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Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics

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As the author is quick to point out, an obvious characteristic of life is purposefulness. As living creatures, we all have a sense, either unconscious, conscious, or both, of purpose. But how does this purposefulness, or "Life-Urge" fit into how we view ourselves, from a religious point of view?

Carleton says there are four main ways in which people can do this. First, one can view oneself as "Me." That is, the sense of purpose is one's own purpose and no more. Second, one can view oneself as a living being among many living beings, all of whom have a sense of purpose. Third, one can view oneself as part of Life, which has a unified Purpose (basically, a Buddhist point of view). Fourth, one can view oneself as an entity whose purpose is secondary to what really counts, namely one or more Goddesses or Gods and Her, His, or Their Purpose. The author strongly prefers the second of these viewpoints, which he calls "prototheism."

This idea is contrasted with what today is practically a majority concept, namely the fourth point of view: ascribing the Life Urge to a single Deity. Of course, monotheistic religions today generally prescribe specific theologies, sets of beliefs, and practices to vast numbers of people. But Carleton shows that even now, there are alternatives for people who want more flexibilty, freedom, or privacy in their religious practices.

Still, all this is the icing on the cake. I left out decribing the cake, namely the initial chapters of the book. Here, Carleton starts with an excellent summary of the origin of Catholic Christianity (there are appendices that discuss Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam). He starts with the origin of the concept of deities, but adds that when one considers, say, fire to be a deity, it "closes out any attempt to learn the true nature of fire."

Given the tendency for origins to be viewed in religious ways, Carleton gives some more excellent summaries....of the way we view origins scientifically. In roughly sixty impressive pages, he covers the origin of our Universe, the origin of the Earth, the origin of life on Earth, the evolution of life to arrive at humans, and the origin of human society and of societal theistic beliefs (if you think all this is easy to write, you try it). After that, he speculates about the attributes of the conscious and unconscious parts of our thinking and responses, and how that has contributed to our sense of purpose and of religion.

So what is to be done about the fact that much of the world is monotheistic today? Carleton basically advises tolerance, not potentially risky and disruptive confrontation. Attitudes are changing. Let them. His recommendations are to move in a direction (towards prototheism) that he feels we are heading in anyway.

I recommend this book. Nobody is going to agree with every single point in it, but it has plenty for us all to think about.

This unusual book advocates a science of religion, "Prototheism." The author is careful to point out that he is not advocating Prototheism as a new religion, but as the SCIENCE of religion, a subtle but important distinction. Prototheism does not rely on on extant God, but instead puts all its marbles on a "Life Urge" that inhabits all living things - a living thing being any complex collection of molecules above RNA. Unlike religions, Prototheism is amenable to changes in its tenets in response to new discoveries in science.

From page 184: "Life initially emerged from Earth's matter nearly four-billion years ago as molecules randomly rearranged themselves to better withstand adversity. Other molecules adopted the practice and elaborated on it, passing their ever more complex and elegant arrangements on to other macromolecules - they replicated. What was a reaction became a PROaction, a way-of-life, a Life Urge...as this Urge to Life experienced ever greater adversity, it found ever more elegant solutions - synergistic arrangements of complex structures...as nervous systems became more elaborate they became brains and finally brains became reflexive - consciousness emerged. All Life is innately aware of its Life Urge else it wouldn't be alive...we conscious humans can not only revel in Life but can choose to help carry Life's evolution forward."

The fallacy with this lies in how to scientifically identify the "Life Urge." Without that, Prototheism has nothing to study. The author presents supporting literature from brain studies but they do not impress me as "hard data." Dennett's (Darwin's Dangerous Idea) coined term "sky hooks" describes the tendency to ascribe to God that which cannot (as yet) be explained otherwise, that eludes explanation - a "God of the Gaps." The author relied on religion for a large part of his life and then abandoned it. Rather than searching externally for God, Carleton now looks internally to the "Life Urge." I would question the need to look at all - there are many other explanations (Boyer's "Religion Explained," Atran's "In Gods We Trust"). Among other things, whether a non-religious individual perceives an unfilled void depends on his/her personality and on the role religion played in his early life.

The author is a former Catholic with a rather rigid Jesuit upbringing during the last parts of the depression. In his adult life an "epiphany" or two caused him to leave his leadership role in his church. He is an engineer with an MBA and has always been interested in science. In his retirement he embarked on a more extensive study of science resulting in this book. In Prototheism, he postulates that an innate Urge to Life has always been misinterpreted by humans as an external God which doesn't exist. He is not unduly unkind to religions, and suggests to any non-fundamentalists (realising he is never going to be successful with fundamentalists of any sort) how his idea of a SCIENCE of religion might appeal to them regardless of their current affiliation - including those of Jewish or Islam faith. The closest religion to his liking appears to be Universal Unitarianism, except that it has no "overarching doctrine." His excerpt about their belief system does seem to match his ethical thoughts.

With that out of the way, might I say a few words about how truly impressive this book is. The first half is devoted to some of the best summaries of large disciplines of study I have ever read. The bibliography and his frequent personal comments reveal the untold hours of research, rewrites, and care that went into trying to make clear these difficult concepts. These are 1) a synthesis of early Christianity 2) cosmology and quantum physics 3) life's beginnings 4) animal evolution 5) human evolution 6) brain development & consciousness. He appears to be completely mainstream, with the possible exception that 1) He seems to accept group selection 2) He relies on "synergy" as the core of the Life Urge, but is not convincing 3) He suggests a tentative mechanism for ESP.

In addition to 254 pages of text, there are 106 pages of "Notes," very conveniently arranged, extensively documenting his sources and providing additional information in a talkative format. I looked forward to these sections and read each one after finishing the corresponding chapter. The "Life Urge" is partially referenced to other authors, although "prototheism" is entirely his own.

This can be a challenging read in spots for the scientific novice but well worth the effort. I frequently saw him leading up to a given topic and eagerly anticipated how he was going to develop it - his many autobiographical inserts adding flavor. The undertaking of this book was an obvious labor of love and I commend the author for such a well thought out and presented result.

An enthusiastic 5 stars!!

Paul Carleton's Concepts analyses history, physics, biology, psychology and economics. At bottom, however, Concepts is about a single philosophical question: how does a skeptic, turned off by the traditional God, find meaning in life? Indeed, how does s/he find a "religion" in the best senses of that word?

Concepts is the result of an intellectual quest on which Carleton embarked when he retired from his business career. It's difficult to imagine a more worthy retirement project. The fruits of his labor can be summed up as follows: "Where does religion come from ... [i]f not from 'out there' [i.e., heaven]? ... My hunch is that it's our own Life Urge which is the sine qua non of all Life and which emerges spontaneously in all Life ... [I]f what's worshipped as 'God' is in fact our own Life Urge, could our 'Life Urge' be the basis of a new or revised religion?"

Indeed, it could -- and it is wonderful to see people who are turned off by traditional faiths look for alternatives, rather than simply proclaiming themselves "atheists" and kissing religion goodbye. As I read this book, however, I wondered why Carleton spent relatively little time addressing other alternatives already available to the skeptic. For example, Spinoza's philosophy posits a "conatus" inside every natural form that strives to persist in its own being, and extols a God devoid of all supernatural substance that encompasses the eternal and infinite in nature. Those who wish to follow in Carleton's footsteps and create religious alternatives of their own are advised to consider carefully the work of Spinoza and other heretical philosophers before starting from scratch. We all should value many types of wheels, but nobody should feel the need to reinvent the concept.

Joseph Campbell once surveyed our current scientific understanding of the cosmos, compared it to the widespread belief in god as a " non-specific masculine personality residing somewhere beyond the moon" and asked what a thinking person should make of this conceptual contradiction. Paul Carleton's book Concepts is written for such thinking persons. If you are curious about religion-why we have it, why it persists-this is a terrific introduction to prototheism, the science of religion. Carleton covers an impressive amount of territory and shares his research, notes, interpretations and bibliography in a lively, conversational style. His conclusions are remarkably optimistic and pragmatic. Not for the scientifically faint of heart. Definitely for the curious and open-minded. This book should foster the best philosophical conversations you'll ever have.

If you are breaking down the walls of a dogma-ridden religious indoctrination and want a guide and traveling companion as you explore the terrain outside the boundaries, you may find Concepts a useful tool for your journey. Carleton's friendly, personal writing style, and his use of anecdotes from his own life to illustrate points he is crafting, makes reading fairly easy for such a heady and comprehensive topic. Although I didn't always agree with the author's assumptions or conclusions, I found many of his arguments thought provoking. He obviously loves his subject and has given it a great deal of thought. If your touchstone is science, and you like reading that is weighted toward the intellectual, you may find many useful jewels in this wide-ranging exploration.

