Outgrowing God Page 4

  Have you got it? Let me give you a hint. If the secret number had been eight, the father would have shouted something like ‘Do you think you can do it, son?’ If the secret number was three, it would have been ‘Got it, son?’ If the number was four, ‘Got it yet, son?’ But my point is that, even if the conjuror is a really good conjuror (unlike that father and son team) and you simply cannot begin to guess how the trick is done, it’s still a trick. There’s no reason to resort to ‘it must be a miracle’. Think like Hume.

  Let’s apply Hume’s reasoning to some famous conjuring tricks, renaming the two ‘Possibilities’ as ‘Miracles’.

  Miracle 1: The conjuror really did saw the woman in half. Penn and Teller really did catch the bullets from each other’s pistols in their teeth. David Copperfield really did make the Eiffel Tower disappear. James Randi really did penetrate a patient’s abdomen with his bare hands and haul out the guts.

  Miracle 2: Your eyes deceived you, even though you were watching the conjuror’s every move like a hawk, so it would seem ‘miraculous’ for you to miss anything.

  I think you have to agree that ‘Miracle’ 2, however much you want to protest, is less of a miracle. You have to prefer the lesser miracle and conclude, with Hume, that Miracle 1 never happened. You were deceived.

  Sometimes Miracle 1, the allegedly real miracle, seems to be confirmed by the sheer number of witnesses. Perhaps the most famous example is the Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima.

  In 1917, at Fatima in Portugal, three children claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. One of them, Lucia, said Mary had spoken to her and had promised to return to the same spot on the 13th of each month until October, when she would do a miracle to prove who she was. Rumours spread all around Portugal. And on 13 October a huge crowd of seventy thousand gathered to witness the miracle. Sure enough, according to witnesses, it happened. The Virgin Mary appeared to Lucia (nobody else), who pointed excitedly towards the sun. Then—

  the sun seemed to tear itself from the heavens and come crashing down upon the horrified multitude…Just when it seemed that the ball of fire would fall upon and destroy them, the miracle ceased, and the sun resumed its normal place in the sky, shining forth as peacefully as ever.

  Roman Catholics took the story seriously (a lot of them still do). They declared it an official miracle. Pope John Paul II survived an assassination attempt in 1981. He believed he was saved by ‘Our Lady of Fatima’ who ‘guided the bullet’ so it didn’t kill him. Not just ‘Our Lady’ but specifically ‘Our Lady of Fatima’. Does this mean Catholics believe in lots of different ‘Our Ladies’? Are they even more polytheistic than I suggested in Chapter 1? Not just one Mary but lots of Marys, one for each appearance in some hillside or cave or grotto.

  In 2017 Bishop Dominick Lagonegro, Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of New York, preached a sermon in which he quoted his aunt, who had been an eye-witness at Fatima. By her account, the sun

  went up and down and turned back and forth, almost as if it were dancing. ‘Who else but the Blessed Mother could make the sun dance,’ [Bishop Lagonegro] laughed. But then it got big and ‘started coming to the earth,’ the bishop continued. ‘My aunt recalled that “it looked as if everyone’s clothes were bright yellow from the sun”. It continued to fall to the earth for a few minutes,’ he said, telling her story, ‘and then stopped’, going back into its orbit.

  Its ‘orbit’? What ‘orbit’ would that be? And it ‘continued to fall to the earth for a few minutes’. For a few minutes! Let’s do a Hume on the case.

  Miracle 1: The sun really did move about the sky and then start to come crashing down towards the crowd, moving perceptibly towards them for several minutes.

  Miracle 2: Seventy thousand witnesses were mistaken, or lied, or were misreported.

  Miracle 2 really does seem like a miracle, doesn’t it? Seventy thousand people all had the same hallucination at the same time? Or all told the same lie? Surely that would be a gigantic miracle? So it would seem. But consider the alternative, Miracle 1. If the sun really had moved, wouldn’t it have been seen by everybody on the daylight side of the world? Not just the people gathered outside a single village in Portugal? And if it really had moved (or the Earth had moved so that it looked as though the sun had moved), it would have been a catastrophe which would have destroyed the world if not all the other planets too. Especially if it ‘fell’ for ‘a few minutes’!

