Gods Again.

Different lands have different gods. The magic of one land will not work in another land, but the stories are the same: finding the underlying harmony in things, non-violence, compassion, the river and the way, dying gods, in my end is my beginning. And of all these stories, the Abrahamic religions, born of the desert's austerity, are the most foreclosed: only one god mediating the umbilical between self and world, their simplicity and inflexibility perfectly equipping them for rapid viral dissemination and rabid fundamentalist extrapolations – misread, misused, missing the point entirely. 

Or so I thought as I watched Princess Mononoke for the first time last week. 

Norman’s Intelligent Design.

How I felt after talking to Norman.

I was chatting some time ago with a maths teacher by the name of Norman. Life is crazy like that sometimes. Anyway, our conversation strayed onto the subject of religion and trundled along amicably enough until my new friend stated rather baldly that, despite not subscribing to any particular faith, he believes some kind of organising intelligence must exist in the universe. The reason he believes this, he said, is because there are simply too many unexplained phenomena out there for this not to be the case. Which is to say, Norman subscribes to a peculiar variant of the idea known as intelligent design in which the individual does not simply read god into the visible marvels (the perfect suitability for purpose of an eye, for example) but deduces from the unknown the presence of the ineffable.

I’ve been feeling the urge to write about this for a while because the whole experience left me feeling vaguely violated, like I was open-mouth kissed by a stranger. In part this is due to the confidence with which Norman expressed himself, as if his conclusion was so transparently obvious as to be beyond logical examination. But it’s also because he put me, a certified cuff-wafting ponce, in the invidious position of trying to defend rational empiricism to someone whom I would have assumed, as a maths teacher, to be a natural advocate of this type of thinking and an equally natural opponent to precisely the sort of a priori mysticism which Norman was espousing (i.e. deriving a supernatural belief from your gut feeling that it just must be the case). The whole thing was like waking up in upside-down land. Furthermore, due to having a deep horror of confrontation, I ended up furious with myself afterwards for having nodded politely throughout the whole exchange despite inwardly resisting Norman's idea with pretty much every atom of my being (a few were left out for digestion and breathing and stuff). So this post has a dual purpose: it is first by way of atonement for having failed to give a better account of myself that evening and, second, an attempt to set down for my own benefit why I find this idea so atavistic and misleading.

There are two principle aspects to my objection. First of all, I think Norman’s idea represents an abnegation of our ability to reason. The assumption that just because something is currently unexplained means that it will remain unexplained indefinitely, therefore placing us in the position of supplicants to the wisdom and will of some undisclosed deity, disregards centuries of scientific progress. The whole point of scientific enquiry, surely, is that we progress from incomprehension to understanding and our lives expand to accommodate more verified knowledge about the world. Hence the comet which once caused villagers to run amok and their hermits to prophesy the end of days is now known to be the effects of solar radiation and solar wind upon the nucleus of an asteroid. And hence the existence of dark matter which is currently deduced as a likely reality through the gravitational force it exerts on visible matter might not yet be proven or understood, but this does not lead the physicists working on the problem to burn their diplomas and start worshipping the damn stuff; they simply assume that they or one of their peers will one day figure it out. Meanwhile they continue to work diligently and rationally in the expectation of that moment.

The other objection I have to Norman’s defence of the intelligent design argument is that it, like most religions, derives from the human race’s innate and highly resistant narcissism. One of the foundation stones of Judeo-Christian religion is that God made us in his image – but surely it was the other way around? We create God in our image and justify our exercise of will and dominion over the rest of creation by supposing that this was what god (who looks like us and thinks like us) intended for us all along. In the case of intelligent design, it’s possible to reduce the narcissistic process of self-identification to a syllogism: statement one: there are things I can’t understand; statement two: I am unconscionably brilliant; conclusion: if I, as someone unconscionably brilliant, can’t understand something, there must be someone out there even cleverer than me who put it there.

We can readily contradict this argument by referring back to the empirical process which brings us from incomprehension to understanding. For example, the transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astrology entailed accepting that the earth moves around the sun and not the other way around. Like The Origin of the Species, the promulgation of this idea triggered serious controversy as well as a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe. It is also fair to say that both of these rationally and empirically deduced theories scared the willies out of Christians precisely because they undermined the argument for intelligent design.

The idea of the earth as the centre of the universe was a natural one for a world without telescopes, stemming as it does from observation of the diurnal cycle and the assumption that the earth was put here for us and therefore the heavens were also. Douglas Adams wrote a very eloquent refutation of this type of narcissistic account for creation:

‘Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.’

To carry on from Adams’ point, I think the transition from the Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy offers us in microcosm an account of mankind’s ability to overcome his narcissism. By using scientific method to look beyond mankind’s innate subjectivity – without attempting to read there the vindication of some pre-existing idea, without striving to reinforce the creed that the world was put here for us by something very much like us – Copernicus, like Darwin, was able to decry within the patterning of nature and the universe a truth which was intrinsically sound and empirically verifiable.

