A: The nature of the existence of God
God, you gave us insufficient evidence.
Bertrand Russell
The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle.
Steven Pinker
It does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
Carl Sagan (1934–96), cosmologist
1 | Lucretius believed the world is atoms and motion, but still we must worship, he said, we must worship the atoms and the motion of atoms.
God, he told me, is the progress from chaos to order to human responsibility.
John Cheever (1912–82), from the short story ‘Artemis, the Honest Well Digger’
I ask myself, if I were God, whether I would have arranged the world in such a way.
Albert Einstein
God might have arranged things differently. But he did not.
James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love
We can act as if there was a God; feel as if we were free; consider nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were immortal.
William James
2 | Out of belief in God came The Divine Comedy and the B Minor Mass. Out of belief in the tooth fairy comes the occasional sixpence. (Paraphrase of an observation made by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.)
But God may act in subtle ways that are hidden from physical science.
John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian
His everlasting power and deity have been visible ever since the world began, to the eye of reason, in the things that he has made.
St Paul
Our world is the first true essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance.
David Hume, philosopher
‘He is everywhere,’ replied Miss Potter with dignity.
‘But, my dear Maiden,’ exclaimed His Highness, planting himself firmly on one of the chairs, ‘what good is that to me?’
J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday
Illiterates understand about saints and that saints prove the existence of a benevolent God. The educated are subverted by logic.
The novelist William Golding (1911–93), in an interview
3 | The mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace said of God that he had ‘no need of that particular hypothesis’.
4 | It is easy to shoot holes in logical proofs of the existence of God, but most of us long ago gave up believing in that kind of God.
Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is ‘nothing’ out there; in making these assertions their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.
Karen Armstrong, writer on comparative religion
God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue God exists is to deny him.
Paul Tillich (1886–1965), theologian
What makes God comprehensible is that he cannot be comprehended.
Tertullian (c.160–c.225), Christian apologist
God: the arch-abstraction
Patrick White
I don’t know whether God exists or not … Some forms of atheism are arrogant and ignorant and should be rejected, but agnosticism – to admit that we don’t know and to search – is all right … When I look at what I call the gift of life, I feel a gratitude which is in tune with some religious ideas of God. However, the moment I even speak of it, I am embarrassed that I may do something wrong to God in talking about God.
Karl Popper, in an interview he gave in 1969, on the condition that it be kept secret until after his death
5 | We doubters worry that God cannot exist in any meaningful sense of the word ‘exist’, and then looking over our shoulders we happen to catch sight of scientists in the outside lane happily redefining for their own purposes what existence means.
6 | We cannot resolve the universe. Under scientific examination the universe becomes more and more abstract, whether examined close to or looked at from a distance. If not the universe, then why not God?
We do not know what the universe is made out of; or, rather, we know that it is made out of some kind of nothing. Why, then, would we expect God to be made out of something?
Science is good at subtle measurement, but these days the public world has little patience with subtle argument. Science is subtle, why should God not be subtler? God is not going to appear, no matter how fine the measurement.
7 | How many angels can fit on a pinhead?1 the man in the audience asked the Australian physicist. More if thin, the physicist replied, fewer if fat.
8 | In the mid-1980s the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow warned that string theory – because it threatened to undermine science by elevating faith – had become ‘a new version of medieval theology’.2
9 | We have swapped the mystery of God for the mystery of the laws of nature. Once, we were everywhere with God; but God has fled, leaving behind the Big Bang and a Higgs-type boson.
10 | Materialism reduces God to a ‘God of the gaps’, hiding in irreducible blood-clotting proteins or in the quantum wave equation, a God allowed to make only occasional outings into the physical world, a peek-a-boo God, a tinkering God restricted to the margins of the world, behind the scenes with an oilcan. Newton worried that the universe might collapse in on itself under gravity. He thought God must intervene to keep the stars apart. God looks on the material world, and sometimes He sighs and sometimes He laughs.
11 | To reduce God to, say, a figure only present at the creation of the universe requires of God that He bow down to the role science offers Him. But it is not only God who is backed into a corner by the scientific method; human beings are too. If humans did not obviously exist, it is likely science would deny the possibility of them. God can be denied more readily. God is a ghost in the machine, but then so are you.
12 | Stephen Hawking famously wrote in A Brief History of Time (1988) that if we ever found a complete physical theory ‘then we will know the mind of God’, which seems as good a way as any of saying that we will never know the mind of God. Perhaps one day we will know the mind of a fly. Perhaps.
13 | The philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) once said that the only significant events in the universe are the Big Bang and the Apocalypse. In a physical universe, in which all the significance is weighted to the beginning and the end, humans, who come somewhere in the middle, are skipped over.
14 | Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that if evolution was run twice there might well not be human beings, nor any God to see Himself reflected in humans. On the other hand, nor would there be any scientists to see themselves reflected in their methodology. As Rowan Williams has pointed out, perhaps God needs us as much as we need Him.
15 | There is something provincial about reductive scientific descriptions of the ineffable. They make the universe sound like some sprawling dormitory town, large and rather boring overall but with a few defined areas of interest: perhaps a museum here and a park there. They want us to enjoin in the mystery of the universe, but only on their terms, as if the mystery can only be a certain kind of mystery, whereas true mystery, whatever it is, vanishes unless it is unfettered.
