Event
Date
by Mark O’Connor
Presented at From Stars to Brains MCH conference in honor of Paul Davies, Canberra, 20-21 June 2006.
Earlier papers looked at the bottom-up paths by which matter might be organized to calculate, think, perceive, understand. Now let’s look at a top-down path. Taking the human brain as given, I want to look at what the great writers of literature tell us, either by their observation of the universe or in some cases by tuning their minds like a radio antenna in hope to pick up the mind of the universe.
Long, long before written literature, Homer described the blessed gods that are forever, the makaroi theoi athanatoi –the deathless ones, whom he contrasted to mortal men whose intelligence was always mocked by its brief duration in the body. The blessed gods were fickle, indifferent to human pain, as was the universe; yet the world was full of rich possibilities; and humans if they had wisdom could live well, for a time.
2000 years later a still higher peak emerged in European literature. Shakespeare’s King Lear, carefully set in a bygone pagan era to avoid accusations of blasphemy, depicted an even bleaker world. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/ They kill us for their sport.” The universe seems amoral, purposeless. The impulse to care about what’s right comes from within human beings, inadequately yet unstoppable. It is not dependent on (and does not get) any backing from the universe.
Mind you, Shakespeare delivers a different universe in each of his major plays.
Other writers sense something quite different in the universe.
Show slide:
Do other beings inhabit our biosphere
Whose life is one and whole? I cannot tell.
I only know at moments everywhere
I sense their presences in earth and air...
A D Hope, from ‘The Wild Bees’
Poets have traditionally been expected to confirm that the universe has been designed—for humans, and by God (or gods)— and to clinch that claim in ringing words. Many have been prepared to do just that. The great Roman poet Vergil (70-19BC) described how mens agitat molem, that is, how spirit quickens the mass of the world:
Show slide:
Spiritus intus alit totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.-- VIRGIL.
Heaven and earth, the watered plains, the moon's shining globe, the sun and stars are all strengthened by Spirit working within them, and mind stirs this great mass, infused through all its limbs and mixed in with its body. [Aeneid vi.724-727 (30-19BC)]
Iupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris.--LUCAN.
All in all and all in every part.--COWLEY.
Lives through all life, extends through all extent.
Spreads undivided, operates unspent.-- POPE.
This kind of optimistic pantheism or deism reached its height, or its reduction ad absurdum, in Pope’s famous lines:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
An Essay on Man (1735)
Robert Louis Stevenson perhaps did optimism better:
The world is so full of a number of things
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Yes, the world is wonderful and we are so wonderfully adapted to it that we can be misled into thinking it is our friend. Yet Pope forgot the lesson of King Lear, that the world is indifferent to us as individuals.
Let me go back a little. Medieval European poets were usually even more certain that there was a good God at the helm, being convinced Christians (though no one ever quite pinned Geoffrey Chaucer down on anything). After the Reformation and Counter-Reformation such certainties began to evaporate. Uncertainty as to which was the true Christian religion opened the door to uncertainty if any religion was true; and by the early C19th Wordsworth’s pantheism was only about as definite as Virgil’s, which it echoes:
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And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;]]
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
—Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
The problem with such intimations is that is hard to know how much is authentic bardic illumination and how much is intimations of immortality based on indoctrination in early childhood. As everyone knows, or ought to know, the human impulse towards religion involves an appetite for certainty —“Man’s need for certainty is a disease beyond all cure”, as A D Hope, our premier poet of cosmology, wrote—and religion produces around the world a vast range of often-incompatible certainties. Might Wordsworth’s perception of a spirit in nature be no more than that?
Not long afterwards one Charles Darwin, who was a little more inclined than Wordsworth to notice exactly what the spiders were doing to the butterflies, wrote:
“What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of Nature!”
Darwin, by Adrian Desmond & James Moore, p. 449.
