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+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 1/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons; October 2, 1914 – June 17, 1952) was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Aerojet. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets.
+Parsons was raised in Pasadena, California. He began amateur rocket experiments with school friend Edward Forman in 1928. Parsons was admitted to Stanford University but left before graduating due to financial hardship during the Great Depression. In 1934, Parsons, Forman, and Frank Malina formed the Caltech-affiliated Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) Rocket Research Group, with support by GALCIT chairman Theodore von Kármán. The group worked on Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO) for the U.S. military, and founded Aerojet in 1942 to develop and sell JATO technology during World War II. The GALCIT Rocket Research Group became JPL in 1943.
+In 1939, Parsons converted to Thelema, a religious movement founded by English occultist Aleister Crowley. Parsons and his first wife, Helen Northrup, joined Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.); he became the California O.T.O. branch leader in 1942. Historians of Western esotericism cite him as a prominent figure in propagating Thelema in North America. Parsons was dismissed from JPL and Aerojet in 1944, due to his involvement with O.T.O. and his hazardous laboratory practices. In 1945, he and Helen divorced. In 1946, he married Marjorie Cameron. Shortly afterward, L. Ron Hubbard defrauded Parsons of his life savings.
+Parsons worked as an explosives expert during the late 1940s, but his career in rocketry ended due to accusations of espionage and the increasing trend of McCarthyism. Parsons died at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion in 1952; his death was officially ruled an accident but many of his associates suspected suicide or murder. Although publicly unknown during his lifetime, Parsons is now recognized for his innovations in rocket engineering, advocacy of space exploration and human spaceflight, and as an important figure in the history of the U.S. space program. He has been the subject of several biographies and fictionalized portrayals.
+
+== Biography ==
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+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 2/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Early life: 1914–1934 ===
+Marvel Whiteside Parsons was born on October 2, 1914, at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. His parents, Ruth Virginia Whiteside (c. 1893–1952) and Marvel H. Parsons (c. 1894–1947), had moved to California from Massachusetts the previous year, purchasing a house on Scarff Street in downtown Los Angeles. Their son was his father's namesake, but was known in the household as Jack. The marriage broke down soon after Jack's birth, when Ruth discovered that her husband was sexually involved with a prostitute. Ruth filed for divorce in March 1915. Jack's father returned to Massachusetts after being exposed as an adulterer, with Ruth forbidding him from having any contact with his infant son. Marvel Parsons later joined the U.S. Armed Forces, reaching the rank of major, and married a woman with whom he had a son, Charles, a half-brother Jack only met once. Although she retained her ex-husband's surname, Ruth started calling her son John, but many friends throughout his life knew him as Jack.
+Ruth's parents—Walter and Carrie Whiteside—moved to California to be with Jack and their daughter, purchasing an upscale house on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena—known locally as "Millionaire's Mile"—where they could live together. Jack was surrounded by domestic servants. Having few friends, he lived a solitary childhood and spent much time reading; he took a particular interest in works of mythology, Arthurian legend, and the Arabian Nights. Through the works of Jules Verne he became interested in science fiction and a keen reader of pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, which led to his early interest in rocketry.
+At age 12, Parsons began attending Washington Junior High School, where he performed poorly—which biographer George Pendle attributed to undiagnosed dyslexia—and was bullied for his upper-class status and perceived effeminacy. Although unpopular, he formed a strong friendship with Edward Forman, a boy from a poor working-class family who defended him from bullies and shared his interest in science fiction and rocketry. In 1928 the pair—adopting the Latin motto per aspera ad astra (through hardship to the stars)—began engaging in homemade gunpowder-based rocket experiments in the nearby Arroyo Seco canyon, as well as the Parsons family's back garden, which left it pockmarked with craters from explosive test failures. They incorporated commonly available fireworks such as cherry bombs into their rockets, and Parsons suggested using glue as a binding agent to increase the rocket fuel's stability. This research became more complex when they began using materials such as aluminium foil to make the gunpowder easier to cast. Parsons had also begun to investigate occultism, and performed a ritual intended to invoke the Devil into his bedroom; he worried that the invocation was successful and was frightened into ceasing these activities. In 1929, he began attending John Muir High School, where he maintained an insular friendship with Forman and was a keen participant in fencing and archery. After he received poor school results, Parsons's mother sent him away to study at the Brown Military Academy for Boys, a private boarding school in San Diego, but he was expelled for blowing up the toilets.
+The Parsons family spent mid-1929 touring Europe before returning to Pasadena, where they moved into a house on San Rafael Avenue. With the onset of the Great Depression their fortune began to dwindle, and in July 1931 Jack's grandfather Walter died. Parsons began studying at the privately run University School, a liberal institution that took an unconventional approach to teaching. He flourished academically, becoming editor of the school newspaper, El Universitano, and winning an award for literary excellence; teachers who had trained at the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech) guided his attention to the study of chemistry. With the family's financial difficulties deepening, Parsons began working on weekends and school holidays at the Hercules Powder Company, where he learned more about explosives and their potential use in rocket propulsion. He and Forman continued to independently explore the subject in their spare time, building and testing different rockets, sometimes with materials that Parsons had stolen from work. Parsons soon constructed a solid-fuel rocket engine.
+Parsons graduated from University School in 1933, and moved with his mother and grandmother to a more modest house on St. John Avenue, where he continued to pursue his interests in literature and poetry. He enrolled in Pasadena Junior College with the hope of earning an associate degree in physics and chemistry, but dropped out after one term because of his financial situation and took up permanent employment at the Hercules Powder Company. His employers then sent him to work at their manufacturing plant in Hercules, California on the San Francisco Bay, where he earned a relatively high monthly wage of $100; he was plagued by headaches caused by exposure to nitroglycerin. He saved money in hopes of continuing his academic studies and began a degree in chemistry at Stanford University, but found the tuition unaffordable and returned to Pasadena.
+
+=== GALCIT Rocket Research Group and the Kynette trial: 1934–1938 ===
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+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 11/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Loss of FBI clearance, Red Scare Marxist and espionage accusations and acquittal: 1946–1952 ===
+
+Parsons was employed by North American Aviation at Inglewood, where he worked on the Navaho Missile Program. He and Cameron moved into a house in Manhattan Beach, where he instructed her in occultism and esotericism. When Cameron developed catalepsy, Parsons referred her to Sylvan Muldoon's books on astral projection, suggesting that she could manipulate her seizures to accomplish it. They were married on October 19, 1946, four days after his divorce from Helen was finalized, with Forman as their witness. Parsons continued to be seen as a specialist in rocketry; he acted as an expert consultant in numerous industrial tribunals and police and Army Ordnance investigations regarding explosions. In May 1947, Parsons gave a talk at the Pacific Rocket Society in which he predicted that rockets would take humans to the Moon. Although he had become distant from the now largely defunct O.T.O. and had sold much of his Crowleyan library, he continued to correspond with Crowley until the latter's death in December 1947.
+At the emergence of the Cold War, a Red Scare developed in the U.S. as the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating and obstructing the careers of people with perceived communist sympathies. Many of Parsons' former colleagues lost their security clearances and jobs as a result, and eventually the FBI stripped Parsons of his clearance because of his "subversive" character, including his involvement in and advocacy of "sexual perversion" in O.T.O. He speculated in a June 1949 letter to Germer that his clearance was revoked in response to his public dissemination of Crowley's Liber OZ, a 1941 tract summarizing the individualist moral principles of Thelema. Declassified FBI documents later revealed that the FBI's primary concern was Parsons' former connections to Marxists at Caltech and his membership of the also "subversive" ACLU. When they interviewed Parsons, he denied communist sympathies but informed them of Sidney Weinbaum's "extreme communist views" and Frank Malina's involvement in Weinbaum's communist cell at Caltech, which resulted in Weinbaum's arrest for perjury since he had lied under oath by denying any involvement in communist groups. Malina's security clearance was withdrawn as well. In reaction to this hostile treatment, Parsons sought work in the rocket industry abroad. He sought advice to do so in correspondence with von Kármán; whose advice he followed by enrolling in an evening course in advanced mathematics at USC to bolster his employability in the field—but again he neglected attendance and failed the course. Parsons again resorted to bootlegging nitroglycerin for money, and managed to earn a wage as a car mechanic, a manual laborer at a gas station, and a hospital orderly; for two years he was also a faculty member at the USC Department of Pharmacology. Relations between Parsons and Cameron became strained; they agreed to a temporary separation and she moved to Mexico to join an artists' commune in San Miguel de Allende.
+Unable to pursue his scientific career, without his wife and devoid of friendship, Parsons decided to return to occultism and embarked on sexually based magical operations with prostitutes. He was intent, informally following the ritualistic practice of Thelemite organization the A∴A∴, on performing "the Crossing of the Abyss", attaining union with the universal consciousness, or "All" as understood in the context of the Great Work, and becoming the "Master of the Temple". Following his apparent success in doing so, Parsons recounted having an out-of-body experience invoked by Babalon, who astrally transported him to the biblical City of Chorazin, an experience he referred to as a "Black Pilgrimage". Accompanying Parsons' "Oath of the Abyss" was his own "Oath of the AntiChrist", which was witnessed by Wilfred Talbot Smith. In this oath, Parsons professed to embody an entity named Belarion Armillus Al Dajjal, the Antichrist "who am come to fulfill the law of the Beast 666 [Aleister Crowley]". Viewing these oaths as the completion of the Babalon Working, Parsons wrote an illeist autobiography titled Analysis by a Master of the Temple and an occult text titled The Book of AntiChrist. In the latter work, Parsons (writing as Belarion) prophesied that within nine years Babalon would manifest on Earth and supersede the dominance of the Abrahamic religions.
+During this period, Parsons also wrote an essay on his individualist philosophy and politics—which he described as standing for "liberalism and liberal principles"—titled "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword", in which he condemned the authoritarianism, censorship, corruption, antisexualism and racism he saw as prevalent in American society. None of these works were published in his lifetime. Through Heinlein, Parsons received a visit from writer L. Sprague de Camp, with whom he discussed magic and science fiction, and disclosed that Hubbard had sent a letter offering him Sara back. De Camp later referred to Parsons as "An authentic mad genius if I ever met one", and based the character Courtney James on him in his time travel short story "A Gun for Dinosaur" (1956). Parsons was also visited by Jane Wolfe, who unsuccessfully appealed for him to rejoin the dilapidated O.T.O. He entered a brief relationship with an Irishwoman named Gladis Gohan; they moved to a house in Redondo Beach, a building known by them as the "Concrete Castle". Cameron returned to Redondo Beach from San Miguel de Allende and violently argued with Parsons upon discovering his infidelity, before she again left for Mexico. Parsons responded by initiating divorce proceedings against her on the grounds of "extreme cruelty".
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+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 12/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Parsons testified to a closed federal court that the moral philosophy of Thelema was both anti-fascist and anti-communist, emphasizing his belief in individualism. This along with references from his scientific colleagues resulted in his security clearance being reinstated by the Industrial Employment Review Board, which ruled that there was insufficient evidence that he had ever had communist sympathies. This allowed Parsons to obtain a contract in designing and constructing a chemical plant for the Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City. Von Kármán put Parsons in touch with Herbert T. Rosenfeld, President of the Southern Californian chapter of the American Technion Society—a Zionist group dedicated to supporting the newly created State of Israel. Rosenfeld offered Parsons a job with the Israeli rocket program and hired him to produce technical reports for them. In November 1950, as the Red Scare intensified, Parsons decided to migrate to Israel to pursue Rosenfeld's offer, but a Hughes secretary whom Parsons had asked to type up a portfolio of technical documents reported him to the FBI. She accused Parsons of espionage and attempted theft of classified company documents on the basis of some of the reports that he had sought to submit to the Technion Society.
+Parsons was immediately fired from Hughes; the FBI investigated the complaint and were suspicious that Parsons was spying for the Israeli government. Parsons denied the allegations when interrogated; he insisted that his intentions were peaceful and that he had suffered an error of judgment in procuring the documents. Some of Parsons' scientific colleagues rallied to his defense, but the case against him worsened when the FBI investigated Rosenfeld for being linked to Soviet agents, and more accounts of his occult and sexually permissive activities at the Parsonage came to light. In October 1951, the U.S. attorney decided that because the contents of the reports did not constitute state secrets, Parsons was not guilty of espionage.
+The Review Board still considered Parsons a liability because of his historical Marxist affiliations and investigations by the FBI, and in January 1952 they permanently reinstated their ban on his working for classified projects, effectively prohibiting him from working in rocketry. To make a living he founded the Parsons Chemical Manufacturing Company, which was based in North Hollywood and created pyrotechnics and explosives such as fog effects and imitation gunshot wounds for the film industry, and he also returned to chemical manufacturing at the Bermite Powder Company in Saugus.
+
+Parsons reconciled with Cameron, and they resumed their relationship and moved into a former coach house on Orange Grove Boulevard. Parsons converted its large, first-floor laundry room into a home laboratory to work on his chemical and pyrotechnic projects, homebrew absinthe and stockpile his materials. They let out the upstairs bedrooms and began holding parties that were attended largely by bohemians and members of the Beat Generation, along with old friends including Forman, Malina and Cornog. They also congregated at the home of Andrew Haley, who lived on the same street. Though Parsons in his mid-thirties was a "prewar relic" to the younger attendees, the raucous socials often lasted until dawn and frequently attracted police attention. Parsons also founded a new Thelemite group known as "the Witchcraft", whose beliefs revolved around a simplified version of Crowley's Thelema and Parsons' own Babalon prophecies. He offered a course in its teachings for a ten-dollar fee, which included a new Thelemic belief system called "the Gnosis", a version of Christian Gnosticism with Sophia as its godhead and the Christian God as its demiurge. He also collaborated with Cameron on Songs for the Witch Woman, a collection of poems which she illustrated that was published in 2014.
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+---
+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 13/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Death: 1952 ===
+Parsons and Cameron decided to travel to Mexico for a few months, both for a vacation and for Parsons to take up a job opportunity establishing an explosives factory for the Mexican government. They hoped that this would facilitate a move to Israel, where they could start a family, and where Parsons could bypass the U.S. government to recommence his rocketry career. He was particularly disturbed by the presence of the FBI, convinced that they were spying on him.
+On June 17, 1952, a day before their planned departure, Parsons received a rush order of explosives for a film set and began to work on it in his home laboratory. An explosion destroyed the lower part of the building, during which Parsons sustained mortal wounds. His right forearm was severed, his legs and left arm were broken, and a hole was torn in the right side of his face. Despite these critical injuries, Parsons was found conscious by the upstairs lodgers. He tried to communicate with the arriving ambulance workers, who rushed him to the Huntington Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead approximately thirty-seven minutes after the explosion. When his mother, Ruth, learned of his death, she immediately took a fatal overdose of barbiturates.
+Pasadena Police Department criminologist Don Harding led the official investigation; he concluded that Parsons had been mixing fulminate of mercury in a coffee can when he dropped it on the floor, causing an initial explosion that triggered a larger blast among other chemicals in the room. Forman considered this likely, stating that Parsons often had sweaty hands and could easily have dropped the can. Some of Parsons' colleagues rejected this explanation, saying that he was very attentive about safety. Two colleagues from the Bermite Powder Company described Parsons' work habits as "scrupulously neat" and "exceptionally cautious". The latter statement—from chemical engineer George Santymers—insisted that the explosion must have come from beneath the floorboards, implying an organized plot to kill Parsons. Harding accepted that these inconsistencies were "incongruous" but described the manner in which Parsons had stored his chemicals as "criminally negligent", and noted that Parsons had previously been investigated by the police for illegally storing chemicals at the Parsonage. He also found a morphine-filled syringe at the scene, suggesting that Parsons had been under the influence of narcotics. The police saw insufficient evidence to continue the investigation and closed the case as an accidental death.
+
+Both Wolfe and Smith suggested that Parsons' death had been suicide, stating that he had suffered from depression for some time. Others theorized that the explosion was an assassination planned by Howard Hughes in response to Parsons' suspected theft of Hughes Aircraft Company documents. Cameron became convinced that Parsons had been murdered — either by police officers seeking vengeance for his role in the conviction of Earl Kynette or by anti-Zionists opposed to his work for Israel. One of Cameron's friends, the artist Renate Druks, later stated her belief that Parsons had died in a rite designed to create a homunculus. His death has never been definitively explained.
+The immediate aftermath of the explosion attracted the interest of the U.S. media, making headline news in the Los Angeles Times. These initial reports focused on Parsons' prominence in rocketry but neglected to mention his occult interests. When asked for comment, Aerojet secretary-treasurer T.E. Beehan said that Parsons "liked to wander, but he was one of the top men in the field". Within a few days, journalists had discovered his involvement in Thelema and emphasized this in their reports.
+A private prayer service was held for Parsons at the funeral home where his body was cremated. Cameron scattered his ashes in the Mojave Desert, before burning most of his possessions. She later tried to perform astral projection to commune with him. O.T.O. also held a memorial service—with attendees including Helen and Sara—at which Smith led the Gnostic Mass.
+
+== Personal life ==
+
+=== Personality ===
+Parsons was considered effeminate as a child; in adult life he exhibited an attitude of machismo. Jane Wolfe described him as "potentially bisexual" and he once expressed experiencing a latent homosexuality. The actor Paul Mathison said he had had a gay relationship with Parsons in the 1950s, though this was disputed by others who knew him and Cameron. Parsons had the reputation of being a womanizer, and was notorious for frequently flirting and having sexual liaisons with female staff members at JPL and Aerojet. He was also known for personal eccentricity such as greeting house guests with a large pet snake around his neck, driving to work in a rundown Pontiac, and using a mannequin dressed in a tuxedo with a bucket labelled "The Resident" as his mailbox.
+As well as a fencing and archery enthusiast, Parsons was also a keen shooter; he often hunted jack rabbits and cotton tails in the desert, and was amused by mock dueling with Forman while on test sites with rifles and shotguns. Upon proposing to his first wife Helen, he gave her a pistol. Parsons enjoyed playing pranks on his colleagues, often through detonating explosives such as firecrackers and smoke bombs, and was known to spend hours at a time in the bathtub playing with toy boats while living at the Parsonage.
+As well as intense bursts of creativity, Parsons suffered from what he described as "manic hysteria and depressing melancholy". His father Marvel, after suffering a near-fatal heart attack, died in 1947 as a psychiatric patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., diagnosed with severe clinical depression, a condition Pendle suggested the younger Parsons inherited.
+
+=== Professional associations ===
+Parsons' obituary listed him as a member of the Army Ordnance Association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and—despite his lack of an academic degree—the Sigma Xi fraternity. It also stated that he had turned down several honorary degrees.
+
+== Philosophy ==
+
+=== Religious beliefs ===
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+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 14/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Parsons adhered to the occult philosophy of Thelema, which had been founded in 1904 by the English occultist Aleister Crowley following a spiritual revelation that he had in Cairo, Egypt, when—according to Crowley's accounts—a spirit being known as Aiwass dictated to him a prophetic text known as The Book of the Law. Prior to becoming aware of Thelema and Crowley, Parsons' interest in esotericism was developed through his reading of The Golden Bough (1890), a work in comparative mythology by Scottish social anthropologist James George Frazer. Parsons had also attended lectures on Theosophy by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti with his first wife Helen, but disliked the belief system's sentiment of "the good and the true". During rocket tests, Parsons often recited Crowley's poem "Hymn to Pan" as a good luck charm. He took to addressing Crowley as his "Most Beloved Father" and signed off to him as "thy son, John".
+In July 1945, Parsons gave a speech to the Agape Lodge, in which he attempted to explain how he felt that The Book of the Law could be made relevant to "modern life". In this speech, which was subsequently published under the title of "Doing Your Will", he examined the Thelemite concept of True Will, writing that:
+
+The mainspring of an individual is his creative Will. This Will is the sum of his tendencies, his destiny, his inner truth. It is one with the force that makes the birds sing and flowers bloom; as inevitable as gravity, as implicit as a bowel movement, it informs alike atoms and men and suns.
+To the man who knows this Will, there is no why or why not, no can or cannot; he is!
+There is no known force that can turn an apple into an alley cat; there is no known force that can turn a man from his Will. This is the triumph of genius; that, surviving the centuries, enlightens the world.
+
+This force burns in every man.
+Parsons identified four obstacles that prevented humans from achieving and performing their True Will, all of which he connected with fear: the fear of incompetence, the fear of the opinion of others, the fear of hurting others, and the fear of insecurity. He insisted that these must be overcome, writing that "The Will must be freed of its fetters. The ruthless examination and destruction of taboos, complexes, frustrations, dislikes, fears and disgusts hostile to the Will is essential to progress."
+Though Parsons was a lifelong devotee to Thelema, he grew weary of and eventually left Ordo Templi Orientis—the religious organization that began propagating Thelema under Crowley's leadership from the 1910s—which Parsons viewed, despite the disagreement of Crowley himself, as excessively hierarchical and impeding upon the rigorous spiritual and philosophical practice of True Will, describing O.T.O. as "an excellent training school for adepts, but hardly an appropriate Order for the manifestation of Thelema". In this sense Parsons was described by Carter as an "almost fundamentalist" Thelemite who placed The Book of the Law's dogma above all other doctrine.
+
+=== Politics ===
+
+From early on in his career, Parsons took an interest in socialism and communism, views that he shared with his friend Frank Malina. Under the influence of another friend, Sidney Weinbaum, the two joined a communist group in the late 1930s, with Parsons reading Marxist literature, but he remained unconvinced and refused to join the American Communist Party. Malina asserted that this was because Parsons was a "political romantic", whose attitude was more anti-authoritarian than anti-capitalist. Parsons later became critical of the Marxist–Leninist government of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin, sarcastically commenting that
+
+The dictatorship of the proletariat is merely temporary — the state will eventually wither away like a snark hunter, leaving us all free as birds. Meanwhile, it may be necessary to kill, torture and imprison a few million people, but whose fault is it if they get in the way of progress?
+During the era of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare in the early 1950s, Parsons was questioned regarding his former links to the communist movement, by which time he denied any connection to it, instead describing himself as "an individualist" who was both anti-communist and anti-fascist. In reaction to the McCarthyite red-baiting of scientists, he expressed disdain that
+
+[s]cience, that was going to save the world in H. G. Wells' time is regimented, straight-jacked, [and] scared shitless, its universal language diminished to one word, security.
+Parsons was politically influenced by Thelema, which holds to the ethical code of "Do what thou wilt". In his essay, "Freedom is a Lonely Star", Parsons equated this principle to the libertarian views of a number of the Founding Fathers of the United States. By his own time, he wrote, these values had been "sold out by America, and for that reason the heart of America is sick and the soul of America is dead." He proceeded to criticize many aspects of contemporary U.S. society, particularly the police force ("[t]he police mind is usually of a sadistic and homicidal trend") and note they carried out the "ruthless punishment of symbolic scapegoats" such as African-Americans, prostitutes, alcoholics, homeless people and sociopolitical radicals, under the pretense of a country that upheld "liberty and justice for all."
+To bring about a freer future, Parsons believed in liberalizing attitudes to sexual morality stating that, in his belief, the publication of the Kinsey Reports and development of the psychonautical sciences had as significant an influence on Western society as the creation of the atomic bomb and the development of nuclear physics. He believed that in the future the restrictions on sexual morality within society should be abolished in order to bring about greater freedom and individuality. Parsons concluded that
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+---
+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 15/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+the liberty of the individual is the foundation of civilization. No true civilization is possible without this liberty and no state, national or international, is stable in its absence. The proper relation between individual liberty on the one hand and social responsibility on the other is the balance which will assure a stable society. The only other road to social equilibrium demands the total annihilation of individuality. There is not further evasion of nature's immemorial ultimatum: change or perish but the choice of change is ours.
