The GOD Delusion (13 page)

1. 
The creation of the world is the most marvellous achievement imaginable.

2. 
The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic
quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.

3. 
The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more
impressive the achievement.

4. 
The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.

5. 
Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent
creator we can conceive a greater being - namely, one who created
everything while not existing.

6. 
An existing God therefore would not be a being greater than which a
greater cannot be conceived because an even more formidable and
incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.

Ergo:

7. 
God does not exist.

Needless
to say, Gasking didn't really prove that God does not exist. By the
same token, Anselm didn't prove that he does. The only difference is,
Gasking was being funny on purpose. As he realized, the existence or
non-existence of God is too big a question to be decided by
'dialectical prestidigitation'. And I don't think the slippery use of
existence as an indicator of perfection is the worst of the argument's
problems. I've forgotten the details, but I once piqued a gathering of
theologians and philosophers by adapting the ontological argument to
prove that pigs can fly. They felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to
prove that I was wrong.

The
ontological argument, like all
a priori
arguments
for the existence of God, reminds me of the old man in Aldous Huxley's
Point
Counter Point
who discovered a mathematical proof of the
existence of God:

You
know the formula,
m
over nought equals infinity,
m
being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation
to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought. In which case
you have
m
equals infinity times nought. That is
to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.
Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite
power out of nothing? Doesn't it?

Or
there is the notorious eighteenth-century debate on the existence of
God, staged by Catherine the Great between Euler, the Swiss
mathematician, and Diderot, the great encyclopedist of the
Enlightenment. The pious Euler advanced upon the atheistic Diderot and,
in tones of the utmost conviction, delivered his challenge: 'Monsieur,
(a
+ b")/n
=
x,
therefore God exists.
Reply!' Diderot was cowed into withdrawal, and one version of the story
has him withdrawing all the way back to France.

Euler
was employing what might be called the Argument from Blinding with
Science (in this case mathematics). David Mills, in
Atheist
Universe,
transcribes a radio interview of himself by a
religious spokesman, who invoked the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy
in a weirdly ineffectual attempt to blind with science: 'Since we're
all composed of matter and energy, doesn't that scientific
principle lend credibility to a belief in eternal life?' Mills replied
more patiently and politely than I would have, for what the interviewer
was saying, translated into English, was no more than: 'When we die,
none of the atoms of our body (and none of the energy) are lost.
Therefore we are immortal.'

Even
I, with my long experience, have never encountered wishful thinking as
silly as that. I have, however, met many of the wonderful 'proofs'
collected at
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/
GodProof.htm, a richly comic numbered list of 'Over Three Hundred
Proofs of God's Existence'. Here's a hilarious half-dozen, beginning
with Proof Number 36.

36. 
Argument from Incomplete Devastation:
A plane
crashed killing 143 passengers and crew. But one child survived with
only third-degree burns. Therefore God exists.

37. 
Argument from Possible Worlds:
If things had been
different, then things would be different. That would be bad. Therefore
God exists.

38. 
Argument from Sheer Will:
I do believe in God! I do
believe in God! I do I do I do. I do believe in God! Therefore God
exists.

39. 
Argument from Non-belief:
The majority of the
world's population are non-believers in Christianity. This is just what
Satan intended. Therefore God exists.

40. 
Argument from Post-Death Experience:
Person X died
an atheist. He now realizes his mistake. Therefore God exists.

41. 
Argument from Emotional Blackmail:
God loves you.
How could you be so heartless as not to believe in him? Therefore God
exists.

Another
character in the Aldous Huxley novel just mentioned proved the
existence of God by playing Beethoven's string quartet no. 15 in A
minor
{'heiliger Dankgesang')
on a gramophone.
Unconvincing as that sounds, it does represent a popular strand of
argument. I have given up counting the number of times I receive the
more or less truculent challenge: 'How do you account for Shakespeare,
then?' (Substitute Schubert, Michelangelo, etc. to taste.) The argument
will be so familiar, I needn't document it further. But the logic
behind it is never spelled out, and the more you think about it the
more vacuous you realize it to be. Obviously Beethoven's late quartets
are sublime. So are Shakespeare's sonnets. They are sublime if God is
there and they are sublime if he isn't. They do not prove the existence
of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and of Shakespeare. A
great conductor is credited with saying: 'If you have Mozart to listen
to, why would you need God?'

I
once was the guest of the week on a British radio show called
Desert
Island Discs.
You have to choose the eight records you would
take with you if marooned on a desert island. Among my choices was
'Mache
dich mein Herze rein'
from Bach's
St Matthew
Passion.
The interviewer was unable to understand how I
could choose religious music without being religious. You might as well
say, how can you enjoy
Wuthering Heights
when you
know perfectly well that Cathy and Heathcliff never really existed?

But
there is an additional point that I might have made, and which needs to
be made whenever religion is given credit for, say, the Sistine Chapel
or Raphael's
Annunciation.
Even great artists have
to earn a living, and they will take commissions where they are to be
had. I have no reason to doubt that Raphael and Michelangelo were
Christians - it was pretty much the only option in their time - but the
fact is almost incidental. Its enormous wealth had made the Church the
dominant patron of the arts. If history had worked out differently, and
Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant
Museum of Science, mightn't he have produced something at least as
inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear
Beethoven's
Mesozoic Symphony,
or Mozart's opera
The
Expanding Universe.

