Watched an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey last night, Rumpole’s Return, in which Rumpole’s client, an accountant accused of murder, refuses to cooperate in his own defense because he thinks God wants him punished and has intervened with a miracle to make sure he’s found guilty.
The accountant’s innocent, of course, but he’d fled from a religious cult after discovering it was a con designed to separate the desperately lonely and lost from their money and put it in the pockets of the “master.” The master put a hit on the accountant to shut him up but the would-be assassin didn’t count on the accountant putting up a fight and wound up stabbed with his own knife.
Because there were no witnesses to the finish of the fight and the dead man was a respectable member of the aristocracy and the accountant himself is confused about what happened, the police charge the accountant with murder.
Their key evidence against him is a note found in his room that says, “Sunlight to Children of the Sun! Blood to Children of the Dark!”
The note’s in the accountant’s handwriting but apparently written in the dead man’s blood.
Since the accountant knows he didn’t use the dead man as an inkwell, he assumes that its existence is miraculous, the hand of God reaching out to collar him and throw him into prison.
And who is he to tell God He’s got the wrong man?
The accountant’s first lawyer gives the case up as hopeless but then Rumpole steps in.
Rumpole prides himself on his expertise on blood evidence.
Rumpole is able to show that there’s a simple scientific explanation for how the note appears to have been written in the dead man’s blood. There’s no miracle. God has not had His hand in it, unless you count God’s role in setting up the rules of biology and blood chemistry.
Relieved that the hand of God hasn’t been raised against him, the accountant tells his story, evidence about the dead man’s involvement with the cult is presented, and the verdict comes back, “Not guilty.”
During cross-examination, Rumpole asks the accountant how he feels knowing that no miracle had taken place.
The accountant admits that he’s disappointed.
A part of him would rather have been sent to prison for life rather than know that God hadn’t been playing games with his life.
That part of him would rather believe that God cared enough about the fact of his existence to want to make it miserable, for no particular reason, than face the possibility that God is indifferent to his existence or, more terrifying still, doesn’t exist Himself to care one way or the other.
Which, it seems to me, is a feeling the accountant shares with a lot of believers in the real world. They’d rather believe in a God who plays games with their lives than in one who is apparently indifferent.
These are the people who can be counted on to explain every disaster as God’s will.
Even when I was a devout little altar boy I had trouble with that one.
God doesn’t tell people to build towns on flood plains.
He doesn’t tell them to build slums on hills that collapse in heavy rains.
He doesn’t tell them to build slums, period.
He doesn’t tell them to build subdivisions full of houses made of cheap and substandard materials in defiance of safety codes on flat ground near coasts that are routinely pounded by hurricanes.
He doesn’t tell them to buy up Congressmen and Vice-Presidents and whole federal regulatory agencies so that they can sink their deep water drills far below the ocean floor with a near complete disregard for the safety of their employees and the ecosystem and with no plans for when something goes wrong and without the technology to stop leaks and clean up the resulting messes.
What God did do was give us the brains to know not to do these things.
Maybe because my father was a scientist and the nuns who taught at our school all had college degrees in their subjects---the nun who taught my seventh and eighth grade science classes had a master’s degree---but I grew up thinking that one of God’s great gifts to us was a world that didn’t operate by magic.
He plunked us down in a universe that operates according to rules that can be figured out and then gave us the brains to figure out those rules with.
He gave us the brains to figure out how to grow crops and husband livestock.
He gave us the brains to figure out how to make clothes to defeat the weather.
He gave us the brains to figure out how to build houses that wouldn’t fall down at the first breeze.
He gave us the brains to figure out that we could put boats in the water and row and then sail them to points far over the horizon and back again.
He gave us the brains to figure out how our own bodies work so that we could treat illnesses, fix injuries, invent vaccines to prevent diseases, cure some of those diseases, improve the general functioning of all the parts and increase the working life of those parts.
He gave us the brains to figure out how to heat and power our homes and run our machines by burning fossil fuels and he gave us the brains to figure out we need to stop doing that and figure out cheaper, more efficient, less poisonous ways of heating and powering our homes and running our machines.
What He didn’t give us was brains enough to appreciate the brains He did give us and use them all the time.
He didn’t give us enough brains to know to rely on the brains he did give us and trust to them to figure things out and not want to live in a world that was all figured out for us by others who told us that it all worked by magic and that they were the only ones who knew how to make that magic happen.
It probably wasn’t very far into human history when somebody noticed that where some seeds had been dropped in the spring plants were growing in the summer. And it probably wasn’t very long after that, possibly even immediately, somebody got the idea to see what would happen if the seeds from those plants were dropped in another spot.