+Jack Cashill, American studies professor at Purdue University, argues that "Although his literary career never got much beyond pamphleteering and an untitled anti-war, anti-capitalist manuscript", Parsons played a significant role—greater than that of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey—in shaping the Californian counterculture of the 1960s and beyond through his influence on contemporaries such as Hubbard and Heinlein. Hugh Urban, religious studies professor at Ohio State University, cites Parsons' Witchcraft group as precipitating the neopagan revival of the 1950s.
+Robert Anton Wilson, a cult writer and occultist known for his works of nonfiction and science fiction, described Parsons' political writings as exemplifying an "ultra-individualist" who exhibited a "genuine sympathy for working people", strongly empathized with feminism and held an antipathy toward patriarchy comparable to that of John Stuart Mill. Wilson argued in this context that Parsons was an influence on the American libertarian and anarchist movements of the 20th century.
+Parsons was also supportive of the creation of the State of Israel. He made plans to emigrate there when his military security clearance was revoked.
+
+== Legacy and influence ==
+
+In the decades following his death, Parsons was well-remembered among the Western esoteric community; his scientific recognition frequently amounted to a footnote. For instance, English Thelemite Kenneth Grant suggested that Parsons' Babalon Working marked the start of the appearance of flying saucers in the skies, leading to phenomena such as the Roswell UFO incident and Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting – Grant's ideas found new life in the 2010 book Final Events. Cameron postulated that the 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident was a spiritual reaction to Parsons' death. In 1954 she portrayed Babalon in American Thelemite Kenneth Anger's short film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, viewing this cinematic depiction of a Thelemic ritual as aiding the literal invocation of Babalon begun by Parsons' working, and later said that his Book of the AntiChrist prophecies were fulfilled through the manifestation of Babalon in her person.
+In December 1958, JPL was integrated into the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration, having built the Explorer 1 satellite that commenced America's Space Race with the Soviet Union. Aerojet was contracted by NASA to build the main engine of the Apollo Command/Service Module, and the Space Shuttle Orbital Maneuvering System. In a letter to Frank Malina, von Kármán ranked Parsons first in a list of figures he viewed as most important to modern rocketry and the foundation of the American space program. According to Richard Metzger, Wernher von Braun—who was nicknamed "The Father of Rocket Science"—once argued that Parsons was more worthy of this moniker. In October 1968, Malina, a pioneer in sounding rocketry, gave a speech at JPL in which he highlighted Parsons' contribution to the U.S. rocket project, and lamented how it had come to be neglected, crediting him for making "key contributions to the development of storable propellants and of long duration solid propellant agents that play such an important role in American and European space technology."
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+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The same month, JPL held an open access event to mark the 32nd anniversary of its foundation—which featured a "nativity scene" of mannequins reconstructing the November 1936 photograph of the GALCIT Group—and erected a monument commemorating their first rocket test on Halloween 1936. Among the aerospace industry, JPL was nicknamed as standing for "Jack Parsons' Laboratory" or "Jack Parsons Lives". The International Astronomical Union decided to name a crater on the far side of the Moon Parsons after him in 1972. JPL later credited him for making "distinctive technical innovations that advanced early efforts" in rocket engineering, with aerospace journalist Craig Covault stating that the work of Parsons, Qian Xuesen and the GALCIT Group "planted the seeds for JPL to become preeminent in space and rocketry."
+Many of Parsons' writings were posthumously published as Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword in 1989, a compilation co-edited by Cameron and O.T.O. leader Hymenaeus Beta, which incited a resurgence of interest in Parsons within occult and countercultural circles. For example, comic book artist and occultist Alan Moore noted Parsons as a creative influence in a 1998 interview with Clifford Meth. The Cameron-Parsons Foundation was founded as an incorporated company in 2006, with the intention of conserving and promoting Parsons' writings and Cameron's artwork, and in 2014 Fulger Esoterica published Songs for the Witch Woman—a limited edition book of poems by Parsons with illustrations by Cameron, released to coincide with his centenary. An exhibition of the same name was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
+In 1999, Feral House published the biography Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter, who opined that Parsons had accomplished more in under five years of research than Robert H. Goddard had in his lifetime, and said that his role in the development of rocket technology had been neglected by historians of science; Carter thought that Parsons' abilities and accomplishments as an occultist had been overestimated and exaggerated among Western esotericists, emphasizing his disowning by Crowley for practicing magic beyond his grade. Feral House republished the work as a new edition in 2004, accompanied with an introduction by Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson believed that Parsons was "the one single individual who contributed the most to rocket science", describing him as being "very strange, very brilliant, very funny, [and] very tormented", and considering it noteworthy that the day of Parsons' birth was the predicted beginning of the apocalypse advocated by Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Bible Student movement.
+In 2005, Weidenfeld & Nicolson published Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle, who described Parsons as "the Che Guevara of occultism". Pendle said that although Parsons "would not live to see his dream of space travel come true, he was essential to making it a reality." Pendle considered that the cultural stigma attached to Parsons' occultism was the primary cause of his low public profile, noting that "Like many scientific mavericks, Parsons was eventually discarded by the establishment once he had served his purpose." It was this unorthodox mindset, creatively facilitated by his science fiction fandom and "willingness to believe in magic's efficacy", Pendle argued, "that allowed him to break scientific barriers previously thought to be indestructible"—commenting that Parsons "saw both space and magic as ways of exploring these new frontiers—one breaking free from Earth literally and metaphysically."
+L. Ron Hubbard's role in Parsons' Agape Lodge and the ensuing yacht scam were explored in Russell Miller's 1987 Hubbard biography Bare-faced Messiah. Parsons' involvement in the Agape Lodge was also discussed by Martin P. Starr in his history of the American Thelemite movement, The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the Thelemites, published by Teitan Press in 2003. The QI Book of the Dead (2004), based on the BBC game show, included a Parsons obituary. Parsons' occult partnership with Hubbard was also mentioned in Alex Gibney's 2015 documentary film Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, produced by HBO.
+Before his death, Parsons appeared in science fiction writer Anthony Boucher's murder-mystery novel Rocket to the Morgue (1942) under the guise of mad scientist character Hugo Chantrelle. Another fictional character based on Parsons was Courtney James, a wealthy socialite who features in L. Sprague de Camp's 1956 short time travel story A Gun for Dinosaur. In 2005, Pasadena Babalon, a stage play about Parsons written by George D. Morgan and directed by Brian Brophy, premiered at Caltech as a production by its theater Arts Group in 2010, the same year Cellar Door Publishing released Richard Carbonneau and Robin Simon Ng's graphic novel, The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons.
+Parsons' mythology was incorporated into the narrative of David Lynch's mystery-horror television series Twin Peaks. In 2014, AMC Networks announced plans for a serial television dramatization of Parsons' life, but in 2016 it was reported that the series "will not be going forward." In 2017, the project was adopted as a web television series by CBS All Access. Strange Angel, produced by Mark Heyman and starring Irish actor Jack Reynor as Parsons, premiered in June 2018 and ran for two seasons. Parsons appears as a side character in China Miéville's 2016 fantastical novella, The Last Days of New Paris. In 2018, Parsons was featured in an episode of the Amazon series Lore. Also in 2018, Parsons' exploits were featured in the fifth season, second episode of Drunk History entitled "Dangerous Minds".
+Parsons is the subject of musical tributes by Johan Johannson (Fordlandia, 2008), Six Organs of Admittance (Parsons' Blues, 2012), The Claypool Lennon Delirium (South of Reality, 2019), and Luke Haines and Peter Buck (Beat Poetry for Survivalists, 2020).
+
+== Patents ==
+
+== See also ==
+Members of Ordo Templi Orientis
+Scientology and the occult
+
+== References ==
+
+=== Notes ===
+
+=== Citations ===
+
+=== Works cited ===
+
+== Further reading ==
+
+== External links ==
+ Media related to Jack Parsons at Wikimedia Commons
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In hopes of gaining access to the state-of-the-art resources of Caltech for their rocketry research, Parsons and Forman attended a lecture on the work of Austrian rocket engineer Eugen Sänger and hypothetical above-stratospheric aircraft by the institute's William Bollay—a PhD student specializing in rocket-powered aircraft—and approached him to express their interest in designing a liquid-fuel rocket motor. Bollay redirected them to another PhD student, Frank Malina, a mathematician and mechanical engineer writing a thesis on rocket propulsion who shared their interests and soon befriended them. Parsons, Forman, and Malina applied for funding from Caltech together; they did not mention that their ultimate objective was to develop rockets for space exploration, realizing that most of the scientific establishment then considered such ideas science fiction. Caltech's Clark Blanchard Millikan immediately rebuffed them, but Malina's doctoral advisor Theodore von Kármán saw more promise in their proposal and agreed to allow them to operate under the auspices of the university's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT). Naming themselves the GALCIT Rocket Research Group, they gained access to Caltech's specialist equipment, though the economics of the Great Depression left von Kármán unable to finance them.
+The trio focused their distinct skills on collaborative rocket development; Parsons was the chemist, Forman the machinist, and Malina the technical theoretician. Malina wrote in 1968 that the self-educated Parsons "lacked the discipline of a formal higher education, [but] had an uninhibited and fruitful imagination." Parsons and Forman who, as described by Geoffrey A. Landis, "were eager to try whatever idea happened to spring to mind", contrasted with Malina, who insisted on scientific discipline as informed by von Kármán. Landis writes that their creativity "kept Malina focused toward building actual rocket engines, not just solving equations on paper". Sharing socialist values, they operated on an egalitarian basis; Malina taught the others about scientific procedure and they taught him about the practical elements of rocketry. They often socialized, smoking marijuana and drinking, while Malina and Parsons set about writing a semiautobiographical science fiction screenplay they planned to pitch to Hollywood with strong anti-capitalist and pacifist themes.
+
+Parsons met Helen Northrup at a local church dance and proposed marriage in July 1934. She accepted and they were married in April 1935 at the Little Church of the Flowers in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, before undertaking a brief honeymoon in San Diego. They moved into a house on South Terrace Drive, Pasadena, while Parsons got a job at the explosives manufacturer Halifax Powder Company's facility in Saugus. Much to Helen's dismay, Parsons spent most of his wages funding the GALCIT Rocket Research Group. For extra money, he manufactured nitroglycerin in their home, constructing a laboratory on their front porch. At one point, he pawned Helen's engagement ring, and he often asked her family for loans.
+Malina recounted that "Parsons and Forman were not too pleased with an austere program that did not include at least the launching of model rockets", but the Group reached the consensus of developing a working static rocket motor before embarking on more complex research. They contacted liquid-fuel rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard and he invited Malina to his facility in Roswell, New Mexico, but he was not interested in cooperating—reticent about sharing his research and having been subjected to widespread derision for his work in rocketry. They were instead joined by Caltech graduate students Apollo M. O. "Amo" Smith, Carlos C. Wood, Mark Muir Mills, Fred S. Miller, William C. Rockefeller, and Rudolph Schott; Schott's pickup truck transported their equipment. Their first liquid-fuel motor test took place near the Devil's Gate Dam in the Arroyo Seco on Halloween 1936. Parsons's biographer John Carter described the layout of the contraption as showing
+
+oxygen flowing from one side, with methyl alcohol (the fuel) and nitrogen flowing from the other side. Water cooled the rocket during the burn. Thrust pulled down a spring which measured force. The deflection of the spring measured the force applied to it. A small diamond tip on the apparatus scratched a glass plate to mark the furthest point of deflection. The rocket and mount were protected by sandbags, with the tanks (and the experimenters) well away from it.
+Three attempts to fire the rocket failed; on the fourth the oxygen line accidentally ignited and perilously billowed fire at the Group, but they viewed this experience as formative. They continued their experiments throughout the last quarter of 1936; after the final test was successfully completed in January 1937 von Kármán agreed that they could perform future experiments at an exclusive rocket testing facility on campus.
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+---
+
+In April 1937, Caltech mathematician Qian Xuesen joined the Group. Several months later, Weld Arnold, a Caltech laboratory assistant who worked as the Group's official photographer, also joined. The main reason for Arnold's appointment to this position was his provision of a donation to the Group on behalf of an anonymous benefactor. They became well known on campus as the "Suicide Squad" for the dangerous nature of some of their experiments and attracted attention from the local press. Parsons himself gained further media publicity when he appeared as an expert explosives witness in the trial of Captain Earl Kynette, the head of police intelligence in Los Angeles who was accused of conspiring to set a car bomb in the attempted murder of private investigator Harry Raymond, a former LAPD detective who was fired after whistleblowing against police corruption. When Kynette was convicted largely on Parsons' testimony, which included his forensic reconstruction of the car bomb and its explosion, his identity as an expert scientist in the public eye was established despite his lack of a university education. While working at Caltech, Parsons was admitted to evening courses in chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC), but distracted by his GALCIT workload he attended sporadically and received unexceptional grades.
+By early 1938, the Group had made their static rocket motor, which originally burned for three seconds, run for over a minute. In May that year, Parsons was invited by Forrest J Ackerman to lecture on his rocketry work at Chapter Number 4 of the Los Angeles Science Fiction League (LASFL). Although he never joined the society, he occasionally attended their talks, on one occasion conversing with a teenage Ray Bradbury. Another scientist to become involved in the GALCIT project was Sidney Weinbaum, a Jewish refugee from Europe who was a vocal Marxist; he led Parsons, Malina, and Qian in their creation of a largely secretive communist discussion group at Caltech, which became known as Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party. Although Parsons subscribed to the People's Daily World and joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he refused to join the American Communist Party, causing a break in his and Weinbaum's friendship. This, coupled with the need to focus on paid employment, led to the disintegration of much of the Rocket Research Group, leaving only its three founding members by late 1938.
+
+=== Embracing Thelema; advancing JATO and foundation of Aerojet: 1939–1942 ===
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+title: "Jack Parsons"
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+category: "reference"
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In January 1939, John and Frances Baxter, a brother and sister who had befriended Jack and Helen Parsons, took Jack to the Church of Thelema on Winona Boulevard, Hollywood, where he witnessed the performance of The Gnostic Mass. Celebrants of the church had included Hollywood actor John Carradine and gay rights activist Harry Hay. Parsons was intrigued, having already heard of Thelema's founder and Outer Head of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), Aleister Crowley, after reading a copy of Crowley's text Konx om Pax (1907).
+Parsons was introduced to leading members Regina Kahl, Jane Wolfe, and Wilfred Talbot Smith at the mass. Feeling both "repulsion and attraction" for Smith, Parsons continued to sporadically attend the Church's events for a year. He continued to read Crowley's works, which increasingly interested him, and encouraged Helen to read them. Parsons came to believe in the reality of Thelemic magick as a force that could be explained through quantum physics. He tried to interest his friends and acquaintances in Thelema, taking science fiction writers Jack Williamson and Cleve Cartmill to a performance of The Gnostic Mass. Although they were unimpressed, Parsons was more successful with Grady Louis McMurtry, a young Caltech student he had befriended, as well as McMurtry's fiancée Claire Palmer, and Helen's sister Sara "Betty" Northrup.
+Jack and Helen were initiated into the Agape Lodge, the renamed Church of Thelema, in February 1941. Parsons adopted the Thelemic motto of Thelema Obtenteum Proedero Amoris Nuptiae, a Latin mistranslation of "The establishment of Thelema through the rituals of love". The initials of this motto spelled out T.O.P.A.N., also serving as the declaration "To Pan". Commenting on Parsons' errors of translation, in jest Crowley said that "the motto which you mention is couched in a language beyond my powers of understanding". Parsons also adopted the Thelemic title Frater T.O.P.A.N—with T.O.P.A.N represented in Kabbalistic numerology as 210—the name with which he frequently signed letters to occult associates—while Helen became known as Soror Grimaud. Smith wrote to Crowley saying that Parsons was "a really excellent man ... He has an excellent mind and much better intellect than myself ... JP is going to be very valuable". Wolfe wrote to German O.T.O. representative Karl Germer that Parsons was "an A1 man ... Crowleyesque in attainment as a matter of fact", and mooted Parsons as a potential successor to Crowley as Outer Head of the Order. Crowley concurred with such assessments, informing Smith that Parsons "is the most valued member of the whole Order, with no exception!"
+At von Kármán's suggestion, Frank Malina approached the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Army Air Corps Research to request funding for research into what they referred to as "jet propulsion", a term chosen to avoid the stigma attached to rocketry. The military were interested in jet propulsion as a means of getting aircraft quickly airborne where there was insufficient room for a full-length runway, and gave the Rocket Research Group $1,000 to put together a proposal on the feasibility of Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO) by June 1939, making Parsons et al. the first U.S. government-sanctioned rocket research group. Since their formation in 1934, they had also performed experiments involving model, black powder motor-propelled multistage rockets. In a research paper submitted to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Parsons reported these rockets reaching exhaust velocities of 4,875 miles per hour, thereby demonstrating the potential of solid fuels to be more effective than the liquid types primarily preferred by researchers such as Goddard. In light of this progress, Caltech and the GALCIT Group received an additional $10,000 rocketry research grant from the AIAA.
+Although a quarter of their funding went to repairing damage to Caltech buildings caused by their experiments, in June 1940 they submitted a report to the NAS in which they showed the feasibility of the project for the development of JATO and requested $100,000 to continue; they received $22,000. Now known as GALCIT Project Number 1, they continued to be ostracized by other Caltech scientists who grew increasingly irritated by their accidents and noise pollution, and were forced to relocate their experiments back to the Arroyo Seco, at a site with unventilated, corrugated iron sheds that served as both research facilities and administrative offices. It was here that JPL would be founded. Parsons and Forman's rocket experiments were the cover story of the August 1940 edition of Popular Mechanics, in which the pair discussed the prospect of rockets being able to ascend above Earth's atmosphere and orbit around it for research purposes, as well as reaching the Moon.
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+For the JATO project, they were joined by Caltech mathematician Martin Summerfield and 18 workers supplied by the Works Progress Administration. Former colleagues like Qian were prevented from returning to the project by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who ensured the secrecy of the operation and restricted the involvement of foreign nationals and political extremists. The FBI was satisfied that Parsons was not a Marxist but were concerned when Thelemite friend Paul Seckler used Parsons' gun in a drunken car hijacking, for which Seckler was imprisoned in San Quentin State Prison for two years. Englishman George Emerson replaced Arnold as the Group's official photographer.
+The Group's aim was to find a replacement for black-powder rocket motors—units consisting of charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate with a binding agent. The mixture was unstable and there were frequent explosions damaging military aircraft. The solid JATO fuel invented by Parsons consisted of amide, corn starch, and ammonium nitrate bound together in the JATO unit with glue and blotting paper. It was codenamed GALCIT-27, implying the previous invention of 26 new fuels. The first JATO tests using an ERCO Ercoupe plane took place in late July 1941; though they aided propulsion, the units frequently exploded and damaged the aircraft. Parsons theorized that this was because the ammonium nitrate became dangerously combustible following overnight storage, during which temperature and consistency changes had resulted in a chemical imbalance. Parsons and Malina accordingly devised a method in which they would fill the JATOs with the fuel in the early mornings shortly before the tests, enduring sleep deprivation to do so. On August 21, 1941, Navy Captain Homer J. Boushey, Jr.—watched by Clark Millikan and William F. Durand—piloted the JATO-equipped Ercoupe at March Air Force Base in Moreno Valley, California. It proved a success and reduced takeoff distance by 30%, but one of the JATOs partially exploded. Over the following weeks 62 further tests took place, and the NAS increased their grant to $125,000. During a series of static experiments, an exploding JATO did significant damage to the rear fuselage of an Ercoupe; one observer optimistically noted that "at least it wasn't a big hole", but necessary repairs delayed their efforts.
+The military ordered a flight test using liquid rather than solid fuel in early 1942. Upon the United States' entry into the Second World War in December 1941, the Group realized they could be drafted directly into military service if they failed to provide viable JATO technology for the military. Informed by their left-wing politics, aiding the war effort against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers was as much of a moral vocation to Parsons, Forman and Malina as it was a practical one. Parsons, Summerfield and the GALCIT workers focused on the task and found success with a combination of gasoline with red fuming nitric acid as its oxidizer; the latter, suggested by Parsons, was an effective substitute for liquid oxygen. The testing of this fuel resulted in another calamity, when the testing rocket motor exploded; the fire, containing iron shed fragments and shrapnel, inexplicably left the experimenters unscathed. Malina solved the problem by replacing the gasoline with aniline, resulting in a successful test launch of a JATO-equipped A-20A plane at the Muroc Auxiliary Air Field in the Mojave Desert. It provided five times more thrust than GALCIT-27, and again reduced takeoff distance by 30%; Malina wrote to his parents that "We now have something that really works and we should be able to help give the Fascists hell!"
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+title: "Jack Parsons"
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Group then agreed to produce and sell 60 JATO engines to the United States Army Air Corps. To do so they formed the Aerojet Engineering Corporation in March 1942, in which Parsons, Forman, Malina, von Kármán, and Summerfield each invested $250, opening their offices on Colorado Boulevard and bringing in Amo Smith as their engineer. Andrew G. Haley was recruited by von Kármán as their lawyer and treasurer. Although Aerojet was a for-profit operation that provided technology for military means, the founders' mentality was rooted in the ideal of using rockets for peaceful space exploration. As Haley recounted von Kármán requesting: "we will make the rockets—you must make the corporation and obtain the money. Later on you will have to see that we all behave well in outer space."
+Despite these successes, Parsons, the project engineer of Aerojet's Solid Fuel Department, remained motivated to address the malfunctions observed during the Ercoupe tests. In June 1942, assisted by Mills and Miller, he focused his attention on developing an effective method of restricted burning when using solid rocket fuel, as the military demanded JATOs that could provide over 100 pounds of thrust without any risk of exploding. Although solid fuels such as GALCIT-27 were more storable than their liquid counterparts, they were disfavored for military JATO use as they provided less immediate thrust and did not have the versatility of being turned on and off mid-flight. Parsons tried to resolve GALCIT-27's stability issue with GALCIT-46, which replaced the former's ammonium nitrate with guanidine nitrate. To avoid the problems seen with ammonium nitrate, he had GALCIT-46 cooled and then heated prior to testing. When it failed the test, he realized that the fuel's binding black powders rather than the oxidizers had resulted in their instability, and in June that year had the idea of using liquid asphalt as an appropriate binding agent with potassium perchlorate as oxidizer.
+Malina recounted that Parsons was inspired to use asphalt by the ancient incendiary weapon Greek fire; in a 1982 talk for the International Association of Astronomical Artists Captain Boushey stated that Parsons experienced an epiphany after watching workers using molten asphalt to fix tiles onto a roof. Known as GALCIT-53, this fuel proved to be significantly more stable than the Group's earlier concoctions, fulfilling Parsons' aim of creating a restricted-burn rocket fuel inside a castable container, and providing a thrust 427% more powerful than that of GALCIT-27. This set a precedent which according to his biographer John Carter "changed the future of rocket technology": the thermoplastic asphalt casting was durable in all climates, allowing for mass production and indefinite storage and transforming solid-fuel agents into a safe and viable form of rocket propulsion. Plasticized variants of Parsons' solid-fuel design invented by JPL's Charles Bartley were later used by NASA in Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters and by the Strategic Air Command in Polaris, Poseidon and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles.
+
+=== Foundation of JPL and leading the Agape Lodge: 1942–1944 ===
+
+Aerojet's first two contracts were from the U.S. Navy; the Bureau of Aeronautics requested a solid-fuel JATO and Wilbur Wright Field requested a liquid-fuel unit. The Air Corps had requested two thousand JATOs from Aerojet by late 1943, committing $256,000 toward Parsons' solid-fuel type. Despite this drastically increased turnover, the company continued to operate informally and remained intertwined with the GALCIT project. Caltech astronomer Fritz Zwicky was brought in as head of the company's research department. Haley replaced von Kármán as Aerojet chairman and imposed payroll cuts instead of reducing JATO output; the alternative was to cut staff numbers while maintaining more generous salaries, but Haley's priority was Aerojet's contribution to the war effort. Company heads including Parsons were exempted from this austerity, drawing the ire of many personnel.
