The GOD Delusion (14 page)

I
say all this just to demonstrate the formidable power of the brain's
simulation software. It is well capable of constructing 'visions' and
'visitations' of the utmost veridical power. To simulate a ghost or an
angel or a Virgin Mary would be child's play to software of this
sophistication. And the same thing works for hearing. When we hear a
sound, it is not faithfully transported up the auditory nerve and
relayed to the brain as if by a high-fidelity Bang and Olufsen. As with
vision, the brain constructs a sound model, based upon continuously
updated auditory nerve data. That is why we hear a trumpet blast as a
single note, rather than as the composite of pure-tone harmonics that
gives it its brassy snarl. A clarinet playing the same note sounds
'woody', and an oboe sounds 'reedy', because of different balances of
harmonics. If you carefully manipulate a sound synthesizer to bring in
the separate harmonics one by one, the brain hears them as a
combination of pure tones for a short while, until its simulation
software 'gets it', and from then on we experience only a single note
of pure trumpet or oboe or whatever it is. The vowels and consonants of
speech are constructed in the brain in the same kind of way, and so, at
another level, are higher-order phonemes and words.

Once,
as a child, I heard a ghost: a male voice murmuring, as if in
recitation or prayer. I could almost, but not quite, make out the
words, which seemed to have a serious, solemn timbre. I had been told
stories of priest holes in ancient houses, and I was a little
frightened. But I got out of bed and crept up on the source of the
sound. As I got closer, it grew louder, and then suddenly it 'flipped'
inside my head. I was now close enough to discern what it really was.
The wind, gusting through the keyhole, was creating sounds which the
simulation software in my brain had used to construct a model of male
speech, solemnly intoned. Had I been a more impressionable child, it is
possible that I would have 'heard' not just unintelligible speech but
particular words and even sentences. And had
I been both impressionable and religiously brought up, I wonder what
words the wind might have spoken.

On
another occasion, when I was about the same age, I saw a giant round
face gazing, with unspeakable malevolence, out through the window of an
otherwise ordinary house in a seaside village. In trepidation, I
approached until I was close enough to see what it really was: just a
vaguely face-like pattern created by the chance fall of the curtains.
The face itself, and its evil mien, had been constructed in my fearful
child's brain. On 11 September 2001, pious people thought they saw the
face of Satan in the smoke rising from the Twin Towers: a superstition
backed by a photograph which was published on the Internet and widely
circulated.

Constructing
models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep
it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or,
when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination. As Chapter 10 will show,
children who have 'imaginary friends' sometimes see them clearly,
exactly as if they were real. If we are gullible, we don't recognize
hallucination or lucid dreaming for what it is and we claim to have
seen or heard a ghost; or an angel; or God; or - especially if we
happen to be young, female and Catholic - the Virgin Mary. Such visions
and manifestations are certainly not good grounds for believing that
ghosts or angels, gods or virgins, are actually there.

On
the face of it mass visions, such as the report that seventy thousand
pilgrims at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 saw the sun 'tear itself from
the heavens and come crashing down upon the multitude',
⁴⁹
are harder to write off. It is not easy to explain how seventy thousand
people could share the same hallucination. But it is even harder to
accept that it really happened without the rest of the world, outside
Fatima, seeing it too - and not just seeing it, but feeling it as the
catastrophic destruction of the solar system, including acceleration
forces sufficient to hurl everybody into space. David Hume's pithy test
for a miracle comes irresistibly to mind: 'No testimony is sufficient
to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that
its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it
endeavours to establish.'

It
may seem improbable that seventy thousand people could simultaneously
be deluded, or could simultaneously collude in a mass
lie. Or that history is mistaken in recording that seventy thousand
people claimed to see the sun dance. Or that they all simultaneously
saw a mirage (they had been persuaded to stare at the sun, which can't
have done much for their eyesight). But any of those apparent
improbabilities is far more probable than the alternative: that the
Earth was suddenly yanked sideways in its orbit, and the solar system
destroyed, with nobody outside Fatima noticing. I mean, Portugal is not
that isolated.*

*
Although admittedly my wife's parents once stayed in a Paris hotel
called the
Hotel de I'Univers et du Portugal.

That
is really all that needs to be said about personal 'experiences' of
gods or other religious phenomena. If you've had such an experience,
you may well find yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don't
expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have
the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.

THE
ARGUMENT FROM SCRIPTURE

There
are still some people who are persuaded by scriptural evidence to
believe in God. A common argument, attributed among others to C. S.
Lewis (who should have known better), states that, since Jesus claimed
to be the Son of God, he must have been either right or else insane or
a liar: 'Mad, Bad or God'. Or, with artless alliteration, 'Lunatic,
Liar or Lord'. The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of
divine status is minimal. But even if that evidence were good, the
trilemma on offer would be ludicrously inadequate. A fourth
possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was
honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are. In any case, as I said, there
is no good historical evidence that he ever thought he was divine.

The
fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to
asking questions like: 'Who wrote it, and when?' 'How did they know
what to write?' 'Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in our
time, understand them to be saying?' 'Were they unbiased observers, or
did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?' Ever since the
nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming
case that the gospels are not reliable accounts
of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written
long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul,
which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus' life. All were
then copied and recopied, through many different 'Chinese Whispers
generations' (see Chapter 5) by fallible scribes who, in any case, had
their own religious agendas.