And
what a shame that we are deprived of Haydn's
Evolution
Oratorio -
but that does not stop us from enjoying his
Creation.
To approach the argument from the other side, what if, as my
wife chillingly suggests to me, Shakespeare had been obliged to work to
commissions from the Church? We'd surely have lost
Hamlet,
King Lear
and
Macbeth.
And what would
we have gained in return? Such stuff as dreams are made on? Dream on.

If
there is a logical argument linking the existence of great art to the
existence of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents. It is simply
assumed to be self-evident, which it most certainly is not. Maybe it is
to be seen as yet another version of the argument from design:
Schubert's musical brain is a wonder of improbability, even more so
than the vertebrate's eye. Or, more ignobly, perhaps it's a sort of
jealousy of genius. How dare another human being make such beautiful
music/poetry/art, when I can't? It must be God that did it.

One
of the cleverer and more mature of my undergraduate contemporaries, who
was deeply religious, went camping in the Scottish isles. In the middle
of the night he and his girlfriend were woken in their tent by the
voice of the devil - Satan himself; there could be no possible doubt:
the voice was in every sense diabolical. My friend would never forget
this horrifying experience, and it was one of the factors that later
drove him to be ordained. My youthful self was impressed by his story,
and I recounted it to a gathering of zoologists relaxing in the Rose
and Crown Inn, Oxford. Two of them happened to be experienced
ornithologists, and they roared with laughter. 'Manx Shearwater!' they
shouted in delighted chorus. One of them added that the diabolical
shrieks and cackles of this species have earned it, in various parts of
the world and various languages, the local nickname 'Devil Bird'.

Many
people believe in God because they believe they have seen a
vision of him - or of an angel or a virgin in blue - with their own
eyes. Or he speaks to them inside their heads. This argument from
personal experience is the one that is most convincing to those who
claim to have had one. But it is the least convincing to anyone else,
and anyone knowledgeable about psychology.

You
say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have
experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you.
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of
Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George
W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't
vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass
destruction). Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie
Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that
they can broadcast their thoughts into other people's heads. We humour
them but don't take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly
because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different
only in that the people who claim them are numerous. Sam Harris was not
being overly cynical when he wrote, in
The End of Faith:

We
have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no
rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call
them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad',
'psychotic' or 'delusional' . . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers.
And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered
normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can
hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to
believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in
Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are
not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.

I
shall return to the subject of hallucinations in Chapter 10.

The
human brain runs first-class simulation software. Our eyes don't
present to our brains a faithful photograph of what is out there, or an
accurate movie of what is going on through time. Our brains construct a
continuously updated model: updated by coded pulses
chattering along the optic nerve, but constructed nevertheless. Optical
illusions are vivid reminders of this.
⁴⁷
A major
class of illusions, of which the Necker Cube is an example, arise
because the sense data that the brain receives are compatible with two
alternative models of reality. The brain, having no basis for choosing
between them, alternates, and we experience a series of flips from one
internal model to the other. The picture we are looking at appears,
almost literally, to flip over and become something else.

The
simulation software in the brain is especially adept at constructing
faces and voices. I have on my windowsill a plastic mask of Einstein.
When seen from the front, it looks like a solid face, not surprisingly.
What is surprising is that, when seen from behind - the hollow side -
it also looks like a solid face, and our perception of it is very odd
indeed. As the viewer moves around, the face seems to follow - and not
in the weak, unconvincing sense that the Mona Lisa's eyes are said to
follow you. The hollow mask really
really
looks as
though it is moving. People who haven't previously seen the illusion
gasp with amazement. Even stranger, if the mask is mounted on a slowly
rotating turntable, it appears to turn in the correct direction when
you are looking at the solid side, but in the
opposite
direction
when the hollow side comes into view. The result is that, when you
watch the transition from one side to the other, the coming side
appears to 'eat' the going side. It is a stunning illusion, well worth
going to some trouble to see. Sometimes you can get surprisingly close
to the hollow face and still not see that it is 'really' hollow. When
you do see it, again there is a sudden flip, which may be reversible.

Why
does it happen? There is no trick in the construction of the mask. Any
hollow mask will do it. The trickery is all in the brain of the
beholder. The internal simulating software receives data indicating the
presence of a face, perhaps nothing more than a pair of eyes, a nose
and a mouth in approximately the right places. Having received these
sketchy clues, the brain does the rest. The face simulation software
kicks into action and it constructs a fully solid model of a face, even
though the reality presented to the eyes is a hollow mask. The illusion
of rotation in the wrong direction comes about because (it's quite
hard, but if you think it through carefully you will confirm it)
reverse rotation is the only way to make
sense of the optical data when a hollow mask rotates while being
perceived to be a solid mask.
⁴⁸
It is like the
illusion of a rotating radar dish that you sometimes see at airports.
Until the brain flips to the correct model of the radar dish, an
incorrect model is seen rotating in the wrong direction but in a
weirdly cockeyed way.