+Parsons' newfound credentials and financial security gave him the opportunity to travel more widely throughout the U.S. as an ambassador for Aerojet, meeting with other rocket enthusiasts. In New York he met with Karl Germer, the head of O.T.O. in North America and in Washington, D.C. he met Poet Laureate Joseph Auslander, donating some of Crowley's poetry books to the Library of Congress. He also became a regular at the Mañana Literary Society, which met in Laurel Canyon at the home of Parsons' friend Robert A. Heinlein and included science fiction writers including Cleve Cartmill, Jack Williamson, and Anthony Boucher. Among Parsons' favorite works of fiction was Williamson's Darker Than You Think, a novelette published in the fantasy magazine Unknown in 1940, which inspired his later occult workings. Boucher used Parsons as a partial basis for the character of Hugo Chantrelle in his murder mystery Rocket to the Morgue (1942).
+Helen went away for a period in June 1941, during which Parsons, encouraged to do so by the sexually permissive attitude of O.T.O., began a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old sister, Sara. Upon Helen's return, Sara asserted that she was Parsons' new wife, and Parsons himself admitted that he found Sara more sexually attractive than Helen. Conflicted in her feelings, Helen sought comfort in Wilfred Talbot Smith and began a relationship with him that lasted for the rest of his life; the four remained friends. The two couples, along with a number of other Thelemites (some of whom with their children), moved to 1003 South Orange Grove Boulevard, an American Craftsman-style mansion. They all contributed to the rent of $100 a month and lived communally in what replaced Winona Boulevard as the new base of the Agape Lodge, maintaining an allotment and slaughtering their own livestock for meat as well as blood rituals. Parsons decorated his new room with a copy of the Stele of Revealing, a statue of Pan, and his collection of swords and daggers. He converted the garage and laundry room into a chemical laboratory and often held science fiction discussion meetings in the kitchen, and entertained the children with hunts for fairies in the 25-acre garden.
\ No newline at end of file
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+---
+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 8/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Although there were arguments among the commune members, Parsons remained dedicated to Thelema. He gave almost all of his salary to O.T.O. while actively seeking out new members—recruiting JPL mathematician Barbara Canright—and financially supported Crowley in London through Germer. Parsons' enthusiasm for the Lodge quickly began to impact on his professional life. He frequently appeared at Aerojet hungover and sleep-deprived from late nights of Lodge activities, and invited many of his colleagues to them, drawing the ire of staff who previously tolerated Parsons' occultism as harmless eccentricity; known to von Kármán as a "delightful screwball", he was frequently observed reciting Crowley's poem "Hymn to Pan" in an ecstatic manner compared to the preaching of Billy Graham during rocket tests—and on request at parties to their great amusement. They disapproved of his hesitancy to separate his vocations; Parsons became more rigorously engaged in Aerojet's day-to-day business in an effort to resolve this wariness, but the Agape Lodge soon came under investigation by both the Pasadena Police Department and the FBI. Both had received allegations of a "black magic cult" involved in sexual orgies; one complainant was a 16-year-old boy who said that he was raped by lodge members, while neighbors reported a ritual involving a naked pregnant woman jumping through fire. After Parsons explained that the Lodge was simply "an organization dedicated to religious and philosophical speculation", neither agency found evidence of illegal activity and came to the conclusion that the Lodge constituted no threat to national security. Having been a long-term heavy user of alcohol and marijuana, Parsons now habitually used cocaine, amphetamines, peyote, mescaline, and opiates as well. He continued to have sexual relations with multiple women, including McMurtry's fiancée Claire. When Parsons paid for her to have an abortion, McMurtry was angered and their friendship broke down.
+
+Crowley and Germer wanted to see Smith removed as head of the Agape Lodge, believing that he had become a bad influence on its members. Parsons and Helen wrote to them to defend their mentor but Germer ordered him to stand down; Parsons was appointed as temporary head of the Lodge. Some veteran Lodge members disliked Parsons' influence, concerned that it encouraged excessive sexual polyandry that was religiously detrimental, but his charismatic orations at Lodge meetings assured his popularity among the majority of followers. Parsons soon created the Thelemite journal Oriflamme, in which he published his own poetry, but Crowley was unimpressed—particularly due to Parsons' descriptions of drug use—and the project was soon shelved. Helen gave birth to Smith's son in April; the child was named Kwen Lanval Parsons. Smith and Helen left with Kwen for a two-room cabin in Rainbow Valley in May. Concurrently in England, Crowley undertook an astrological analysis of Smith's birth chart and came to the conclusion that Smith was the incarnation of a god, greatly altering his estimation of him. Smith remained skeptical as Crowley's analysis was seemingly deliberately devised in Parsons' favor, encouraging Smith to step down from his role in the Agape Lodge and instructing him to take a meditative retreat. Refusing to take orders from Germer any more, Smith resigned from O.T.O. Parsons—who remained sympathetic and friendly to Smith during the conflict and was weary of Crowley's "appalling egotism, bad taste, bad judgement, and pedanticism"—ceased lodge activities and resigned as its head, but withdrew his resignation after receiving a pacifying letter from Crowley.
+
+By mid-1943, Aerojet was operating on a budget of $650,000. The same year Parsons and von Kármán traveled to Norfolk, Virginia on the invitation of Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to consult on a new JATO contract for the U.S. Navy. Though JATOs were being mass-produced for military applications, JATO-propelled aircraft could not "keep up" with larger, bomber planes taking off from long aircraft carrier runways—which made Aerojet's industry at risk of becoming defunct. Parsons demonstrated the efficacy of the newer JATOs to solve this issue by equipping a Grumman plane with solid-fuel units; its assisted takeoff from the USS Charger was successful, but produced smoke containing a noxious, yellow-colored residue. The Navy guaranteed Parsons a contract on the condition that this residue was removed; this led to the invention of Aeroplex, a technology for smokeless vapor trails developed at Aerojet by Parsons.
+As the U.S. became aware that Nazi Germany had developed the V-2 rocket, the military—following recommendations from von Kármán based upon research using British intelligence—placed a renewed impetus on its own rocket research, reinstating Qian to the GALCIT project. They gave the Group a $3 million grant to develop rocket-based weapons, and the Group was expanded and renamed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). By this point the Navy were ordering 20,000 JATOs a month from Aerojet, and in December 1944 Haley negotiated for the company to sell 51% of its stock to the General Tire and Rubber Company to cope with the increased demand. Aerojet's Caltech-linked employees—including Zwicky, Malina and Summerfield—would only agree to the sale on the condition that Parsons and Forman were removed from the company, viewing their occult activities as disreputable. JPL historian Erik M. Conway also attributes Parsons' expulsion to more practical concerns: he "still wanted to work in the same way as he'd done in his backyard, instinctive and without regard for safety". Parsons and Forman were unfazed, informing Haley of their prediction that the rocket industry would become obsolete in the postwar age and seeing more financial incentive in starting a chain of laundromats. Haley persuaded them to sell their stock, resulting in Parsons leaving the company with $11,000. With this money he bought the lease to 1003, which had come to be known as "the Parsonage" after him.
+
+=== L. Ron Hubbard and the Babalon Working: 1945–1946 ===
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+---
+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 9/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Now disassociated from JPL and Aerojet, Parsons and Forman founded the Ad Astra Engineering Company, under which Parsons founded the chemical manufacturing Vulcan Powder Company. Ad Astra was subject to an FBI investigation under suspicion of espionage when security agents from the Manhattan Project discovered that Parsons and Forman had procured a chemical used in a top secret project for a material known only as x-metal, but they were later acquitted of any wrongdoing. Parsons continued to financially support Smith and Helen, although he asked for a divorce from her and ignored Crowley's commands by welcoming Smith back to the Parsonage when his retreat was finished. Parsons continued to hold O.T.O. activities at the Parsonage but began renting rooms at the house to non-Thelemites, including journalist Nieson Himmel, Manhattan Project physicist Robert Cornog, and science fiction artist Louis Goldstone. Parsons attracted controversy in Pasadena for his preferred clientele. As Parsonage resident Alva Rogers recalled: "In the ads placed in the local paper Jack specified that only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or any other exotic types need to apply for rooms—any mundane soul would be unceremoniously rejected". Science fiction writer and U.S. Navy officer L. Ron Hubbard soon moved into the Parsonage; he and Parsons became close friends. Parsons wrote to Crowley that although Hubbard had "no formal training in Magick he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduce he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel. ... He is the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles."
+Parsons and Sara were in an open relationship encouraged by O.T.O.'s polyamorous sexual ethics, and she became enamored with Hubbard; Parsons, despite attempting to repress his passions, became intensely jealous. Motivated to find a new partner through occult means, Parsons began to devote his energies to conducting black magic, causing concern among fellow O.T.O. members who believed that he was invoking troublesome spirits into the Parsonage; Jane Wolfe wrote to Crowley that "our own Jack is enamored with Witchcraft, the houmfort, voodoo. From the start he always wanted to evoke something—no matter what, I am inclined to think, as long as he got a result." He told the residents that he was imbuing statues in the house with a magical energy in order to sell them to fellow occultists. Parsons reported paranormal events in the house resulting from the rituals; including poltergeist activity, sightings of orbs and ghostly apparitions, alchemical (sylphic) effect on the weather, and disembodied voices. Pendle suggested that Parsons was particularly susceptible to these interpretations and attributed the voices to a prank by Hubbard and Sara. One ritual allegedly brought screaming banshees to the windows of the Parsonage, an incident that disturbed Forman for the rest of his life. In December 1945, Parsons began a series of rituals based on Enochian magic during which he masturbated onto magical tablets, accompanied by Sergei Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto. Describing this magical operation as the Babalon Working, he hoped to bring about the incarnation of Thelemite goddess Babalon onto Earth. He allowed Hubbard to take part as his "scribe", believing that he was particularly sensitive to detecting magical phenomena. As described by Richard Metzger, "Parsons jerked off in the name of spiritual advancement" while Hubbard "scanned the astral plane for signs and visions."
+Their final ritual took place in the Mojave Desert in late February 1946, during which Parsons abruptly decided that his undertaking was complete. On returning to the Parsonage, he discovered that Marjorie Cameron—an unemployed illustrator and former Navy WAVE—had come to visit. Believing her to be the "elemental" woman and manifestation of Babalon that he had invoked, in early March Parsons began performing sex magic rituals with Cameron, who acted as his "Scarlet Woman", while Hubbard continued to participate as the amanuensis. Unlike the rest of the household, Cameron knew nothing at first of Parsons' magical intentions: "I didn't know anything about O.T.O., I didn't know that they had invoked me, I didn't know anything, but the whole house knew it. Everybody was watching to see what was going on." Despite this ignorance and her skepticism about Parsons' magic, Cameron reported her sighting of a UFO to Parsons, who secretly recorded the sighting as a materialization of Babalon. Inspired by Crowley's novel Moonchild (1917), Parsons and Hubbard aimed to magically fertilize a "magical child" through Immaculate Conception, which when born to a woman somewhere on Earth nine months following the working's completion would become the Thelemic messiah embodying Babalon. To quote Metzger, the purpose of the Babalon Working was "a daring attempt to shatter the boundaries of space and time" facilitating, according to Parsons, the emergence of Thelema's Æon of Horus. When Cameron departed for a trip to New York, Parsons retreated to the desert, where he believed that a preternatural entity psychographically provided him with Liber 49, which represented a fourth part of Crowley's The Book of the Law, the primary sacred text of Thelema, as well as part of a new sacred text he called the Book of Babalon. Crowley was bewildered and concerned by the endeavor, complaining to Germer of being "fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts!" Believing the Babalon Working was accomplished, Parsons sold the Parsonage to developers for $25,000 under the condition that he and Cameron could continue to live in the coach house, and he appointed Roy Leffingwell to head the Agape Lodge, which would now have to meet elsewhere for its rituals. Parsons co-founded a company called Allied Enterprises with Hubbard and Sara, into which Parsons invested his life savings of $20,970. Hubbard suggested that with this money they travel to Miami to purchase three yachts, which they would then sail through the Panama Canal to the West Coast, where they could sell them on for a profit. Parsons agreed, but many of his friends thought it was a bad idea. Hubbard had secretly requested permission from the U.S. Navy to sail to China and South and Central America on a mission to "collect writing material"; his real plans were for a world cruise. Left "flat broke" by this defrauding, Parsons was incensed when he discovered that Hubbard and Sara had left for Miami with $10,000 of the money; he suspected a scam but was placated by a telephone call from Hubbard and agreed to remain business partners. When Crowley, in a telegram to Germer, dismissed Parsons as a "weak fool" and victim to Hubbard and Sara's obvious confidence trick, Parsons changed his mind, flew to Miami and placed a temporary injunction and restraining order on them. Upon tracking them down to a harbor in County Causeway, Parsons discovered that the couple had purchased three yachts as planned; they tried to flee aboard one but hit a squall and were forced to return to port. Parsons was convinced that he had brought them to shore through a lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram containing an astrological, geomantic invocation of Bartzabel—a vengeful spirit of Mars. Allied Enterprises was dissolved and in a court settlement Hubbard was required to promise to reimburse Parsons.
\ No newline at end of file
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+---
+title: "Jack Parsons"
+chunk: 10/16
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:07.745794+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Parsons was discouraged from taking further action by Sara, who threatened to report him for statutory rape since their sexual relationship took place when she was under California's age of consent of 18. Parsons was ultimately compensated with only $2,900. Hubbard, already married to Margaret Grubb, bigamously married Sara and went on to found Dianetics and Scientology. The Sunday Times published an article about Hubbard's involvement with O.T.O. and Parsons' occult activities in December 1969. In response, the Church of Scientology released an unsubstantiated press statement which said that Hubbard had been sent as an undercover agent by the U.S. Navy to intercept and destroy Parsons' "black magic cult", and save Sara from its influence. The Church also stated that Robert A. Heinlein was the clandestine Navy operative who "sent in" Hubbard to undertake this operation. Returning to California, Parsons completed the sale of the Parsonage, which was then demolished, and resigned from O.T.O. He wrote in his letter to Crowley that he did not believe that "as an autocratic organization, [the O.T.O.] constitutes a true and proper medium for the expression and attainment" of Thelema.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merton_thesis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merton_thesis-0.md
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+---
+title: "Merton thesis"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merton_thesis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:54.749002+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Merton thesis is an argument about the nature of early experimental science proposed by Robert K. Merton. Similar to Max Weber's famous claim on the link between Protestant work ethic and the capitalist economy, Merton argued for a similar positive correlation between the rise of Protestant Pietism and early experimental science. The Merton thesis has resulted in continuous debates.
+Although scholars are still debating it, Merton's 1936 doctoral dissertation (and two years later his first monograph by the same title) Science, Technology and Society in 17th-Century England raised important issues on the connections between religion and the rise of modern science, became a significant work in the realm of the sociology of science and continues to be cited in new scholarship. Merton further developed this thesis in other publications.
+
+
+== Thesis ==
+The Merton thesis has two separate parts: firstly, it presents a theory that science changes due to an accumulation of observations and improvement in experimental technique and methodology; secondly, it puts forward the argument that the popularity of science in England in the 17th century, and the religious demography of the Royal Society (English scientists of that time were predominantly Puritans or other Protestants) can be explained by a correlation between Protestantism and the scientific values (see Mertonian norms).
+Merton focuses on English Puritanism and German Pietism as being responsible for the development of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. He explains that the connection between religious affiliation and interest in science is a result of a significant synergy between the ascetic Protestant values and those of modern science. Protestant values encouraged scientific research by allowing science to identify God's influence on the world and thus providing religious justification for scientific research.
+
+
+== Criticism ==
+The first part of Merton's thesis has been criticized for insufficient consideration of the roles of mathematics and the mechanical philosophy in the scientific revolution. The second part has been criticized for the difficulty involved in defining who counts as a Protestant of the "right type" without making arbitrary distinctions. It is also criticized for failing to explain why non-Protestants do science (consider the Catholics Copernicus, da Vinci, Descartes, or Galileo) and conversely why Protestants of the "right type" are not all interested in science.
+Merton, acknowledging the criticism, replied that the Puritan ethos was not necessary, although it did facilitate development of science. He also noted that when science had acquired institutional legitimacy, it no longer needed religion, eventually becoming a counterforce, leading to religious decline. Nonetheless, early on, in Merton's view religion was a major factor that allowed the  scientific revolution to occur. While the Merton thesis does not explain all the causes of the scientific revolution, it does illuminate possible reasons why England was one of its driving motors and the structure of the English scientific community.
+
+
+== Support ==
+In 1958, American sociologist Gerhard Lenski published a book summarizing an empirical study of the influence of religious affiliation among residents of the Detroit, Michigan area. Among other insights, he interpenetrated his study to reveal that there were significant differences between Catholics on the one hand, and (white) Protestants and Jews on the other hand, with regard to economics and the sciences.
+Lenski's data supported the basic hypotheses of Max Weber's work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. According to Lenski, the "contributions of Protestantism to material progress have been largely unintended by-products of certain distinctive Protestant traits. This was a central point in Weber's theory." Lenski noted that more than a hundred years prior to Weber, John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist church, had observed that "diligence and frugality" made Methodists wealthy. "In an early era, Protestant asceticism and dedication to work, as noted both by Wesley and Weber, seem to have been important patterns of action contributing to economic progress." However, Lenski said, asceticism was rare among modern Protestants, and the distinctive Protestant doctrine of "the calling" was largely forgotten. Instead, modern (white) Protestants and Jews had a high degree of "intellectual autonomy" that facilitated scientific and technical advance. By contrast, Lenski pointed out, Catholics developed an intellectual orientation which valued "obedience" to the teachings of their church above intellectual autonomy, which made them less inclined to enter scientific careers. Catholic sociologists had come to the same conclusions.
+Lenski traced these differences back to the Reformation and the Catholic church's reaction to it. In Lenski's view, the Reformation encouraged intellectual autonomy among Protestants, in particular the Anabaptists, Puritans, Pietists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. In the Middle Ages, there had been tendencies toward intellectual autonomy, as exemplified in men like Erasmus. But after the Reformation, the Catholic leaders increasingly identified these tendencies with Protestantism and heresy and demanded that Catholics be obedient and faithful to ecclesiastical discipline. In Lenski's opinion, his study showed that these differences between Protestants and Catholics survived to the present day. As a consequence
+
+"none of the predominantly and devoutly Catholic nations in the modern world can be classified as a leading industrial nation. Some Catholic nations – such as France, Italy, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile – are quite highly industrialized, but none of them are leaders in the technological and scientific fields, nor do they seem likely to become so. Recently [1963] some Brazilian Catholic social scientists compared their country's progress with that of the United States and concluded that the chief factor responsible for the differential rates of development is the religious heritage of the two nations."
+Puritans and Pietists both contributed to intellectual autonomy and provided intellectual tools and values important for science. As an example, pietism challenged the orthodoxy via new media and formats: Periodical journals gained importance versus the former pasquills and single thesis, traditional disputation was replaced by competitive debating, which tried to gain new knowledge instead of defending orthodox scholarship. It is a part of the forces that lead to modernity.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Sources ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Steven Shapin, Understanding the Merton Thesis, Isis, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 594–605
+Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanexus_Institute-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanexus_Institute-0.md
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+---
+title: "Metanexus Institute"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanexus_Institute"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:56.276774+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Metanexus Institute is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1997 to explore scientific and philosophical questions. The institute has organized the exchange of ideas through conferences and published books. It has EIN 23-2977021 as a 501(c)(3) Public Charity; in 2016, it claimed $28,249 in total revenue and $8,827 in total assets.
+
+
+== History ==
+With the help of Peter Dodson, Soloman Katz, Andrew Newberg, and Stephen Dunning, William Grassie created the Philadelphia Center for Religion and Science (PCRS) to promote literacy in science and religion by hosting seminars, courses, and conferences. PCRS was renamed to Metanexus Institute in 2000, and the Meta-List was relaunched as a website with the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, and Metanexus launched a $5.1 million Local Societies Initiative. In 2003, Metanexus launched the $3.3 million Spiritual Transformation Scientific Research Project. The organization hosted numerous conferences at universities and elsewhere, including a conference entitled Science and Religion in Context at the University of Pennsylvania. Metanexus has promoted the concept of Big History, sometimes termed the Epic of Evolution, which examines history using long time frames through a multidisciplinary approach.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Metanexus Institute
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution-0.md
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+---
+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 1/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) takes no official position on whether or not biological evolution has occurred, nor on the validity of the modern evolutionary synthesis as a scientific theory. In the twentieth century, the First Presidency of the LDS Church published doctrinal statements on the origin of man and creation. In addition, individual leaders of the church have expressed a variety of personal opinions on evolution, many of which have affected the beliefs and perceptions of Latter-day Saints.
+There have been three public statements from the First Presidency (1909, 1910, 1925) and one private statement from the First Presidency (1931) about the LDS Church's view on evolution. The 1909 statement was a delayed response to the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. In the statement, the First Presidency affirmed their doctrine that Adam is the direct, divine offspring of God. In response to the 1911 Brigham Young University modernism controversy, the First Presidency issued an official statement in its 1910 Christmas message that the church members should be kind to everyone regardless of differences in opinion about evolution and that proven science is accepted by the church with joy. In 1925, in response to the Scopes Trial, the First Presidency published a statement, similar in content to the 1909 statement, but with "anti-science" language removed. A private memo written in 1931 by the First Presidency to church general authorities confirmed a neutral stance on the existence of pre-Adamites and "death before the fall." It further asserted that geology, biology, and other sciences were best left to scientists (and implicitly, not theologians), and were not central to church teachings.
+There are a variety of LDS Church publications that address evolution, often with neutral or opposing viewpoints. In order to address students' questions about the church's position on evolution in biology and related classes, Brigham Young University (BYU) released a library packet on evolution in 1992. This packet contains the first three official First Presidency statement as well as the "Evolution" section in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism to supplement normal course material. Statements from church presidents are mixed with some vehemently against evolution and the theories of Charles Darwin, and some willing to admit that the circumstances of earth's creation are unknown and that evolution could explain some aspects of creation. In the 1930s, church leaders Joseph Fielding Smith, B. H. Roberts, and James E. Talmage debated about the existence of pre-Adamites, eliciting a memo from the First Presidency in 1931 claiming a neutral stance on pre-Adamites.
+Since the publication of On the Origin of Species, some Latter-day Saint scientists have published essays or speeches to try and reconcile science and Mormon doctrine. Many of these scientists subscribe to the idea that evolution is the natural process God used to create the Earth and its inhabitants and that there are commonalities between Mormon doctrine and foundations of evolutionary biology. Debate and questioning among members of the LDS Church continues concerning evolution, religion, and the reconciliation between the two. Although articles from publications like BYU Studies often represent neutral or pro-evolutionary stances, LDS-sponsored publications such as the Ensign tend to publish articles with anti-evolutionary views. Studies published since 2014 have found that the majority of Latter-day Saints do not believe humans evolved over time. A 2018 study in the Journal of Contemporary Religion found that very liberal or moderate members of the LDS Church were more likely to accept evolution as their education level increased, whereas very conservative members were less likely to accept evolution as their education level increased. Another 2018 study found that over time, Latter-day Saint undergraduate attitudes towards evolution have changed from antagonistic to accepting. The researchers attributed this attitude change to more primary school exposure to evolution and a reduction in the number of anti-evolution statements from the First Presidency.
+
+== Official doctrine ==
+The LDS Church has no official position on the theory of evolution or the details of "what happened on earth before Adam and Eve, including how their bodies were created." Even so, some church general authorities have made statements suggesting that, in their opinion, evolution is opposed to scriptural teaching. Apostles Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie were among the most well-known advocates of this position. Other church authorities and members have made statements suggesting that, in their opinion, evolution is not in opposition to scriptural doctrine. Examples of this position have come from B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, and John A. Widtsoe.
+While maintaining its "no position" stance, the LDS Church has produced a number of official publications that have included discussion and personal statements from these various church leaders on evolution and the "origin of man." These statements generally adopt the position, as a church-approved encyclopedia entry states, "[t]he scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how, though the Lord has promised that he will tell that when he comes again."
+
+=== First Presidency statements ===
+There have been three authoritative public statements (1909, 1910, and 1925) and one private statement (1931) given from the LDS Church's highest authority, the First Presidency, which represents the church's doctrinal position on the origin of mankind. The 1909 and 1925 statements of the First Presidency have been subsequently endorsed by church leaders such as apostle Boyd K. Packer in 1988.
+In February 2002, the entire 1909 First Presidency message was reprinted in the church's Ensign magazine.
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+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 2/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+==== 1909 statement "The Origin of Man" ====
+Historically, Latter-day Saints were isolated in the western plains when The Origin of Species was published by Charles Darwin in 1859. Consequently, there was little discussion about evolution among Mormon communities. The Latter-day Saints were trying to survive and build settlements in Utah and evolution was not a prominent concern for them. George Q. Cannon of the Quorum of the Twelve discussed his beliefs on Darwin in 1861, stating that revelation is superior to science, but considered the possibility of evolution among animals and plants. The building of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 allowed for the Saints to gain greater access to outside ideas and influences. Because of this new knowledge, Mormon schools sought to combat scientific theories such as evolution with faith. Publications helped reaffirm church doctrine; however, views on evolution were mixed. Some believed a belief in evolution was equivalent to atheism, whereas some sought to find common ground between evolution and faith. Due to the many differing opinions that emerged, in the early 1900s the LDS Church began to officially respond to the theories that had already been discussed for nearly fifty years.
+The first official statement from the First Presidency on the issue of evolution was in November 1909, the centennial of Darwin's birth, and the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Church president Joseph F. Smith appointed a committee headed by Orson F. Whitney, a member of Quorum of the Twelve, to prepare an official statement, "basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, proclaim[ing] man to be the direct and lineal offspring of Deity." This teaching regarding the origin of man differs from traditional Christianity's doctrine of creation, referred to by some as "creationism", which consists of belief in a fiat creation. One author said the statement's wording wasn't "outright denying evolutionary claims", but "presented a clear anti-evolutionary slant", and a BYU columnist described the 1909 statement as "anti-evolution" and anti-science.
+In reference to potential humans before Adam the First Presidency stated, "It is held by some that Adam was not the first man upon this earth and that the original human being was a development from lower orders of the animal creation. These, however, are the theories of men. The word of the Lord declared that Adam was 'the first man of all men' ... and we are therefore in duty bound to regard him as the primal parent of our race. ...[A]ll men were created in the beginning after the image of God ... Man began life as a human being, in the likeness of our Heavenly Father." Moreover, it stated that although man begins life as a germ or embryo, it did not mean that, "[Adam] began life as anything less than a man, or less than the human germ or embryo that becomes a man".
+
+==== 1910 statement "Words in Season from the First Presidency" ====
+In response to continual questions from church members regarding evolution, as well as problems preceding the 1911 Brigham Young University modernism controversy, in its 1910 Christmas message, the First Presidency made reference to the church's position on science. It stated that the church is not hostile to "real science" and that "diversity of opinion does not necessitate intolerance of spirit". The message continues by stating that "real science" which is demonstrated is accepted with joy, but theories, speculation, or anything contrary to revelation or common sense are not accepted.
+
+==== 1925 statement "Mormon View of Evolution" ====
+In 1925, in the midst of the Scopes Trial in Tennessee, a new First Presidency issued an official statement which reaffirmed the doctrine that Adam was the first man upon the earth and that he was created in the image of God. There is a short article in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism which is largely composed of quotes from the 1909 and 1925 statements. It states that men and women are created in the image of the "universal Father and Mother", and Adam, like Christ was a pre-existing spirit who took a body to become a "living soul". It continues by stating that because man is "endowed with divine attributes", he "is capable, by experience through ages and aeons, of evolving into a God." The official statement was initially published in Deseret News on July 18, 1925, and later published in the Improvement Era in September 1925. The 1925 statement is shorter than the 1909 statement, containing selected excerpts from the 1909 statement. "Anti-science" language was removed and the title was altered from "The Origin of Man" to "Mormon View of Evolution". The comment which concluded that theories of evolution are "theories of men" in the 1909 official statement was no longer included in the 1925 official statement. The First Presidency has not publicly issued an official statement on evolution since 1925.
+
+==== 1931 statement "First Presidency Minutes" ====
+In April 1931, the First Presidency sent out a lengthy memo to all church general authorities in response to the debate between B. H. Roberts of the Presidency of the Seventy and Joseph Fielding Smith of the Quorum of the Twelve on the existence of pre-Adamites. The memo stated the church's neutral stance on the existence of pre-Adamites.
+
+== Official church publications ==
+The subject of evolution has been addressed in several official publications of the church.
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+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 3/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== General conference speeches ===
+The LDS Church has published several general conference talks mentioning evolution. In the October 1984 conference, apostle Boyd K. Packer stated that "no one with reverence for God could believe that His children evolved from slime or from reptiles" as well as affirming that "those who accept the theory of evolution don't show much enthusiasm for genealogical research." In the April 2012 conference, apostle Russell M. Nelson discussed the human body stating "some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere". He then compared this to an "explosion in a printing shop produc[ing] a dictionary".
+
+=== Instruction manuals ===
+
+==== Old Testament Student Seminary Manual ====
+The Old Testament Student Manual, published by the Church Educational System, contains several quotes by general authorities as well as academics from a variety of backgrounds (both members of the church and non-members) related to organic evolution and the origins of the earth. The 2003 edition states that there is no official stance on the age of the earth but that evidence for a longer process is substantial and very few people believe the earth was actually created in the space of one week. However, it also includes a quote from Joseph Fielding Smith indicating his interpretation of church doctrine as it pertains to the theory of organic evolution. He asserts that organic evolution is incompatible and inconsistent with revelations from God and that to accept it is to reject the plan of salvation.
+
+==== Doctrine and Covenants and Church History Seminary Teacher Manual ====
+Doctrine and Covenants mentions "the seven thousand years of [the earth's] continuance, or its temporal existence", which has been interpreted by Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie as a statement suggesting that the earth is no more than about six thousand years old (the seventh thousand-year period being the future millennium). Speciation generally occurs over very large spans of time.
+However, in relation to this verse, the manual for seminary teachers explains: "It may be helpful to explain that the 7,000 years refers to the time since the Fall of Adam and Eve. It is not referring to the actual age of the earth including the periods of creation."
+
+==== BYU Library packet on evolution ====
+Since 1992 at the LDS-owned universities, a packet of authoritative statements approved by the BYU Board of Trustees (composed of the First Presidency, other general authorities, and general organizational leaders) has been provided to students in classes when discussing the topic of organic evolution. The packet was assembled due to the large number of questions students had about evolution and the origins of man and is intended to be distributed along with other course material. The packet includes the first three Official First Presidency statements on the origin of man as well as the "Evolution" section in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism which includes elements from the 1909 and 1925 statements as well as the 1931 "First Presidency Minutes".
+
+=== Official magazines ===
+
+==== Ensign ====
+In 1982, the Ensign, an official periodical of the church, published an article entitled "Christ and the Creation" by Bruce R. McConkie, which stated that "[m]ortality and procreation and death all had their beginnings with the Fall." In an earlier edition of the Ensign published in 1980, McConkie stated that "the greatest heresy in the sectarian world ... is that God is a spirit nothingness which fills the immensity of space, and that creation came through evolutionary processes."
+
+==== New Era ====
+A July 2016 article for young adults in the New Era acknowledged questions about how the age of the earth, dinosaurs, and evolution fit with church teachings, stating "it does all fit together, but there are still a lot of questions." The article offered no further explanation to how science and LDS teachings fit together, and stated "nothing that science reveals can disprove your faith" and told youth "not to get worried in the meantime."
+A few months later in the same magazine, the church published an anonymously authored article stating that "the Church has no official position of the theory of evolution." The article continues by stating that the theory of organic evolution should be left for scientific study and that details about the what happened before Adam and Eve and how their bodies were created have not been revealed, but the origin of man is clear from the teaching of the church.
+A much earlier anonymously authored article from 2004 did not attempt to reconcile church teachings and scientific views of evolution, but stated that not having the answers does not discredit the existence of God, and that God will not reveal more unto us until we prove our faith. An example was provided of how the author avoided a classroom debate on evolution by stating that they knew God existed and created us. The article also quoted past church president Gordon B. Hinckley giving his own example of how he chose to drop the question and not let it bother him. Subsequent letters from youth stated that the youth viewed themselves as against evolution and supportive of intelligent design. A previous article in the New Era also showed youth viewing evolution as an antagonistic idea to their faith and becoming upset when it was taught and another featured a church seventy using scientific arguments in an attempt to disprove evolutionary natural selection and adaptation.
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+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 4/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+==== Improvement Era ====
+The Improvement Era was an official periodical of the church between 1897 and 1970. In the April 1910 edition in the "Priesthood Quorum's Table" section of that periodical, Genesis is cited as well as other scriptures from Genesis and the Pearl of Great Price. The article states that it is unclear whether the mortal bodies of man evolved through natural processes, whether Adam and Eve where transplanted to Earth from another place, or whether they were born on Earth in mortality. The article states that those questions are not fully answered in the church's current revelation and scripture. The article cites the answer is attributed to the church's First Presidency.
+
+=== Canonized scriptures ===
+Some verses in the standard works raise questions about the compatibility of scriptural teachings and scientists' current understanding of organic evolution. One such verse, in Doctrine and Covenants describes the "temporal existence" of the earth as 7,000 years old.
+Other scriptural verses suggest that no organisms died before the fall of Adam. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Lehi teaches: "If Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end". In Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, the prophet Enoch states: "Because that Adam fell, we are; and by his fall came death; and we are made partakers of misery and woe."
+
+=== Bible Dictionary ===
+In the Bible Dictionary of the LDS Church, the entry for "Fall of Adam" previously included the following statement: "Before the fall, Adam and Eve had physical bodies but no blood. There was no sin, no death, and no children among any of the earthly creations." Under the entry "Flesh", it is written: "Since flesh often means mortality, Adam is spoken of as the 'first flesh' upon the earth, meaning he was the first mortal on the earth, all things being created in a non-mortal condition, and becoming mortal through the fall of Adam.
+As noted above, the Bible Dictionary is published by the LDS Church, and its preface states: "It [the Bible Dictionary] is not intended as an official or revealed endorsement by the church of the doctrinal, historical, cultural, and other matters set forth."
+
+== Statements from church presidents ==
+Every statement by an LDS Church president does not necessarily constitute official church doctrine, but a statement from him is generally regarded by church membership as authoritative and usually represents doctrine. Official church doctrine is however presented and taught unitedly by the entire First Presidency, usually released in an official letter or other authorized publication.
+
+=== Brigham Young ===
+Brigham Young, the church's second president, stated that the LDS Church differs from other Christian churches, because they do not seek to clash their ideas with scientific theory. He further stated that whether God began with an empty Earth, whether he created the Earth out of nothing, and whether he made it in six days or millions of years will remain a mystery unless God reveals something about it. Two years later Young also stated it was unjust that the theories of scientists were taught in schools, but not the principles of the gospel, and hoped in the future to have schools teach from curriculum written by members of his church that taught church doctrine. He wrote to his son stating that he'd created Brigham Young Academy in part because of his opposition to the theory of evolution, and was "resolutely and uncompromisingly opposed" to "the theories...of Darwin."
+
+=== John Taylor ===
+John Taylor was the second church president to comment directly on Darwinian theory. In his 1882 book Mediation and Atonement, Taylor stated that nature and creation is governed by the laws of man and organisms exist in the same form since creation, as contradicted by the ideas of evolutionists. Taylor continued that man did not originate from chaos of matter, but from "the faculties and powers of a God".
+
+=== Joseph F. Smith ===
+Soon after the First Presidency's 1909 statement, Joseph F. Smith professed in an editorial that "the Church itself has no philosophy about the modus operandi employed by the Lord in His creation of the world." However, in the very same month (and in the wake of the evolution controversy that had recently ensued at Brigham Young University), Smith published and signed a statement wherein he explained some of the conflicts between revealed religion and the theories of evolution. He cited the 1911 Brigham Young University modernism controversy, stating that evolution is in conflict with scriptures and modern revelation. He continues that the church holds 
+that "divine revelation" must be the "standard" and is "truth". Smith mentions that "science has changed from age to age", and "philosophic theories of life" have their place, but do not belong in LDS Church school classes and anywhere else when they contradict the word of God.
+A 1910 editorial in a church magazine that enumerates various possibilities for creation is usually attributed to Smith or to the First Presidency. Included in the listed possibilities were the ideas that Adam and Eve: (1) "evolved in natural processes to present perfection"; (2) were "transplanted [to earth] from another sphere"; or (3) were "born here ... as other mortals have been." Smith authored an editorial the next year in the church magazine discouraging the discussion of evolution in church school stating that members of the church believe the theory of evolution was "more or less a fallacy."
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+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 5/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== David O. McKay ===
+In a 1952 speech to students at BYU, McKay used the theory of evolution as an example while suggesting that science can "leave [a student] with his soul unanchored." He stated that a professor that denies "divine agency in creation" imposes on the student that life was created by chance. McKay insisted that students should be led to a "counterbalancing thought" that "God is the Creator of the earth", "the Father of our souls and spirits", and "the purpose of creation is theirs (God and Jesus Christ)." In the April 1968 general conference, McKay's son, David, read a message on his father's behalf that was an edited version of the 1952 speech, including the omission of the word "beautiful" when describing the theory of evolution. In 1954, McKay quoted the Old Testament while affirming to members of the BYU faculty that living things only reproduce "after their kind". He quoted Genesis which states, "Let the earth bring forth the living creatures after his kind, cattle and creeping things, and the beast of the earth after his kind."
+
+=== Spencer W. Kimball ===
+At a 1975 church women's conference, church president Spencer W. Kimball quoted, "And, I God created man in mine own image, and in the image of mine Only Begotten created I him; male and female created I them." (Kimball added that "the story of the rib, of course, is figurative.") Kimball continued, "we don't know exactly how [Adam and Eve's] coming into this world happened, and when we're able to understand it the Lord will tell us."
+
+=== Ezra Taft Benson ===
+Prior to becoming president of the LDS Church, Ezra Taft Benson gave an April 1981 general conference address in which he stated that "the theory of man's development from lower forms of life" is a "false idea". In 1988, after becoming president of the church, Benson published a book counseling members of the church to use the Book of Mormon to counter the theories of evolution. He wrote that "we have not been using the Book of Mormon as we should. Our homes are not as strong unless we are using it to bring our children to Christ. Our families may be corrupted by worldly trends and teachings unless we know how to use the book to expose and combat the falsehoods in socialism, organic evolution, rationalism, humanism, etc." In 1988, Benson published another book that included his earlier warnings about the "deceptions" of Charles Darwin. He wrote that educational institutions serve to mislead youth, which explains—he noted—why the church advises that youth attend church institutions, allowing parents to closely observe the education of their children and clear up "the deceptions of men like . . . Charles Darwin.
+
+=== Gordon B. Hinckley ===
+In a 1997 speech at an Institute of Religion in Ogden, Utah, church president Gordon B. Hinckley said: "People ask me every now and again if I believe in evolution. I tell them I am not concerned with organic evolution. I do not worry about it. I passed through that argument long ago." wherein he contrasts "organic evolution" with the evolution and improvement of individuals: In the late 1990s, Hinckley recalled his university studies of anthropology and geology to reporter Larry A. Witham: "'Studied all about it. Didn't worry me then. Doesn't worry me now'", insisting that the church only requires the belief that Adam was the first man of '"what we would call the human race."' In 2004, an official church magazine printed a quote from Hinckley from a 1983 speech where he expressed a similar sentiment.
+
+== Statements from apostles ==
+In the early 1900s, many general authorities, specifically those with science backgrounds, subscribed to the idea of an old earth, yet most of them rejected Darwinism. Joseph Fielding Smith and other general authorities were against the old earth theory as well as Darwin's theory of evolution. Individual leaders of the church have expressed a variety of personal opinions on biological evolution and as such these do not necessarily constitute official church doctrine.
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+---
+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 6/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Statements from the 1930s Roberts–Smith–Talmage dispute ===
+In 1930, B. H. Roberts, the presiding member of the First Council of the Seventy, was assigned by the First Presidency to create a study manual for the Melchizedek priesthood holders of the church. Entitled The Truth, The Way, The Life, the draft of the manual that was submitted to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for approval stated that death had been occurring on Earth for millions of years prior to the fall of Adam and that human-like pre-Adamites had lived on the Earth.
+On 5 April 1930, Joseph Fielding Smith, a junior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the son of a late church president, "vigorously promulgated [the] opposite point of view" in a speech that was published in a church magazine. In his widely read speech, Smith taught as doctrine that there had been no death on earth until after the fall of Adam and that there were no "pre-Adamites".
+In 1931, both Roberts and Smith were permitted to present their views to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve. After hearing both sides, the First Presidency issued a memo to the general authorities of the church which stated while they agree with the idea that "Adam is the primal parent of our race", there is no advantage to continuing the discussion and that church members should focus on "[bearing] the message of the restored gospel to the people of the world" and that those sciences do not have anything to do with, "the salvation of the souls of mankind". They stated that continuation of the discussion would only lead to "confusion, division, and misunderstanding if continued further."
+Another of the apostles, geologist James E. Talmage, pointed out that Smith's views could be misinterpreted as the church's official position, since Smith's views were widely circulated in a church magazine but Roberts's views were limited to an internal church document. As a result, the First Presidency gave permission to Talmage to give a speech promoting views that were contrary to Smith's. In his speech on August 9, 1931, in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Talmage taught the same principles that Roberts had originally outlined in his draft manual. Over Smith's objections, the First Presidency authorized a church publication of Talmage's speech in pamphlet form.
+In 1965, Talmage's speech was reprinted again by the church in an official church magazine. As Talmage points out in the article, "The outstanding point of difference ... is the point of time which man in some state has lived on this planet." With regards to evolution in general, Talmage challenged many of its aspects in the same speech. He said that he does not believe Adam descended from cavemen or lower forms of men, but is divinely created. He did, however, state that were it true that Adam evolved from lower form, it only seems likely that men will continue to evolve into something higher as a part of eternal progression. He continued by stating that, "evolution is true so far as it means development, and progress, and advancement in all the works of God", and that the scriptures, "should not be discredited by theories of men; they cannot be discredited by fact and truth." Talmage considered the possibility of pre-Adamites; however, he denied speciation and evolution. Roberts died in 1933 and The Truth, The Way, The Life remained unpublished until 1994, when it was published by an independent publisher.
+Although it is apparent that Roberts and Smith may have had differing views on whether there was death before the fall of Adam, it is evident that they may have had similar views against organic evolution as the explanation for the origin of man. For example, Roberts wrote that "the theory of evolution as advocated by many modern scientists lies stranded upon the shore of idle speculation. There is one other objection to be urged against the theory of evolution before leaving it; it is contrary to the revelations of God." Roberts further criticized the theories of evolution by stating that Darwin's claims of evolution are contrary to the experience and knowledge of man, because the law of nature requires that every organism reproduces of its own kind, and while variation may occur, changes usually revert due to extinction, chromosomal infertility, or by reversion to original species.
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+---
+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 7/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Joseph Fielding Smith ===
+In 1954, when he was President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Smith wrote at length about his personal views on evolution in his book Man, His Origin and Destiny stating that it was a destructive and contaminating influence and that "If the Bible does not kill Evolution, Evolution will kill the Bible." He further stated that "There is not and cannot be, any compromise between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the theories of evolution" and that "It is not possible for a logical mind to hold both Bible teaching and evolutionary teaching at the same time" since "If you accept [the scriptures] you cannot accept organic evolution." In response to an inquiry about the book from the head of the University of Utah Geology Department, church president David O. McKay affirmed that "the Church has officially taken no position" on evolution, Smith's book "is not approved by the Church", and that the book is entirely Smith's "views for which he alone is responsible". Smith also produced personal statements on evolution in his Doctrines of Salvation including that "If evolution is true, the church is false" since "If life began on Earth as advocated by Darwin ... then the doctrines of the church are false". Smith stated about his views on evolution, "No Adam, no fall; no fall, no atonement; no atonement, no savior." Smith also asserted that "There was no death of any living creature before the fall of Adam! Adam's mission was to bring to pass the fall and it came upon the earth and living things throughout all nature. Anything contrary to this doctrine is diametrically opposed to the doctrines revealed to the Church! If there was any creature increasing by propagation before the fall, then throw away the Book of Mormon, deny your faith, the Book of Abraham and the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants! Our scriptures most emphatically tell us that death came through the fall, and has passed upon all creatures including the earth itself. For this earth of ours was pronounced good when the Lord finished it. It became fallen and subject to death as did all things upon its face, through the transgression of Adam."
+
+=== Bruce R. McConkie ===
+Bruce R. McConkie was an influential church leader and author on the topic of evolution, having been published several times speaking strongly on the topic. He stated his view in 1982 at BYU that there was no death in the world for Adam or for any form of life before the fall, and that trying to reconcile religion and organic evolution was a false and devilish heresy among church members. In 1984, McConkie disparaged the "evolutionary fantasies of biologists" and stated that yet to be revealed "doctrines will completely destroy the whole theory of organic evolution" and stated that any religion that assumes humans are a product of evolution cannot offer salvation since true believers know humans were made in a state in which there was no procreation or death. In his popular and controversial reference book Mormon Doctrine, McConkie devoted ten pages to his entry on evolution.
+After canvassing statements of past church leaders, the standard works, and the 1909 First Presidency statement, McConkie concluded that "[t]here is no harmony between the truths of revealed religion and the theories of organic evolution." The evolution entry in Mormon Doctrine quotes extensively from Smith's Man, His Origin and Destiny. McConkie characterized the intellect of those Latter-day Saints who believe in evolution while simultaneously having knowledge of church doctrines on life and creation as "scrubby and grovelling". McConkie included a disclaimer in Mormon Doctrine stating that he alone was responsible for the doctrinal and scriptural interpretations. The 1958 edition stated that the "official doctrine of the Church" asserted a "falsity of the theory of organic evolution." McConkie also wrote that "there were no pre-Adamites," that Adam was not the "end-product of evolution," and that there "was no death in the world, either for man or for any form of life until after the Fall of Adam."
+
+=== Russell M. Nelson ===
+Prior to becoming president of the LDS Church, Russell M. Nelson stated in a 2007 interview with the Pew Research Center that "to think that man evolved from one species to another is, to me, incomprehensible. Man has always been man. Dogs have always been dogs. Monkeys have always been monkeys. It's just the way genetics works." He also stated in 1987 in a church magazine article that he found the theory of evolution unbelievable.
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+---
+title: "Mormon views on evolution"
+chunk: 8/8
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:57.700246+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Academic ==
+The earliest instance in which science and evolution were used to support LDS doctrine occurred in a series of six published articles in 1895, "Theosophy and Mormonism" by Nels L. Nelson. These articles were published in 1904 in Scientific Aspects of Mormonism. Nelson used the ideas of evolution to consider the spiritual and physical development of God and humans. Nelson's view of evolution is spiritual with deliberate use of scientific processes by God rather than as a random, accidental process. Mormon philosopher William Henry Chamberlin's Essay on Nature (1915) and Frederick J. Pack's Science and Belief in God (1924) defended the theory of evolution; both attempted to reconcile religion and evolution. In a work, Pack states, "no warfare exists between 'Mormonism' and true science."