A
good example of the colouring by religious agendas is the whole
heart-warming legend of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod's
massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were written, many years
after Jesus' death, nobody knew where he was born. But an Old Testament
prophecy (Micah 5: 2) had led Jews to expect that the long-awaited
Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In the light of this prophecy,
John's gospel specifically remarks that his followers were surprised
that he was
not
born in Bethlehem: 'Others said,
This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee?
Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David,
and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?'

Matthew
and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus
must
have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there
by different routes. Matthew has Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem all
along, moving to Nazareth only long after the birth of Jesus, on their
return from Egypt where they fled from King Herod and the massacre of
the innocents. Luke, by contrast, acknowledges that Mary and Joseph
lived in Nazareth before Jesus was born. So how to get them to
Bethlehem at the crucial moment, in order to fulfil the prophecy? Luke
says that, in the time when Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of Syria,
Caesar Augustus decreed a census for taxation purposes, and everybody
had to go 'to his own city'. Joseph was 'of the house and lineage of
David' and therefore he had to go to 'the city of David, which is
called Bethlehem'. That must have seemed like a good solution. Except
that historically it is complete nonsense, as A. N. Wilson in
Jesus
and Robin Lane Fox in
The Unauthorized Version
(among
others) have pointed out. David, if he existed, lived nearly a thousand
years before Mary and Joseph. Why on earth would the Romans have
required Joseph to go to the city where a remote ancestor had lived a
millennium earlier? It is as though I were required to specify, say,
Ashby-de-la-Zouch
as my home town on a census form, if it happened that I could trace my
ancestry back to the Seigneur de Dakeyne, who came over with William
the Conqueror and settled there.

Moreover,
Luke screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that
historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a
census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by
Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late:
in ad 6, long after Herod's death. Lane Fox concludes that 'Luke's
story is historically impossible and internally incoherent', but he
sympathizes with Luke's plight and his desire to fulfil the prophecy of
Micah.

In
the December 2004 issue of
Free Inquiry,
Tom
Flynn, the Editor of that excellent magazine, assembled a collection of
articles documenting the contradictions and gaping holes in the
well-loved Christmas story. Flynn himself lists the many contradictions
between Matthew and Luke, the only two evangelists who treat the birth
of Jesus at all.
⁵⁰
Robert Gillooly shows how all
the essential features of the Jesus legend, including the star in the
east, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the
miracles, the execution, the resurrection and the ascension are
borrowed - every last one of them - from other religions already in
existence in the Mediterranean and Near East region. Flynn suggests
that Matthew's desire to fulfil messianic prophecies (descent from
David, birth in Bethlehem) for the benefit of Jewish readers came into
headlong collision with Luke's desire to adapt Christianity for the
Gentiles, and hence to press the familiar hot buttons of pagan
Hellenistic religions (virgin birth, worship by kings, etc.). The
resulting contradictions are glaring, but consistently overlooked by
the faithful.

Sophisticated
Christians do not need George Gershwin to convince them that 'The
things that you're li'ble / To read in the Bible / It ain't necessarily
so'. But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there who think
it absolutely is necessarily so - who take the Bible very seriously
indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as
evidence supporting their religious beliefs. Do these people never open
the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice
those glaring contradictions?

Shouldn't
a literalist worry about the fact that Matthew traces Joseph's descent
from King David via twenty-eight intermediate generations, while Luke
has forty-one generations? Worse, there is almost no overlap in the
names on the two lists! In any case, if Jesus really was born of a
virgin, Joseph's ancestry is irrelevant and cannot be used to fulfil,
on Jesus' behalf, the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah should be
descended from David.

The
American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a book whose subtitle is
The
Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why,
unfolds
the huge uncertainty befogging the New Testament texts. * In the
introduction to the book, Professor Ehrman movingly charts his personal
educational journey from Bible-believing fundamentalist to thoughtful
sceptic, a journey driven by his dawning realization of the massive
fallibility of the scriptures. Significantly, as he moved up the
hierarchy of American universities, from rock bottom at the 'Moody
Bible Institute', through Wheaton College (a little bit higher on the
scale, but still the alma mater of Billy Graham) to Princeton in the
world-beating class at the top, he was at every step warned that he
would have trouble maintaining his fundamentalist Christianity in the
face of dangerous progressivism. So it proved; and we, his readers, are
the beneficiaries. Other refreshingly iconoclastic books of biblical
criticism are Robin Lane Fox's
The Unauthorized Version,
already
mentioned, and Jacques Berlinerblau's
The Secular Bible: Why
Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously.

* I
give the subtitle because that is all I am confident of. The main title
of my copy of the book, published by Continuum of London, is
Whose
Word Is It?
I can find nothing in this edition to say
whether it is the same book as the American publication by Harper San
Francisco, which I haven't seen, whose main title is
Misquoting
Jesus.
I presume they are the same book, but why do
publishers do this kind of thing?

The
four gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or
less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen including
the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew and Mary
Magdalen.
⁵¹
It is these additional gospels that
Thomas Jefferson was referring to in his letter to his nephew: