Starting with big game. God and Ireland.
“He doesn’t exist! The bastard!”
Pithy as whatnot, Beckett crams again myriad meanings into a mere five words.
And like whatnot pithy, you can interpret these words many ways. They are at once paradoxical (“How can He be a bastard if He doesn’t exist?”), profound (“How can a bastard God exist – where was His absent father?”) and bawdily ludicrous (the second sentence contradicts the first, the first contradicts the second).
In the context of Endgame – Hamm is bemoaning his lot. Either God doesn’t exist, life has no meaning and Hamm is truly alone. Or God exists and is specifically fingering him in the eye out of spite, and Hamm is truly forsaken. His life’s experience tell him that both statements are true (he lives in an apocalyptic world, his parents live in dustbins), or one statement is true and the other false and it doesn’t really matter which to him.
Art seems to find ways to express this dichotomy again and again. In Conor McPherson’s amazing play, “The Seafarer”, similar sentiments from the character Mr Lockhart – “So God fathered himself in the form of man, got crucified, and then on the cross asked himself, on behalf of himself, to forgive mankind! It’s all a mess!” Another critique of Christianity, except for the trifling fact that Mr Lockhart is, in fact, the Devil, come to Baldoyle to play poker for the souls of a group of Dublin drunkards.
So my own personal take on the big question, and I will elaborate, is as such: He doesn’t exist, and yet, in another sense, he does… As to the first sentence; a God, to quote Dawkins, “almost certainly doesn’t exist”. (Note this phrasing). And to the second, this very same God who probably doesn’t exist and is such a presence in the world (particularly Ireland), is not a benign invention.
“He doesn’t exist.”
Two routes of thought lead me to this conclusion. One is a reducto ad absurdum argument that points at the inconsistencies of the religious basis, story and history. The second is an analysis of the religious reasoning, and a comparison to scientific reasoning; and the conclusion that scientific reasoning is the superior one for interpreting the world.
The first is less fun than it would appear on first look. It’s a gimme. It gets tedious. Its too easy to point out flaws from a two thousand year old book, of a time, written by man. Meat of a Friday! Subservient women! Contraception! Even the testaments, the purported basis of Christian thought, can be reduced to absurdity if you examine them closely enough. For instance, only two of the gospels actually state that Mary begot Jesus by immaculate conception, the other two don’t mention it at all (maybe Mark and John felt it was too trifling to bother mentioning, but it seems to me something worth comment(1)). One by one, the reasonable religious will eventually concede nearly every Biblical story as metaphor (Garden of Eden, Seven Day creation, four thousand year universe, etc etc).
Ultimately, when you nit-pick all the stories down to metaphor, what is left is the “kernel” of the religion-urge – that there is a life after death; that there is a god who looks down on us; that there is a god that created us and the universe; that if we do good we will be rewarded; that those who do bad will be punished. Nice ideas all.
These are the kernel – what is left when you render the fat from religious ceremony and pomp. I hold the Bible/Koran/what-have-you to be a version of Chinese whispers, the kernel being fluffed up over the years by pious bores till we have a religious popcorn, full of contradictions, rings for kissing and hilarious hats.
Even thinking of the kernel – god creation and all that; the argument buster is the question, if god made the universe, who made god? Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as explaining pretty well our own natures, can explain pretty well how complex can unfurl – over thousands of iteration, and millions of years – from the simplest beginnings. I’d hazard the simplest beginnings were a fluke combination of mineral atoms. Aside from biology, cosmology tells us there was indeed a beginning to the universe, we can see no further than this. We can, and will, quest to find out more. It seems lazy to just ascribe this beginning to god.
Coming back to the human history of religion – on anthropological grounds, the arguments do not favour the chances of one true religion. Thousands have come and gone, with the only thing in common a claim that theirs is the one true faith.
I personally can’t understand how you could subscribe to a religion, knowing well that there are, and have been, thousands of different religions, all with different gods and different theories – sun gods, child gods, animal gods, Viking gods, Greek gods, Roman gods, moon gods - and only few of them can be right, if any.
I won’t even bother talk further about the contradictions of the religions – Richard Dawkins does it fairly hilariously in the God Delusion, David Hume does it fairly clinically in Dialogues.
I’ll discuss the kernel, that which religion holds and science and history cannot prove untrue.
