Is the prosperity gospel all that?

In her book "Blessed," Kate Bowler provides a good ... but not fantasic, overview of the history of the success gospel, prosperity gospel, or whatever you'll call it. Below is an expanded version of a recent Goodreads review.

Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel by Kate Bowler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bowler gets five stars for personal research, 4.5 for some of her conclusions, and 3.5 for not drawing further conclusions in some areas or asking further questions. And now, with further reading, she gets 2.5 stars, as I've seen on her website, her other book and more, for the degree she believes in at least the healing portion of the prosperity gospel and doesn't disclose that. So, my overall rating, originally four stars, is reduced to three.

The biggest best part of the book is her tracing the roots of the prosperity gospel and noting its multidenominational background. Most of its preachers are not mainline protestants, but many of them are also not explicitly pentecostal or even explicitly charismatic.

Second biggest part is noting the emphasis on health and related issues along with wealth.

Third biggest is tracing that part as an earlier part, and its connections to Christian fringes like the Divine Science movement of the late 19th century and the New Thought of the early 20th, that included places like Unity.

Fourth is noting its greater racial cross-pollination than much of Christianity while showing it still has flaws.

Fifth is the data she has collected behind all this.

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Where it falls short?

First, with its "name it and claim it" and "power of the spoken word" background, she never asks why so many of these preachers still use KJV English. Or why they use the word "Jehovah," which doesn't exist in Hebrew and is a made-up English (and somewhat, other western languages) conglomeration.

Second, although its prosperity angle is different, it's not charismatic, and it has no paid parish ministry, as I see it, Mormonism is a part of the prosperity gospel, too, with the same ultimate Second Great Awakening roots as the rest of the movement. Nowhere mentioned.

Third, something also nowhere mentioned, and not a church, but yes, a religious movement in my mind, in its language and federal court rulings? The 12-step movement. Again, like Mormons, no paid leadership outside of HQ, and not charismatic. But, New Thought leaders, Emmet Fox above all, were highly cited by many early AA pioneers. And, after the initial "inventory," AA and NA's idea of a daily inventory for good things as well as bad at least somewhat parallels name it and claim it.

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And, now that Googling has led me to her book on battling Stage 4 colon cancer, the 1- and 2-star reviews of it kind of explain why she didn't bring a broader perspective to this book, as good as it is. https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Hap...


View all my reviews

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Added to that initial review here:

A NYT column, and knowing her country of origin, leads me to see her as a kinder, gentler Canadian evangelical protestant.

Also, she says that black prosperity churches, knowing they're battling uphill, seem to do more than white prosperity churches about helping members actually do things like start small businesses.

Which itself is ... interesting.

New research says people who attend prosperity churches are actually LESS likely to be entrepreneurs than the general American public.

First, the study researched more than 1,000 people, so it doesn't have small sample size issues. So, let's call it legit.

Second, it notes that men overall in America are more entrepreneurial than women. But, in prosperity churches, it's more even. Since these churches are below the US average, I presume that means men in prosperity churches have fallen in entrepreneurial spirit. And, the study's authors explicitly admit they're not sure if prosperity teachings and entrepreneurialism are more connected among minorities than whites, the same, or less connected.

But at least they're asking questions that Kate Bowler didn't, or didn't get others to ask.

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Note: A publicist, or something, for Bowler, did her best job in defending Bowler in an email while noting (natch) that she has a new book coming out.

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New update, 2021. First, contra defenders of Wiki, it's kind of laughable that its entry for Bowler can't tell you for sure the year of her birth. BUT! She still gets an entry! Second, it's laughable and sad that she's got a teaching gig at Duke. And, barf me, her website has her connected with Adam Grant, offering blessings and more.

D.S. Wilson tries to extend group selection to cultural evolution

This looks to be a howler.

Wilson, who along with non-relative E.O. Wilson, tried to turd-polish group selection in evolutionary biology by linking it with traditional genetic selection under the moniker of multi-level selection, is now trying to apply it to cultural evolution.

The biological evolution of individual humans itself is less a driver of cultural evolution than are non-biological changes in human societies. To the degree that group selection on the biological side has some small bit of reality, it obviously would be a small bit of the minority half of biological influences on cultural evolution.

But, apparently DS has a new book to sell. That's all about this.

At least, that appears to be the case in a recent exchange of online letters between him and Massimo Pigliucci, which starts with Massimo's response to Wilson's original, which is above it. Massimo politely torpedoes him.

And I snarkily piled on, on Massimo's Facebook page.

 I didn't know that D.S. Wilson had been trying to apply group selection aka multi-level selection to cultural evolution. And, of COURSE there's a new book attached to it. 

Second snarky comment. Is putting "evolutionary" in front of all sorts of ideas and fields kind of like doing the same with "neuro-"? 

And I smell a blog post coming on ... :) 

I think it's going to be about multi-level evolutionary neurobiology. 

And, does Wilson have any algorithms for this?

(Had to throw Dennett under the bus, too.)

More seriously, Wilson does sound like the neuro-faddists.

Wilson is a kind of odd duck in other ways. He rejects most of the Tooby-Cosmides central theorums of evolutionary psychology while still apparently believing in something like it.

That said, OTOH, I think I accept that evolutionary biology has more influence on average human psychological traits than Massimo does, albeit less than Wilson does.

Because of this, and contra his hint that Tooby-Cosmides might be a minority view, while I'll use the more clunky "evolutionary-biology based psychological development" or something like that, the phrase "evolutionary psychology" is poisoned fruit. So is "sociobiology," again contra D.S. — and E.O.

