The Glidd of Glood Blog

Why are we here? TED has the answer

Someone gives you a strange and complicated looking machine.

 

The first things you would probably ask are, what is it? What does it do?

The next thing you might wonder, if you got given the answer to the first question, is how does it do it?

Some way down the list would probably be, who manufactured it? which is a seemingly less interesting question than the first ones.

 

You go outside the front door and you see a stone on the path.

You might say, why is it there?

If you did (and you probably wouldn’t, would you, as the thing is so insignificant that concerning yourself with why it is there would take up a lot of valuable time for no apparent upside), you probably wouldn’t really mean, “why is it there?” What you would really mean is “how did it get there?”

 

This is not the same question. You could explain, with reference to geology and physics and path-layers and quarries and things how the stone got to be where it is. As to why in the scheme of things it should exist, and on your path to boot – this seems like a fairly pointless and unanswerable question.

 

I have been doing a couple of things recently. One is, that I am reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and the other is that I have discovered TED.

 

TED is a website (for those even more ill-informed than me) where you can see videos of eminent thinkers delivering short lectures on a range of topics. It is absolutely brilliant. I have been concentrating on the things that interest me, like sub-atomic physics and cosmology. Thinking about these things cannot help but stagger and amaze.

   

There are some 100 billion (did I get that one right? Or is it more than that?) stars in our galaxy and there are 100 billion galaxies. Try getting your head around that. Our universe may be made up of multiple dimensions – I mean dimensions of which we have no experience. There may be multiple universes.

 

Which brings us to Dawkins and religion. Dawkins says unequivocally that there is no God and I am increasingly inclined to believe him, as I read the book. The interesting thing is the way we leap directly to the question about the manufacturer of the universe machine, when we have but an inkling of how it works, no idea what it is for, if anything, or really even what it looks like.

 

It would seem apparent that we are somewhat less significant, on a cosmological scale, than the stone is upon our path. The question, “why are we here?” is thus equally devoid of meaning. There is no reason why we should be here. There is an explanation how we got here – evolution - but there is no significance to our existence any more than to the stone’s. It is and we are. That’s all there is to it.

 

So when you have digested all that, to start arguing about whether or not you should eat pork, take a certain day of the week off, which particular written myths you want to believe in and what you should wear on your head does seem to be a bit of a waste of time. Certainly not worth blowing yourself or anyone else up for.

God - alive and well and living on a cloud in the Rockies

In a chapter in a book I am reading, on the beginnings of the science of geology– the excellent Mountains of the Mind by Robert MacFarlane – there is this footnote:

“…as Simon Winchester has recently pointed out, a 1991 poll returned that 100 million Americans believed God to have created man in his own image sometime in the last 10’000 years. The earth is thought by science to be around 5 billion years old; the first humans to have appeared circa 2 million years ago.”

I haven’t read personally any of Simon Winchester’s writings, and so do not know the original quote, and even less so the first hand account of the 1991 poll, and not even exactly what the question was. So I am operating at about 3^rd or 4^th hand here. But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the information in the quote is true, and that there really are 100 million Americans who have a pseudo-creationist view of the earth’s history. This is an absolutely mind boggling fact.

There are two elements here. One is the negation of all the scientific evidence to the contrary, which is much akin to saying that the earth is flat. The other is “God created man in his own image”. That little phrase means that all those stained-glass windows in churches showing a chap sitting on a cloudy throne actually reflect what a third of the population of the most powerful country on earth currently believes – unless, of course they have all come to their senses in the last 18 years.

 

One of the prevailing themes of the current zeitgeist, indeed since 2001, you could say, the prevailing theme, is that of the threat from religious fundamentalism. This of course is, in the west, usually equated with Muslim fundamentalism, which is seen to be perpetrated by dark-skinned people with dubious beards. But this little statistic would imply that Christian fundamentalism is every bit as prevalent, maybe even more so. After all, 100 million people represent a fairly huge hunk of America’s electorate. In the light of this, George W Bush’s double election victory suddenly seems to be not an aberration of a somnolent populace, but the logical consequence of a seriously deluded pool of voters.

My feelings about religion are increasingly ambivalent, but I suppose could be summarised as being that everyone should believe what they want to, so long as they accord that same privilege to everyone else. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that people with strong religious beliefs find this hard to do, not unsurprisingly, as when you are convinced you are right, it is difficult to just accept that others are wrong without wanting to convert them.

Now, we shouldn’t get carried away here. After all, the poll also means that there are 200 million Americans who don’t believe that man was created in God’s image some time in the last 10’000 years. Still, you can’t help but be a little bit concerned when a country with more explosives than you can shake a stick at and a highly interventionist foreign policy, contains a truly massive minority who hold a conviction that is not vastly more whacky than believing in Santa Claus or in fairies at the bottom of the garden. How much sense are you going to get out of a population when every third person you talk to wilfully ignores modern science?

That the USA is the world’s most influential country is undeniable. Its stock market rules the economy, its culture, from music to film to TV, is omnipresent. What chance have you got to get the Americans to rally around issues like pollution and climate-change when a massive proportion of them can’t see beyond biblical fairy tales?  It doesn’t look good.

There is something almost endearingly child-like about many Americans: their belief in dreams (viz the American dream), their predilection for kids’ food (hamburgers and fried chicken), their love of poetic justice, where life is a succession of Hollywood endings. But it has always been considered wise to keep matches away from children, and not to let them make major decisions for you, as their unformed brains will frequently make the wrong ones. So next time the USA entices us all to subscribe to its world view, we would do well to consider the 100 million neo-creationists living there.