In passing I should note that there is now a tendency not to see evolution as red in tooth and claw but as a co-operative process. The pig we slaughter has evolved to be eaten; the sardine that the tuna plucks from the shoal may have been an inferior one, whose removal helps to build a better adapted line of sardines. The TB bacilli that kill your spouse are helping to select for a more disease-resistant human. True, perhaps. But these are Olympian views, armchair views. If you were the sardine in the tuna’s teeth or the butterfly in the web you might see it differently. Much as I personally value the beautiful balance of nature, I suspect I would feel differently about it if I were lower on the food chain. A very large number of earth’s critters do seem to live by spoiling some other critter’s day.
The case for skepticism about the universe having a purpose had been marshaled in the C16th by Montaigne (and Shakespeare’s skeptical Hamlet). In the C18th it was marshaled by Voltaire who, through his comical character Pangloss in Candide, ridiculed the notion that the world we humans experience could possibly be the work of an infinitely good, infinitely powerful and infinitely loving God.
'It is demonstrated,' [Pangloss] said, 'that things cannot be otherwise: for, since everything was made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose. Note that noses were made to wear spectacles; we therefore have spectacles. Legs were clearly devised to wear breeches, and we have breeches. Stones were created to be hewn and made into castles; [the Baron Thunder-Ten-Tronkh] therefore has a very beautiful castle…'
And the universe was made to bear intelligent life? Voltaire might have sneered at that too.
Yet parts of the world did seem well designed for our good; and our bodies seemed clear proof of intelligent and functional (if partly bungled) design. So why was the world full of loathsome diseases and lamentable accidents? why did people’s minds die the living death of senility, like King Lear, while their bodies still cluttered the Earth? and why were some persons born with shocking birth-defects —“Did the hand then of the Potter shake?” Doubts grew. Tennyson’s reading, not of Darwin but of those proto cosmologists the early C19th geologists, left him confused. He wondered at so many species brought into existence through so many ages, and then destroyed, leaving only fossils. Long before Darwin published his theories, Tennyson saw his famous vision of Nature “red in tooth and claw”:
Show slide:
"I falter where I firmly trod;
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the world's great altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God:
"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope."
Tennyson: "In Memoriam."
In fact most of the expressions of agnostic melancholy in great Victorian poets were not responses to Darwin but to those early pioneers of cosmology. The poets and poems (like Arnold’s “Dover Beach”) became famous later, after Darwin published, but their positions were reached earlier.
But the conclusive argument against any sort of intelligent design, at least by a creator who was both all-good and all-powerful, was mounted by a poet who specialized in this topic. Edward Fitzgerald, used as his cover a C12th Islamic (or ex-Islamic) poet, the great mathematician and scientist called Omar Khayyam, whom he translated into matchless English verse. Khayyam had seen that the all-powerful all-loving God of Islam (and of Christianity) was impossible to square with common human experience; yet he also saw that there had to be some design in the bodies of humans, animals and plants. Hence, like such later scientists as Paul Davies, he saw a creative intelligence in the universe, but one that worked in a distant and circumscribed way, bringing no answer to human questions, no balm for human hearts.
[Quote Fitzgerald]
Show slide:
Omar Khayyam’s heartless universe:
(Edward Fitzgerald’s translation, 5th edition)
Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean'd, the Secret of my Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd--"While you live,
"Drink!--for, once dead, you never shall return."
What! out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the yoke
Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain
Of Everlasting Penalties, if broke!
Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s forgiveness give—and take.
(1st edition, Quatrain no. 58)
---
Khayyam to the fundamentalists
And do you think that unto such as you
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew
God gave a secret, and denied it me—
Well, well, what matters it? Believe that too.
(Richard Le Gallienne’s translation)
But for those whose early indoctrination had focused them not on “God-lite” but on a full-strength omnipotent Christian deity, Khayyam’s position was impossible. For them, the argument for intelligent design of living structures was a colossus that stood braced to grapple with that other colossus, the argument that a benign omnipotent deity could not be the author of our world. It was clear that one of these mighty arguments concealed a fatal flaw: that one of these mighty wrestlers must fling the other to the ground.
