The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (39 page)

There were strong erotic and misogynistic elements—as might be expected in a sexually repressed, male-dominated society with inquisitors drawn from the class of nominally celibate priests. The trials paid close attention to the quality and quantity of orgasm in the supposed copulations of defendants with demons or the Devil (although Augustine had been certain “we cannot call the Devil a fornicator”), and to the nature of the Devil’s “member” (cold, by all reports). “Devil’s marks” were found “generally on the breasts or private parts” according to Ludovico Sinistrari’s 1700 book. As a result pubic hair was shaved, and the genitalia were carefully inspected by the exclusively male inquisitors. In the immolation of the 20-year-old Joan of Arc, after her dress had caught fire the Hangman of Rouen slaked the flames so onlookers could view “all the secrets which can or should be in a woman.”

The chronicle of those who were consumed by fire in the single German city of Würzburg in the single year 1598 penetrates the statistics and lets us confront a little of the human reality:

The steward of the senate named Gering; old Mrs. Kanzler; the tailor’s fat wife; the woman cook of Mr. Mengerdorf; a stranger; a strange woman; Baunach, a senator, the fattest citizen in Würtzburg; the old smith of the court; an old woman; a little girl, nine or ten years old; a younger girl, her little sister; the mother of the two little aforementioned girls; Liebler’s daughter; Goebel’s child, the most beautiful girl in Würtzburg; a student who knew many languages; two boys from the Minster, each twelve years old; Stepper’s little daughter; the woman who kept the bridge gate; an old woman; the little son of the town council bailiff; the wife of Knertz, the butcher; the infant daughter of Dr. Schultz; a little girl; Schwartz, canon at Hach….

On and on it goes. Some were given special humane attention: “The little daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed and burnt.” There were 28 public immolations, each with 4 to 6 victims on average, in that small city in a single year. This was a microcosm of what was happening all across Europe. No one knows how many were killed altogether—perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Those responsible for prosecuting, torturing, judging, burning, and justifying were selfless. Just ask them.

They could not be mistaken. The confessions of witchcraft could not be based on hallucinations, say, or desperate attempts to satisfy the inquisitors and stop the torture. In such a case, explained the witch judge Pierre de Lancre (in his 1612 book,
Description of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels),
the Catholic Church would be committing a great crime by burning witches. Those who raise such possibilities are thus attacking the Church and
ipso facto
committing a mortal sin. Critics of witch-burning were punished and, in some cases, themselves burnt. The inquisitors and torturers were doing God’s work. They were saving souls. They were foiling demons.

Witchcraft of course was not the only offense that merited torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serious crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly. In the sixteenth century the scholar William Tyndale had the temerity to contemplate translating the New Testament into English. But if people could actually read the Bible in their own language instead of arcane Latin, they could form their own, independent religious views. They might conceive of their own private unintermediated line to God. This was a challenge to the job security of Roman Catholic priests. When Tyndale tried to publish his translation, he was hounded and pursued all over Europe. Eventually he was captured, garroted, and then, for good measure, burned at the stake. His copies of the New Testament (which a century later became the basis of the exquisite King James translation) were then hunted down house-to-house by armed posses—Christians piously defending Christianity by preventing other Christians from knowing the words of Christ. Such a cast of mind, such a climate of absolute confidence that knowledge should be rewarded by torture and death were unlikely to help those accused of witchcraft.

Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has, with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth century. In the last judicial execution of witches in England a woman and her nine-year-old daughter were hanged. Their crime was raising a rainstorm by taking their stockings off. In our time, witches and djinns are found as regular fare in children’s entertainment, exorcism of demons is still practiced by the Roman Catholic and other churches, and the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic practices of another. We still use the word “pandemonium” (literally, all demons). A crazed and violent person is still said to be demonic. (Not until the eighteenth century was mental illness no longer generally ascribed to supernatural causes; even insomnia had been considered a punishment inflicted by demons.) More than half of Americans tell pollsters they “believe” in the Devil’s existence, and 10 percent have communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did regularly. In a 1992 “spiritual warfare manual” called
Prepare for War,
Rebecca Brown informs us that abortion and sex outside of marriage “will almost always result in demonic infestation”; that meditation, yoga and martial arts are designed so unsuspecting Christians will be seduced into worshiping demons; and that “rock music didn’t ‘just happen,’ it was a carefully masterminded plan by none other than Satan himself.” Sometimes “your loved ones are demonically bound and blinded.” Demonology is today still part and parcel of many earnest faiths.

And what is it that demons do? In the
Malleus,
Kramer and Sprenger reveal that “devils…busy themselves by interfering with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it.” Demonic artificial insemination in the Middle Ages goes back at least to St. Thomas Aquinas, who tells us in
On the Trinity
that “demons can transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the bodies of others.” His contemporary, St. Bonaventura, spells it out in a little more detail: Succubi “yield to males and receive their semen; by cunning skill, the demons preserve its potency, and afterwards, with the permission of God, they become incubi and pour it out into female repositories.” The products of these demon-mediated unions are also, when they grow up, visited by demons. A multi-generational transspecies sexual bond is forged. And these creatures, we recall, are well known to fly; indeed they inhabit the upper air.