+In 1978, dean of the College of Biology and Agriculture at BYU, A. Lester Allen, tried to present an approach to evolution from the perspective of an LDS biologist. Allen established seven doctrinal landmarks that are fundamental beliefs of the LDS Church, but considered that human's limited perspective and limited perception of reality means that humans may not very well understand the circumstances surrounding the creation of Adam and Eve and the existence of the Garden of Eden using only their mortal senses. Allen also stated that besides core doctrine of the LDS Church relating to the existence of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden, all hypotheses are fair game for "responsible scientists" to consider and investigate. In 2018, BYU professor and evolutionary biologist Steven L. Peck at a Mormon studies conference at Utah Valley University explained that Mormons believe in "eternal progression" and that the universe was organized from pre-existing matter, which are ideas also held by evolutionary biologists.
+
+== Views in the early 2000s ==
+There is an ongoing discussion and questioning among members of the LDS Church concerning the religion, evolution, and the reconciliation between the two. There are a number of current Mormon-related publications with articles on evolution. According to scholar Michael R. Ash, a great number of church members read the Ensign, which generally publishes articles with unfavorable views on evolution. Other publications like BYU Studies, FARMS Review of Books, Dialogue, and Sunstone have published pro-evolution or neutral articles. The official stance of the church on evolution is neutral. Though scholar Joseph Baker argues that the church's position is rather "skeptically neutral", because the church continues to endorse their 1910 statement. There are many church members, including scientists, who accept evolution as a legitimate scientific theory.
+
+== Surveys of LDS members ==
+Multiple surveys of views on evolution by general LDS adults have been conducted. For example, in 1973, 81% of students at the church-run university BYU denied that the creation involved evolution in a survey of over 1,000 respondents. In a 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, researchers found that 52% of Mormons believe that humans always existed in their present form while 42% believe that humans evolved over time. More specifically, 29% of Mormons believe that evolution is guided by a supreme being, while 11% believe the evolution occurred due to natural processes.
+A 2017 study, the Next Mormons Survey, professor Benjamin Knoll surveyed Mormons about their beliefs in evolution. Of those surveyed, 74% responded that they were confident or had faith that God created Adam and Eve in the last 10,000 years and that Adam and Eve did not evolve from other forms of life. When asked whether evolution is the best explanation for how God brought about life on Earth, 33% of Mormons were confident or had faith that this was not true. After analyzing the results Knoll suggested that 37% of Mormons completely reject God-guided evolution. Another 37% accept God-guided evolution for life on Earth, but feel that Adam and Eve were an exception and were physically created by God. The other 26% were split between the belief that Adam and Eve may have been created through the process of evolution and the disbelief in God-guided evolution and the existence of a physical Adam and Eve. Moreover, unlike other studies conducted which have found a correlation between education level and belief in evolution, Next Mormons Survey found no correlation between education level and belief in evolution among Mormons.
+In contrast, a 2018 study of American Mormons in the Journal of Contemporary Religion found that education was a defining factor of evolution acceptance. This is, however, only true when accounting for political ideology as well. The study determined that among those with moderate or liberal political ideology, the probability of accepting evolution increases with increasing education level. The correlation between evolution acceptance and education level was even higher among liberals. The probability of accepting evolution among very liberal Mormons with an 8th grade or less education was 9%, while the probability of accepting evolution among very liberal Mormons with a post-graduate degree increases to 82%. The findings were different from conservative Mormons who showed a decrease in probability of accepting evolution as their education level increased. A very conservative Mormon with an 8th grade education or less had a 35% probability of accepting evolution, whereas a very conservative Mormon with a post-graduate degree was 20% likely to accept evolution. Baker suggests that low rates of acceptance of evolution of Mormons may be related to the high rates of political conservatism among Mormons.
+A 2018 study in PLOS One researched the attitudes toward evolution of Latter-day Saint undergraduates. The study revealed that there has been a recent shift of attitude towards evolution among LDS undergraduates. These attitudes have shifted from antagonistic to accepting. The researchers cited examples of more acceptance of fossil and geological records, as well as an acceptance of the old age of the earth. The researchers attributed this attitude change to several factors including primary-school exposure to evolution and a reduction in the number of anti-evolution statements from the First Presidency.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== References ==
+
+== Further reading ==
+Bailey, David H. (Winter 2002), "Mormonism and the New Creationism" (PDF), Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 35 (4): 53–73, doi:10.2307/45226894, JSTOR 45226894, S2CID 184128546.
+Jeffrey, Duane E.; Norman, Keith E. (Winter 2002), "Thoughts on Mormonism, Evolution, and Brigham Young University" (PDF), Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 35 (4): 15–32
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 1/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+A mystical or religious experience, also known as a spiritual experience or sacred experience, is a subjective experience which is interpreted within a religious framework. In a strict sense, "mystical experience" refers specifically to an ecstatic unitive experience, or nonduality, of 'self' and other objects, but more broadly may also refer to non-sensual or unconceptualized sensory awareness or insight, while religious experience may refer to any experience relevant in a religious context. Mysticism entails religious traditions of human transformation aided by various practices and religious experiences.
+The concept of mystical or religious experience developed in the 19th century, as a defense against the growing rationalism of western society. William James popularized the notion of distinct religious or mystical experiences in his Varieties of Religious Experience, and influenced the understanding of mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge of the transcendental.
+The interpretation of mystical experiences is a matter of debate. According to James, mystical experiences have four defining qualities, namely ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity. According to Rudolf Otto, the broader category of numinous experiences have two qualities, namely mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. Perennialists like William James and Aldous Huxley regard mystical experiences to share a common core, pointing to one universal transcendental reality, for which those experiences offer the proof. R. C. Zaehner (1913–1974) rejected the perennialist position, instead discerning three fundamental types of mysticism following Dasgupta, namely theistic, monistic, and panenhenic ("all-in-one") or natural mysticism. Walter Terence Stace criticised Zaehner, instead postulating two types following Otto, namely extraverted (unity in diversity) and introverted ('pure consciousness') mysticism.
+The perennial position is "largely dismissed by scholars" but "has lost none of its popularity." Instead, a constructionist approach became dominant during the 1970s, which also rejects the neat typologies of Zaehner and Stace, and states that mystical experiences are mediated by pre-existing frames of reference, while the attribution approach focuses on the (religious) meaning that is attributed to specific events.
+Correlates between mystical experiences and neurological activity have been established, pointing to the temporal lobe as the main locus for these experiences, while Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene G. d'Aquili have also pointed to the parietal lobe. Recent research points to the relevance of the default mode network, while the anterior insula seems to play a role in the ineffability subjective certainty induced by mystical experiences.
+
+== Terminology ==
+
+=== Mystical or religious experience ===
+The terms "mystical experience," "religious experience", spiritual experience and sacred experience have become synonyms, all referring to non-ordinary, numinous, subjective experiencees which are typically interpreted in a religious framework. "Mystical experience" may specifically refers to unitive or nondual experiences, but may also more broadly refer to non-sensual or unconceptualized sensory awareness or insight, while religious experience may refer to any experience relevant in a religious context. Jones and Gellman note that "few classical mystics refer to their experiences as the union of two realities: there is no literal 'merging' or 'absorption' of one reality into another resulting in only one entity." According to them,
+
+A more inclusive definition of "mystical experience" is: A purportedly nonsensory awareness or a nonstructured sensory experience granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of ordinary sense-perception structured by mental conceptions, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection.
+Experiences like visions, near death experiences and parapsychological phenomena are excluded from this definition of "mystical experience," but may be regarded as "religious experiences."
+
+=== Mysticism ===
+
+Mysticism as a historical religious tradition relates primarily to Christian mysticism, and involves more than "mystical experience". According to Gellman, the ultimate goal of mysticism is human transformation, not just experiencing mystical or visionary states. According to McGinn, personal transformation is the essential criterion to determine the authenticity of Christian mysticism.
+Gellman notes that the so-called mystical experience is not a transitional event, as William James claimed, but an "abiding consciousness, accompanying a person throughout the day, or parts of it. For that reason, it might be better to speak of mystical consciousness, which can be either fleeting or abiding." Parsons stresses the importance of distinguishing between temporary experiences and mysticism as a process, which is embodied within a "religious matrix" of texts and practices. Richard Jones does the same.
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 2/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Related terms ===
+Ecstasy, trance – In ecstasy the believer is understood to have a soul or spirit which can leave the body. In ecstasy the focus is on the soul leaving the body and to experience transcendental realities. This type of religious experience is characteristic for the shaman.
+Enthusiasm – In enthusiasm – or possession – God is understood to be outside, other than or beyond the believer. A sacred power, being or will enters the body or mind of an individual and possesses it. A person capable of being possessed is sometimes called a medium. The deity, spirit or power uses such a person to communicate to the immanent world. Lewis argues that ecstasy and possession are basically one and the same experience, ecstasy being merely one form which possession may take. The outward manifestation of the phenomenon is the same in that shamans appear to be possessed by spirits, act as their mediums, and even though they claim to have mastery over them, can lose that mastery.
+Spiritual awakening – A spiritual awakening usually involves a realization or opening to a sacred dimension of reality and may be a religious experience. Often a spiritual awakening has lasting effects upon one's life. It may refer to any of a wide range of experiences including being born again, near-death experiences, Liberation (moksha), and Enlightenment (bodhi).
+Dan Merkur makes a distinction between trance states and reverie states. According to Merkur, in trance states the normal functions of consciousness are temporarily inhibited, and trance experiences are not filtered by ordinary judgements, and seem to be real and true. In reverie states, numinous experiences are also not inhibited by the normal functions of consciousness, but visions and insights are still perceived as being in need of interpretation, while trance states may lead to a denial of physical reality.
+
+== "Experience" as a hermeneutic category ==
+
+=== The concept of mystical or religious experience ===
+
+The concept of mystical or religious experience originated in the 19th century, as a defense against the growing rationalism of western society. Wayne Proudfoot traces the roots of the notion of "religious experience" to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that religion is based on a feeling of the infinite. The notion of "religious experience" was used by Schleiermacher to defend religion against the growing scientific and secular critique. It was adopted by many scholars of religion, of which William James was the most influential.
+The origins of the use of this term can also be dated further back. In the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, several historical figures put forth very influential views that religion and its beliefs can be grounded in experience itself. While Kant held that moral experience justified religious beliefs, John Wesley in addition to stressing individual moral exertion thought that the religious experiences in the Methodist movement (paralleling the Romantic Movement) were foundational to religious commitment as a way of life.
+
+==== William James ====
+William James popularized the notion of "mystical experience" in his The Varieties of Religious Experience. James wrote:
+
+In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which bring it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.
+This book is the classic study on religious or mystical experience, which influenced deeply both the academic and popular understanding of "religious experience". James popularized the use of the term "religious experience" in his Varieties, and influenced the understanding of mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge of the transcendental:
+
+Under the influence of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, heavily centered on people's conversion experiences, most philosophers' interest in mysticism has been in distinctive, allegedly knowledge-granting "mystical experiences."
+
+==== Other authors ====
+Other scholars and writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also began their studies on the historical and psychological descriptive analysis of the mystical experience, by investigating examples and categorizing it into types. Early notable examples include the study of the term "cosmic consciousness" by Edward Carpenter (1892) and psychiatrist Richard Bucke (in his book Cosmic Consciousness, 1901); the definition of "oceanic feeling" by Romain Rolland (1927) and its study by Freud; Rudolf Otto's description of the "numinous" (1917) and its studies by Jung; Friedrich von Hügel in The Mystical Element of Religion (1908); Evelyn Underhill in her work Mysticism (1911); Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy (1945).
+
+=== Influence ===
+The concept of "mystical experience" has influenced the understanding of specific subjective experiences as a distinctive experiences which supply knowledge of a transcendental reality, cosmic unity, or ultimate truths.
+A broad range of western and eastern movements have incorporated and influenced the emergence of the modern notion of "mystical experience", such as the Perennial philosophy, Transcendentalism, Universalism, the Theosophical Society, New Thought, Neo-Vedanta and Buddhist modernism.
+
+==== Perennial philosophy ====
+
+According to the Perennial philosophy, the mystical experiences in all religions are essentially the same. It supposes that many, if not all of the world's great religions, have arisen around the teachings of mystics, including Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tze, and Krishna. It also sees most religious traditions describing fundamental mystical experience, at least esoterically. A major proponent in the 20th century was Aldous Huxley, who "was heavily influenced in his description by Vivekananda's neo-Vedanta and the idiosyncratic version of Zen exported to the west by D.T. Suzuki. Both of these thinkers expounded their versions of the perennialist thesis", which they originally received from western thinkers and theologians.
+
+==== Transcendentalism and Unitarian Universalism ====
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+---
+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 11/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Psychology ===
+Several psychologists have proposed models in which religious experiences are part of a process of transformation of the self.
+Carl Jung's work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. One's main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfil deep innate potential, much as the acorn contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this journey of transformation is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential to well-being.
+The notion of the numinous was an important concept in the writings of Carl Jung. Jung regarded numinous experiences as fundamental to an understanding of the individuation process because of their association with experiences of synchronicity in which the presence of archetypes is felt.
+McNamara proposes that religious experiences may help in "decentering" the self, and transform it into an integral self which is closer to an ideal self.
+Transpersonal psychology is a school of psychology that studies the transpersonal, self-transcendent or spiritual aspects of the human experience. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology describes transpersonal psychology as "the study of humanity’s highest potential, and with the recognition, understanding, and realization of unitive, spiritual, and transcendent states of consciousness". Issues considered in transpersonal psychology include spiritual self-development, peak experiences, mystical experiences, systemic trance and  other metaphysical experiences of living.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== References ==
+
+== Sources ==
+
+=== Printed sources ===
+
+Wright, Dale S. (2000), Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
+Om, Swami (2014), If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir, Harper Collins
+Yen, Chan Master Sheng (1996), Dharma Drum: The Life and Heart of Ch'an Practice, Boston & London: Shambhala
+Zaehner, R. C. (1957), Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience, Clarendon
+Zaehner, R. C. (1974), Our Savage God: The Perverse Use of Eastern Thought, Sheed and Ward
+Zimmer, Heinrich (1948), De weg tot het Zelf. Leer en leven van de Indische heilige, Sri Ramana Maharshi uit Tiruvannamalai, 's Graveland: Uitgeverij De Driehoek
+
+=== Web sources ===
+
+== Further reading ==
+Batson, C. D., & Ventis, W. L. (1982). The religious experience: A social-psychological perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-503030-3
+Dein, Simon (2011), Religious experience: perspectives and research paradigms Archived 2016-03-05 at the Wayback Machine, WCPRR June 2011: 3–9
+Giussani, Luigi (1997). The Religious Sense. Mcgill Queens Univ Press, ISBN 978-0773516267
+James, William (1985) [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674932258.
+McNamara, Patrick, ed. (2006). Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion. 3 volumes. Westport, CT: Praeger.
+McNamara, Patrick (2022). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience: Decentering and the Self (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108973496. ISBN 9781108833172. S2CID 249321868.
+Richards, William A. (2016). Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-54091-9.
+Taves, Ann (1999). Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691010243.
+Yaden, David B.; Newberg, Andrew B. (2022). The Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190665678.
+
+== External links ==
+Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mysticism
+Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Religious Experience
+"Self-transcendence enhanced by removal of portions of the parietal-occipital cortex" Article from the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion
+Is This Your Brain On God? (May 2009 week long NPR series)
+Institute for Mystical Experience and Education, including a Mystical Experience Questionnaire on mystical experiences
+Australian Institute of Parapsychology, AIPR Information Sheet: Mystical Experiences
+D. W. Shrader, Seven Characteristics of Mystical Experiences, personal account and theoretical exploration
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+---
+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 3/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Transcendentalism was an early 19th-century liberal Protestant movement, which was rooted in English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume. The Transcendentalists emphasised an intuitive, experiential approach of religion. Following Schleiermacher, an individual's intuition of truth was taken as the criterion for truth. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the first translations of Hindu texts appeared, which were also read by the Transcendentalists, and influenced their thinking. They also endorsed universalist and Unitarianist ideas, leading to Unitarian Universalism, the idea that there must be truth in other religions as well, since a loving God would redeem all living beings, not just Christians.
+
+==== Theosophical Society ====
+
+The Theosophical Society was formed in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, William Quan Judge and others to advance the spiritual principles and search for Truth known as Theosophy. The Theosophical Society has been highly influential in promoting interest, both in west and east, in a great variety of religious teachings:
+
+No single organization or movement has contributed so many components to the New Age Movement as the Theosophical Society ... It has been the major force in the dissemination of occult literature in the West in the twentieth century.
+The Theosophical Society searched for 'secret teachings' in Asian religions. It has been influential on modernist streams in several Asian religions, notably Hindu reform movements, the revival of Theravada Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki, who popularized the idea of enlightenment as insight into a timeless, transcendent reality. Another example can be seen in Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India, which introduced Ramana Maharshi to a western audience.
+
+==== Orientalism and the "pizza effect" ====
+
+The interplay between western and eastern notions of religion is an important factor in the development of modern mysticism. In the 19th century, when Asian countries were colonialised by western states, a process of cultural mimesis began. In this process, Western ideas about religion, especially the notion of "religious experience" were introduced to Asian countries by missionaries, scholars and the Theosophical Society, and amalgamated in a new understanding of the Indian and Buddhist traditions. This amalgam was exported back to the West as 'authentic Asian traditions', and acquired a great popularity in the west. Due to this western popularity, it also gained authority back in India, Sri Lanka and Japan.
+The best-known representatives of this amalgamated tradition are Annie Besant (Theosophical Society), Swami Vivekenanda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Neo-Vedanta), Anagarika Dharmapala, a 19th-century Sri Lankan Buddhist activist who founded the Maha Bodhi Society, and D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese scholar and Zen Buddhist. A synonymous term for this broad understanding is nondualism. This mutual influence is also known as the pizza effect.
+
+=== Criticism of the notion of "experience" as insufficient for worldwide viewpoints ===
+The notion of "experience", however, has been criticized in religious studies today.  Robert Sharf points out that "experience" is a typical Western term, which has found its way into Asian religiosity via western influences. The notion of "experience" introduces a false notion of duality between "experiencer" and "experienced", whereas the essence of kensho is the realisation of the "non-duality" of observer and observed. "Pure experience" does not exist; all experience is mediated by intellectual and cognitive activity. The specific teachings and practices of a specific tradition may even determine what "experience" someone has, which means that this "experience" is not the proof of the teaching, but a result of the teaching. A pure consciousness without concepts, reached by "cleaning the doors of perception", would be an overwhelming chaos of sensory input without coherence.
+Constructivists such as Steven Katz reject any typology of experiences since each mystical experience is deemed unique.
+Other critics point out that the stress on "experience" is accompanied with favoring the atomic individual, instead of the shared life of the community. It also fails to distinguish between episodic experience, and mysticism as a process, that is embedded in a total religious matrix of liturgy, scripture, worship, virtues, theology, rituals and practices.
+Richard King also points to disjunction between "mystical experience" and social justice:
+
+The privatisation of mysticism – that is, the increasing tendency to locate the mystical in the psychological realm of personal experiences – serves to exclude it from political issues as social justice. Mysticism thus becomes seen as a personal matter of cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity, which, rather than seeking to transform the world, serve to accommodate the individual to the status quo through the alleviation of anxiety and stress.
+The American scholar of religion and philosopher of social science Jason Josephson Storm has also critiqued the definition and category of religious experience, especially when such experiences are used to define religion. He compares the appeal to experience to define religion to failed attempts to defend an essentialist definition of art by appeal to aesthetic experience, and implies that each category lacks a common psychological feature across all such experiences by which they may be defined.
+
+== Characteristics ==
+
+=== William James - mystical and religious experience ===
+James emphasized the personal experience of individuals, and describes a broad variety of such experiences in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He considered the "personal religion" to be "more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism", and defines religion as
+
+...the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
+According to James, mystical experiences have four defining qualities:
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 4/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Ineffability. According to James the mystical experience "defies expression, that no adequate report of its content can be given in words".
+Noetic quality. Mystics stress that their experiences give them "insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect." James referred to this as the "noetic" (or intellectual) "quality" of the mystical.
+Transiency. James notes that most mystical experiences have a short occurrence, but their effect persists.
+Passivity. According to James, mystics come to their peak experience not as active seekers, but as passive recipients.
+James recognised the broad variety of mystical schools and conflicting doctrines both within and between religions. Nevertheless, 
+
+...he shared with thinkers of his era the conviction that beneath the variety could be carved out a certain mystical unanimity, that mystics shared certain common perceptions of the divine, however different their religion or historical epoch,
+According to Jesuit scholar William Harmless, "for James there was nothing inherently theological in or about mystical experience", and felt it legitimate to separate the mystic's experience from theological claims. Harmless notes that James "denies the most central fact of religion", namely that religion is practiced by people in groups, and often in public. He also ignores ritual, the historicity of religious traditions, and theology, instead emphasizing "feeling" as central to religion.
+
+=== Rudolf Otto ===
+The German philosopher and theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) argues that there is one common factor to all religious experience, independent of the cultural background. In his book The Idea of the Holy (1923) he identifies this factor as the numinous. The "numinous" experience has two aspects:
+
+mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling;
+mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel.
+The numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a holy other. Otto sees the numinous as the only possible religious experience. He states: "There is no religion in which it [the numinous] does not live as the real innermost core and without it no religion would be worthy of the name". Otto does not take any other kind of religious experience such as ecstasy and enthusiasm seriously and is of the opinion that they belong to the 'vestibule of religion'.
+
+== Typologies ==
+
+=== Mystical experience ===
+
+==== R. C. Zaehner – theistic, monistic and panenhenic mystical experience ====
+R. C. Zaehner (1913–1974) distinguishes between three fundamental types of mysticism, namely theistic, monistic, and panenhenic ("all-in-one") or natural mysticism: 
+
+Theistic mystical experience includes most forms of Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism and occasional Hindu examples such as Ramanuja and the Bhagavad Gita.
+Monistic mystical experience, the experience of the unity of one's soul in isolation (kayvala) from the material and psychic world, includes early Buddhism and Hindu schools such as Samkhya, yoga, and Advaita vedanta.
+Panenhenic mystical experience refers to "an experience of Nature in all things or of all things as being one," and includes, for instance, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, much Upanishadic thought, as well as American Transcendentalism.
+Within the monistic mystical experience, Zaehner draws a clear distinction between the dualist 'isolationist' ideal of Samkhya, the historical Buddha, and various gnostic sects, and the non-dualist position of Advaita vedanta. According to the former, the union of an individual spiritual monad (soul) and body is "an unnatural state of affairs, and salvation consists in returning to one's own natural 'splendid isolation' in which one contemplates oneself forever in timeless bliss."
+Zaehner considers theistic mysticism to be superior to the other two categories, because of its appreciation of God, but also because of its strong moral imperative. Zaehner is directly opposing the views of Aldous Huxley. Natural mystical experiences are in Zaehner's view of less value because they do not lead as directly to the virtues of charity and compassion. Zaehner is generally critical of what he sees as narcissistic tendencies in nature mysticism.
+Zaehner has been criticised by Paden for the "theological violence" which his approach does to non-theistic traditions, "forcing them into a framework which privileges Zaehner's own liberal Catholicism."
+
+==== Walter T. Stace – extrovertive and introvertive mysticism ====
+Zaehner has also been criticised by Walter Terence Stace in his book Mysticism and philosophy (1960) on similar grounds. Stace argues that doctrinal differences between religious traditions are inappropriate criteria when making cross-cultural comparisons of mystical (unitive) experiences. Stace argues that mysticism is part of the process of perception, not interpretation, that is to say that the unity of mystical experiences is perceived, and only afterwards interpreted according to the perceiver's background. This may result in different accounts of the same phenomenon. While an atheist describes the unity as "freed from empirical filling", a religious person might describe it as "God" or "the Divine". In "Mysticism and Philosophy", one of Stace's key questions is whether there are a set of common characteristics to all mystical experiences.
+Based on the study of religious texts, which he took as phenomenological descriptions of personal experiences, and excluding occult phenomena, visions, and voices, Stace distinguished two types of mystical experience, namely extrovertive and introvertive mysticism. He describes extrovertive mysticism as an experience of unity within the world, whereas introvertive mysticism is "an experience of unity devoid of perceptual objects; it is literally an experience of 'no-thing-ness'". The unity in extrovertive mysticism is with the totality of objects of perception. While perception stays continuous, "unity shines through the same world"; the unity in introvertive mysticism is with a pure consciousness, devoid of objects of perception, "pure unitary consciousness, wherein awareness of the world and of multiplicity is completely obliterated."  According to Stace such experiences are nonsensical and nonintellectual, under a total "suppression of the whole empirical content."
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+---
+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 5/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Stace finally argues that there is a set of seven common characteristics for each type of mystical experience, with many of them overlapping between the two types. Stace furthermore argues that extrovertive mystical experiences are on a lower level than introvertive mystical experiences.
+Stace's categories of "introvertive mysticism" and "extrovertive mysticism" are derived from Rudolf Otto's "mysticism of introspection" and "unifying vision".
+William Wainwright distinguishes four different kinds of extrovert mystical experience, and two kinds of introvert mystical experience:
+
+Extrovert: experiencing the unity of nature; experiencing nature as a living presence; experiencing all nature-phenomena as part of an eternal now; the "unconstructed experience" of Buddhism.
+Introvert: pure empty consciousness; the "mutual love" of theistic experiences.
+Richard Jones, following William Wainwright, elaborated on the distinction, showing different types of experiences in each category:
+
+Extrovertive experiences: the sense of connectedness ("unity") of oneself with nature, with a loss of a sense of boundaries within nature; the luminous glow to nature of "nature mysticism"; the presence of God immanent in nature outside of time shining through nature of "cosmic consciousness"; the lack of separate, self-existing entities of mindfulness states.
+Introvertive experiences: theistic experiences of connectedness or identity with God in mutual love; nonpersonal differentiated experiences; the depth-mystical experience empty of all differentiable content.
+Following Stace's lead, Ralph Hood developed the "Mysticism scale." According to Hood, the introvertive mystical experience may be a common core to mysticism independent of both culture and person, forming the basis of a "perennial psychology". According to Hood, "the perennialist view has strong empirical support," since his scale yielded positive results across various cultures, stating that mystical experience as operationalized from Stace's criteria is identical across various samples.
+Although Stace's work on mysticism received a positive response, it has also been strongly criticised in the 1970s and 1980s, for its lack of methodological rigueur and its perennialist pre-assumptions. Major criticisms came from Steven T. Katz in his influential series of publications on mysticism and philosophy, and from Wayne Proudfoot in his Religious experience (1985).
+Masson and Masson criticised Stace for using a "buried premise," namely that mysticism can provide valid knowledge of the world, equal to science and logic. A similar criticism has been voiced by Jacob van Belzen toward Hood, noting that Hood validated the existence of a common core in mystical experiences, but based on a test which presupposes the existence of such a common core, noting that "the instrument used to verify Stace's conceptualization of Stace is not independent of Stace, but based on him." Belzen also notes that religion does not stand on its own, but is embedded in a cultural context, which should be taken into account. To this criticism Hood et al. answer that universalistic tendencies in religious research "are rooted first in inductive generalizations from cross-cultural consideration of either faith or mysticism," stating that Stace sought out texts which he recognized as an expression of mystical expression, from which he created his universal core. Hood therefore concludes that Belzen "is incorrect when he claims that items were presupposed."
+
+=== Religious experiences ===
+
+==== Norman Habel - mediated and immediate ====
+Biblical scholar Norman Habel defines religious experiences as the structured way in which a believer enters into a relationship with, or gains an awareness of, the sacred within the context of a particular religious tradition. Religious experiences are by their very nature preternatural; that is, out of the ordinary or beyond the natural order of things. They may be difficult to distinguish observationally from psychopathological states such as psychoses or other forms of altered awareness. Not all preternatural experiences are considered to be religious experiences. Following Habel's definition, psychopathological states or drug-induced states of awareness are not considered to be religious experiences because they are mostly not performed within the context of a particular religious tradition.
+Moore and Habel identify two classes of religious experiences: the immediate and the mediated religious experience.
+
+Mediated – In the mediated experience, the believer experiences the sacred through mediators such as rituals, special persons, religious groups, totemic objects or the natural world.
+Immediate – The immediate experience comes to the believer without any intervening agency or mediator. The deity or divine is experienced directly.
+
+==== Richard Swinburne - public or private ====
+In his book Faith and Reason, the philosopher Richard Swinburne formulated five categories into which all religious experiences fall:
+
+Public – a believer 'sees God's hand at work', whereas other explanations are possible e.g. looking at a beautiful sunset
+Public – an unusual event that breaches natural law e.g. walking on water
+Private – describable using normal language e.g. Jacob's vision of a ladder
+Private – indescribable using normal language, usually a mystical experience e.g. "white did not cease to be white, nor black cease to be black, but black became white and white became black."
+Private – a non-specific, general feeling of God working in one's life.
+Swinburne also suggested two principles for the assessment of religious experiences:
+
+Principle of Credulity – with the absence of any reason to disbelieve it, one should accept what appears to be true e.g. if one sees someone walking on water, one should believe that it is occurring.
+Principle of Testimony – with the absence of any reason to disbelieve them, one should accept that eyewitnesses or believers are telling the truth when they testify about religious experiences.
+
+== Interpretation: perennialism, constructionism and contextualism ==
+
+=== Perennialism ===
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 6/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Scholarly research on mystical experiences in the 19th and 20th century was dominated by a discourse on "mystical experience," laying sole emphasis on the experiential aspect, be it spontaneous or induced by human behavior. Perennialists regard those various experiences traditions as pointing to one universal transcendental reality, for which those experiences offer the prove. In this approach, mystical experiences are privatised, separated from the context in which they emerge. William James, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, was highly influential in further popularising this perennial approach and the notion of personal experience as a validation of religious truths.
+The essentialist model argues that mystical experience is independent of the sociocultural, historical and religious context in which it occurs, and regards all mystical experience in its essence to be the same. According to this "common core-thesis", different descriptions can mask quite similar if not identical experiences:
+
+[P]eople can differentiate experience from interpretation, such that different interpretations may be applied to otherwise identical experiences".
+Principal exponents of the perennialist position were William James, Walter Terence Stace, who distinguishes extroverted and introverted mysticism, in response to R. C. Zaehner's distinction between theistic and monistic mysticism; Huston Smith; and Ralph W. Hood, who conducted empirical research using the "Mysticism Scale", which is based on Stace's model.
+The perennial position is "largely dismissed by scholars", but "has lost none of its popularity". The contextual approach has become the common approach, and takes into account the historical and cultural context of mystical experiences.
+
+=== Steven Katz – constructionism ===
+After Walter Stace's seminal book in 1960, the general philosophy of mysticism received little attention. But in the 1970s the issue of a universal "perennialism" versus each mystical experience being was reignited by Steven Katz. In an often-cited quote he states:
+
+There are NO pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any ground for believing, that they are unmediated [...] The notion of unmediated experience seems, if not self-contradictory, at best empty. This epistemological fact seems to me to be true, because of the sort of beings we are, even with regard to the experiences of those ultimate objects of concern with which mystics have had intercourse, e.g., God, Being, Nirvana, etc.
+Social constructionism argues that mystical experiences are "a family of similar experiences that includes many different kinds, as represented by the many kinds of religious and secular mystical reports". The constructionist states that mystical experiences are fully constructed by the ideas, symbols and practices that mystics are familiar with, shaped by the concepts "which the mystic brings to, and which shape, his experience". What is being experienced is being determined by the expectations and the conceptual background of the mystic. Critics of the "common-core thesis" argue that 
+
+[N]o unmediated experience is possible, and that in the extreme, language is not simply used to interpret experience but in fact constitutes experience. The principal exponent of the constructionist position is Steven T. Katz, who, in a series of publications, has made a highly influential and compelling case for the constructionist approach.
+According to Katz (1978), Stace's typology is "too reductive and inflexible," reducing the complexities and varieties of mystical experience into "improper categories." According to Katz, Stace does not notice the difference between experience and interpretation, but fails to notice the epistemological issues involved in recognizing such experiences as "mystical," and the even more fundamental issue of which conceptual framework precedes and shapes these experiences. Katz further notes that Stace supposes that similarities in descriptive language also implies a similarity in experience, an assumption which Katz rejects. According to Katz, close examination of the descriptions and their contexts reveals that those experiences are not identical. Katz further notes that Stace held one specific mystical tradition to be superior and normative, whereas Katz rejects reductionist notions and leaves God as God, and Nirvana as Nirvana.
+According to Paden, Katz rejects the discrimination between experiences and their interpretations. Katz argues that it is not the description, but the experience itself which is conditioned by the cultural and religious background of the mystic. According to Katz, it is not possible to have pure or unmediated experience.
+Yet, according to Laibelman, Katz did not say that the experience cannot be unmediated; he said that the conceptual understanding of the experience cannot be unmediated, and is based on culturally mediated preconceptions. According to Laibelman, misunderstanding Katz's argument has led some to defend the authenticity of "pure consciousness events," while this is not the issue. Laibelman further notes that a mystic's interpretation is not necessarily more true or correct than the interpretation of an uninvolved observer.
+
+=== Robert Forman – pure consciousness event ===
+Robert Forman has criticised Katz' approach, arguing that lay-people who describe mystical experiences often notice that this experience involves a totally new form of awareness, which cannot be described in their existing frame of reference. Newberg argued that there is neurological evidence for the existence of a "pure consciousness event" empty of any constructionist structuring.
+
+=== Richard Jones – constructivism, anticonstructivism, and perennialism ===
+Richard H. Jones believes that the dispute between "constructionism" and "perennialism" is ill-formed. He draws a distinction between "anticonstructivism" and "perennialism": constructivism can be rejected with respect to a certain class of mystical experiences without ascribing to a perennialist philosophy on the relation of mystical doctrines. Constructivism versus anticonstructivism is a matter of the nature of mystical experiences themselves while perennialism is a matter of mystical traditions and the doctrines they espouse. One can reject constructivism about the nature of mystical experiences without claiming that all mystical experiences reveal a cross-cultural "perennial truth". Anticonstructivists can advocate contextualism as much as constructivists do, while perennialists reject the need to study mystical experiences in the context of a mystic's culture since all mystics state the same universal truth.
+
+=== Contextualism and attribution theory ===
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 7/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The theoretical study of mystical experience has shifted from an experiential, privatised and perennialist approach to a contextual and empirical approach. The contextual approach, which also includes constructionism and attribution theory, takes into account the historical and cultural context. Neurological research takes an empirical approach, relating mystical experiences to neurological processes.
+Wayne Proudfoot proposes an approach that also negates any alleged cognitive content of mystical experiences: mystics unconsciously merely attribute a doctrinal content to ordinary experiences. That is, mystics project cognitive content onto otherwise ordinary experiences having a strong emotional impact. Objections have been raised concerning Proudfoot's use of the psychological data. This approach, however, has been further elaborated by Ann Taves. She incorporates both neurological and cultural approaches in the study of mystical experience.
+Many religious and mystical traditions see religious experiences (particularly that knowledge that comes with them) as revelations caused by divine agency rather than ordinary natural processes. They are considered real encounters with God or gods, or real contact with higher-order realities of which humans are not ordinarily aware.
+
+== Inducement and development ==
+Mystical traditions offer the means to induce mystical experiences, which may have several origins:
+
+Spontaneous; either apparently without any cause, or by persistent existential concerns;
+Neurophysiological origins. These are studied in the field of neurotheology, and the cognitive science of religion, and include near-death experiences. Causes may be: temporal lobe epilepsy, as described in the Geschwind syndrome, stroke, profound depression, or schizophrenia;
+Religious practices, such as contemplation, meditation, questioning or investigating (self)representations/cognitive schemata, such as Self-enquiry, Hua Tou practice, and Douglas Harding's on having no head; mantra-repetition, prayer, music dance, such as Sufi whirling, and lucid dreaming;
+Entheogens (drugs).
+Most mystical traditions warn against an attachment to mystical experiences, and offer a "protective and hermeneutic framework" to accommodate these experiences.
+
+== Empirical studies ==
+The empirical study of mysticism today focuses on two topics: identifying the neurological correlates of mystical experiences, and demonstrating the purported benefits of meditation. Correlates between mystical experiences and neurological activity have been established, pointing to the temporal lobe as the main locus for these experiences, while Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene G. d'Aquili have also pointed to the parietal lobe. Recent research points to the relevance of the default mode network and the anterior insula, which may be related to the
+experience of ineffability, the subjective sense of certainty induced by mystical experiences.
+
+=== Neuroscience ===
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 8/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Early studies in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to use EEGs to study brain wave patterns correlated with spiritual states. During the 1980s Dr. Michael Persinger stimulated the temporal lobes of human subjects with a weak magnetic field. His subjects claimed to have a sensation of "an ethereal presence in the room." Some current studies use neuroimaging to localize brain regions active, or differentially active, during religious experiences. These neuroimaging studies have implicated a number of brain regions, including the limbic system, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, superior parietal lobe, and caudate nucleus. Based on the complex nature of religious experience, it is likely that they are mediated by an interaction of neural mechanisms that all add a small piece to the overall experience.
+Neuroscience of religion, also known as neurotheology, biotheology or spiritual neuroscience, is the study of correlations of neural phenomena  with subjective experiences of spirituality and hypotheses to explain these phenomena. Proponents of neurotheology claim that there is a neurological and evolutionary basis for subjective experiences traditionally categorized as spiritual or religious.
+The neuroscience of religion takes neural correlates as the basis of cognitive functions and religious experiences. These religious experiences are thereby emergent properties of neural correlates. This approach does not necessitate exclusion of the Self, but interprets the Self as influenced or otherwise acted upon by underlying neural mechanisms. Proponents argue that religious experience can be evoked through stimulus of specific brain regions and/or can be observed through measuring increase in activity of specific brain regions.
+According to the neurotheologist Andrew B. Newberg and two colleagues, neurological processes which are driven by the repetitive, rhythmic stimulation which is typical of human ritual, and which contribute to the delivery of transcendental feelings of connection to a universal unity. They posit, however, that physical stimulation alone is not sufficient to generate transcendental unitive experiences. For this to occur they say there must be a blending of the rhythmic stimulation with ideas. Once this occurs "...ritual turns a meaningful idea into a visceral experience." Moreover, they say that humans are compelled to act out myths by the biological operations of the brain due to what they call the "inbuilt tendency of the brain to turn thoughts into actions."
+An alternate approach is influenced by personalism, and exists contra-parallel to the reductionist approach. It focuses on the Self as the object of interest, the same object of interest as in religion. According to Patrick McNamara, a proponent of personalism, the Self is a neural entity that controls rather than consists of the cognitive functions being processed in brain regions.
+A biological basis for religious experience may exist. References to the supernatural or mythical beings first appeared approximately 40,000 years ago. A popular theory posits that dopaminergic brain systems are the evolutionary basis for human intellect and more specifically abstract reasoning.  The capacity for religious thought arises from the capability to employ abstract reasoning. There is no evidence to support the theory that abstract reasoning, generally or with regard to religious thought, evolved independent of the dopaminergic axis. Religious behavior has been linked to "extrapersonal brain systems that predominate the ventromedial cortex and rely heavily on dopaminergic transmission." A biphasic effect exists with regard to activation of the dopaminergic axis and/or ventromedial cortex.  While mild activation can evoke a perceived understanding of the supernatural, extreme activation can lead to delusions characteristic of psychosis. Stress can cause the depletion of 5-hydroxytryptamine, also referred to as serotonin. The ventromedial 5-HT axis is involved in peripersonal activities such as emotional arousal, social skills, and visual feedback. When 5-HT is decreased or depleted, one may become subject to "incorrect attributions of self-initiated or internally generated activity (e.g. hallucinations)."
+
+==== Temporal lobe ====
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 9/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Temporal lobe epilepsy has become a popular field of study due to its correlation to religious experience. Religious experiences and hyperreligiosity are often used to characterize those with temporal lobe epilepsy. Visionary religious experiences, and momentary lapses of consciousness, may point toward a diagnosis of Geschwind syndrome. More generally, the symptoms are consistent with features of temporal lobe epilepsy, not an uncommon feature in religious icons and mystics. It seems that this phenomenon is not exclusive to TLE, but can manifest in the presence of other epileptic variates as well as mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia, conditions characterized by ventromedial dopaminergic dysfunction.
+The temporal lobe generates the feeling of "I", and gives a feeling of familiarity or strangeness to the perceptions of the senses. It seems to be involved in mystical experiences, and in the change in personality that may result from such experiences. There is a long-standing notion that epilepsy and religion are linked, and some religious figures may have had temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Raymond Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness (1901) contains several case-studies of persons who have realized "cosmic consciousness"; several of these cases are also being mentioned in J.E. Bryant's 1953 book, Genius and Epilepsy, which has a list of more than 20 people that combines the great and the mystical. James Leuba's The psychology of religious mysticism noted that "among the dread diseases that afflict humanity there is only one that interests us quite particularly; that disease is epilepsy."
+Slater and Beard renewed the interest in TLE and religious experience in the 1960s. Dewhurst and Beard (1970) described six cases of TLE-patients who underwent sudden religious conversions. They placed these cases in the context of several western saints with a sudden conversion, who were or may have been epileptic. Dewhurst and Beard described several aspects of conversion experiences, and did not favor one specific mechanism.
+Norman Geschwind described behavioral changes related to temporal lobe epilepsy in the 1970s and 1980s. Geschwind described cases which included extreme religiosity, now called Geschwind syndrome, and aspects of the syndrome have been identified in some religious figures, in particular extreme religiosity and hypergraphia (excessive writing). Geschwind introduced this "interictal personality disorder" to neurology, describing a cluster of specific personality characteristics which he found characteristic of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Critics note that these characteristics can be the result of any illness, and are not sufficiently descriptive for patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.
+Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick, in the 1980s and 1990s, also found a relationship between the right temporal lobe and mystical experience, but also found that pathology or brain damage is only one of many possible causal mechanisms for these experiences. He questioned the earlier accounts of religious figures with temporal lobe epilepsy, noticing that "very few true examples of the ecstatic aura and the temporal lobe seizure had been reported in the world scientific literature prior to 1980". According to Fenwick, "It is likely that the earlier accounts of temporal lobe epilepsy and temporal lobe pathology and the relation to mystic and religious states owes more to the enthusiasm of their authors than to a true scientific understanding of the nature of temporal lobe functioning."
+The occurrence of intense religious feelings in epileptic patients in general is rare, with an incident rate of about 2–3%. Sudden religious conversion, together with visions, has been documented in only a small number of individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy. The occurrence of religious experiences in TLE-patients may as well be explained by religious attribution, due to the background of these patients. Nevertheless, the Neuroscience of religion is a growing field of research, searching for specific neurological explanations of mystical experiences. Those rare epileptic patients with ecstatic seizures may provide clues for the neurological mechanisms involved in mystical experiences, such as the anterior insular cortex, which is involved in self-awareness and subjective certainty.
+
+==== Anterior insula ====
+
+A common quality in mystical experiences is ineffability, a strong feeling of certainty which cannot be expressed in words. This ineffability has been threatened with scepticism. According to Arthur Schopenhauer the inner experience of mysticism is philosophically unconvincing. In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky argues that mystical experiences only seem profound and persuasive because the mind's critical faculties are relatively inactive during them.
+Geschwind and Picard propose a neurological explanation for this subjective certainty, based on clinical research of epilepsy. According to Picard, this feeling of certainty may be caused by a dysfunction of the anterior insula, a part of the brain which is involved in interoception, self-reflection, and in avoiding uncertainty about the internal representations of the world by "anticipation of resolution of uncertainty or risk". This avoidance of uncertainty functions through the comparison between predicted states and actual states, that is, "signaling that we do not understand, i.e., that there is ambiguity." Picard notes that "the concept of insight is very close to that of certainty," and refers to Archimedes "Eureka!" Picard hypothesizes that in ecstatic seizures the comparison between predicted states and actual states no longer functions, and that mismatches between predicted state and actual state are no longer processed, "block[ing] negative emotions and negative arousal arising from predictive uncertainty," which will be experienced as emotional confidence. Picard concludes that "[t]his could lead to a spiritual interpretation in some individuals."
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+title: "Mystical or religious experience"
+chunk: 10/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystical_or_religious_experience"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:59.266126+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+==== Parietal lobe ====
+Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene G. d'Aquili, in their book Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, take a perennial stance, describing their insights into the relationship between religious experience and brain function. d'Aquili describes his own meditative experiences as "allowing a deeper, simpler part of him to emerge", which he believes to be "the truest part of who he is, the part that never changes." Not content with personal and subjective descriptions like these, Newberg and d'Aquili have studied the brain-correlates to such experiences. They scanned the brain blood flow patterns during such moments of mystical transcendence, using SPECT-scans, to detect which brain areas show heightened activity. Their scans showed unusual activity in the top rear section of the brain, the "posterior superior parietal lobe", or the "orientation association area (OAA)" in their own words. This area creates a consistent cognition of the physical limits of the self. This OAA shows a sharply reduced activity during meditative states, reflecting a block in the incoming flow of sensory information, resulting in a perceived lack of physical boundaries. According to Newberg and d'Aquili, 
+
+This is exactly how Robert and generations of Eastern mystics before him have described their peak meditative, spiritual and mystical moments.
+Newberg and d'Aquili conclude that mystical experience correlates to observable neurological events, which are not outside the range of normal brain function. They also believe that 
+
+...our research has left us no choice but to conclude that the mystics may be on to something, that the mind's machinery of transcendence may in fact be a window through which we can glimpse the ultimate realness of something that is truly divine.
+Why God Won't Go Away "received very little attention from professional scholars of religion". According to Bulkeley, "Newberg and D'Aquili seem blissfully unaware of the past half century of critical scholarship questioning universalistic claims about human nature and experience". Matthew Day also writes that the discovery of a neurological substrate of a "religious experience" is an isolated finding which "doesn't even come close to a robust theory of religion".
+
+==== Default mode network ====
+Recent studies evidenced the relevance of the default mode network in spiritual and self-transcending experiences. Its functions are related, among others, to self-reference and self-awareness, and new imaging experiments during meditation and the use of hallucinogens indicate a decrease in the activity of this network mediated by them, leading some studies to base on it a probable neurocognitive mechanism of the dissolution of the self, which occurs in some mystical phenomena.
+
+=== Psychiatry ===
+
+A 2011 paper suggested that psychiatric conditions associated with psychotic spectrum symptoms may be possible explanations for revelatory-driven experiences and activities such as those of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Saint Paul. It also proposed that the behavior of the followers of these religious figures could be explained through the lens of psychopathology and group dynamics.
+
+=== Psychedelic drugs ===
+
+A number of studies by Roland R. Griffiths and other researchers have concluded that high doses of psilocybin and other classic psychedelics trigger mystical experiences in most research participants. Mystical experiences have been measured by a number of psychometric scales, including the Hood Mysticism Scale, the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. The revised version of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, for example, asks participants about four dimensions of their experience, namely the "mystical" quality, positive mood such as the experience of amazement, the loss of the usual sense of time and space, and the sense that the experience cannot be adequately conveyed through words. The questions on the "mystical" quality in turn probe multiple aspects: the sense of "pure" being, the sense of unity with one's surroundings, the sense that what one experienced was real, and the sense of sacredness. Some researchers have questioned the interpretation of the results from these studies and whether the framework and terminology of mysticism are appropriate in a scientific context, while other researchers have responded to those criticisms and argued that descriptions of mystical experiences are compatible with a scientific worldview.