16 | It has been suggested that God might be a being in another universe that compressed a particle of matter to such a high density that a new universe of space and matter was created out of the negative energy of the gravitational field. God is reduced to one of the lads, playing a prank in some other part of the multiverse. Other arguments of this sort include the speculation that God might have left a message encoded in our DNA, like the word BRIGHTON through a stick of rock, or perhaps the message is to be found in the cosmic background radiation, as a sophisticated kind of sky-writing.
17 | If we knew how to make a universe we would have shown that universes can be simulated. But that raises the question: is this a simulated universe that we are living in? If it is, then what we know about the universe is cast into doubt, including our knowledge that universes can be simulated. This is just the kind of nerdy speculation I enjoy, but I can’t help noticing that scientists who claim to despise philosophy and theology love this kind of speculation too.
B: God of the synapses
1 | Religion has been dismissed as genetic error, neural misfiring or cancerous meme.
2 | The reduction of religious experience to neurology is what William James called medical materialism.
3 | ‘Not enough,’ the fellow guest sitting next to me at dinner said when I told her about my breakdown and the occasional moments of bliss that it precipitated. ‘Jesus came to me once’, she said – ‘in the kitchen where I was peeling potatoes. I turned around and there he was. I was furious. It’s too little too late. Bugger off I said, and he disappeared. Afterwards I told myself he was just an odd firing pattern in my brain.’
But then, where else can anything be except as a firing pattern in the brain? The brain is the junction of all our sensory input, and the instigator of all our responses, and yet still it is not who we are.
First one then another [voice] presses forward to my shoulder to speak above the engine’s voice … [or they] come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, travelling through distances that can’t be measured by the scale of human miles … conversing and advising me on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance in ordinary life.
The American aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902–74), describing his experiences while making the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight in the ‘Spirit of St Louis’
4 | Sometimes the earth shakes and the ground undulates like a shaken rug. Sometimes when I see the moon rise above the horizon of the sea I feel the earth turn and I lose my balance. Even when time and space become unmoored, when we see visions, and events occur that are impossible, how quickly, afterwards, do the fissures in the space-time continuum close and we find our material footings once more.
Witnesses are only as convincing as their stories. We are well-heeled rationalists most of the time. When what is being described is not rational the story had better be good. Even when we are moved, awed or titillated we remain in doubt, most of us, most of the time. Art can be convincing. Music – surely the most immaterial of all the arts, mute to words, blind to images – seems to me the most convincing evidence (of what of course I cannot quite say), pointing as it does towards meaning, as science does, without the need to trouble purpose.
What does it matter that it is an abnormal tension, if the result, if the moment of sensation, remembered and analysed in a state of health, turns out to be harmony and beauty brought to their highest point of perfection, and gives a feeling, individual and undreamed of till then, of completeness, proportion, reconciliation, and an ecstatic and prayerful fusion in the highest synthesis of life?
Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, describing what it is like to experience an epileptic attack
A shower of phosphenes in transit across the visual field, their passage being succeeded by a negative scotoma.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks accounts for the visions of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), mystic and composer
Just as our primary wider-awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material, so it is logically conceivable that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them.
William James
C: Religion
Religiare, Latin: to bind together.
The poet invents the metaphor, and the Christians live it.
R.S. Thomas (1913–2000), poet
1 | Hal is an Old English word from which hale, health, whole and holy are derived. Sely is an early form of the word silly, and that once meant holy. By the 1500s the word had entirely lost its original meaning.
We are in the universe and the universe is in us. I don’t know any deeper spiritual feeling than those thoughts.
Neil de Grasse Tyson, astrophysicist
That curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses.
William James
I could swallow landscapes, and swill down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth to me with hoops of steel. But the world is so impassive, silent, secret.
W.N.P. Barbellion
2 | What we think is out there enables us to negotiate what actually is out there, which is a reality beyond terror and bliss, of which even a glimpse would be enough to destroy us. In the end, maybe it is not the pressing weight of the material world that threatens to crush us, but the sublime and annihilating power of the immaterial.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible.
Richard Dawkins
To him, one can do honour in a forest, a field – or merely by gazing up at the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, of Béranger! My credo is the credo of Rousseau! … I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later! Those things aren’t only absurd in themselves, Madame – they’re completely opposed to all physical laws. It goes to prove, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in squalid ignorance and have wanted nothing better than to drag the entire world down to their own level.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
3 | For the philosopher Spinoza (1632–77), God and nature are the same reality. God is not transcendent. The divine is in the world.
My belief is theistic not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza.
Kurt Gödel (1906–78), mathematician and philosopher
4 | Gödel, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Planck believed in the divine mind. Einstein spoke of the Old One.
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger … is as good as dead.
Albert Einstein
The religious impulse in its truest sense seems to me to be about that awareness of how extraordinary everything is. Everything.
Frederick Turner, historian
5 | The word olé, called out in bullfights after some dangerous move has been elegantly executed, is a corruption of ‘Allah’. The shout acknowledges God, glimpsed in the actions of an artist.
Religion, whatever it is, is man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say any total reaction upon life is a religion?
William James
6 | Which in this sense makes Richard Dawkins a religious. I can’t help but see him as a kind of Muscular Christian out of his time. He would have made a fine cardinal, and but for his outspokenness might have made Pope.
I told him I wanted to find eternal truths, to help understand why things are the way they are. Naïve and blustery, for sure …
The theoretical physicist Brian Greene, recalling his younger self
Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious propensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us today lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts.
William James