“Me? Well I’m an atheist amn’t I? I believe in science. Ricky Gervais, Extras.
The second route is a comparison of religious and scientific reasoning:
Maths and science postulate – a scientific hypothesis (a truth) is never held to be absolute or eternal. Rather a hypothesis is true, until it is proved false. It fits with our observations of the world, it fits better than any other theories, so we hold it true until we meet evidence that proves it false. When we meet evidence that proves it false, we jettison it and search for a better theory.
Compare this to the religious method. Religion has received “wisdom”, such as the kernel and the popcorn, and the interpretation of the world is made to fit into this wisdom. This way of thinking is based on a collection of “fundamental truths”, that are held to be immutable for all eternity.
Note the requirements of a scientific theory:
- “Fits with observations” – this is important, otherwise you could just postulate any old MAD theories and hold them true because they haven’t yet been disproved, or can’t be disproved. For instance, I could postulate that the universe is a big turtle inside the belly of a shark – no one can disprove this statement – but likewise we have no good reason to postulate it in the first place – such a statement “does not fit with observations”.
- “…proved false, we jettison it” – this is crucial – all theories, if proved false, will be jettisoned!
The requirements of a religious belief:
- “Fits with observations” – Religion will fight tooth and nail to resist developing theories that contradict received wisdoms if they are inconvenient – apropos Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Crick and Watson, Dr Kinsey, Malthus…
- “…proved false, we jettison it” – the received wisdom is not jettisonable, no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary.
Religion holds that certain facts are truths eternal, no matter what shift in the paradigm. Science holds truths to be relative and temporary.
Even mathematical truths are relative truths. You might say that surely maths is willing to assert that 1=1 for all eternity and that’s THAT, or the three angles of a triangle always add to 180°. These truths are self-evident, are they not? No, maths says 1=1 at the moment. If something comes along that suggests otherwise, science will re-evaluate.
Does this seem meek? Well, if you draw a triangle, the angles of the three sides – however drawn, will add to 180°. If you draw a triangle on a sphere, the angles add up to greater than 180°. We didn’t know this before Georges Riemann and the 17th century. If we add 1 and 1 in twenty four dimensions, we don’t know if the answer will be 2. We might discover this in years to come. (In fact, at a quantum level, 1 is not even equal to 1 – in logical terms, this statement is equivalent to saying a particle is in two different places at the same time).
This is the relativity within the scientific method, a flexibility of thought. A scientist is not married to any idea, no matter how solid it would seem. Present proof to the contrary and she will reject it.
I hold that the religious kernel (universe intentionally created by a mono-deity, this mono-deity an interested party in our affairs, life after death), does not “fit with observations”. It fails the test of my bullet points for this reason:
Science cannot prove the kernel false, agreed; but we have no good reason to postulate such theories in the first place. So a god created the universe and since then takes a bizarre notion of interest in what’s going on. Fine – but we have no reason for supposing this. The foundations are suspect, its proponents now (the Church) are suspect also. If we want to be generous and allow people postulate theories with no objective basis to them, by this logic I can propose several more that have equal merit in the context of the religious reasoning, but have the added advantage of being less pompously po-faced. For example:
- We are all characters in a yet-unpublished Flann O’Brien novel.
This “theory” is facetious granted, but it stands on a logical par with the religious kernel. It cannot be disproved, and as science encroaches on it, I can keep shifting the goalposts anyway.
Science has no theory are to why we exist, and this is often criticised as a weakness versus religion – “Science has nothing to say on this subject. Religion does. Science should thus stay out of this realm and leave religion to the big questions.”
But science is not a body of knowledge per se – it is a way of thinking. I would hold that the fact that science modestly withholds comment on the big questions is actually commendable. Science says we don’t know for sure, and won’t presume to speculate aimlessly. Rather it quests for further knowledge. Religion says we KNOW for sure, and further quest is pointless, but what they KNOW for sure is actually aimless speculation.
So, now you know why I feel science is the superior method of thought.
“This is the word of the Lord.”
An argument I have often heard from the religious is this:
What underlines the religious worldview is the various interventions the god has made throughout history – for example, the god introduced himself to Moses (via a burning bush) and told him the 10 commandments. The same god who created the universe actually came to Earth in human form (but also the God’s own form – remember) and told us a bunch of stuff, later transcribed in the gospels. Various other prophets claim to have been in communion with the god, of which each religion believes some and ignores the others. Miracles are said to have occurred, apparitions of angels, seas parted, foes blinded, poxes delivered, skin diseases healed, peoples freed from slavery, races favoured, conceptions immaculated, people saltified. Tragically, we have no reason to believe any of this either.
The whole Bible, the aforementioned “word of the Lord”, was written by human hand and is hence predictably and lamentably riddled with errors. I’ve already spoken of the Chinese Whispers effect – any time when accounts are passed a few times in the oral tradition, radical exaggerations are always introduced. I’m thinking of the old Fionn MacCuamhail legends (“such a giant of a man that he had a backside that would halt the march of men through a mountain pass” (3)). Most of the gospels were written in the 2nd century, none of the authors were alive at the time of Jesus. Most of the Jesus stories make no sense – particularly the nativity story. While a historical character called Jesus did incontrovertibly exist – the idea that the Roman Empire, the most efficient and organisationally brilliant association that ever existed to that point, would compel every male in the empire to return to his father’s birth town for the purposes of a 7-yearly census, makes no sense whatsoever. This is the purported reason for Jesus being born in a shed in Jerusalem . I base this on my reading of A.N. Wilson’s biography of Jesus.
No, probability, history and commonsense tells us that the most of this, probably all of it, did not occur. Certainly the Old Testament is a joke of a text – full of god-sanctioned rapes, god-sanctioned genocide, god marching into battle with certain ethnic tribes, filial sacrifices – it reads like a Mills and Boon Lord Of The Rings. Its account of the creation of the universe is, shall we say, lacking something in the reality department.
So why do so many people believe this stuff so thoroughly? And I would say 95% of the world’s current population do. (Because so many people believe this stuff, is not and never will be an argument for anything).
I propose there are two reasons:
One, we have an innate tendency to believe in gods. Two, we are taught this stuff at an impressionable age and it is very difficult to entirely shake off.
Innate tendency:
One irony of my theory I find delicious – this innate tendency, this “god gene”, probably actually favours the survival prospects of its holders and evolution (which religion holds does not exist) perpetuates this. Religion should, and does, proliferate. Co-operative societies (like free markets) benefit the aggregate of society – religion promotes co-operation (at least among members of the same religion), its rituals have traditionally helped make a cohesive, structured society – marriage, birth, death are marked ceremonies in every major religion – suicide, euthanasia and abortion shunned. For the dark side of mankind, religion has historically provided justification for massacre and rape, forced marriage and subjugation – again, all these acts will probably serve to further your genes (along as you get your rape and pillage in first, as all good gods do).
Religion is waning in the West because stories about a psychotic god in the pre-medieval middle east are becoming less and less relevant in the space age. The amazing thing is that it is still so widely practiced in a technically advanced, scientific society – but again this should not surprise us. Less developed societies never had this enlightenment (indeed, an Enlightenment). But this does not negate the existence innate tendency to religion. Given something suitable, we will revert, no matter how advanced our technology. For instance, the cult surrounding dictators in totalitarian states could reasonably be described as religious. It is terrifying but not surprising, how readily it was embraced by the vast majority of some of the most advanced societies in the last century. A second reason religion wanes is because of the advance of science and the ready dissemination of information pertaining to this – in the age of uncensored Google and Wikipedia (a glorious age I would say), ideas that directly and indirectly challenge religion are easily accessed and shared. Again, should this tap be turned off – think of Hitler’s book pyres, or Mao’s de-intellectualisation pogroms – we will eventually revert to whatever we are taught and cannot unteach.
“Whatever we are taught” is my second reason for the persistence of religion. Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, defines a “meme” as ………. He likens it to something that is itself alive – I think it more a seductive idea that supplants whatever else it competes with in carriers’ heads. Either way, religious teaching is a meme, however you define it. Like Beckett’s Hamm or Conor McPherson’s Devil, alluded to above, we live in an essentially post-religious world in which everywhere are the trappings of religion – the religion meme is so powerful (It should be, the process of natural selection applies as much to ideas as to organisms – these ideas have survived maybe 50 generations of humans since Jesus Christ – they are powerful). Art grapples again and again with this fundamental dichotomy in the fabric of contemporary reality. Think of Francis Bacon’s popes on the jacks, James Joyce’s fire-and-brimstone pulpit scenes in a Portrait, Yossarian’s crush on the army chaplain in Catch-22, the genius that is Father Ted, the novels of John McGahern, the lock-out clashes in Plunkett’s Strumpet City, Hume’s Dialogues, Pullman’s Dark Materials, the poems of Phillip Larkin, the novels of Graham Greene… Even Beckett’s post-everything play, Waiting for Godot – Beckett could not be unaware of, at the very least, the correspondences between “Godot” and “God” – three letters, unknowable, male, hope-engendering, and…he never actually arrives?