But which? Then in 1859, the same year that Fitzgerald published the Rubaiyat, Charles Darwin published a credible account of how you could have the appearance of intelligent design, but not the reality, in a biological world that depended instead on predation, parasitism, and prolific birth. The writing was on the wall.
It is ironic that today some conservative Christians are trying to revive the argument for “intelligent design”. It seems they have forgotten that it was precisely the impossibility of believing that the world we observe was designed by omnipotent benevolence that undermined the faith of the greatest intellectuals of C19th Britain. But then most of those involved in this folly are from the USA, a country that was distracted from these issues by its own Civil War, and never quite caught up with the Darwinian revolution. Indeed the Civil War pushed people back into pietism. Oddly, the US entered the C19th intellectually more radical in religion than the rest of the English-speaking world, thanks to its founding fathers who were mainly C18th deists, but exited it sadly behind.
After Darwin, poets of strong religious conviction might ignore these changes in thought, and continue to insist that “the word is charged with the glory of God” (Hopkins) or that invisible mystical forces were everywhere (Francis Thompson, passim). Yet even many convinced Christians conceded that while God might have tasks for the human heart, he was effectively absent from the wider universe. Thus the Anglican W H Auden began his reflection on the inhospitability of the universe with:
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That for all they care, I can go to hell.
(“The more loving one”)
More religious poets, including James McAuley and Les Murray, have resisted this view of cosmic indifference; but most accept it, even if much of the reading public, especially in the USA is still hungry for the old soft soap about poets being people whose super-sensitivity lets them perceive (and announce to the rest of us) the spiritual world inside the material.
Others are interested in ideas closer to this conference’s notion of “the emergent”. Here is a poem of mine in which the astronaut, as representative of humanity, emerges almost like a chrysalis from this old worn earth that Homer knew, leaves it frozen in winter, and joins the children of the sun:
Show slide:
Astronaut Emergent
She walked in silence
enamoured of touch, on
the thin film of life that encrusts
the hot planet of iron.
On garrulous buoys aloft
the nervous system of the horde
flickered from pole to cloudy pole.
To leave this surface we love, join
the gnat-choirs, bound
for Lagrangian space . . .
Seeing Ophelia's face in the freezing stream
swept with euglena, ranunculus, starwort,
she walks, face iced free of time and terror, her
shod foot crunching
the scaly shale bric-a-brac matrix
of petrified dragons and many-toothed birds
(what my sister is now, that shall I be)
on this slag top of the fiery furnace.
Where again to meet
what we understand so little?
Aloft and smiling, she touched a key
to hear the voice of that deep planet
call the children of the sun.
--Mark O’Connor from “Embryo Voyage”
Despite spiritual perceptions like Francis Thompson’s, few poets today assert simple doctrinal or pantheistic views. So we may feel surprised, even slightly wrong-footed, when Paul Davies and other eminent cosmologists start suggesting that our universe may, after all, have been set up to be friendly to life. Or at least that the fundamental constants in its equations might have been set at values likely to produce stable galaxies and planets.
I personally find the Davies’s line of argument doubly surprising. Firstly, because we don’t seem to be finding much evidence that the universe, or at least our neigbouring galaxy is exactly swarming with life. Can we really be the first radio-capable civilization to evolve in our region?
Secondly, Davies’s view is surprising because the inhospitality of most of the universe (or perhaps it would be safer to speak mainly of our solar system) to life has long been taken to be a major objection to seeing a ‘God’ or even a benign principle behind the universe.
Of course the hints of meaningful design that Paul Davies points out are not offered as evidence for a benign personal God like that of Christianity. They are merely life-friendly. (I presume Davies recognizes that “life-friendly” includes friendly to the hookworm, the leprosy bacillus, and the tarantula.)