This transition from subjectivity to reasoned objectivity is surely at the heart of becoming a more civilised people. And it’s not as if the rigorous application of empiricism is an unnatural condition for members of the human race. We all do it all the time as we grow older. After all, isn’t a baby the most perfect egotist ever invented, a true monster of subjectivity, the absolute unmoving centre of its own universe? And yet, as we age, our awareness of the world gradually expands from this position of absolute subjectivity to assimilate more and more contrary information until a critical mass is reached and the subjective self is forced to accept that it is not the centre of the universe and the sun and planets don't revolve around him. This is a tough moment, this acceptance of your own peripheral status, but most of us manage to do it because it's a necessary logical step towards a deeper and more rewarding interaction with the world around us. It’s exactly the same story with mankind and his relationship to ideas – the only difference is the scale of application.

Ultimately there may or not be a governing intelligence out there, along with Jedi mind control, Bodhisattva saints and a talking hot dog who shits ice cream. But that is not the point. The point is that we should be free to believe what we want to believe but we must also always try and let our beliefs remain flexible enough to alter when they are presented with unimpeachable, empirically derived contradictory information. The ability to assimilate this knowledge and revise our beliefs is, naturally, somewhat anathema to organised religion, since these institutions have invested millennia of lives and thought in propping up those monolithic commandments. But this ability is what facilitates mankind’s transition from the reflexive narcissism of intelligent design, and the implicit belief that the world was created exclusively for our use, to an objective detachment which reveals the universe in all its complexity and beauty. It is this gift of reason which frees us, as another analogy of Douglas Adams so memorably puts it, to ‘see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it.’

Whilst We're On The Subject Of Religion.

P.S. Can't remember where I found this - happy to acknowledge source if anyone knows.

Latitude.

When I was in India, and young and stupid enough to believe any idea no matter how ridiculous, I was told a theory about religion which has nonetheless stayed with me ever since. The idea was that religions which evolve independently yet on the same line of latitude will often share fundamental similarities beyond the basic stuff common to all religions (do good things, don't do bad things). Now, this friend of mine was referring to similarities between Tibetan Buddhism and Native American religious beliefs at the time, but I think that you could usefully add others to this grouping – including Shintoism in Japan, Paganism in Europe (including Roman and Greek religions) and Hinduism in India. The fundamental similarity shared by these religions, and which I am using to justify lumping them together, is pantheism.

Pantheism can be convincingly argued to have derived directly from the latitude thesis. My thinking is this: there is an inherent plurality of phenomena associated with living in a temperate climate. We are surrounded by fields, woods, rivers, rocks, streams, lakes, animals, plants, berries, fruit. Therefore, the people who live in these environments naturally adopt a perspective which accommodates this plurality; they seek to placate a multitude of forces and conditions in order to sustain their lives. Over time, these forces and phenomena become storied and, ultimately, personified as gods – the god of the harvest, of light, of the trees, of war, of the river, of the household, the moon, the hearth. These practices then gradually harden into a complex system of ritual and belief, a religion. Hence we shape our religions to fit our environment.

But what of religions from adverse climates? What effect does this have? Well, the obvious conclusion is that environmental adversity leads to monotheism. Along those lines of latitude where extreme conditions were the norm, life depended on a series of either/or scenarios, such as whether the harvest took or the locusts came or the war was successful. On one side was life, on the other death. The austerity and fragility of this existence naturally lent itself to the anthropomorphism of a single deity, a deity who sat in judgement over the entire imaginable universe dispensing death or life, blessing or punishment. Life was so hard that an afterlife became the only way to rationalise the adversity, suffering and death of your loved ones. Out of this type of environment, then, stem all the Abrahamic religions – which is an interesting proposition, since it means that Europe’s predominant religious system of the last thousand or so years is effectively a surrogate from a harsher, less forgiving world.

However, one can also introduce to this geographical model other variables. For example, historic social relevance is a determining factor which might account for the endurance of certain religions and the demise of others. The first principle here is that religions live or die by their relevance to the particular society to which they minister; adding time into the equation raises the notion that societies change and therefore that the relevance of this or that religion to a society will vary. This accounts for the obsolescence of the Viking pantheon, for example, which didn’t endure because it was fundamentally a martial religion, i.e. it was shaped by the necessity of ensuring the survival of a fledgling society threatened by other young, warlike societies. By contrast, the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, etc., all retain relevance because they have a message of compassion and moral guidance which concerns the self and which therefore remains relevant whatever the condition of society. 

Of course, it would be ludicrously easy to shoot this argument down with one or two well-chosen examples. I haven't, for example, considered Confucianism and Taoism because I don't know enough about them. Inuit religion, which hails from one of the most extreme latitudes on earth, is animist and therefore seems to contradict my thesis, as does African shamanism. The Ancient Egyptian religion, which developed within spitting distance of the Holy Land, boasted more gods than nearly all the other religions put together. And yet, for all its flaws (of which there are clearly many), I can't shake off the appeal held by this demarcation between the many gods of the green and diverse lands and the one god sitting in stern judgement among his deserts and white stone. Perhaps it's just the symmetry of the thing, I don't know.