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Always smartly dressed: Richard Dawkins who rather curiously converted me to God |
The very fact that I am asking the old question about the existence of God (or god if you are an atheist) shows that, in a way, he does exist. If I ask if He exists then I am bringing him into being. The question is probably better put – does God exist as a concept or as a being. It is probably better to ask, how much is God a concept and how much is he a being? Did God invent people or did people invent God. Which came first – the chicken or the egg?
I have always believed that people invented God rather than the other way around. This is not to disparage belief, merely to say that it is a prerequisite of living. A part of the process of coming into being is to think that we are not alone, that we are part of a larger plan emanating from a deity who remains unknown. God does not interfere in our daily lives or he (He?) would not have let horrors like the World Wars claim so many millions of lives.
How could a benevolent God who was watching over and controlling us allow so many young men be cut down by machine gun fire as they climbed out of the trenches. How could so many innocent Jews – women and children especially – be slaughtered in gas ovens at Auschwitz and similar concentration camps, their bodies burned after death to dispose of them without any kind of proper funeral or burial, just tossed away like so much rubbish?
When you see the terrible things human beings have done to each other and which Nature does to us in the form of earthquakes and natural disasters it is hard to believe in an all-controlling and benevolent deity who has our best interests at heart. After Charles Darwin’s ideas were eventually published – he kept them under a staircase so as not to upset his pious wife – we gradually began to believe more in chance and less in a just god.
Nowadays, people are increasingly indifferent to religious belief. They ignore the idea of a deity and an afterlife and accept, for all the talk of being ‘in a better place’ after death, that we live in our bodies until we die and we can only expect oblivion afterwards. I think this indifference is far more of a danger to religious belief than the atheism of people like – to quote a famous example – Richard Dawkins, who takes a more approach to the question.
Yet, it is surely because atheists are often very moral people that we still maintain some kind of belief in a deity, a greater power than a purely human one. I like Dawkins the scientist and read one of his books, The Blind Watchmaker, once. He presents the Darwinian idea that human life gradually evolved on this planet rather than it being created by a greater power. He is backed up by Darwin and geology so his arguments remain hard to contradict.
In his book, however, Dawkins makes several moralistic comments which have a kind of almost undergraduate flavour about them – against the boiling alive of lobsters and in favour of abortion rights, for example. It is these which spoke most loudly to me and which I remember best of all, long after I have forgotten the rational scientific arguments he makes.
Take the boiling alive of lobsters. Afficionados of their preparation (of which I am not one) believe that the flavour of the finished product is improved by boiling them alive rather than killing them quickly. Just say you were given the choice at a restaurant between boiled alive lobster and the quick-killed variety. This is not too crazy an idea, by the way. We have the choice between free range and factory farmed chickens when we go shopping for example.
A scientist believes that taste and smell are senses that developed to tell if food was poisonous or had gone off and might make you sick if it did not prove fatal. This has now developed to the extent that people spend thousands of pounds on meals and wines to go with them. They also have extended their moral senses to give priority to free range foods or to eschew animal and meat products entirely by embracing vegetarianism and veganism.
Yet science is factual rather than moral. It does not give priority to moral considerations when choosing, for example, to embrace quick-killed or gradually boiled alive lobsters. One is merely supposed to taste better than the other. Our sense of morality helps us to make the decision here and morality developed as a mechanism to make it easier for us to live together. Put bluntly, moral people tend to make better neighbours than immoral ones.
This sense of morality has now been extended to non-human species who are afforded rights they could only have dreamed of once. These are not universally adopted by humans (which is why many still boil lobsters alive). Scientific investigations may explain this process but, in doing so, it also explains them away. If analysis tells us that we are acting in a purely moral way, we can just as easily reject this morality in order to enjoy better-tasting lobster.
Despite being a classic fence-sitting agnostic, I am sure that it is right not to boil lobsters alive (even if Woody Allen can make a good joke out of it in Annie Hall). I join the team of both atheists and believers who want their lobsters killed humanely and quickly, even if this results in a poorer taste. Yet I do so not because science is telling me to – science is indifferent to the matter – but because God is saying that this is the best way to behave.
So I believe in God even if I accept that he/she/it is a largely human creation. The most pious person would probably admit that form of his belief is partly an accident of history and geography and, if he had been in a different time and place, he would have followed a different path. Yet the most militant of atheists would be hard-pressed to explain why he or she adopted a very moral position if it was not partly due to the existence of a higher power.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is DiaryofaTouristGuide,blogspot.com