And of course astrophysics is an unusually speculative science. It is an area where most equations lack an “equals” sign, being often valid only to within a factor of 2, or even a factor of 10. It is also an area where controlled experiment is rarely possible. As well, astro-physics depends on speculations based on sub-atomic physics, an area in which observation is difficult or often impossible, and where speculations (not to mention speculative particles) proliferate. Our current theories about quarks, positrons, leptons etc. are the reverse of elegant or simplifying. Rarely, at least since the era of Ptolemaic epic-cycles, have scientists been forced to build such unsupported spars of theory so far out in into unproven . . . space.
As well, all the evidence is not in, and the experts are not quite agreed. For instance, in a 1999 ABC Radio National science show program on this issue [From http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s19541.htm The Golden Chain" Part 5 of 5"Broadcast Saturday 30/01/99],
Lawrence Cram, then Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sydney remarked about the Big Bang theory that, while it deserved its current pre-eminence, he retained an open mind on it, adding:
My own feeling is that it's more probable than not that sometime in the future astronomers will construct a coherent picture of the evolution of the universe that would surprise us with the amount that it differs from the picture that we have at the present time.
It would be unkind to dwell on one of Paul Davies’s less plausible calculations, when he went on record as working out how many 'Adelaides' we could and or should have in a string of across the Top End, to soak up into their reticulation the rivers going to 'waste' in the NT. The cosmologist’s slide-rule can indeed be a bit of a fool’s instrument when applied to the biology of Earth. It may work better on the remoter cosmos; but perhaps there too it suffers a lack of correction from common experience.
I am not yet sure, then, how certain we can be that the physical constants of our universe are (a) arbitrary (in the sense that they might equally well have been “set” at quite different values) and (b) selectively tuned to favor the emergence of (intelligent?) life. Instead, I would feel safer in arguing from a more general sense I have that both the biological world we know on earth, and also the larger universe outside, look as if they were designed to be “interesting”.
As I put it, in 1999 on the ABC Radio National Program The Words To Say It:
“The more one looks at science the more interesting and surprising the world turns out to be. And it didn't have to be that way. The universe could have been vast but simple. There might have been just four basic laws of nature and two fundamental particles. Instead, the story keeps on getting more subtle and complicated. The Science Show is never going to run out of surprises to offer us.”
But perhaps that's something most poets have always known, that we live, if not quite in an fractal universe, at least in damned interesting one.
Thus I find myself in agreement with Paul Davies, though with a difference. Where he, looking mainly at cosmology, asks, why is the universe so stable (and therefore potentially hospitable to life)? I, looking mainly at biology, ask, Why is it so consistently surprising? Of course it may be that we are both deluded. Future researchers may find some blindingly obvious reason why things must be as they are. But there is at least some reason for our suspecting a set up, a design. This will not, I think, prove to be the work of an infinitely or perhaps even a predominantly benign force (it might have to be one that’s very fond of predation and parasitism, for instance). But it just might be a force that likes things to be interesting.
Here is a poem in which, 33 years ago, I summed up these thoughts in a vision of biological creation:
THE BEGINNING
God himself
having that day planted a garden
walked through it at evening and knew
that Eden was not nearly complex enough.
And he said:
'Let species swarm like solutes in a colloid.
Let there be ten thousand species of plankton
and to eat them a thousand zooplankton.
Let there be ten phyla of siphoning animals,
one phylum of finned vertebrates, from
white-tipped reef shark to long-beaked coralfish,
and to each his proper niche,
and - no Raphael, I'm not quite finished yet -
you can add seals and sea-turtles & cone-shells & penguins
(if they care) and all the good seabirds your team can devise -
oh yes, and I nearly forgot, I want a special place
for the crabs! And now for parasites to keep
the whole system in balance, let . . .'
'In conclusion, I want,' he said
'ten thousand mixed chains of predation -
none of your simple rabbit and coyote stuff!
This ocean shall have many mouths, many palates. I want,
say, a hundred ways of death, and three thousand of regeneration -
all in technicolor naturally. And oh yes, I nearly forgot,
we can use Eden again for the small coral cay in the center.