It probably wasn’t very far into human history when somebody noticed that when two rocks are struck together in the vicinity of some dried leaves those leaves catch fire.
And it probably wasn’t very far into human history when somebody who liked to spend time watching the night sky noticed that the stars moved in regular and repeating patterns, that relationships within groups of them were fixed, and that those patterns and relationships were the same way over there as they were over here, and if you kept your eye on them when you were out walking at night you could get from here to way over there and back again without getting lost.
Some of those somebodies were eager to share their discoveries with everybody else in their tribe or village.
They were the first scientists and engineers.
But many of those somebodies liked the awestruck look on people’s faces when they performed the “magic” that their discoveries allowed and they decided to keep the explanations to themselves and let people believe they had special and secret powers.
They were the first priests.
For some reason, over the course of human history, most people have preferred to be ruled by the priests than be guided by the scientists.
They have preferred to trust in the magical powers of self-appointed authorities than in the brains that their God or gods gave them.
They have preferred to believe that the world works by magic and not that it just works.
They have preferred to believe, for example, that volcanoes blow their tops whenever a god gets angry because the people haven’t been obedient enough to the priests than that they blow up because of geophysical forces that can be figured out and predicted and if you spend the money on volcano monitors you can know when a volcano is working its way towards an eruption and tell people living around it to get the hell out of the way.
They have preferred to believe, for another example, that poisoned oceans will clean themselves up if everybody gets together to pray and so they don’t have to hold anybody in a nice suit accountable for the poisoning or pay out of pocket for the clean up or give up relying so much on burning fossil fuels to run their machines and so don’t have to keep poisoning the oceans and the air.
They have preferred to believe that horrors and miseries that have been caused by their rulers’ negligence, greed, incompetence, and fecklessness or by the greed, incompetence, stupidity, and sociopathic recklessness of thieves and vandals in nice suits are their own fault and they are being justly punished for not being obedient enough to the priests.
They have preferred to believe in an irritable, vindictive, capricious, and often malicious God who cares about their existence at least enough to want to play games with them and make them miserable rather than one who says, “I gave you the brains, use them.”
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I’m not much of a believer anymore. I can’t claim to be an atheist because I backslide all the time. I’ll find myself believing in God at least to the point of being mad at Him for not existing. But when I did believe I believed that He had given us as His first and most important commandment, Come find me, and that the way to look for him was through applying our brains to figure out how His universe works---I believed that scientists more than priests were doing what He wanted us to do and a rocket to the moon meant more to Him than a thousand novenas.
Apparently, Plato would have agreed with me.
Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund says that even if they aren’t believers themselves most scientists aren’t hostile to religion.
PZ Myers is one scientist who is, and he’s glad to explain why.
Sean Carroll says it’s time to let go:
I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.
Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.
Speaking of angry gods causing volcanoes to erupt, etc. Jerry Falwell's take on 911 comes to mind. And more tragic than his statements (in this the 21st century!), were the millions who chose to embrace that bigoted voodoo.
Brilliant post, Lance!
Posted by: scribbler50 | Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 10:41 AM
We will meet and talk, brother, we will surely meet and talk.
Lance, you're ignoring the immense contribution of social power that is accumulated by the "priests" through interpersonal interaction (friendliness, busybodiness, caring and empathetic gestures, mentorship, and all manner of "non-scientific" schmoozing (if you were a scientist, playing the game of peer review, you would understand those scare quotes)). The magic act is just a tactic for consolidating that power. If we were all lone individuals, roaming about our territory in isolation, then we would all be empiricists and the priests wouldn't exist (and libertarian dogma wouldn't be so hopelessly unrealistic). But we are social animals and we are busybodies to the very core of our being. And most of us will put our faith in a trusted friend who cares for us long before we will believe the sterile pronouncements of some social outcast in a lab coat (an authoritarian commander in a lab coat is a different story, ...for another time).
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 11:19 AM
I am a scientist and an atheist. I don't try to convince anyone not to believe in a god and I am on perfectly good terms with all kinds of religious people. I even went on mission trips with my father and some of his church members when the trip involved helping people with their everyday lives rather than trying to convert them.
But I consider religion no more useful than, say, the behavior of Star Trek or Star Wars fans at a ST/SW convention, and as meaningful. I consider dialogue with religious people about the intersection of religion and science as a total waste of time. A scientist can be religious because of the ability of humans to compartmentalize their thinking. A person is not a scientist when he is being religious and he is not religious when he is being a scientist.
Where do I fall in Ecklund's categorization?
Posted by: Mark | Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 01:30 PM
>I can’t claim to be an atheist
>because I backslide all the time.
Heh. Well said.
bn
Posted by: nothstine | Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 04:27 PM