Letters to a God-Daughter: Belief
My dear Susan
You asked me why it is that some people believe in God, and others do not, and why some people change their beliefs.
I have heard many explanations, but the answer is that we just don’t know.
One explanation that I think is wrong is that there is a genetic disposition towards belief in some kind. In this explanation, as Richard Dawkins explains it, belief in God is a kind of “misfire”, when out genetic program goes wrong, and that’s what causes people to believe in God.
The trouble is that there is no evidence for it. It reminds me of an author who was writing around the start of the 20th century called Rudyard Kipling. In 1902, he wrote a series of short tales for his children explaining how various creatures came to be the way they are now.
For example, the whale has a tiny throat because he swallowed a mariner, who tied a raft inside to block the whale from swallowing other men.
These stories were later published in a book called “Just So Stories”, and while they are wonderfully told - why rhinos have folds in their skin and bad tempers, how the elephant's trunk became long. how the idle camel was punished and given a hump etc – they are not the real truth about how these things happen. They are made up stories.
Richard Dawkin’s explanation seems to me to be like this: a scientific “just so story”. It makes a lot of assumptions – that there is no God – and then tries to explain why people believe there is a God anyway. That’s fine if you know the assumption is true, but if that is unproven, or even false – then the explanation is also wrong – a “Just So Story”.
Whether God exists or not is not something I think which can be proven one way or the other. But there are lots of things like this in the world. We don’t know if the whole world is just in our head, a dream, and some philosophers have pondered this – the term for it is “solipsism”. And there really is no way of proving or disproving it. It’s a bit like “The Matrix”, where what appears to be the real world turns out to be virtual reality.
I trained as a mathematician, and one of the earliest mathematicians was a Greek called Euclid. He began with simple axioms- what he saw as self-evident truths, and he developed his geometry (a mathematics of shapes) from this.
Put simply, these are:
1. Given any two points, you can draw a straight line between them (making what's called a line segment).
2. Any line segment can be made as long as you like (that is, extended indefinitely).
3. Given a point and a line segment starting at the point, you can draw a circle centred on the given point with the given line segment as its radius. Think of a fixed point, and a pencil on a piece of string turned around with the string tight to make a circle.
4. All right angles are equal to each other.
5. If you draw a line segment across two straight lines and it creates two angles on the same side which add to less than two right angles, then those two straight lines intersect. (This axiom is equivalent to saying that the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees.)
The fifth axiom can also be re-written as “Through a given point, only one line can be drawn parallel to a given line.”, or more popularly, "parallel lines never meet".
Through history, mathematics have striven to see if the fifth axiom can be derived from the other four, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that it was realised that if you changed the fifth one, you could develop other kinds of geometry, in which space was curved.
This may seem very strange, but in fact Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggested that space was curved or distorted by gravity, and light could curve around an object with a lot of gravity, such as the sun. Einstein’s universe is a kind of non-Euclidean universe. And there are others, which may or may not exist, including a circular one shaped like the earth.
While we can test Einstein’s theory, there are lots of other matters such as the world being real where we have no easy way of testing our ideas. I think belief in God is like that. We can choose the axiom that God exists, or the axiom that God does not exist, and look at the world in two different ways.
But to say “I believe in God” suggests that we know what we mean by that, and that is more complicated than you might think. Different people have different understandings of what that might mean, and in my next letter, I will look at how complicated that is, and what we mean by belief. But here are a few pointers.
Belief in God is more like believing the world is real than believing that dinosaurs existed, and rather like when we find that art moves us, or music lifts our spirits, it is not something that can be simply expressed in propositions, as if we were unfeeling machines.
Belief in God is not just intellectual, and in a way it is rather like love or friendship, where we know about someone but emotions also come into play. It would be a strange world in which we only interacted with other people as if they were machines!
You asked me why it is that some people believe in God, and others do not, and why some people change their beliefs.
I have heard many explanations, but the answer is that we just don’t know.