There’s a jaw-dropping passage for me in Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion where Dawkins attempts to formulate a theory of the preponderance of religion throughout the ages. One, in particular appeals to me, because its so simple and logical. This theory states that there is an evolutionary advantage in children believing everything their parents and other elders tell them. The example Dawkins gives is: “Don’t swim in that lake children – there are crocodiles in that lake”. Children who are genetically predisposed to believing their parents won’t swim in the lake, won’t get killed, and therefore survive to adulthood and spreading these very same genes throughout the population. “Such trusting obedience is good for survival…But the flipside of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility… The child cannot know that “Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infected Limpodo” is good advice, while “You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail” is, at best, a waste of time and goats.” This theory holds that we are genetically predisposed to believing whatever our elders tell us, and are incapable of distinguishing good advice from bad. We grow up and are still incapable of telling apart the good from the bad/pointless. So we then pass it all onto our own children and the merry-go-round continues. This may or may not be true, but I think it sounds logical. I don’t think we should underestimate the impact of education on young children; moreso if you accept this point.
This brings me to my final point. Religion needs to be taken out of schools.
But this is what parents want, and parents have a right to school their children as they see fit.
Granted parents have a right to educate their children in what they perceive are their best interests. Regrettably this probably includes religious indoctrination. 90% of all primary schools are patronised by the Catholic Church. (2) So it would be reasonable to say that at least 90% of children receive a religious education in Ireland. But parents want their children to receive a religious education, right?
I’d actually question this.
Consider the thought experiment; overnight religion is, by inspired legislative decree, taken off the school syllabuses. Henceforth, if parents wish their children to receive a religious education they must take them to attend a Sunday morning school run by the religious institution of their choice. Ok? Now answer the question honestly – do you think, in this new scenario, that 90% of children would continue to receive a religious education?
They would not.
I’d propose it’d be closer to 5%.
Parents, by and large, will opt for the “path of least resistance” in this case. They don’t have strong views. You’ll accept this. The 5% of children who would be taken to Sunday schools would be the 5% of parents with strong religious beliefs. The rest combine the “I don’t care” brigade, and the “I received a religious education, and it did me no harm” brigade. There is much hypocrisy in this view, and indeed intellectual laziness.
Instead of asking themselves “what harm religion?”, and accepting the status quo – the lazy “religious” parents ought really to be asking themselves why the status quo is a default religious education, and not an optional extra for those parents who explicitly “opt in” for their children.
As I said, 90% of all primary schools are patronised by the Catholic Church. This in effect means the area bishop is automatically the Trustee, with the local parish priest his representative on the board of Trustees. This local parish priest is automatically the chairman of the schools board. This gives him the power to appoint/de-appoint other members, to set the agenda for the board, and the ability to hire and fire teachers. This is the case (also for hospitals). There are two teacher training centres in Ireland, both patronised by the Catholic Church.
I have been told on good authority that it would be impossible for anyone to graduate from these colleges without taking and passing the religious teaching modules. Even if this unfortunate young atheist faked his or her way through the modules, and somehow navigated the clerically-chaired-and-appointed interview panel and obtained a job, he or she would not last long in the job if – in a pang of guilt at the hypocrisy of it all – refused to teach intellectually-defenceless 5 year olds about the skygod and all the dubious, at best, religious tenets. Children, as above, will in fact believe anything we tell them! Santa, the tooth fairy, crocodiles, holy ghosts… That is a serious moral responsibility for anyone in the teaching vocation. Even if you harboured religious beliefs yourself – could you in good conscience pass on this method of thinking, if you even harboured a modicum of doubts yourself about any of it? And when even the most senior theologians (eg the Pope) declare that “faith” is just that – a blind leap into belief, whatever the real-world evidence… This I could not do in good conscience.