'So now Raphael, if you please,
just draw out and marshall these species,
and we'll plant them all out in a twelve-hectare patch.'
For five and a half days God labored
and on the seventh he donned mask and snorkel
and a pair of bright yellow flippers.
And, later, the host all peered wistfully down
through the high safety fence around Heaven
and saw God with his favorites finning slowly over the coral
in the eternal shape of a grey nurse shark,
and they saw that it was very good indeed.
- -
However I’m sure you didn’t invite a poet here to give you his best guess as to what scientists will eventually conclude.
What I can more usefully offer, I hope, from my background in literature, is an insight into the relationship between religion, science, and literature. Is there a core area where all three claim authority? And if so, whose authority takes precedence?
The issue of religion is relevant because, as I think we all know, some of Paul Davies’s writing raises quasi-religious issues. Or promises to advance science to that point where it might begin to answer some of those ultimate questions that were once the preserve of religion: questions about how and why the universe got here.
This religious implication of or edge to Davies’s science is I think of special interest to the political Left, and for a reason that’s worth stating.
The Left is interested in altruism. Now it has long been felt, and not just by religious conservatives, that our natural human instincts towards altruism are a good deal too patchy, and often too much focused on our near and dear (as biology might require, but philosophers deplore). Altruism would be on a far stronger basis if there were some sort of objective moral principle at work in the universe—ideally a benign creator, one who implies, endorses, designs, and sanctions moral behavior. The sinner would then have multiple reasons to repent; and the upright would feel, at times, less like charlies. In short, leftwing orientation, which is often the residue of a strongly moral upbringing, could proceed more confidently in a universe with a moral purpose. One where we are meant to be, and meant to be the sort of creatures we . . . errr . . . are, or at least could be.
But how to reconcile educated science-based thinking with moral imperatives? Why for instance do we care so much more about our own children (like the left-liberal character in the West Wing who said, half seriously, that he would carpet-bomb any nation that threatened his kids) yet refuse to rescue distant peoples, or even on-shore refugees? Because that’s the way humans are; we care most about those closest to us. No point in arguing about it. The politicians, observing where and how much the voters care, have got it right.
Yet many people, especially in the political Left, do want to argue about it; and it’s a problem for them, that being non religious they can’t argue that the universe shares or endorses their concerns. Their moral argument tends to come down to: “What I’m saying is right, because that’s the way humans feel about it—at least this human does, even if he or she is in a minority.” Not very satisfactory as an argument, is it? How much easier it would be if they could let back into their universe a little hint of a moral creator—even if it’s only a hint that the universe seems to have been designed to favor the development of life, and perhaps therefore, intelligent life, and perhaps therefore moral life. That would be only the tiniest wink-and-a-nod from the universe; but it might help make moral arguments seem less solipsistic.
So I understand why people are drawn to Paul Davies’s not quite random universe, and why his writings have won prizes from a religious foundation. But I do sound a warning note. Humans care about morality; I care about morality. Perhaps we don’t care enough, or consistently enough, but we do care; and probably our species would not have survived if we didn’t. But there is buggar-all evidence that the universe cares. Ask the tsunami, or the cholera bacillus. Or the forces of evolution that made the female pelvis narrow enough to run away from predators but not so narrow that more than about one attempt in 50 to give birth would cause the mother to die in agony. (That’s about a one in ten chance of dying in childbirth per woman per lifetime—which, you might be interested to know, is what it’s recently reverted to in much of PNG, as services vanish.)
It was human doctors who cared enough to change that situation, not nature, not the universe, not some relenting deity. I am only re-saying in a feeble way what Shakespeare showed so memorably in King Lear; the universe lets us live and even revel, but it is indifferent to our pain. Hence to trust in Providence, that is, in the universe’s kindness, is folly. Intelligent life may be meant to be here; but you and I, particular representatives of intelligent life, are not the universe’s favored children, and should not expect favors, or answers to prayers.
So, the issue of science and religion. Perhaps we already know what scientific doctrines are. What—and how different are religious doctrines?
I suggest the following. A religion, at the level of doctrine, is a set of beliefs which may seem to the believer to be rational and logically proven, but which in fact are held with a certainty which is in excess of what logic and evidence could provide. That is where a religious view differs from a scientific view. Note that this is not a knock at a particular religion; it is a general description of all religions. They all do it. (In fact my statement is really not so much about religions as about human nature, and specifically about the human impulse to believe.) Religions all offer a certainty that is in excess of the evidence. That is how they are able to create congregations, all singing off the same song-sheet and asserting the same dogmas. It is also, of course, why the different religions, the different congregations that have evolved separate beliefs, can never argue their way to agreement, no matter how much each may assert that it can prove its truth.
The man who proved this point about religion was the great Mogul emperor Akbar. He took the famous initiative of bringing together the greatest Hindu, Moslem, Zoroastrian, Jain, and Christian scholars and keeping them talking till they reached agreement. If they had been scientists, it might have worked. (But then can you imagine any scientist arguing that their theory must be right because the book that says it's right is their sacred book?)
Once you grasp this first fact about religious “truth”, that it is essentially unprovable, most of what we know by daily experience about religions falls into place. Religions are social phenomena. Even the hermit got his faith originally as a member of a congregation. This social unity and agreement is possible precisely because faith provides a certainty that is in excess of the evidence. This is also why people’s religious beliefs are far more commonly determined by background and upbringing than by logic.
Notice the chicken and egg situation. The possibility of belief that is in excess of the evidence (or even flatly against the evidence) makes possible agreement and social cohesion; conversely, social cohesion demands that humans possess this tendency to believe in excess of the evidence.
In short, religion is a huge singularity pinched off from the logical universe, yet internally consistent. A nation that lacked the religious gene would be a nation full of rational skeptics but without a religion in common. Without the unifying effect of a religion its troops might cease trusting in God to defeat their foes, and refuse to keep coming on in disciplined formations, and therefore the nation might cease to exist. Therefore, to parody Paul Davies, it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a religious universe, or at least in religious societies, because other types of societies might not have allowed us to have survived and be here today to observe things.
And now to literature. It is no accident that so much of the poetry and literature of the Augustan age, like Pope’s Essay on Man (which Anne Edgeworth will talk about later) deals with the problems of social politics, and especially with how to handle that explosive yet unavoidable social phenomenon called religion. The terrifying religious wars of the C17th had been the last gasp of the old medieval notion that religious truth is absolute and ultimate truth. Within that mindset the only way to categorize someone who denied your beliefs was to call them a heretic --and then, if possible, kill them. About a million persons were murdered in the post-reformation wars in Europe. (In modern terms, their human rights to freedom of religion were trampled on—but that modern view of things was only slowly brought to birth, after thinkers as diverse as Queen Elizabeth the First, Montaigne, and Shakespeare began to recoil from the cruelties the older view produced.) “What do I really know,” asked Montaigne, and Shakespeare read him and constructed a universe of uncertainty for his Hamlet to inhabit.
Slowly, the age of reason, and uncertainty, replaced the age of religion, and groped towards a way of accommodating religion within reason. The paradox they had to cope with was this: religious truth often seems to the believer the highest and most certain type of truth (and it may also be the ground and guarantor of the moral behavior on which society depends). Yet it is fatal for the state to endorse any particular set of religious beliefs. Courts may lay down, and citizens may be required to accept legal verdicts, but not religious ones. In short, the modern secular state understands that religion may be the highest and even the most certain truth for the individual as private citizen, but insists that the individual when acting as a functionary of the state must not treat religious truth as truth at all. And certainly, religious-style faith must have no part in science.