+
+== Integrating religious experience ==
+
+=== Religious traditions ===
+
+In mystical and contemplative traditions, mystical experiences are not a goal in themselves, but part of a larger path of self-transformation. For example, the Zen Buddhist training does not end with kenshō, but practice is to be continued to deepen the insight and to express it in daily life. To deepen the initial insight of kensho, shikantaza and kōan-study are necessary. This trajectory of initial insight followed by a gradual deepening and ripening is expressed by Linji Yixuan in his Three mysterious Gates, the Five Ranks, the Four Ways of Knowing of Hakuin, and the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures which detail the steps on the Path.
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+---
+title: "Natural theology"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_theology"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:00.714648+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Natural theology is a type of theology that seeks to provide arguments for theological topics, such as the existence of a deity, based on human reason. It is distinguished from revealed theology, which is based on supernatural sources such as scripture or religious experiences.   It is thus a form of theology open to critical examination, aimed at understanding the divine.
+Natural theology does not preclude the concept of divine intervention nor presuppose a clockwork universe; however, it demands that any position be supported through reasoned arguments based on natural reason.
+In contemporary philosophy, natural theology is not limited to approaches based on empirical facts, such as natural phenomena, nor are its conclusions limited to pantheism. It was once also termed "physico-theology".
+Natural theology includes theology based on scientific discoveries, arguments for God's existence grounded in observed natural facts, and interpretations of natural phenomena or complexities as evidence of a divine plan (see predestination) or God's Will. It also includes efforts to explain the nature of celestial motors, gods, or a supreme god responsible for heavenly motion. Natural theologians have offered their own explanations for some unsolved problems in science.
+
+== Overview ==
+
+=== Natural theology and physico-theology ===
+In the modern understanding, natural theology does not solely refer to the study of God based on natural facts but rather to the study of God based on natural reason. Although the term "physico-theology" is still occasionally used to describe an earlier understanding, natural theology does not necessarily involve teleological arguments, such as the defense of creationism or the intelligent design hypothesis, as seen in 19th–century England.  Also, a posteriori cosmological arguments such as Aristotle's first mover theory and a priori ontological arguments such as those of Anselm and Descartes fall within the scope of natural theology.
+Furthermore, natural theology is not limited to Christian theology. As will be described later, natural theology—i.e., the study of God through reason rather than revelation—has been explored by ancient Greeks such as Plato and by Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina.
+
+=== History ===
+For monotheistic religions, this principally involves arguments about the attributes or non-attributes of a deity, and especially the deity's existence, using arguments that do not involve recourse to revelation.
+The ideals of natural theology can be traced back to the Old Testament and Greek philosophy. Early sources evident of these ideals come from Jeremiah and the Wisdom of Solomon (c. 50 BCE) and Plato's dialogue Timaeus (c. 360 BCE). Aristotle's tractate on metaphysics claims to demonstrate the necessary existence of an unmoved prime mover.
+Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) established a distinction between political theology (the social functions of religion), natural theology and mythical theology. His terminology became part of the Stoic tradition and then Christianity through Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.
+
+== Ancient Greece ==
+Besides Hesiod's Works and Days and Zarathushtra's Gathas, Plato gives the earliest surviving account of a natural theology.
+
+=== Plato ===
+In the Timaeus, written c. 360 BCE, in the preamble to the account of the origin of the cosmos, we read: "We must first investigate concerning [the whole Cosmos] that primary question which has to be investigated at the outset in every case ... namely, whether it has always existed, having no beginning or generation, or whether it has come into existence, having begun from some beginning." The subsequent parts of the text argues for the necessity of a divine craftsman, who rationally constructed the cosmos out of pre-existing chaos (Timaeus 27d-30c) In the Laws, in answer to the question as to what arguments justify faith in the gods, Plato affirms: "One is our dogma about the soul...the other is our dogma concerning the ordering of the motion of the stars".
+In Book II of the Republic and Book X of the Laws, Plato argues against the following ideas: 
+
+Gods do not exist.
+They exist but do not care about humans.
+They are easily persuaded by offerings and prayers.
+
+=== Aristotle ===
+
+Aristotle's tractate on metaphysics claims to demonstrate the necessary existence of an unmoved prime mover.
+
+== Ancient Rome ==
+Marcus Terentius Varro in his (lost) Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum (Antiquities of Human and Divine Things, 1st century BCE) established a distinction between three kinds of theology: civil (political) (theologia civilis), natural (physical) (theologia naturalis) and mythical (theologia mythica). The theologians of civil theology are "the people", asking how the gods relate to daily life and the state (imperial cult). The theologians of natural theology are the philosophers, asking about the nature of the gods, and the theologians of mythical theology are the poets, crafting mythology.
+
+== Middle Ages ==
+From the 8th century CE, the Mutazilite school of Islam, compelled to defend their principles against the orthodox Islam of their day, used philosophy for support, and were among the first to pursue a rational Islamic theology, termed Ilm-al-Kalam (scholastic theology). The teleological argument was later presented by the early Islamic philosophers Alkindus and Averroes, while Avicenna presented both the cosmological argument and the ontological argument in The Book of Healing (1027).
+Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 1274) presented several versions of the cosmological argument in his Summa Theologica, and of the teleological argument in his Summa contra Gentiles. He presented the ontological argument, but rejected it in favor of proofs that invoke cause and effect alone. His quinque viae ("five ways") in those books attempted to demonstrate the existence of God in different ways, including (as way No. 5) the goal-directed actions seen in nature.
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+---
+title: "Natural theology"
+chunk: 2/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_theology"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:00.714648+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Early modern ==
+Raymond of Sabunde's (c. 1385–1436) Theologia Naturalis sive Liber Creaturarum, written 1434–1436, but published posthumously (1484), marks an important stage in the history of natural theology. John Ray (1627–1705) also known as John Wray, was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. He published important works on plants, animals, and natural theology, with the objective "to illustrate the glory of God in the knowledge of the works of nature or creation". Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) established another term for natural theology as theodicy, defined exactly as "the justification of God". He viewed the science in a positive light as it supported his personal ethical belief system.
+William Derham (1657–1735) continued Ray's tradition of natural theology in two of his own works, Physico-Theology, published during 1713, and Astro-Theology, 1714. These later influenced the work of William Paley.
+
+== Nineteenth century ==
+In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published during 1798, Thomas Malthus ended with two chapters on natural theology and population. Malthus—a devout Christian—argued that revelation would "damp the soaring wings of intellect", and thus never let "the difficulties and doubts of parts of the scripture" interfere with his work.
+William Paley, an important influence on Charles Darwin, gave a well-known rendition of the teleological argument for God. During 1802 he published Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature. In this he described the Watchmaker analogy, for which he is probably best known. His book, which was one of the most-published books of the 19th and 20th centuries, presents a number of teleological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. The book served as a template for many subsequent natural theologies during the 19th century.
+The Bridgewater Treatises were eight works "the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation" published during the years 1833 to 1836.  They were written by eight scientific authors appointed by the President of the Royal Society using an £8000 bequest from Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater. The series, which was widely read, offered extensive discussion concerning the relationship between religion and science, and many of the authors offered observations on natural theology, although their views on the subject differed widely.  Responding critically to one of the series, Charles Babbage published what he termed The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment.
+Professor of chemistry and natural history Edward Hitchcock also studied and wrote on natural theology. He attempted to unify and reconcile science and religion, emphasizing geology.  His major work of this type was The Religion of Geology and its Connected Sciences (1851).
+The Gifford Lectures were established by the will of Adam Lord Gifford to "promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God." The term "natural theology", as used by Gifford, refers to theology supported by science and not dependent on the miraculous.
+
+== Criticism ==
+The ideas of natural theology did not come without criticism. Many opposed the idea of natural theology, but some philosophers had a greater influence, including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Charles Darwin. Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics also heavily opposed the entirety of natural theology.
+David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion played a major role in Hume's standpoint on natural theology. Hume's ideas heavily stem from the idea of natural belief. It was stated that, "Hume's doctrine of natural belief allows that certain beliefs are justifiably held by all men without regard to the quality of the evidence which may be produced in their favour". However, Hume's argument also stems from the design argument. The design argument comes from people being labeled as morally good or evil. Hume's argument claims that if we restrict ourselves to the idea of good and evil, that we must also assign this to the designer as well. Hume states, "I will allow that pain or misery in man is compatible with infinite power and goodness in the Deity...A mere possible compatibility is not sufficient. You must prove these pure, unmixt, and uncontrollable attributes...". Hume argues for the idea of a morally perfect deity and requires evidence for anything besides that. Hume's arguments against natural theology had a wide influence on many philosophers.
+Charles Darwin's criticism of the theory had a broader impact on scientists and commoners. Darwin's theories showed that humans and animals developed through an evolutionary process. This implied that a chemical reaction was occurring; but it had no influence from the idea of God. However, Darwin's ideas did not erase the question of how the original ideas of matter came to be.
+Hume and Kant's ire was not directed at Christian theology, but at the danger of Pagan theology; through refusing natural theology they were denying the legitimacy of Pagan theology.
+
+=== Faith and fideism ===
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+title: "Natural theology"
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:00.714648+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard had similar ideas about natural theology. Kant's ideas focused more on the natural dialect of reason, while Kierkegaard focused more on the dialect of understanding. Both men suggest that "the natural dialect leads to the question of God". Kant argues for the idea that reason leads to the ideas of God as a regulative principle. Kierkegaard argues that the idea of understanding will ultimately lead itself to becoming faith. Both of these men argue that the idea of God cannot be based solely on the idea of reason, that the dialect and ideals will transcend into faith.
+Karl Barth opposed the entirety of natural theology. Barth argued that "by starting from such experience, rather that from the gracious revelation through Jesus Christ, we produce a concept of God that is the projection of the highest we know, a construct of human thinking, divorced from salvation history". Barth argues that God is restricted by the construct of human thinking if he is divorced from salvation. Barth also acknowledges that God is knowable because of his grace. Barth's argument stems from the idea of faith rather than reason. Barth held that God can be known only through Jesus Christ, as revealed in scripture, and that any such attempts should be considered idolatry. As Thomas F. Torrance wrote:
+
+So far as theological content is concerned, Barth's argument runs like this. If the God whom we have actually come to know through Jesus Christ really is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in his own eternal and undivided Being, then what are we to make of an independent natural theology that terminates, not upon the Being of the Triune God—i.e., upon God as he really is in himself—but upon some Being of God in general?  Natural theology by its very operation abstracts the existence of God from his act, so that if it does not begin with deism, it imposes deism upon theology.
+Søren Kierkegaard questioned the existence of God, rejecting all rational arguments for God's existence (including the teleological argument) on the grounds that reason is inevitably accompanied by doubt. He proposed that the argument from design does not take into consideration future events which may serve to undermine the proof of God's existence: the argument would never finish proving God's existence. In the Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard writes:
+
+The works of God are such that only God can perform them. Just so, but where then are the works of the God? The works from which I would deduce his existence are not directly and immediately given. The wisdom in nature, the goodness, the wisdom in the governance of the world – are all these manifest, perhaps, upon the very face of things? Are we not here confronted with the most terrible temptations to doubt, and is it not impossible finally to dispose of all these doubts? But from such an order of things I will surely not attempt to prove God's existence; and even if I began I would never finish, and would in addition have to live constantly in suspense, lest something so terrible should suddenly happen that my bit of proof would be demolished.
+Fideists may reject attempts to prove God's existence.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== Note ==
+
+== References ==
+
+== Further reading ==
+
+== External links ==
+Apollos.ws A Christian site surveying arguments for the existence of God and responses to common arguments against.
+Toward a new kalām cosmological argument
+Catholic Encyclopedia article Bridgewater Treatises
+Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume
+Babbage, Charles The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise 2nd edn. 1838, London: John Murray.
+Natural Theology article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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+title: "Neuroscience of religion"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:02.107948+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The neuroscience of religion, also known as "neurotheology" or "spiritual neuroscience," seeks to explain the biological and neurological processes behind religious experience. Researchers in this field study correlations of the biological neural phenomena, in addition to subjective experiences of spirituality, in order to explain how brain activity functions in response to religious and spiritual practices and beliefs. This contrasts with the psychology of religion, which studies the behavioral responses to religious practices. Some people do warn of the limitations of neurotheology, as they worry that it may simplify the socio-cultural complexity of religion down to neurological factors.
+Researchers that study the field of the neuroscience of religion use a formulation of scientific techniques to understand the correlations between brain pathways in response to spiritually based stimuli. The approach is interdisciplinary with neurological and evolutionary studies in order to understand the broader subjective experiences under which traditionally categorized spiritual or religious practices are organized. This is done through a multilateral approach of scientific and cultural studies. Such studies include but are not limited to fMRI and EEG scans, theological studies, and anthropological studies. By using these approaches, researchers can better understand how spirituality and religion affect the chemistry of human brains and in turn how brain activity may affect experiences of transcendence and spirituality.  
+
+== Terminology ==
+
+=== Neurotheology ===
+Aldous Huxley coined the term "neurotheology" for the first time in his utopian novel Island. In this, he described the discipline as a combination of cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality. The term has also been used in a less scientific context, as a subcategory of philosophy. In some cases, according to the mainstream scientific community, it is considered a pseudoscience. 
+
+=== Biocultural ===
+In Armin W. Geertz article on Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion, the term "biocultural" refers to the simultaneous intersection of humans as both biological and cultural animals. In his article, Geertz discusses the connection between the human brain and the rest of the body, stating that the brain does not work independently, but rather in unison with other sense organs in the body. Essentially, arguing that the "cognition functions in the embodiment of the brain." With this, he says that religio-spiritual practices (such as dancing, chanting, or the use of psychoactive substances) that engage the other senses, have physical effects on brain chemistry. This varies cross-culturally, as different cultural and religious practices engage in different methods to induce senses of divine transcendence. This, in turn, demonstrates the connection between biology and cultural contexts, since neither are uniform.  
+
+=== Religion ===
+Spiritual practices and religious rituals have been around for hundreds of thousands of years with some dating as far back as 300,000 in the Rising Star Cave with the discovery of Homo Naledi. Dave Vliegenthart's article Can Neurotheology Explain Religion? aims at answering the question of neurotheology as a legitimate way of explaining religious experiences. In this he defines the term "religion" as a "state of consciousness in which reality is deemed religious and thought and experienced through the lens of a particular human mind-set." This is categorized under feelings of intuition, higher or altered states of consciousness, or a connection to a divine being. Through attempts to achieve religious ecstasy, people have tried to connect to divine or ethereal beings as a way to breed human connection in addition to achieving higher wisdom. This goal of attaining eternal knowledge or harmony with the universe is demonstrated cross culturally, as mentioned above in Geertz's work on biocultural studies.  
+
+=== Consciousness ===
+According to an article in Scientific American, "consciousness" is everything a person experiences: a personal sense of reality based on experiences of one's own real life events. The article discusses the neuronal correlates of consciousness and the neurological process that go behind the brain's formations of conscious thinking, saying how the senses relay information through the spinal cord to the cerebellum in order to translate physical experience into neurological interpretation. For hundreds of thousands of years humans have been trying to find ways to alter their states of consciousness. This varies widely across cultural groups, religious practices, and more so when looking from individual to individual. In Ancient Greece, maenads would attempt this by ecstatic and frenzied dance. In Sufi Mysticism, also known as Rumism, there is a similar practice of the whirling dervishes where spinning in circles to music is done in order to create a connection with the Divine. In some more extreme cases, it may include forms of asceticism such as fasting, celibacy, or extreme isolation.
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+---
+title: "Neuroscience of religion"
+chunk: 2/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:02.107948+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== History, Developments, and Theoretical Work ==
+In an attempt to focus and clarify what was a growing interest in this field, 1994 educator and businessman Laurence O. McKinney published the first book on the subject, titled Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century. In addition to being written for a popular audience, it was also promoted in the theological journal Zygon. According to McKinney, "neurotheology" sources the basis of religious inquiry in relatively recent developmental neurophysiology. McKinney's theory emphasizes how pre-frontal development in humans creates an illusion of chronological time as a fundamental part of normal adult cognition past the age of three. The inability of the adult brain to retrieve earlier images experienced by an infantile brain creates questions such as "Where did I come from?" and "Where does it all go?" He suggests that this neurological process led to the creation of various religious explanations. Moreover, studies behind the experience of death as a peaceful regression into timelessness as the brain dies won praise from readers as varied as writer Arthur C. Clarke, eminent theologian Harvey Cox, and the Dalai Lama and sparked a new interest in the field.  Similarly, radical Catholic theologian Eugen Drewermann developed a two-volume critique of traditional conceptions of God and the soul in which he reinterpreted religion based on contemporary neuroscientific research. 
+The neuroscientist Andrew B. Newberg has claimed that "intensely focused spiritual contemplation triggers an alteration in the activity of the brain that leads one to perceive transcendent religious experiences as solid, tangible reality. In other words, the sensation that Buddhists call oneness with the universe." The orientation area requires sensory input to do its calculus. "If you block sensory inputs to this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self and not-self," says Newberg. With no information from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything." "The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that they have touched infinity." Still, it has also been argued "that neurotheology should be conceived and practiced within a theological framework."
+
+== Experimental Work ==
+In 1969, British biologist Alister Hardy founded a Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) at Oxford after retiring from his post as Linacre Professor of Zoology. Citing William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he set out to collect first-hand accounts of numinous experiences. He was awarded the Templeton Prize before his death in 1985. His successor David Hay suggested in God's Biologist: A Life of Alister Hardy (2011) that the RERC later dispersed as investigators turned to newer techniques of scientific investigation. 
+
+=== Magnetic Stimulation Studies ===
+During the 1980s, Michael Persinger stimulated the temporal lobes of human subjects with a weak magnetic field using an apparatus that popularly became known as the "God helmet" and reported that many of his subjects claimed to experience a "sensed presence" during stimulation. This work has been criticised,
+ though some researchers have published a replication of one God Helmet experiment.
+Granqvist et al. claimed that Persinger's work was not double-blind, and failed to replicate Persinger's experiments double-blinded. They concluded that the magnetic field had no effect on any religious or spiritual experience reported by the participants, but was predicted entirely by their suggestibility and personality traits. Following the publication of this study, Persinger et al. dispute this. One published attempt to create a "haunted room" using environmental "complex" electromagnetic fields based on Persinger's theoretical and experimental work did not produce the sensation of a "sensed presence" and found that reports of unusual experiences were uncorrelated with the presence or absence of these fields. As in the study by Granqvist et al., reports of unusual experiences were instead predicted by the personality characteristics and suggestibility of participants. One experiment with a commercial version of the God helmet found no difference in response to graphic images whether the device was on or off.
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+title: "Neuroscience of religion"
+chunk: 3/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:02.107948+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging ===
+The first researcher to note and catalog the abnormal experiences associated with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) was neurologist Norman Geschwind, who noted a set of religious behavioral traits associated with TLE seizures. These include hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, reduced sexual interest, fainting spells, and pedantism, often collectively ascribed to a condition known as Geschwind syndrome.
+Vilayanur S. Ramachandran explored the neural basis of the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE using the galvanic skin response (GSR), which correlates with emotional arousal, to determine whether the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE was due to an overall heightened emotional state or was specific to religious stimuli. Ramachandran presented two subjects with neutral, sexually arousing and religious words while measuring GSR. Ramachandran was able to show that patients with TLE showed enhanced emotional responses to the religious words, diminished responses to the sexually charged words, and normal responses to the neutral words. This study was presented as an abstract at a neuroscience conference and referenced in Ramachandran's book, Phantoms in the Brain, which was not published as a peer-reviewed scientific article.
+Research by Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal, using fMRI on Carmelite nuns, has purported to show that religious and spiritual experiences include several brain regions and not a single 'God spot'. As Beauregard has said, "There is no God spot in the brain. Spiritual experiences are complex, like intense experiences with other human beings." The neuroimaging was conducted when the nuns were asked to recall past mystical states, not while actually undergoing them; "subjects were asked to remember and relive (eyes closed) the most intense mystical experience ever felt in their lives as a member of the Carmelite Order."
+A 2011 study by researchers at the Duke University Medical Center found hippocampal atrophy is associated with older adults who report life-changing religious experiences, as well as those who are "born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation".
+A 2016 study using fMRI found "a recognizable feeling central to ... (Mormon)... devotional practice was reproducibly associated with activation in nucleus accumbens, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and frontal attentional regions. Nucleus accumbens activation preceded peak spiritual feelings by 1–3 s and was replicated in four separate tasks. ... The association of abstract ideas and brain reward circuitry may interact with frontal attentional and emotive salience processing, suggesting a mechanism whereby doctrinal concepts may come to be intrinsically rewarding and motivate behavior in religious individuals."
+
+=== Psychopharmacology ===
+Some scientists working in the field hypothesize that the basis of spiritual experience arises in neurological physiology.  Speculative suggestions have been made that an increase of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) levels in the pineal gland contribute to spiritual experiences. It has also been suggested that stimulation of the temporal lobe by psychoactive ingredients of magic mushrooms mimics religious experiences. This hypothesis has found laboratory validation with respect to psilocybin.
+
+== See also ==
+Bicameral mentality
+Cognitive science of religion
+Psychedelic crisis
+Religion and schizophrenia
+Scholarly approaches to mysticism
+Transpersonal psychology
+
+== References ==
+
+== Further reading ==
+Begley, Sharon (7 May 2001). "Your Brain on Religion: Mystic visions or brain circuits at work?". Newsweek. Archived from the original on 2 December 2005 – via Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics.
+Hitt, Jack (1 November 1999). "This Is Your Brain on God". Wired.
+Neher, Andrew (1990). The Psychology of Transcendence (2nd ed.). Dover. ISBN 0-486-26167-0.
+Newberg, Andrew B. (1999). The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ISBN 0-8006-3163-3.
+McNamara, Patrick (2009). The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-88958-2.
+Powell, Victoria (2007). "Neurotheology: With God in Mind". Clinically Psyched. Archived from the original on 14 June 2013.
+Roberts, Thomas B. (2006). "Chemical Input — Religious Output: Entheogens". In McNamara, Robert (ed.). Where God and Science Meet: The Psychology of Religious Experience. Vol. 3. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-0-275-98791-6.
+Runehov, Anne L. C. (2007). Sacred or Neural? The Potential of Neuroscience to Explain Religious Experience. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. ISBN 978-3-525-56980-1.
+Vliegenthart, Dave. "Can Neurotheology Explain Religion?" Archiv Für Religionspsychologie / Archive for the Psychology of Religion 33, no. 2 (2011): 137–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23919331.
+‌Geertz, Armin W. "Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion." Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 22, no. 4, 2010, pp. 304–21. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23555751.
+Taylor, Jill Bolte. "My Stroke of Insight." TED Talks, 2019.
+Carvour HM, Radke AK and French NS (2025): A review of the neuroscience of religion: an overview of the field, its limitations, and future interventions. Front. Neurosci. 19:1587794. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1587794.
+
+== External links ==
+God on the Brain - programme summary at BBC
+Mystical Brain at National Film Board of Canada
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+title: "Non-overlapping magisteria"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:03.424947+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) is the view, advocated by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, fact vs. values, so there is a difference between the "nets" over which they have "a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority", and the two domains do not overlap. He suggests, with examples, that "NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism" and that it is "a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria." Some have criticized the idea or suggested limitations to it, and there continues to be disagreement over where the boundaries between the two magisteria should be.