What is this then? This is called a pre-rigged game, a self-reinforcing loop of control maintenance. Having attained the privilege of control of all the State’s schools (granted in a different age and climate, granted) – the game has been set up so that control is maintained, and this control remains as strong to this day. Only those who are willing to pedal cosmic improbabilities to children will get to teach, dissenters need not apply.
My Ryanair analogy:
The Ryanair website is familiar to most. The EU is currently taking litigation proceedings against the company for its dubious policy of bundling up insurance with every flight booked, unless customers explicitly opt out. To opt out is harder to do than to opt in, in fact it requires unticking one box among many. This is the same model that used to apply to mail-order book clubs until made illegal – “To order these products, simply do nothing! We’ll send it out and, for your convenience, dock your credit card!”
The result of Ryanair’s sly and much hated trick:
- Many, many customers unwittingly purchase insurance when they never intended to…
- Most don’t even notice they have purchased it…
- Some, however, maybe 5% would have bought it anyway, because they believe in travel insurance
- And some are even glad they unwittingly purchased it…in retrospect it was required
- Most however simply loathe Ryanair for their devious model whereby one must go out of one’s way to “opt out” of a service
You can see where I’m going with this analogy. So I’ll make it explicit:
Ryanair’s model is intrinsically wrong – it is widely expected it will soon be found illegal and outlawed by the EU litigation in train. It goes against the principle of honest markets – the default option should not be to receive and pay for the product, unless one goes out of one’s way to decline it.
The model of education in Ireland is similarly intrinsically wrong.
The default option should not be to receive a religious education unless one goes out of one’s way to decline it.
The default option should not be “opt out” of a religious education, it should be “opt in”. This is the model in Europe and North America.
Where 90% of schools are Catholic controlled, the “opt out” option – depending on where you live – could conceivably mean a school three hundred miles away. Enter the lazy parents from above (and their children). We know why the default option is a religious education – because of the pre-rigged game outlined above, that self-reinforcing control loop. We know why parents maintain these nebulous religious ideas – they were children who believed adults who told them this. We loathe such a set-up in the Ryanair website – so why accept such an education model? In Ryanair’s defense, at least we are sure travel insurance actually exists! A nebulous religious education, side by side with subjects like history and logic is, at best confusing for children, at worst underhanded, intellectually spurious, and hypocritical.
The privilege of control of the education of the children of the Irish Nation was given to the Catholic church in another age, true – when the confused elite, like Eamon De Valera and his acolytes, conflated Irish identity with religion, and set up society accordingly. This was a mistake, Irish identity is not inextricably bound up with religion and never should have been. It may have been a facet, along with Protestantism and Quakerism and England – but to bound it up with the State was wrong, and had predictable results. The writer who did the most to forge the nation’s conscience in the “smithy of his soul”, wrote … “You speak to me of language, nationality, religion…I shall try to fly by those nets” (James Joyce). My contention is that language and religion were, at the inception of the state, bound up into Irish identity. Joyce recognised this. In the still-gestating nation-state, the Church was invited to fill the void, and they duly did so. So the game was thus rigged. With absolute power granted the church, and with the ludicrously repressed sexuality of the popcorn, came inevitably the sad litany of child abuse, subjugation and guilt.
If the sex abuse scandals and grotesque cover-ups were not enough to prompt a re-think of a default religious education, then – whatever the factuality of religion or no – the simple fact of the perverse set-up that requires taxpayer citizens to go out of their way and opt out of an optional extra, would all to me suggest the system needs immediate overhauling. If you must opt out of an optional extra, then it is not optional, it is the default. The game has been mendaciously rigged. When you bring in the extreme improbability of the religious message, and its concomitant promotion of extreme illogical thinking (God made us – but who made God?!), the argument for change is, to me, irrefutable.
To summarise:
I believe:
- The basis of all religions is fundamentally illogical
- Gods almost certainly don’t exist
- Irish identity does not, and should not, equal Catholicism
- The patronage of the school system in Ireland by the Catholic Church – or any church – is wrong and must be changed
- Religion should not be “taught” in schools, certainly not primary schools.
- Religious education should be an optional extra, not bundled up in the package unordered. This optional extra, if availed of, should not be on school time.
If I am wrong, please tell me why.
Footnotes:
(1) http://library.marcionite-scripture.info/CB-Was-Jesus-Virgin-Born.pdf
(2)http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0130/1224263431345.html
(3) Actually from At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, but you get my drift.
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