As for Wilson touting his ideas of the evolutionary development of religion? No soap. I'll take Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran ahead of you any day.

And, that leads us back to the original.

Pace Massimo, the claim that one can find different group levels to study in exegesis of history is laughable.

Or tohu wevohu, per Genesis 1.

Or empty and cognitively meaningless, per logical positivism.

I mean, there are different schools of history, like Great Man, economic, etc., but ...

BUT ...

First, most of them aren't that exclusive; they cross-pollinate and aren't separately selected for.

Second, Wilson doesn't even explain what group selection would be like in cultural evolution, at least not from what he writes Massimo. That's the cognitively meaningless part.

Third, as Massimo points out, Wilson offers no explanatory power, nor testable hypotheses.

What is "agency"? What is Aristotle's influence on defining it?

These are both issues relevant to Jessica Riskin's 2016 book "The Restless Clock," first brought to my attention by Barbara Ehrenreich's "Natural Causes."

In a recent review of Christopher List's book on free will, I first thought her definition of agency might be the same as his of "intentionality," especially since he seemed to use both words almost interchangeably. Then I recognized my definition may not be Rifkin's. She leaves it a bit fuzzy, as noted in this very good review of her book and may overstate the empirical case that justifies her idea, or does not. Additional reviews, like this, make me wonder if she isn't partly down the rabbit hole of Aristotelean causes, especially with her stress on the theological background of mechanistic agency, and of course, Aristotle dominating late medieval Europe's intellectualism. I halfway think she is trying to thread her way between final and efficient causes, wiht her talk of pass-mechanical and active views of nature.

So, if all of Western philosophy is, to riff on Whitehead, but footnotes to Plato and Aristotle, we have yet another example of needing to burn the original books and throw away most of the footnotes. Tinbergen's Four Questions would be a good start on this vis a vis Aristotle's four causes.

Christopher List, the new hottie on free will, leads me to double down on "mu"

Christopher List has a new book out defending free will from determinists.

Two online friends of mine, John Horgan and Massimo Pigliucci, have strongly differing reactions.

Massimo, citing a Nautilus piece, calls his arguments muddled.

Horgan, interviewing him, loves him.

So, who's right?

Neither, totally, and of course, List isn't totally right.

He first says, per Nautilus, that free will is compatible with physics. Any non-greedy reductionist, or non-reductionist, who is still a materialist, has no problem with that. Does that mean that compatibilist free will is what's in play, per a Dan Dennett?

No, because there is nothing free will needs to be compatible TO. But, List doesn't really delve into that, it seems.

He does seem to make some sort of argument for some sort of traditional free will, either weakly compatibilist or non-compatibilist.

And, in doing so, he assumes a unitary self is running the switches — the same mistake Dennett makes in assuming there is a Cartesian Free Willer even after denying there is a Cartesian Meaner. All ground I've covered regularly. But List seems to assume a unitary self.

Now, per Hume and his comment to people who asked how he slept at night after articulating the Problem of Induction, to some degree, "we" act as if "we" have unitary selves.

Well, not always, we don't.

From St. Paul's saying "that which I don't want to do, I do the more," to alcohol and drug addicts having a sober self and addicted self, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (that's what the book was actually about, folks) battling it out, "we" sometimes recognize there IS no unitary self in command. It's rare for us to do that, and it usually has to be shoved in our faces.

But, "we" pick which one of these subselves wins, don't we?

No. And Dennett easily could have taken the Daniel Wegner step to accept that.

The medieval western church said, "Cur alii, non alii?"

"Why are some (saved), not others?"

"Why does one subself (win out), not another?"

It's a mystery to psychologists in general who are honest about it, let alone addiction researchers and counselors in that particular area.

He's also a bit off on intentionality.

First, there's nothing that indicates groups have intentionality.

Second, intentionality is not the same as, or necessarily a part of, free will. Barbara Ehrenreich, in "Natural Causes," invokes Jessica Riskin's book "The Restless Clock," which talks about "agency" as a purpose-based set of actions below the mental level of consciousness.

That said, List does partially address that in Horgan's interview, where he explicitly separates free will and consciousness.

He also is more generous to Benjamin Libet and the Libet-class  (class, as others have done follow-up) experiments than is Massimo, which I think is still a bit of a failure of Massimo's on the issue.

Thirdly, while agency doesn't require consciousness (he uses that word next, so I stand by the not above that it's equivalent to intentionality), free will, especially if one uses the broad idea of volition, is much more than "just" agency. And, it does, as I see it, require consciousness. And, in Horgan's own interview, I see some of the muddling that Massimo saw elsewhere.

In fact, with more thought, I think "agency" and "intentionality" actually are separate concepts, and that part of List's muddling is happening when he fuses and confuses the two. Agency, at least as I see Riskin discuss it, by being below the level of consciousness, is not intentional. Per Dennett's infamously titled book, intentionality, to me at least, is linked to consciousness.

I have pulled further discussion of Riskin's book out for a separate piece.

Fourthly, this whole issue, despite his talk of an analog switch two-thirds of the way down, ignores what I have previously talked about as psychological "constraints." That means whatever subself is in the driver's seat doesn't act fully freely, but is not determined in a physics way, either. Rather, things like child abuse, a loathsome boss, etc., all constrain how freely that subself acts.

And, we may be differently constrained, by degree of constraint, on different current issues at different times in our lives by different specific issues from our pasts. It could be 90 percent at some times, near but not at one pole, 10 percent at other times, and 40 percent at yet other times.

List does talk about "contingent factors" in Horgan's piece, but that's not at all what I mean.

I'll stick with "mu." As I've done for nearly a full decade.