Haven; London 2009, p. 34.

Ganoczy 2004, pp. 7–8; Cottret 2000, pp. 63–65, 73–74, 82–88, 101; Parker 2006, pp. 47–51; McGrath 1990, pp. 62–67

Ganoczy 2005

Ganoczy 2004, p. 9; Cottret 2000, pp. 110–114; Parker 2006, pp. 52, 72

McGrath 1990, pp. 76–78; Cottret 2000, pp. 110, 118–120; Parker 2006, pp. 73–75

Cottret 2000, p. 120

Parker 2006, p. 80

De Greef 2004, p. 50

Cottret 2000, pp. 128–129; Parker 1975, pp. 74–76

McGrath 1990, pp. 98–100; Cottret 2000, pp. 129–131; Parker 2006, pp. 85–90

McGrath 1990, pp. 101–102; Parker 2006, pp. 90–92

Calvin et Strasbourg Archived 8 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine (in French)

Parker 2006, pp. 92–93

Parker 1995, pp. 4–5

Parker 2006, pp. 97–101

Cottret 2000, pp. 143–146

Cottret 2000, p. 140

Parker 1975, p. 87

Cottret 2000, pp. 139–142; Parker 2006, pp. 96–97

Ganoczy 2004, pp. 12–14; De Greef 2004, p. 46; Cottret 2000, pp. 152–156

Parker 2006, p. 105

Parker 2006, pp. 103–107

Ganoczy 2004, pp. 15–17

Cottret 2000, pp. 165–166; Parker 2006, pp. 108–111

Cottret 2000, pp. 172–174; Parker 2006, pp. 112–115

Cottret 2000, pp. 170–171

Mark J. Larson (2009). Calvin's Doctrine of the State: A Reformed Doctrine and Its American Trajectory, The Revolutionary War, and the Founding of the Republic. Wipf and Stock. pp. 1–20. ISBN 978-1-60608-073-3. Archived from the original on 15 September 2015. Retrieved 14 August 2015.

Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge University Press, 1985)

DeVries 2004, pp. 106–124; Parker 2006, pp. 116–123

See also Parker, T. H. L. (2002), The Oracles of God: An Introduction to the Preaching of John Calvin, Cambridge: James Clarke Company, ISBN 978-0-227-17091-5

Currid, John D. (2006), Calvin and the Biblical Languages, UK: Christian Focus Publications, ISBN 978-1-84550-212-6

Voltaire, 1694–1778. "The works of Voltaire : Volume XXVII. Ancient and Modern History. 4 . Charles V., 1512 – Philip II., 1584". cristoraul.com. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 13 September 2015.

Parker 2006, pp. 129–130

Cottret 2000, pp. 183–184; Parker 2006, p. 131

Schaff, Philip, "§ 108. Calvin's Struggle with the Patriots and Libertines", History of the Christian Church, vol. VIII, archived from the original on 9 May 2012, retrieved 17 January 2013

Fisher, George Park (1912). The Reformation. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 192. Archived from the original on 3 April 2016. Retrieved 23 October 2015.

Cottret 2000, pp. 185–186; Parker 2006, pp. 124–126

Cottret 2000, p. 187; Parker 2006, p. 126

Parker 2006, p. 127

De Greef 2008, pp. 30–31; McNeill 1954, pp. 170–171; Cottret 2000, pp. 190–191; Parker 2006, pp. 136–138

Parker 2006, pp. 139–145

Majeed, Azeem (2005). "How Islam changed medicine". BMJ. 331 (7531): 1486–1487. doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1486. PMC 1322233. PMID 16373721.

"Michael Servetus: Saint, Heretic and Martyr (Part 3: A Radical Theology)". The PostBarthian. 5 October 2018. Retrieved 9 May 2020.

Hunted Heretic, p. 141.

Cottret 2000, pp. 213–216; Parker 2006, p. 146

Cottret 2000, pp. 216–217; Parker 2006, pp. 147–148; Levy, Leonard W. (1995), Blasphemy: Verbal offense Against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie, p. 65, ISBN 978-0-8078-4515-8.

See the letters in John Calvin, Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, Book VIII, First Appendix, IV & VII.

