OVER THE YEARS, I HAVE HAD CONVERSATIONS with many people about the ideas in this book. I thank: Matt Brin and Tom Head for mathematical discussions; David Chalmers for discussions about the mind, consciousness, and knowledge; Anne Clark for discussions about cognition in nonhuman animals, and for coteaching courses with me on this topic; Rick Dale for discussions about human psychology; Terrence Deacon for the idea that humans are both African apes yet deserving of their own phylum; Chris Fields for discussions about everything from artificial intelligence to zoology; Kris Gilbert for discussions of religions, religious mysteries, and Neopaganism; Charles Goodman for discussions about Buddhism; David Martin for discussions about religion and Christianity; Ally Peltier for discussions on religion and witchcraft, and for helping me teach Witchcraft and Science, where early ideas that eventually resulted in this book were presented; Graham Priest for discussions of paraconsistent logics and the structure of nothingness; Stephen David Ross for discussions about how weird science really is; Elizabeth Tucker for discussions about style, language, tone, and other details; Zach Weber for discussions about how weird philosophy really is and also for discussions about paraconsistent logics and paraconsistency in mathematics; and David Sloan Wilson for discussions about evolution and how our religious proclivities shaped and were shaped by our evolution. Also, Anne Clark, David, and I cotaught a course on the evolution of immorality. That course was a real eye-opener.
I also thank fellow-travelers Tom Head (again), Karen Fisher, David Martin (again), Chris Pogson, and Julia Rose for reading and commenting on early drafts of this book. Thanks especially to Tom for ideas about how to present the mathematical proofs. Thanks to Lynn George for geology discussions and for reading and commenting on the description of Wyoming’s Shirley Basin. Books seem to develop a mind or personality of their own, and this book went in a different direction than originally planned, so I couldn’t include the Shirley Basin description, unfortunately. Jake Bartholomew gave me some sage advice on the first part of the book, and Elahd Bar-Shai read and commented on an early draft—thanks to both. I received several good comments from Binghamton University undergraduate students in my Science and Religion courses (fall 2009, spring 2011). I want to especially thank Melissa Foster for her long list of good comments. And for a late-night brainstorming session in the fall of 2013, I thank: Jacey Gottlieb, Kyle Kilmetis, Sean Kindya, Matt Martello, Matthew Polistina, Nate Powell, and Sean Stapleton. Also, I thank three anonymous Columbia University Press referees, as well as Wendy Lochner, Robert Demke, and all the people at CUP who worked hard shepherding this book through the whole process. As always, I thank my friend and longtime colleague Chris Fields for many detailed, erudite, and incisive comments on several previous drafts, all of which he read all the way through. Finally, thanks to my wife, Tara, for her help and encouragement, and thanks to the rest of my family, up, down, and sideways, all of whom wanted the Shirley Basin part included.