+
+== Gould's separate magisteria ==
+In a 1997 essay "Non-overlapping Magisteria" for Natural History magazine, and later in his book Rocks of Ages (1999), Gould put forward what he described as "a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to ... the supposed conflict between science and religion", from his puzzlement over the need and reception of the 1996 address of Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth". He draws the term magisterium from Pope Pius XII's encyclical, Humani generis (1950), and defines it as "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution", and describes the NOMA principle as "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve." "These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."
+Gould emphasized the legitimacy of each field of endeavor only within its appropriate area of inquiry: "NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution." In the chapter "NOMA Defined and Defended" Gould gave examples of the types of questions appropriate to each area of inquiry, on the topic of "our relationship with other living creatures": "Do humans look so much like apes because we share a recent common ancestor or because creation followed a linear order, with apes representing the step just below us?" represents an inquiry concerning fact, while "Under what conditions (if ever) do we have a right to drive other species to extinction by elimination of their habitats? Do we violate any moral codes when we use genetic technology to place a gene from one creature into the genome of another species?" represent questions in the domain of values. He went on to present "an outline of historical reasons for the existence of conflict, where none should exist".
+In a speech before the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Gould stressed the diplomatic reasons for adopting NOMA as well, stating that "the reason why we support that position is that it happens to be right, logically. But we should also be aware that it is very practical as well if we want to prevail." Gould argued that if indeed the polling data was correct—and that 80–90% of Americans believe in a supreme being, and such a belief is misunderstood to be at odds with evolution—then "we have to keep stressing that religion is a different matter, and science is not in any sense opposed to it", otherwise "we're not going to get very far". He did not, however, consider this diplomatic aspect to be paramount, writing in 1997: "NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance."
+In 1997 he had elaborated on this position by describing his role as a scientist with respect to NOMA:
+
+Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.
+Ciarán Benson sees a tendency to re-negotiate the borders between the  "human sciences and the natural sciences", as in Wilhelm Dilthey's 1883 claim for the distinction between Geisteswissenschaften (humanities) and Naturwissenschaften (science). The astrophysicist Arnold O. Benz proposes that the boundary between the two magisteria is in the different ways they perceive reality: objective measurements in science, participatory experience in religion. The two planes of perceptions differ, but meet each other, for example, in amazement and in ethics.
+
+== National Academy of Sciences ==
+Also in 1999, the National Academy of Sciences adopted a similar stance. Its publication Science and Creationism stated that "Scientists, like many others, are touched with awe at the order and complexity of nature. Indeed, many scientists are deeply religious. But science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each."
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+---
+title: "Non-overlapping magisteria"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:03.424947+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Humani generis ==
+Gould wrote that he was inspired to consider non-overlapping magisteria after being driven to examine the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, in which Pope Pius XII permits Catholics to entertain the hypothesis of evolution for the human body so long as they accept the divine infusion of the soul. Gould cited the following paragraph:
+
+The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.
+
+== Reception ==
+Richard Dawkins has criticized Gould's position on the grounds that religion is not divorced from scientific matters or the material world. He writes, "it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims."
+Dawkins also argues that a religion free of divine intervention would be far different from any existing ones, and certainly different from the Abrahamic religions. Moreover, he claims that religions would be only too happy to accept scientific claims that supported their views. For example, if DNA evidence proved that Jesus had no earthly father, Dawkins claims that the argument of non-overlapping magisteria would be quickly dropped.
+The theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has been sympathetic to the approach, but claims it for the theological side—Graf assumes that e.g. creationism may be interpreted as a reaction of religious communities on the Verweltanschaulichung (i.e. interpretation as a worldview) of (natural) science in social Darwinism. That said, attempts to compete with religion by natural science may generate a backlash that is detrimental to both sides.
+Ciarán Benson, a secular humanist, defends the spiritual as a category against both. He assumes that while Gould claims for NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria of science, morality and religion), and Richard Dawkins  for, verbally, "a brand of SM (bondage  of the others by the scientific magisterium)", Benson preferred OM (overlapping magisteria), especially in the case of art and religion.
+Francis Collins criticized what he saw as the limits of NOMA, arguing that science, religion, and other spheres have "partially overlapped" while agreeing with Gould that morals, spirituality and ethics cannot be determined from naturalistic interpretation. This exceeds the greatest interconnection allowed by Gould in his original 1997 essay "Nonoverlapping Magisteria" in which he writes:
+
+Each ... subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority ... This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man's land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult.
+Matt Ridley notes that religion does more than talk about ultimate meanings and morals, and science is not proscribed from talking about the above either. After all, morals involve human behavior, an observable phenomenon, and science is the study of observable phenomena. Ridley notes that there is substantial scientific evidence on evolutionary origins of ethics and morality.
+Sam Harris has heavily criticized this concept in his book The Moral Landscape. Harris notes that "Meaning, values, morality and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures – and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain."
+
+== See also ==
+
+Fact–value distinction
+God of the gaps
+New atheism § Views on non-overlapping magisteria
+Relationship between science and religion
+Sphere sovereignty
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+
+Nonoverlapping Magisteria – by Stephen Jay Gould (MP3)
+Nonmoral Nature – by Stephen Jay Gould
+Gould on God – by H. Allen Orr, Boston Review.
+Review of Rocks of Ages – by Michael Ruse, Metanexus Institute.
+A Separate Peace – by Michael Ruse, Science & Spirit.
+The Holes in Gould's Semipermeable Membrane Between Science and Religion – by Ursula Goodenough
+Gould's Separate "Magisteria" – by Mark Durm, Massimo Pigliucci, Skeptical Inquirer
+The religious views of Stephen Gould and Charles Darwin – by Martin Gardner, Skeptical Inquirer
+Rocks of Ages Book review – by Jim Walker
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+---
+title: "Omega Point"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:04.710472+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Omega Point is a theorized future event in which the entirety of the universe spirals toward a final point of unification. The term was invented by the French Jesuit Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is "God from God", "Light from Light", "True God from True God", and "through him all things were made". In the Book of Revelation, Christ describes himself three times as "the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end". Several decades after Teilhard's death, the idea of the Omega Point was expanded upon in the writings of John David Garcia (1971), Paolo Soleri (1981), Frank Tipler (1994), and David Deutsch (1997).
+
+== Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's theory ==
+
+=== Etymology ===
+Teilhard de Chardin was a paleontologist and Roman Catholic priest in the Jesuit order. In France in the 1920s, he began incorporating his theories of the universe into lectures that placed Catholicism and evolution in the same conversation. Because of these lectures, he was suspected by the Holy Office of denying the doctrine of original sin. This caused Teilhard to be exiled to China and banned from publication by Church authorities. It was not until one year after his death in 1955 that his writings were published for the world to read. His works were also supported by the writings of a group of Catholic thinkers, which includes Pope Benedict XVI. His book The Phenomenon of Man has been dissected by astrophysicists and cosmologists, and is now viewed as a work positing a theological or philosophical theory that cannot be scientifically proven. Teilhard, who was not a cosmologist, opens his books with the statement: 
+
+... if this book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise.
+
+=== Evolution ===
+Teilhard maintained that one-cell organisms develop into metazoans or animals, but some of the members of this classification develop organisms with complex nervous systems. This group has the capability to acquire intelligence. When Homo sapiens inhabited Earth through evolution, a noosphere, the cognitive layer of existence, was created. As evolution continues, the noosphere gains coherence. Teilhard explained that this noosphere can be moved toward or constructed to be the Omega Point or the final evolutionary stage with the help of science. Teilhard refers to this process as "planetization." Eventually, the noosphere gains total dominance over the biosphere and reaches a point of complete independence from tangential energy forming a metaphysical being, called the Omega Point.
+
+=== Energy ===
+Energy exists in two basic modes:
+
+"Tangential Energy": energy that can be measured by physics.
+"Radial Energy": spiritual energy which accumulates into a higher state as time progresses.
+Teilhard defines Radial Energy as becoming more concentrated and available as it is a critical element in man's evolution. The theory applies to all forms of matter, concluding that everything with existence has some sort of life. In regard to Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man, Peter Medawar wrote, "Teilhard's radial, spiritual, or psychic energy may be equated to 'information' or 'information content' in the sense that has been made reasonably precise by communication engineers."
+
+=== Formal properties ===
+Teilhard's theory is based on four "properties":
+
+Humans will escape the heat death of the universe. He theorizes that since radial energy is non-compliant with entropy, it escapes the collapses of forces at world's end.
+The Omega Point does not exist within the timeline of the universe, it occurs at the exact edge of the end of time. From that point, all sequences of existence are sucked into its being.
+The Omega Point can be understood as a volume shaped like a cone in which each section, taken from the base to its summit, decreases until it diminishes into a final point.
+The volume described in the Third Property must be understood as an entity with finite boundaries. Teilhard explains:
+... what would have become of humanity, if, by some remote chance, it had been free to spread indefinitely on an unlimited surface, that is to say, left only to the devices of its internal affinities? Something unimaginable. ... Perhaps even nothing at all, when we think of the extreme importance of the role played in its development by the forces of compression.
+
+=== Forces of compression ===
+Teilhard calls the contributing universal energy that generates the Omega Point "forces of compression". Unlike the scientific definition, which incorporates gravity and mass, Teilhard's forces of compression are sourced from communication and contact between human beings. This value is limitless and directly correlated with entropy. It suggests that as humans continue to interact, consciousness evolves and grows. For the theory to occur, humans must also be bound to the finite earth. The creation of this boundary forces the world's convergence upon itself which he theorizes to result in time ending in communion with the Omega Point-God. This portion of Teilhard's thinking shows his lack of expectation for humans to engage in space travel and transcend the bounds of Earth.
+
+== The Omega Point cosmology ==
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+title: "Omega Point"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:04.710472+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler generalized Teilhard's term Omega Point to describe what he alleges is the ultimate fate of the universe as required by the laws of physics: roughly, Tipler argues that quantum mechanics is inconsistent unless the future of every point in spacetime contains an intelligent observer to collapse the wavefunction and that the only way for this to happen is if the Universe is closed (that is, it will collapse to a single point) and yet contains observers with a "God-like" ability to perform an unbounded series of observations in finite time. Tipler's conception of the Omega Point is regarded as pseudoscience by some scientists. 
+The originator of quantum computing, Oxford's David Deutsch, wrote about how a universal quantum computer could bring about Tipler's salvation in his 1997 book, The Fabric of Reality.
+
+== Related concepts ==
+
+=== Big Crunch ===
+
+The scientific hypothesis of the Big Crunch closely resembles the Omega Point theory. However, the current scientific consensus rejects this theory. Nevertheless, in 2025, a paper in the journal Monthly Notices appeared suggesting that the universe's expansion is not accelerating, as commonly believed, but slowing, and that it could result in a Big Crunch. This followed another paper earlier in the year reaching similar conclusions.
+
+=== Accelerating expansion of the universe ===
+
+In 1998, a value measured from observations of Type Ia supernovae seemed to indicate that what was once assumed to be temporary cosmological expansion was actually accelerating. The apparent acceleration has caused further dismissal of the validity of Tipler's Omega Point, since the necessity of a final big crunch singularity is key to the Omega Point's workability. However, Tipler believes that the Omega Point is still workable, arguing that a big crunch/ final singularity is still required under many current universal models.
+
+=== Technological singularity ===
+The technological singularity is the hypothetical advent of artificial general intelligence becoming capable of recursive self-improvement, resulting in an irreversible machine intelligence explosion, with unknown impact on humanity. Eric Steinhart, a proponent of "Christian transhumanism," argues there is a significant overlap of ideas between the secular singularity and Teilhard's religious Omega Point. Steinhart quotes Ray Kurzweil, who stated that "evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never reaching this ideal."  Like Kurzweil, Teilhard predicted a period of rapid technological change that results in a merger of humanity and technology. He believes that this marks the birth of the noosphere and the emergence of the "spirit of the Earth," but the Teilhardian Singularity comes later. Unlike Kurzweil, Teilhard's singularity is marked by the evolution of human intelligence reaching a critical point in which humans ascend from "transhuman" to "posthuman." He identifies this with the Christian "parousia."
+
+== In popular culture ==
+
+The Spanish painter Salvador Dalí was familiar with Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point theory. His 1959 painting The Ecumenical Council is said to represent the "interconnectedness" of the Omega Point. Point Omega by Don DeLillo takes its name from the theory and involves a character who is studying Teilhard de Chardin. Flannery O'Connor's acclaimed collection of short stories refers to the Omega Point theory in its title, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and science fiction writer Frederik Pohl references Frank Tipler and the Omega Point in his 1998 short story "The Siege of Eternity". Scottish writer / counterculture figure Grant Morrison has used the Omega Point as a plot line in several of his Justice League of America and Batman stories.
+Dan Simmons references Teilhard and the Omega Point throughout the Hyperion Cantos, with extended discussions about the feasibility of the concept driving much of the plot.
+Julian May's Galactic Milieu Series includes multiple references to Chardin, the Omega Point and the Noosphere. Part of the driving force for the Milieu of the title is to promote an increase in the population of various intelligent species, including humans, in order to enable them to reach a point of psychic Unity.
+Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days references Teilhard de Chardin and includes a brief explanation of the Omega Point. Italian writer Valerio Evangelisti has used the Omega Point as main theme of his Il Fantasma di Eymerich novel. In William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist, the character of Father Merrin references Omega Point. In 2021, Dutch symphonic metal band Epica released their eighth studio album, Omega, which features concepts related to the Omega Point theory. Epica's guitarist and vocalist, Mark Jansen, specifically referenced Teilhard's theory when describing the album's concept.
+Charles Sheffield's 1997 novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow also uses the concept in the concluding act of the novel.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+Computer history's stride towards an expected Omega Point by Jürgen Schmidhuber, from "The New AI: General & Sound & Relevant for Physics", In B. Goertzel and C. Pennachin, eds.: Artificial General Intelligence, p. 175-198, 2006.
+Essays by Tipler on the Omega Point
+Human Evolution Research Institute Archived 2018-06-19 at the Wayback Machine
+Princeton Noosphere project cites Teilhard de Chardin
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diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Mauna_Kea_Observatories-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Mauna_Kea_Observatories-0.md
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+title: "Opposition to the Mauna Kea Observatories"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Mauna_Kea_Observatories"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:06.129220+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Mauna Kea Observatories have been controversial since the first telescope was built in the late 1960s. Originally part of research begun by Gerard Kuiper of the University of Arizona, the site has expanded into the world's largest observatory for infrared and submillimeter telescopes. Opposition to the telescope from residents in the city of Hilo, Hawaii were concerned about the visual appearance of the mountain and Native Hawaiians voiced concerns over the site being sacred to the Hawaiian religion as the home of several deities. Environmental groups and activists have been expressing concern over endangered species habitat.
+The Outrigger Telescopes Project, intended to build from four to six comparatively small telescopes for interferometry, was to surround the Keck telescopes.  It was cancelled in 2006, after a court found NASA's Environmental Impact Statement was improperly limited to just the telescope area.
+An ongoing proposal for one of the world's largest optical telescopes, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) was the focus of protests concerning the continued development of the mountain Hawaiians consider the most sacred peak in the island chain. The telescope has still not been built as of 2025, and its future is in jeopardy.
+
+== Background ==
+After studying photos for NASA's Apollo program that contained greater detail than any ground-based telescope, Gerard Kuiper began seeking an arid site for infrared studies. While he first began looking in Chile, he also made the decision to perform tests in the Hawaiian Islands. Tests on Maui's Haleakalā were promising but the mountain was too low in the inversion layer and often covered by clouds. On the "Big Island" of Hawaii, Mauna Kea is considered the highest island mountain in the world. While the summit is often covered with snow the air itself is extremely dry. Kuiper began looking into the possibility of an observatory on Mauna Kea. After testing, he discovered the low humidity was perfect for infrared signals. He persuaded then-Governor John A. Burns to bulldoze a dirt road to the summit where he built a small telescope on Puʻu Poliʻahu, a cinder cone peak. The peak was the second highest on the mountain with the highest peak being holy ground, so Kuiper avoided it. Next, Kuiper tried enlisting NASA to fund a larger facility with a large telescope, housing and other needed structures. NASA, in turn decided to make the project open to competition. Professor of physics, John Jefferies of the University of Hawaii placed a bid on behalf of the university. Jefferies had gained his reputation through observations at Sacramento Peak Observatory. The proposal was for a two-meter telescope to serve both the needs of NASA and the university. While large telescopes are not ordinarily awarded to universities without well established astronomers, Jefferies and UH were awarded the NASA contract, infuriating Kuiper who felt that "his mountain" had been "stolen" from "him". Kuiper would abandon his site (the very first telescope on Mauna Kea) over the competition and begin work in Arizona on a different NASA project. After considerable testing by Jefferies' team, the best locations were determined to be near the summit at the top of the cinder cones. Testing also determined Mauna Kea to be superb for nighttime viewing due to many factors including the thin air, constant trade winds and being surrounded by sea. Jefferies would build a 2.24 meter telescope with the State of Hawaii agreeing to build a reliable, all weather roadway to the summit. Building began in 1967 and first light seen in 1970.
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+---
+title: "Opposition to the Mauna Kea Observatories"
+chunk: 2/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Mauna_Kea_Observatories"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:06.129220+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Expansion renews opposition ==
+Some of the people on the Big Island were concerned that the whole thing had got out of hand and the University of Hawaii was going to take over the top of the mountain, push all the skiers off and push all the hunters off, and essentially develop, in the worst sense, the side of the mountain. The Big Island is a rural community and there are a lot of people there who are not very sophisticated, as you know. They are nervous about changes in lifestyles, and they see those following on the development of the program of astronomy as just about as far removed from their daily pursuits as they possibly can be. And they do not trust the University, State, or Federal government worth a damn.
+They feel—and in some cases I’ve had this said to me—that they are going to lose all access to the mountain because of these programs. The Federal government is going to come in and it's going to slowly move down the mountain, taking more and more of the mountain over as more and more programs go up there, and no-one will be able to get there. It is very hard to fight a fear of this kind—a formless, baseless concern—except through the same kind of backwoods interaction, at a grassroots level.
+In Honolulu, the governor and legislature, enthusiastic about the development, set aside an even larger area for the observatory causing opposition in the main city of the Big Island, Hilo. Native Hawaiians believe the entire site to be sacred and that developing the mountain, even for science, would spoil the area. Environmentalists were concerned about rare native bird populations and other citizens of Hilo were concerned about the sight of the domes from the city. Using town hall meetings, Jefferies was able to overcome opposition by weighing the economic advantage and prestige the island would receive.
+There has been substantial opposition to the Mauna Kea observatories that continues to grow. By 1977 Jefferies stated that the Mayor of Hawaii County had joined existing hunting and environmentalist opposition. Over the years, the opposition to the observatories may have become the most visible example of the conflict western science has encountered over access and use of environmental and culturally significant sites. Opposition to development grew shortly after expansion of the observatories commenced. Once access was opened up by the roadway to the summit, skiers began using it for recreation and objected when the road was closed as a precaution against vandalism when the telescopes were being built. Hunters voiced concerns, as did the Hawaiian Audubon Society, which was supported by Governor George Ariyoshi.
+The Audubon Society objected to further development on Mauna Kea over concerns to habitat of the endangered palila, an endemic species to only specific parts of this mountain. The bird is the last of the finch billed honeycreepers existing on the island. Over 50% of native bird species had been killed off due to loss of habitat from early western settlers, or the introduction of non-native species competing for resources. Hunters and sportsmen were concerned that the hunting of feral animals would be affected by the telescope operations. A "Save Mauna Kea" movement was inspired by the proliferation of telescopes, with opposition believing development of the mountain to be sacrilegious. Native Hawaiian non-profit groups, such as Kahea, (whose goals are the protection of cultural heritage and the environment), oppose development on Mauna Kea as a sacred space to the Hawaiian religion. Today, Mauna Kea hosts the world's largest location for telescope observations in infrared and submillimeter astronomy. The land itself is protected by the U.S. Historical Preservation Act due to its significance to Hawaiian culture, but this still allowed development.
+
+== Outrigger telescopes ==
+Development of the Mauna Kea observatories is still opposed by environmental groups and Native Hawaiians. A 2006 proposal for the Outrigger Telescopes to become extensions of the Keck Observatory was canceled after a judge's determination that a full environmental impact statement must be prepared before any further development of the site. The "outrigger" smaller telescopes would have been linked to the main Keck I and Keck II telescopes. Environmental groups and Native Hawaiian activists were much stronger in their opposition this time than they had been in the past, but NASA went ahead with the proposal for lack of an alternate site. The group Mauna Kea Anaina Hou made several arguments against the development, including that Mauna Kea was a sacred mountain to Native Hawaiians where many deities live, and that the cinder cone location being proposed was holy in Hawaiian tradition as a burial site for a demi-god. The group raised several other concerns, such as environmental, concern for the preservation of native insects, the question of Ceded lands, and an audit report critical of the mountain's management.
+
+== Thirty Meter Telescope proposal ==
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+---
+title: "Opposition to the Mauna Kea Observatories"
+chunk: 3/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Mauna_Kea_Observatories"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:32:06.129220+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a proposal for a large, segmented, mirror telescope, planned for the summit of Mauna Kea. The TMT has become a focal point for protests against further development of the observatory site, and a legal battle was fought through the Hawaii court system. The Supreme Court of Hawaii approved the resumption of construction of the telescope on 31 October 2018.
+The TMT project is a response to a recommendation in 2000 from the US National Academy of Sciences that a thirty-meter telescope be the top priority and be built within the decade. Urgency in construction is due to the competitive nature of science with the European-Extremely Large Telescope also under construction. Mauna Kea's summit is the most sacred of all the mountains in Hawaii to many, but not all, Native Hawaiian people. Hawaiian cultural practitioners cite impacts to indigenous cultural practice, while recreational users have argued that construction harms the scenic view plane. Some environmentalists are concerned that irreparable ecological damage may be done by construction, although this has been disputed by other environmental advocates. All three groups are represented among the petitioners opposing the TMT. According to the State of Hawaii law HAR 13-5-30, the eight key criteria must be met before construction be allowed on conservation lands in Hawaii. Among other criteria, the development may not "cause substantial adverse impact to existing natural resources within the surrounding area, community, or region," and the "existing physical and environmental aspects of the land must be preserved or improved upon."
+Native Hawaiian activists such as Kealoha Pisciotta, a former employee of the Mauna Kea Observatories, have raised concerns over the telescopes on Mauna Kea desecrating what some Native Hawaiians consider to be their most sacred mountain. Pisciotta, a former telescope systems specialist technician at James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, is one of several people suing to stop the construction, and is also director of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou. As of April 2015, two separate appeals were still pending.
+The 1998 study Mauna Kea Science Reserve and Hale Pohaku Complex Development Plan Update stated that "...nearly all the interviewees and all others who participated in the consultation process (Appendices B and C) called for a moratorium on any further development on the summit of Mauna Kea."
+The Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources gave final approval for the project in September 2017 after a protracted hearing process that included a six month long contested case hearing.  This decision was challenged in the Hawaii State Supreme Court the following year.  The court ruled that the DLNR decision was valid and that construction may proceed.
+As of late 2021 construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope remained paused due to the controversy and ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 Decadal report of the National Science Foundation has recommended federal investment in the TMT project.  The controversy surrounding construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope continues. Independent polls commissioned by local media organizations show consistent support for the project in the islands with over two thirds of local residents supporting the project.  These same polls indicate Native Hawaiian community support remains split with about half of Hawaiian respondents supporting construction of the new telescope.
+In June 2025 the United States' National Science Foundation dropped support for the TMT in favor of the Giant Magellan Telescope. This lack of funding puts the TMT's future in doubt, although the scientists in the TMT international consortium said they would press forward.
+
+== Stewardship change ==
+A July 2022, state law responds to the protests by removing sole control over the master land lease from the University of Hawaii. After a joint transition period from 2023 to 2028, control will shift to the new Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority, which will include representatives from the University, astronomers and native Hawaiians.
+
+== References ==
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