Calvin and the Judaism, Influence and actions and obsessions. Revoeder Hebr.Press. Levi Lancaster 200, p. 106.

Gonzalez Echeverría," Andrés Laguna and Michael Servetus: two converted humanist doctors of the XVI century" in: Andrés Laguna International Congress. Humanism, Science and Politics in the Renaissance Europe, García Hourcade y Moreno Yuste, coord., Junta de Castilla y León, Valladolid,1999 pp. 377–389

González Echeverría " Michael Servetus belonged to the famous converted Jewish family The Zaporta", Pliegos de Bibliofilia, nº 7, Madrid pp. 33–42. 1999

González Echeverría" On the Jewish origin of Michael Servetus" Raíces. Jewish Magazine of Culture, Madrid, nº 40, pp. 67–69. 1999

Inconsistencies of John Calvin, A.C. Williams, Artiviche Ed, Pressore, 2012, p. 34–39.

1749 First questioning. Judgement of Vienne in Dauphiné against Servet. D'artigny Nouveaux mémoires d'histoire Tome Seconde. pp. 55–154.

1749 Second questioning. Judgement of Vienne in Dauphiné against Servet.D'artigny Nouveaux mémoires d'histoire Tome Seconde pp. 55–154)

Parker 2006, pp. 149–150

Parker 1975, p. 122

Verdict and Sentence for Michael Servetus (1533) in A Reformation Reader eds. Denis R. Janz; 268–270

McGrath 1990, pp. 118–120; Cottret 2000, pp. 222–225; Parker 2006, pp. 150–152

Cottret 2000, pp. 195–198; Parker 2006, pp. 154–156

Cottret 2000, pp. 198–200; Parker 2006, pp. 156–157; Manetsch 2013, p. 187

Cottret 2000, p. 235

Parker 1975, pp. 162–163

Parker 1975, pp. 164–165

Parker 2006, pp. 170–172

Olsen 2004, pp. 158–159; Ganoczy 2004, pp. 19–20; Cottret 2000, pp. 256–259; Parker 2006, pp. 157–160

Preserved Smith (1920). The Age of the Reformation. H. Holt. p. 201.

McGrath 1990, pp. 182–184; Parker 2006, pp. 178–180

Parker 2006, pp. 161–164

McGrath 1990, pp. 195–196; Cottret 2000, pp. 259–262; Parker 2006, pp. 185–191

Rossel, Patrice (1994), Une visite du cimetière de Plainpalais, Les Iles futures; Palfi, Véronique (2003), Le Cimetière des Rois, De l'hôpital des pestiférés au cimetière de Plainpalais, Cinq siècle d'histoire, étude historique pour la Conservation architecturale de la Ville de Genève

Hesselink 2004, pp. 74–75; Parker 1995, pp. 4–9

Bouwsma 1988, p. 9; Helm 2004, p. 6; Hesselink 2004, pp. 75–77

Parker 1995, pp. 4–10; De Greef 2004, pp. 42–44; McGrath 1990, pp. 136–144, 151–174; Cottret 2000, pp. 110–114, 309–325; Parker 2006, pp. 53–62, 97–99, 132–134, 161–164

Niesel 1980, pp. 23–24; Hesselink 2004, pp. 77–78; Parker 1995, pp. 13–14

Parker 1995, p. 21

Steinmetz 1995, pp. 59–62; Hesselink 2004, p. 85; Parker 1995, pp. 29–34

"The human heart is an idol factory: a modern critique of John Calvin". The PostBarthian. 6 August 2019. Retrieved 8 May 2020.

Hesselink 2004, p. 85; Parker 1995, p. 43

Niesel 1980, pp. 70–79; Parker 1995, p. 47

Gerrish 2004, pp. 290–291, 302. According to Gerrish, Calvin put his defence against the charge of novelty in the preface of every edition of the Institutes. The original preface of the first edition was addressed to the King of France, Francis I. The defence expressed his opinion that patristic authority favoured the reformers and that allegation of the reformers deviating from the patristic consensus was a fiction. See also Steinmetz 1995, pp. 122–137.