So we come to the essential problem—other than the scientific problems—raised by Paul Davies’s theories. These theories are perceived as verging on religion, firstly in the sense that they make an emotional appeal like that of religions, because they seem to provide something that many people would like to believe in, viz. a universe with a partly (perhaps very partly) human meaning. They are also religious in the other sense: that like religions they seem to promise answers: answers to excitingly ultimate questions—like Who put the world there? Why? And What does he she or it want us to do? And Will he she or it save us?
At least by comparison with other scientific theories, Davies’s have some elements of these religious qualities. They excite some people for the same reason that James Baxter’s poems used to: that they seemed to be making sense of the world in a different and deeper way, which is also for many of us an older and more primal way, a way remembered from childhood.
Of course the real question about Davies’s theories is, Are they true. But since we won’t solve that today, I stick with the more solvable question: Why do they excite us? And should we beware of that excitement?
I begin by asking, if religion is unreliable as a path to truth, why then do we admire a certain sort of literature that is not doctrinal but which is often praised as having a religious depth.
Why is it that even atheist literary critics express their intense admiration of that great skeptical drama King Lear by calling it “an almost religious experience” –as if implying that religious truth is actually higher than literary or experiential truth? I think, because it seems to offer ultimate answers. That, of course, is one of the things a religion does.
But let me suggest that religion, like opera or pebble-fill cement, is an impure form; an odd mix of different elements that nonetheless form a strong combination. A religion, as I’ve said, is in part a collection of doctrines that are held with a certainty in excess of the evidence for them. That certainty binds congregations and tribes and sometimes nations together. Hence the Roman word religion, which seems to mean “a binding together”: that which unites a tribe or society. And moral rules and compulsions are bolted on too, to this diverse but powerful structure. But just as opera is both words and music, each getting in the other’s way and yet each the stronger for being bolted to a disparate other; so religion is the stronger for being both what keeps your fingers out of your neighbour’s till (and off your neighbor’s wife and ass) and also what answers those deep human needs: the need to know how the universe works, the need to know one’s own place in the universe, the need to know and validate one’s own relationship to society, the need not to be an orphan in life, in society or in the universe, the need to have a divine master and leader and fuehrer, and the need to be loved and protected.
Notice that only two of those needs are needs that it is proper for science to gratify: the need to know how the universe works, and the need to know one’s own place in the universe. But by the time one finds a scientific theory starting to hint at answering the need for us to find a leader or to be loved and to feel safe, it’s time to worry. Ten to one, that theory will turn out to be more religion than science.
I hope I need not labor the point that religion is ground of error –or rather that it produces false levels of certainty. Actually, that’s a distinction without a difference. If you look over what different religions have asserted about the universe, you will find no agreement.
There is one God. There are three. There are two gods: one good and one bad. There are twelve great gods and two thousand minor ones. There are 10,000 gods and their names are . . . There is one god, and he backs our nation. The Great Mother is the supreme god. The gods copulate often with mortals, and anyone of unusual merits is probably a god’s son or daughter. The gods are pure spirits. They want us to be nice to people. They want us to slay our enemies. They want us to sacrifice our captives, our best farm animals, our children, they want us to make the Nine First Fridays. They want us to help them make the Spring come back . . . Need I go on?
If you think there are any limits to the myths that religious thinking can generate, or if you still doubt humanity’s ability, when affected by the religious impulse, to invent and believe endless unproven fantasies, then I suggest you consult an encyclopaedia of Greek or Roman mythology, or of Hindu mythology, or Frazer’s The Golden Bough, that 13 volume compilation of fertility myths alone. Believe me, I am not being perverse or niggly when I say that religion and science cannot be mixed without making thoroughly bad science.
Evaluate Davies’s theories on their merits as science, uninfluenced by any personal desire you may have to believe in a benign universe, or a kindly God. And if you are tempted by those fantasies, read the great literary works that destroyed them: Shakespeare’s King Lear, Voltaire’s Candide, and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
In a word, stray into religion and you stray into a world of endless error. If the literary record has one clear insight to offer those interested in Paul Davies’s theories it is: stick to scientific principles of evaluation: relig-ifying the pursuit of truth will probably lead to error.