There is no spaceship in these stories. But most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless
we
believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?

The Gifford Lectures are supposed to be on the topic of natural theology. Natural theology has long been understood to mean theological knowledge that can be established by reason and experience and experiment alone. Not by revelation, not by mystical experience, but by reason. And this is, in the long, historical sweep of the human species, a reasonably novel view. For example, we might look at the following sentence written by Leonardo da Vinci. In his notebooks he says, “Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory.”

This was an extremely heterodox remark for the early sixteenth century, when most knowledge was derived from authority. Leonardo himself had many clashes of this sort. During a trip to an Apennine mountaintop, he had discovered the fossilized remains of shellfish that ordinarily lived on the ocean floor. How did this come about? The conventional theological wisdom was that the Great Flood of Noah had inundated the mountaintops and carried the clams and oysters with it. Leonardo, remembering that the Bible says that the flood lasted only forty days, attempted to calculate whether this would be sufficient time to carry the shellfish with them, even if the mountaintops were inundated. During what state in the life cycle of the shellfish had they been deposited?—and so on. He came to the conclusion this didn’t work, and proposed a quite daring alternative; namely, that over immense vistas of geological time the mountaintops had pushed up through the oceans. And that posed all sorts of theological difficulties. But it is the correct answer, as I think it’s fair to say it has been definitively established in our time.

If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say “God.” This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn’t a real god. They didn’t believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn’t believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time.

Now, there is a constellation of properties that we generally think of when we in the West, or more generally in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, think of God. The fundamental differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are trivial compared to their similarities. We think of some being who is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, who created the universe, is responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on.

But suppose there were definitive proof of some being who had some but not all of these properties. Suppose somehow it were demonstrated that there was a being who originated the universe but is indifferent to prayer…. Or, worse, a god who was oblivious to the existence of humans. That’s very much like Aristotle’s god. Would that be God or not? Suppose it were someone who was omnipotent but not omniscient, or vice versa. Suppose this god understood all the consequences of his actions but there were many things he was unable to do, so he was condemned to a universe in which his desired ends could not be accomplished. These alternative kinds of gods are hardly ever thought about or discussed. A priori there is no reason they should not be as likely as the more conventional sorts of gods.

And the subject is further confused by the fact that prominent theologians such as Paul Tillich, for example, who gave the Gifford Lectures many years ago, explicitly denied God’s existence, at least as a supernatural power. Well, if an esteemed theologian (and he’s by no means the only one) denies that God is a supernatural being, the subject seems to me to be somewhat confused. The range of hypotheses that are seriously covered under the rubric “God” is immense. A naive Western view of God is an outsize, light-skinned male with a long white beard, who sits on a very large throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow.

Contrast this with a quite different vision of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein. And this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way. Einstein was constantly interpreting the world in terms of what God would or wouldn’t do. But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature, as I have said earlier, that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow, Peking, Mars, Alpha Centauri, the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quasars known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. It represents an unexpected regularity to the universe. It need not have been. It could have been that every province of the cosmos had its own laws of nature. It’s not apparent from the start that the same laws have to apply everywhere.

Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nat re are inapplicable.

I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God. The former definition of God is much more dubious. And there is a wide range of other sorts of gods. And in every case we have to ask, “What kind of god are you talking about, and what is the evidence that this god exists?”

Certainly if we are restricted to natural theology, it is insufficient to say, “I believe in that sort of god, because that’s what I was told when I was young,” because other people are told different things about quite different religions that contradict those of my parents. So they can’t all be right. And in fact they all may be wrong. It is certainly true that many different religions are mutually inconsistent. It’s not that they just aren’t perfect simulacrums of each other but rather that they grossly contradict each other.

I’ll give you a simple example; there are many. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, the world is a finite number of years old. By counting up the begats in the Old Testament, you can come to the conclusion that the world is a good deal less than ten thousand years old. In the seventeenth century, the archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, made a courageous but fundamentally flawed effort to count them up precisely. He came to a specific date on which God created the world. It was October 23 in 4004 B.C., a Sunday.

Now, think again of all the possibilities: worlds without gods; gods without worlds; gods that are made by preexisting gods; gods that were always here; gods that never die; gods that do die; gods that die more than once; different degrees of divine intervention in human affairs; zero, one, or many prophets; zero, one, or many saviors; zero, one, or many resurrections; zero, one, or many gods. And related questions about sacrament, religious mutilation, and scarification, baptism, monastic orders, ascetic expectations, the presence or absence of an afterlife, days to eat fish, days not to eat at all, how many afterlives you have coming to you, justice in this world or the next world or no world at all, reincarnation, human sacrifice, temple prostitution, jihads, and so forth. It’s a vast array of things that people believe. Different religions believe different things. There’s a grab bag of religious alternatives. And there are clearly more combinations of alternatives than there are religions, even though there are something like a few thousand religions on the planet today. In the history of the world, there probably were many tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, if you think back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors when the typical human community was a hundred or so people. Back then there were as many religions as there were hunter-gatherer bands, although the differences between them were probably not all that great. But nobody knows, since, unfortunately, we have virtually no knowledge left of what our ancestors for the greatest part of the tenure of humans on this planet believed, because word-of-mouth tradition is inadequate and writing had not been invented.