Carleton has done our homework for us. Concepts, his book for science-minded, religious skeptics, is like a visit to a deep well. For the well-read, it is a fresh drink of familiar knowledge gained only after years of dry searching. For the newly initiated, it is a baptismal dunk into waters that will flow to every curiosity and question about one's religion and unexplored beliefs. This book takes the reader on a journey that many may hesitate to take, but should take nonetheless. The endnotes by themselves provide a bachelor's level education - take advantage.

This philosophy book details the quest for a believable narrative in light of contemporary science. Carleton has clearly done a fantastic job keeping up with recent scientific developments and uses this to critique the narrative of what we might call fundamental Protestantism. As a complement to this quest two books immediately jump to mind (both of which are in the bibliography) How We Believe : Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (second edition) by Michael Shermer, and Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer. This book follows the basic position taken in those two books.
In reading the bibliography to get an idea what the book offers I note that certain names I expect to find to address narrative construction issues I find most intriguing, that includes those names associated with the linguistic turn and the "prison house of language" are not in this bibliography. These include names such as Hegel, Wittgenstein and Rorty. This aspect central to postmodern narrative construction is not part of the approach.
As a result the book is interesting but the author misses something important. This is evident in the very description of the issues brought up. For example, Carleton explains he is an ex-Catholic and why. This strikes me as defining Carleton as a fundamentalist scientist doing philosophy. By chapter 4 this is even more convincing. Carleton is a scientific fundamentalist in the sense that he is applying contemporary science to revise the narratives from which we traditionally derive our values in much the same way that others have without the insights that come from the linguistic turn. This approach ignores the nature of language, language games, and narrative construction - I am thinking of examples such as Wittgenstein and Quine in this respect, though the whole movement from Hume through Kant and Hegel which sets up the linguistic turn are important. If Carleton would consider the nature of what he is constructing from the standpoint of language analysis and narrative construction, and so recognize "the prison house of language" within which he is working this would come to a better end. An excellent example of how this point would change the outcome concerns Carleton's use of the metaphor of the solar system and the geo-centered system as the typical icon of progress. Yet relativity gives us the view of both of these as mirror image models both useful in different contexts - they are different perspectives on the same thing, while Einstein gives us still another view, both earth and sun are traveling in a straight line while space is curved, and there are still others each of which are useful for certain purposes. The paradigm of relativity when applied across the board, especially when it comes to knowledge and what can be known, would lead to a more successful narrative I think. An example of a scientist that does do this is Stuart Kauffman. (See Investigations by Stuart A. Kauffman) This is important since remaining a skeptic strikes me as a very uncomfortable place to be - I think of Hegel's description of the "unhappy consciousness" in this regard. Einstein and Godel both viewed things from their paradigm in a way that led to better things. (See Incompleteness by Rebecca Goldstein for a wonderful description of this.) This is a good book and leads to an avid desire that the investigations continue!

A challenging, very articulate and extremely well researched book. It ponders the vast topic of origins, from the universe to life and the questions of civilization. Who am I? Why am I here? What is next? A great reference book to and own and re-read.

Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest For Science-Minded Skeptics Of Catholic, And Other Christian, Jewish & Muslim Backgrounds searches for the common source of beliefs in God - exploring prototheism, the science of religion. From the origins of belief in gods to how Christianity came to have such enormous influence in the western world, to what modern science has to tell us on the workings of the brain and applications this knowledge has with regard to faith systems, Concepts is a thought-provoking study that neither embraces nor denounces any one religion. Instead it explores what science has to say about faith itself in a critical and compelling manner.

Note: this review was submitted to me by Charles G. Floeter of Troy Michigan who asked that I post it for him. CONCEPTS, A PROTOTHEIST QUEST FOR SCIENCE-MINDED SKEPTICS IS A MUST READ STUDY FOR THE SERIOUS STUDENT WITH AN OPEN AND INQUIRING MIND. WELL WRITTEN, RESEARCHED IN DEPTH AND CAREFULLY DOCUMENTED. PROVIDES ALTERNATIVE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS WE HAVE BEEN TAUGHT NOT TO ASK.