  So, following Hume, we choose the lesser miracle and conclude that the famous miracle of Fatima never happened.

  Actually, I was bending over backwards to make ‘Miracle’ 2 seem more miraculous than it really was. Were there really seventy thousand people there? What is the historical evidence for such a large number? In our own time such numbers are often exaggerated. Donald Trump claimed that one and a half million people attended his inauguration as President. Photographic evidence shows that to be a massive exaggeration. Even if seventy thousand did converge on Fatima in October 1917, how many of them really claimed to see the sun move? Maybe only a few did, and the number was inflated by the Chinese Whispers effect. If you stare at the sun, as Lucia told them to (don’t try it, by the way, it’s bad for your eyesight), you might well hallucinate a slight movement. Then the size of that movement, as well as the number who saw it, could be exaggerated by the Chinese Whispers effect.

  But the important point is that we don’t need to bother with those considerations. Even if a full seventy thousand people really did claim to see the sun move and come crashing down, we know for certain it didn’t really happen because the planet wasn’t destroyed and nobody outside Fatima saw it move. The alleged miracle certainly never happened and the Roman Catholic Church was very silly to grant it official authentication.

  Incidentally, a similar miracle is reported in the Book of Joshua. Maybe this was what inspired Lucia to invent hers. The Israelite leader Joshua was having one of his many battles with rival tribes and he needed a bit more time to secure his victory. What to do? The obvious solution! You could talk to God directly in those days. All Joshua had to do was ask God to postpone nightfall by making the sun stand still in the sky. God obliged and the sun stood still, providing Joshua with the extra-long day he needed to win his battle. Obviously this miracle never actually happened. No serious scholar thinks it did. But there are fundamentalist Christians who yearn to believe that every single word of the Bible is literally true. And you can find fundamentalist websites that desperately twist and turn to find ways to make the miracle of Joshua’s long day true.

  The Book of Joshua, of course, is one of the books of the Old Testament. We now turn to the Old Testament itself, and ask whether any of its stories are true.

  *Carbon dating is a clever scientific technique for dating archaeological specimens; I explained how it works in The Magic of Reality (London, Bantam Press, 2011).

  In Chapter 2 I talked mainly about the New Testament. Dealing with more recent times than the Old, it’s the Bible’s best shot at being history. I won’t spend long on the Old Testament. It takes us further into the shadowy realms of myth and legend, and biblical scholars don’t take it seriously as history. But myths are interesting and important in their own right, and this chapter will use the Old Testament as a starting point to take a look at myths and how they start.

  Abraham was the original patriarch of the Jewish people and founder of the three main monotheistic religions in the world today – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But did he really exist? As with Achilles and Hercules, as with Robin Hood and King Arthur, it’s impossible to know, and there’s no positive reason to think he did. On the other hand, Abraham’s existence is not an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. Unlike Joshua’s long day or Jesus’s resurrection, or Jonah living three days in the belly of a big fish, Abraham’s existence – or not – is no big deal. There just isn’t any evidence, one way or the other. Same with King David, anot
her great hero of Jewish history. David made no impact either on archaeology or on written history outside the Bible. This suggests that, if he existed at all, he was probably a minor local chieftain rather than the great king of legend and song.

  Talking of song, the Song of ‘Solomon’ (also known as the Song of Songs, which is a better title, for it certainly wasn’t written by King Solomon) is the only sexy book in the Bible. It’s pretty surprising the Council of Nicaea allowed it in the official canon. Here’s something rather funny about it. The King James Bible, the most famous English translation, has commentary lines at the top of each page. The Song is a wonderful poetic expression of sexual love between a woman and a man. But what does the Christian commentary say at the top of the page? ‘The mutual love of Christ and his church.’ Priceless. And utterly typical of the way theologians think: ignore what is actually being said, and pretend it was all intended to be a symbol or a metaphor.

  There’s some beautiful English writing in the King James Bible. Ecclesiastes is at least as good as the Song of Songs, although its poetry is bleak and world-weary. If you read nothing else in the Bible, I recommend those two books, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. But make sure you read the King James version. Translations into modern English just don’t work. As poetry, that is. They do work if you want to get a truer idea of what the original Hebrew said. And that’s likely to help you understand things that religious teachers might prefer you not to understand! If you don’t know what I mean by that, wait till Chapter 4.

  Those two favourite books of mine, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, don’t pretend to be history. Other books of the Old Testament do, for example Genesis, Exodus, Kings and Chronicles. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are called the Pentateuch by Christians, and the Torah by Jews. Moses is traditionally supposed to have written them, but no serious scholar thinks he did. As with the stories of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, or King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, there may be some obscure fragments of truth buried in the Pentateuch, but there’s nothing you could call real history.

  The great ancestral myth of the Jewish people is their captivity in Egypt and their heroic escape to the Promised Land. That was Israel, the land flowing with milk and honey, the land God said should be theirs and for which they fought the tribes who already lived there. The Bible obsessively repeats this legend. And the leader who is supposed to have led the Jews out of Egypt to the promised land was Moses, the same Moses who, they believed, was the author of the first five books of the Bible.

  You would think that such a big event as the enslavement of an entire nation, and its mass migration generations later, would have left traces in the archaeological record and in the written histories of Egypt. Unfortunately there is no evidence of either kind. No evidence of anything like a Jewish captivity in Egypt. It probably never happened, although the legend is burned deep into Jewish culture. When the Bible mentions either God or Moses, their name is likely to be followed by ‘who brought you out of Egypt’ or some equivalent phrase.

  The alleged escape from Egypt is remembered by Jews every year in the Feast of the Passover. Fiction or fact, it’s not a pretty story. God wanted the Egyptian king, the Pharaoh, to set the Israelite slaves free. You might have thought it would be within God’s powers to change Pharaoh’s mind miraculously. He deliberately did the exact reverse, as we shall see. But first he put pressure on Pharaoh by sending a series of ten plagues to Egypt. Each plague was nastier than the last, until eventually Pharaoh gave up and freed the slaves. Among them were a plague of frogs, a plague of painful boils, a plague of locusts, and darkness for three days. The final plague was the clincher, and it’s this one the Passover commemorates. God killed the eldest child in every Egyptian household, but ‘passed over’ the houses of Jews, sparing their children. The Israelites were told to paint their doorposts with lambs’ blood, so the angel of death could tell which houses to avoid on the child-slaughtering spree. You’d think that God, being all-wise and all-knowing, might have been able to tell which house was which. But perhaps the author thought the lambs’ blood would add a nice splash of colour to the story. Anyway, that was the legendary Passover event which is still celebrated by Jews everywhere.

  Actually, Pharaoh had been on the point of giving up and letting the Israelites go earlier, and that would have been nice because all those innocent children would have been saved. But God deliberately used his magic powers to make Pharaoh obstinate, so that God could send some more plagues, as ‘signs’ to show the Egyptians who was boss. Here’s what God said to Moses:

  But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites. And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it. (Exodus 7: 2–3)

  Poor Pharaoh. God ‘hardened his heart’ in order to make him refuse to free the Israelites, specifically so that God could do his Passover trick. God even told Moses in advance that he would make Pharaoh say no. And the blameless firstborn children of the Egyptians were all killed as a result. By God. As I said, it’s not a pretty story and we can be thankful it never really happened.