One explanation that I think is wrong is that there is a genetic disposition towards belief in some kind. In this explanation, as Richard Dawkins explains it, belief in God is a kind of “misfire”, when out genetic program goes wrong, and that’s what causes people to believe in God.
The trouble is that there is no evidence for it. It reminds me of an author who was writing around the start of the 20th century called Rudyard Kipling. In 1902, he wrote a series of short tales for his children explaining how various creatures came to be the way they are now.
For example, the whale has a tiny throat because he swallowed a mariner, who tied a raft inside to block the whale from swallowing other men.
These stories were later published in a book called “Just So Stories”, and while they are wonderfully told - why rhinos have folds in their skin and bad tempers, how the elephant's trunk became long. how the idle camel was punished and given a hump etc – they are not the real truth about how these things happen. They are made up stories.
Richard Dawkin’s explanation seems to me to be like this: a scientific “just so story”. It makes a lot of assumptions – that there is no God – and then tries to explain why people believe there is a God anyway. That’s fine if you know the assumption is true, but if that is unproven, or even false – then the explanation is also wrong – a “Just So Story”.
Whether God exists or not is not something I think which can be proven one way or the other. But there are lots of things like this in the world. We don’t know if the whole world is just in our head, a dream, and some philosophers have pondered this – the term for it is “solipsism”. And there really is no way of proving or disproving it. It’s a bit like “The Matrix”, where what appears to be the real world turns out to be virtual reality.
I trained as a mathematician, and one of the earliest mathematicians was a Greek called Euclid. He began with simple axioms- what he saw as self-evident truths, and he developed his geometry (a mathematics of shapes) from this.
Put simply, these are:
1. Given any two points, you can draw a straight line between them (making what's called a line segment).
2. Any line segment can be made as long as you like (that is, extended indefinitely).
3. Given a point and a line segment starting at the point, you can draw a circle centred on the given point with the given line segment as its radius. Think of a fixed point, and a pencil on a piece of string turned around with the string tight to make a circle.
4. All right angles are equal to each other.
5. If you draw a line segment across two straight lines and it creates two angles on the same side which add to less than two right angles, then those two straight lines intersect. (This axiom is equivalent to saying that the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees.)
The fifth axiom can also be re-written as “Through a given point, only one line can be drawn parallel to a given line.”, or more popularly, "parallel lines never meet".
Through history, mathematics have striven to see if the fifth axiom can be derived from the other four, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that it was realised that if you changed the fifth one, you could develop other kinds of geometry, in which space was curved.
This may seem very strange, but in fact Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggested that space was curved or distorted by gravity, and light could curve around an object with a lot of gravity, such as the sun. Einstein’s universe is a kind of non-Euclidean universe. And there are others, which may or may not exist, including a circular one shaped like the earth.
While we can test Einstein’s theory, there are lots of other matters such as the world being real where we have no easy way of testing our ideas. I think belief in God is like that. We can choose the axiom that God exists, or the axiom that God does not exist, and look at the world in two different ways.
But to say “I believe in God” suggests that we know what we mean by that, and that is more complicated than you might think. Different people have different understandings of what that might mean, and in my next letter, I will look at how complicated that is, and what we mean by belief. But here are a few pointers.
Belief in God is more like believing the world is real than believing that dinosaurs existed, and rather like when we find that art moves us, or music lifts our spirits, it is not something that can be simply expressed in propositions, as if we were unfeeling machines.
Belief in God is not just intellectual, and in a way it is rather like love or friendship, where we know about someone but emotions also come into play. It would be a strange world in which we only interacted with other people as if they were machines!
That is why the word "faith" is perhaps better than "belief". But I will explore that more in my next letter.
Your affectionate Godfather
Tony
Your affectionate Godfather
Tony
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1 comment:
One small quibble:
but it wasn’t until the 20th century that it was realised that if you changed the fifth one, you could develop other kinds of geometry, in which space was curved.
You mean 19th. Bolyai, Lobachevsky, Riemann and Poincare were all working in this space before 1900 - in the case of the first two, as early as the 1820s.
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