Douglas Adams is a bit of a hero of mine. This man could tell a story! I wouldn’t mind one day being half as good a writer as he was. He could draw and hold the attention of tens of thousands of readers, communicate with them, lighten their hearts with laughs and busy their minds with interesting ideas – must be enormously fulfilling.
From my first reading of Douglas Adams, I have felt like the early man who wanders into a cold new land, sees a creature with a nice warm coat and thinks, “I’ll have it off him!” I try to glean from his writing all the literary tidbits I can. Fortunately for me, studying at the feet of Douglas Adams proves a much safer prospect than skinning a hairy beast.
Well, I’d better get on to my subject.
Douglas Adams was fond of the relationship between his initials (DNA) and his birth year (1952 – the year DNAs heliacal shape was discovered). This gives me a great excuse to abbreviate future mentions of Douglas Adams to DNA which I will begin doing forthwith.
DNA gave a brilliant speech on the subject of the origin of God to which I gave an attempt at summarizing in an earlier post. The title he gave the speech was “Is there an Artificial God”, but I only dealt with the presentation of his ideas on mans creation of God. Here, I’d like to expand on his ideas to show that God may yet be up there smiling.
First of all, I'd like to suggest that it surely would have taken a mammoth’s portion of optimism for early man to have seen his world as hospitable and welcoming. I can’t seem to shake the image of early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a hard day’s hunting to see a world that pleased him like a poke in the eye. I mean, let’s be honest here, it wouldn’t have taken the vacuum, radiation, and boulders of space or even bacteria, viruses or violent nuclear reactions to convince man that his environment was hostile. A simple hungry lion, hard winter, nasty flu or harsh famine would have easily done the trick.
No, man would not have concluded that his world fit him like a hole fits a puddle. That idea would have to be the fabrication of a few more modern and confused men. Now, this doesn’t mean that early man wasn’t lead to create his own god. Quite the opposite; fear and desperation would have led to just that sort of thing. However, it does change the view of a man-created god from one of benevolence to one of slapdash and arrogance – one to be appeased in hopes of favors. Indeed, not only one, but many of these gods have been created. Gods that fit another of DNA’s views much more nicely – filled with man-like reason and passion.
The second bit of DNA’s ideas that furrowed my logical brow is his suggestion that man implied a linear pattern of top-down creation. Such an idea relies upon a superimposing of a subset of gods creative abilities onto man and then of a subset of mans creative abilities onto the creations of man and so forth. Well, you can see the problem right away – mans creations are not creative. Two iterations a pattern do not make. Sure, a third iteration may one day be made – that of a robot or super computer obtaining creative abilities, but to imply that man saw his club or spear as being creative is, well - unreasonable. In fact, the ideas of relationships between man, the world and god would have been quite flat – the gods created everything including a few things that could then create other (but rather obviously uncreative) things.
This is not to say that man has not been startled by evidence that there could be a bottom-up pattern of creation. Clearly, we’ve all been surprised, but not so much because we hold desperately to the idea of a top down creation, but rather because of the nature of surprise itself – it’s simply something previously unimagined. Now I run the risk of someone thinking me in denial of the special hurt that the ideas of evolution have put on religionists the world over. This too is clear, but not so much because of the displacement of an old pattern, but because of the assertion that an idea or even a fact must replace a belief.
Say we apply the above two discussions to DNA’s outline; what are we left with? First of all, we are left with a plentitude of man-like gods favoring the men who best please them and who indeed have melted away like wicked witches in the face of human enlightenment. Simple enough.
Second, instead of a divide between correct and incorrect versions of creation, we have a mind-numbing conflict between science and religion. DNA himself wondered aloud how religion could persist in the face of so much enlightenment. That question cannot be casually passed around as a simple curiosity now that the post enlightenment religion turns out to be more mysterious than a misunderstood pattern. God’s nature encompasses attributes that man could not have thought to create and religion answers questions that man could not have thought to ask. Not through environmental study.
For example, the idea that mans world fits him like a puddles hole is a misrepresentation of the idea that the world was made for man for some purpose. The idea of purpose presupposes a future which nothing else in nature points to. Another example is the idea of a single God. Such an idea is countered by anything you see in nature and would have been and indeed was seen as abhorrent by the natural early man. Curiously, these ideas are not unlike mutations in evolution. They are the input into the system that produces progress.
It is evident to me that man has been presented with a dichotomy. On the one hand, he has been given a curious and logical nature. On the other, he has been presented with quiet affirmations of the divine. The knowledge he has obtained of the first yells out against the tenaciousness of the second which ignores the first with the reverence of a stone.
So let not the religionist despair at the scientist and let not the scientist despair at the religionist. For a scientist to say, “I’ll believe in God when I see him.” is like a religionist saying, “I’ll believe evolution when I see science generate life.” Neither statement adds value and either could end up getting their wish. Science has models of how things may have happened, but a an edifice a blueprint does not make. Religion has direction, but cannot explain the environment. Science cannot be explained by religion and religion cannot be explained logically. Let’s stop trying.
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