Niesel 1980, pp. 80–88; Parker 1995, pp. 50–57

Parker 1995, pp. 57–77

Niesel 1980, pp. 126–130; Parker 1995, pp. 78–86

Parker 1995, pp. 97–98

Niesel 1980, pp. 130–137; Parker 1995, pp. 95–103

Parker 1995, p. 114

Heron 2005, p. 243

Calvin 1989, Book III, Chapter 21, Par 5

"John Calvin confessed Double Predestination is a Horrible and Dreadful Decree". The PostBarthian. 31 May 2014. Retrieved 8 May 2020.

Parker 1995, p. 134; Niesel 1980, pp. 187–195

Parker 1995, pp. 135–144

Potter & Greengrass 1983, pp. 34–42; McDonnell 1967, p. 206; Parker 1995, pp. 147–157; Niesel 1980, pp. 211–228; Steinmetz 1995, pp. 172–173

Gamble 2004, p. 199; Cottret 2000, pp. 125–126

Gamble 2004, pp. 198–199; McGrath 1990, pp. 16–17; Cottret 2000, pp. 208–211

Gamble 2004, pp. 193–196; Parker 1975, p. 163

Cottret 2000, pp. 227–233

Ganoczy 2004, pp. 17–18

See Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth: Europe from Christian Separation through the Protestant Reformation, Volume II of the Covenant Tradition in Politics (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995)

Pater 1987, pp. 256–296; Baron 1972, pp. 343–344

Lange van Ravenswaay 2009, p. 144 quoting from Calvin, Institutes II.11.10

Pak, G. Sojin. John Calvin and the Jews: His Exegetical Legacy. Reformed Institute of Metropolitan Washington, 2009, p. 25.

Calvin's commentary of Daniel 2:44–45 translated by Myers, Thomas.Calvin's Commentaries. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948, quoted in Lange van Ravenswaay 2009, p. 146

Detmers 2006, p. 199; Lange van Ravenswaay 2009, pp. 143–146; Pak 2010, p. 177

Pak 2010, p. 3

Ad Questiones et Obiecta Iudaei cuisdam Responsio Ioannis Calvini in CR 37:653–674 and translated by R. Susan Frank in M. Sweetland Laver, Calvin, Jews, and Intra-Christian Polemics (PhD diss, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 220–261.

Pak 2010, p. 27

Jan Weerda, Calvin, in Evangelisches Soziallexikon, Stuttgart (Germany) (1954), col. 210

Clifton E. Olmstead (1960), History of Religion in the United States, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., pp. 9–10

Jan Weerda, Calvin, in Evangelisches Soziallexikon, col. 211

Jan Weerda, Calvin, in Evangelisches Soziallexikon, col. 212

Otto Weber, Calvin, Johannes, in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3. Auflage, Band I (1957), col. 1598

De Greef 2004, p. 41; McGrath 1990, pp. 60–62; Cottret 2000, pp. 63–65; Steinmetz 2009

De Greef 2004, p. 53; Cottret 2000, pp. 77–82

De Greef 2004, pp. 44–45; Parker 2006, pp. 134–136, 160–162

De Greef 2004, pp. 46–48

De Greef 2004, pp. 50–51

McGrath 1990, pp. 200–201; Cottret 2000, p. 239

Pettegree 2004, pp. 207–208

Holder 2004, pp. 246–256; McGrath 1990, pp. 198–199

Pettegree 2004, p. 222

Church of England Calendar Archived 22 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine

"John Calvin". satucket.com. Archived from the original on 6 June 2015. Retrieved 13 September 2015.

"The Calendar". The Church of England. Retrieved 27 March 2021.

References

John Calvin memorial medal by László Szlávics, Jr., 2008

Baron, Salo (1972), "John Calvin and the Jews", in Feldman, Leon A. (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Jewish History, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, OCLC 463285878 (originally published 1965).

Berg, Machiel A. van den (2009), Friends of Calvin, Grand Rapids, Mi.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., ISBN 978-0-8028-6227-3

Bouwsma, William James (1988), John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-504394-5.