So, considering this range of alternatives, one thing that comes to my mind is how striking it is that when someone has a religious-conversion experience, it is almost always to the religion or one of the religions that are mainly believed in his or her community. Because there are so many other possibilities. For example, it’s very rare in the West that someone has a religious-conversion experience in which the principal deity has the head of an elephant and is painted blue. That is quite rare. But in India there is a blue, elephant-headed god that has many devotees. And seeing depictions of this god there is not so rare. How is it that the apparition of elephant gods is restricted to Indians and doesn’t happen except in places where there is a strong Indian tradition? How is that apparit ons of the Virgin Mary are common in the West but rarely occur in places in the East where there isn’t a strong Christian tradition? Why don’t the details of the religious belief cross over the cultural barriers? It is hard to explain unless the details are entirely determined by the local culture and have nothing to do with something that is externally valid.

Put another way, any preexisting predisposition to religious belief can be powerfully influenced by the indigenous culture, wherever you happen to grow up. And especially if the children are exposed early to a particular set of doctrine and music and art and ritual, then it is as natural as breathing, which is why religions make such a large effort to attract the very young.

Or let’s take another possibility. Suppose a new prophet arises who claims a revelation from God, and that revelation contravenes the revelations of all previous religions. How is the average person, someone not so fortunate as to have received this revelation personally, to decide whether this new revelation is valid or not? The only dependable way is through natural theology. You have to ask, “What is the evidence?” And it’s insufficient to say, “Well, there is this extremely charismatic person who said that he had a conversion experience.” Not enough. There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can’t all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It’s even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is.

I would like now to turn to the issue of alleged evidence or, as they’re called, proofs of the existence of God. And I will mainly spend my time on the Western proofs. But to show an ecumenical spirit, let me begin with some Hindu proofs, which in many ways are as sophisticated and certainly more ancient than the Western arguments.

Udayana, an eleventh-century logician, had a set of seven proofs of the existence of God, and I won’t mention all of them; I’ll just try to convey a sense of it. And, by the way, the kind of god that Udayana is talking about is not exactly the same, as you might imagine, as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. His god is all-knowing and imperishable but not necessarily omnipotent and compassionate.

First, Udayana reasons that all things must have a cause. The world is full of things. Something must have made those things. And this is very similar to a Western argument that we’ll come to shortly.

Secondly, an argument not heard in the West is the argument from atomic combinations. It is quite sophisticated. It says at the beginning of Creation, atoms had to be bonded with each other to make bigger things. And such a bonding of atoms always requires the activity of a conscious agent. Well, now we know that’s false. Or we know, at least, that there are laws of atomic interaction that determine how atoms bind together. It’s a subject called chemistry. And you might say that this is due to the intervention of a deity but it does not require the direct intervention of a deity. All the deity has to do is establish the laws of chemistry and retire.

Third is an argument from the suspension of the world. The world isn’t falling, as is clear by just looking out. We’re not hurtling through space, apparently, and therefore something is holding the world up, and that something is God. Well, this is a quite natural view of things. It’s connected with the idea that we are stationary and at the center of the universe, a misapprehension that all peoples all over the world have had. In fact we are falling at a terrific rate of speed in orbit around the Sun. And every year we go 2 pi times the radius of the Earth orbit. If you work that out, you’ll find it’s extremely fast.

Fourth is an argument from the existence of human skills. And this is very close to the von Daniken argument that if someone didn’t show us how to do things, we wouldn’t know how to do it. I think there’s plentiful argument against that.

Then there is the existence of authoritative knowledge separate from human skills. How would we know things that are in, for example, the Vedas, the Hindu holy books, unless God had written them? The idea that humans were able to write the Vedas was difficult for Udayana to accept.

Well, this gives a sense of these arguments and shows that there is a pervasive human wish to give a rational explanation for the existence of a God or gods, and also, I maintain, it demonstrates that these arguments are not always highly successful. Let me now go to some of the Western arguments, which may be entirely familiar to everyone, in which case I apologize.

First of all, there is the cosmological argument, which is not very different from the argument we just heard. The cosmological argument in the West essentially has to do with causality. There are things all around us; those things were caused by something else. And so, after a while, you find yourself back to remote times and causes. Well, it can’t go on forever, an infinite regress of causes, as Aristotle and later Thomas Aquinas argued, and therefore you need to come to an uncaused first cause. Something that started everything going that was not itself caused; that is, that was always there. And this is defined as God.