  Much more authentic than the alleged captivity of the Jews in Egypt is their later captivity in Babylon. There’s plenty of evidence for that. In 605 BC, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and carried off many of the Jews. About 60 years later, Babylon itself was conquered by the Persian king Cyrus the Great. Cyrus permitted the Jews to return home, which some of them did. It was during or around the time of the Babylonian exile that most of the Old Testament books were written. So, if you thought the stories of Moses or David, Noah or Adam, were written by people with up-to-date knowledge of what allegedly happened, think again. Most of the apparent history in the Old Testament was written much more recently – between 600 and 500 BC, many centuries after the events they purport to describe.

  We get clues to when the Old Testament was actually written from anachronisms in the text. An anachronism is something that crops up in the wrong time, say when an actor in a costume drama about ancient Rome forgets to take his wristwatch off. Well, here’s a nice anachronism in the book of Genesis. Genesis says Abraham owned camels. But archaeological evidence shows that the camel was not domesticated until many centuries after Abraham is supposed to have died. Camels had, though, been domesticated by the time of the captivity in Babylon, which is when the book of Genesis was actually written.

  What, then, can we say about the myths from the beginning of Genesis? Adam and Eve? Or Noah’s Ark? The Noah story comes directly from a Babylonian myth, the legend of Utnapishtim – which isn’t surprising, since Genesis was written during the Babylonian captivity. The Utnapishtim story in turn comes from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Arguably the world’s oldest work of literature, it was written two thousand years earlier than the Noah story. The Sumerians were polytheists. Their flood legend says the gods couldn’t get to sleep because humans made so much noise. Fed up with the racket, the gods decided to drown everybody in a great flood. But one of the gods, the water god Enki, took pity on a man called Utnapishtim (Ziusudra in an older version) and warned him to build a huge boat, to be called ‘The Preserver of Life’. The rest of the story is pretty much the same as the Noah version: animals of every kind taken on board, a dove, a swallow and a raven released from the ark to see if there was any land coming up, and so on, including the spectacular rainbow finish. It was another god, Ishtar, who put up the rainbow as a sign that there would be no more catastrophic floods.

  Greek mythology has a related story. Zeus, the king of the gods, furiously decided to put an end to humankind. He flooded the world and drowned everybody. Everybody, that is, except one couple, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha. They survived in a floating chest which even
tually came to rest on Mount Parnassus. All around the world, there are similar myths of a great flood in which only one family survived. In the Aztec legend from ancient Mexico, the sole survivors, Coxcox and his wife, floated in a hollow tree trunk and finally, like Noah, landed on a mountaintop and descended to repopulate the world.

  In blissful ignorance of the story’s polytheistic roots in Babylon, Bible-believing Christians in Kentucky raised the (tax-free) money to build a gigantic wooden Noah’s Ark, which people pay to visit. You’d think they might have given a bit more thought to the story. If the tale of Noah were true, the places where we find each kind of animal should show a pattern of spreading out from the spot where the biblical Ark finally came to rest when the flood subsided – Mount Ararat in Turkey. Instead, what we actually see is that each continent and island has its own unique animals: marsupials in Australia, South America and New Guinea, anteaters and sloths in South America, lemurs in Madagascar. What were those people in Kentucky thinking? Did they imagine that Mr and Mrs Kangaroo came bounding out of the ark and hopped all the way to Australia without having any children on the way? Plus Mr and Mrs Wombat, Mr and Mrs Tasmanian Wolf, Mr and Mrs Tasmanian Devil, Mr and Mrs Bilby and lots of other marsupials not found anywhere except Australia. Mr and Mrs Lemur – all 101 pairs of them – made a beeline for Madagascar and nowhere else! And did Mr and Mrs Sloth crawl – oh, so slowly – all the way to South America? In fact, of course, all the animals, and their fossils, are exactly where they should be according to the principles of evolution. This was one of the main pieces of evidence Charles Darwin used. Ancestral marsupial mammals evolved separately in Australia over millions of years, branching into lots of different marsupials – kangaroos, koalas, opossums, quokkas, phalangers and so on. A different set of mammals evolved in South America, branching, over millions of years, into sloths, anteaters, armadillos and their kind. Yet another set in Africa. Yet another set, including all the lemurs, in Madagascar. And so on.