Calvin, John (1989) [1564], Institutio Christianae religionis [Institutes of the Christian Religion] (in Latin), Translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

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DeVries, Dawn (2004), "Calvin's preaching", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Dyer, Thomas Henry (1850), The Life of John Calvin, London: John Murray

Gamble, Richard C. (2004), "Calvin's controversies", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Ganoczy, Alexandre (2004), "Calvin's life", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Ganoczy, Alexandre (2005), "Calvin, John", in Hillebrand, Hans J. (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-195-06493-3

Gerrish, R. A. (2004), "The place of Calvin in Christian theology", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Graham, W. Fred (1971), The Constructive Revolutionary: John Calvin and His Socio-Economic Impact, Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, ISBN 978-0-8042-0880-2.

Helm, Paul (2004), John Calvin's Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-925569-6.

Heron, Alasdair (2005), "John Calvin", in Lacoste, Jean-Yves (ed.), Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, New York: CRC Press.

Hesselink, I. John (2004), "Calvin's theology", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Holder, R. Ward (2004), "Calvin's heritage", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Lane, Anthony N.S. (2009), "Calvin's Institutes", A Reader's Guide, Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-8010-3731-3

Lange van Ravenswaay, J. Marius J. (2009) [2008], "Calvin and the Jews", in Selderhuis, Herman J. (ed.), Calvijn Handboek [The Calvin Handbook] (in Dutch), Translated by Kampen Kok, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., ISBN 978-0-8028-6230-3

Manetsch, Scott M. (2013), Calvin's Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, New York: Oxford University Press

McDonnell, Kilian (1967), John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist, Princeton: Princeton University Press, OCLC 318418.

McGrath, Alister E. (1990), A Life of John Calvin, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-631-16398-5.

McNeill, John Thomas (1954), The History and Character of Calvinism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-500743-5.

Niesel, Wilhelm (1980), The Theology of Calvin, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, ISBN 978-0-8010-6694-8.

Olsen, Jeannine E. (2004), "Calvin and social-ethical issues", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Pak, G. Sujin (2010), The Judaizing Calvin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-537192-5.

Parker, T. H. L. (1995), Calvin: An Introduction to His Thought, London: Geoffrey Chapman, ISBN 978-0-225-66575-8.

——————— (1975), John Calvin, Tring, Hertfordshire, England: Lion Publishing plc, ISBN 978-0-7459-1219-6.

——————— (2006), John Calvin: A Biography, Oxford: Lion Hudson plc, ISBN 978-0-7459-5228-4.

Pater, Calvin Augustus (1987), "Calvin, the Jews, and the Judaic Legacy", in Furcha, E. J. (ed.), In Honor of John Calvin: Papers from the 1986 International Calvin Symposium, Montreal: McGill University Press, ISBN 978-0-7717-0171-9.

Pettegree, Andrew (2004), "The spread of Calvin's thought", in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-01672-8

Potter, G. R.; Greengrass, M. (1983), John Calvin, London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., ISBN 978-0-7131-6381-0.

Steinmetz, David C. (1995), Calvin in Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-509164-9.

————————— (2009), "Calvin as Biblical Interpreter Among the Ancient Philosophers", Interpretation, 63 (2): 142–153, doi:10.1177/002096430906300204, S2CID 170454772

Further reading

Backus, Irena; Benedict, Philip, eds. (2011). Calvin and His Influence, 1509–2009. Oxford University Press.

Balserak, Jon (2014), John Calvin as Sixteenth-Century Prophet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-198-70325-9.

Calvin, Claude Wesley (1945), The Calvin Families: Origin and History of the American Calvins, with a Partial Genealogy, Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, Inc., ISBN 978-0-598-99702-9.

Gordon, Bruce (2009), Calvin, London/New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-17084-9.

Muller, Richard A. (2001). The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-515168-8.

Mullett, Michael (2011). John Calvin. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-41547-699-7.

Sewell, Alida Leni (2011). Calvin, the Body and Sexuality: An Inquiry into His Anthropology. Amsterdam: VU University Press. ISBN 978-90-8659-587-7.

Tamburello, Dennis E. (2007), Union with Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Bernard, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, ISBN 978-0-664-22054-9

Selderhuis, Herman (2009). The Calvin Handbook. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-6230-3.

Archive sources

The State Archives of Neuchâtel preserve the autograph correspondence sent by John Calvin to other reformers

1PAST, Fonds: Archives de la société des pasteurs et ministres neuchâtelois, Series: Lettres des Réformateurs. Archives de l'État de Neuchâtel.

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