Essay Competition: Religion and Delusion by Donald Rooum

This essay tied for third place in the Mary Evans Picture Library competition. It appears here unedited.

For the purpose this essay, religion is defined as belief that the natural world is controlled by supernatural forces, which may be influenced by humans. Mary Evans and many other people, including myself, are of the opinion that religion is absurd and irrational, and that truly religious people are deluded.

This is not to say that everyone who claims allegiance to a religion is deluded. There are many reasons, other than genuine belief, for declaring such allegiance. Children commonly believe what they are told by people they trust, and will recite religious doctrines and stories without understanding their significance. Some adults just carry on reciting what they learned as children without thinking about the beliefs. Others join in religious groups without believing, because they suppose a religious group has beneficial practical effects, or for other social and expedient reasons, and these include some who would lose their livelihoods if they admitted to their unbelief.

A deluded belief, religious or otherwise, is not only absurd and irrational, but also sincere and genuine.

Some beliefs which are not deluded

We cannot say a belief is deluded, simply because we disagree with it. Sometimes, beliefs which are thought to be deluded are true.

In ‘The Country of the Blind’, a story by H.G. Wells, a traveller finds himself in an isolated village where everyone is blind and the notion of sight has been forgotten, after generations of inherited blindness. It is said that “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”, but the traveller finds that in the country of the blind, the sighted person is thought to suffer from delusions.

Wells’s traveller knows that he is not deluded, because he comes from a world where most people are sighted. But imagine your sighted self born into a world where everybody else is blind. There would be no language concerning sight, so how could you describe the sensation? You may perhaps describe the synaesthetic sensations which accompany sight: a large black shape on a white ground as “heavy”, a bright red as “hot”, particular colour combinations as “sour” or “dirty”, but this would make no sense to your audience. Some people might suppose that, because you speak apparent nonsense, you must be in contact with supernatural powers, and you might agree with them, but in fact your ability would be natural, though unique.

Most humans are sensitive to a narrow range of electro-magnetic vibrations (light), atmospheric vibrations (sound), and molecular vibrations (temperature), but some are not. Perhaps there are other kinds of vibration, to which some humans are sensitive but most are not. Some fishes sense electrical fields. If there are humans who can also sense electrical fields, they have a sense which is unusual, but not in any way supernatural. The term “extra-sensory perception” seems to be an oxymoron, since to perceive something it to sense it, but a “sixth sense”, the ability to perceive things which most people do not perceive, is not impossible.

A hugely expensive machine, the Large Hadron Collider, has been built near Geneva in the hope of demonstrating the existence of the Higgs boson, a type of elementary particle which is supposed to supply mass to other particles. Less expensive studies have been underway for decades, in the hope of demonstrating the reality of events collectively called ‘paranormal’, such as telepathy, psychokinesis, remote viewing, dowsing, the continued existence of part of a person after the body has died, sprites, fairies and dæmons.

The Higgs boson is sometimes called ‘the God particle’, but proof of its existence will not prove the truth of religious belief. Paranormal phenomena are sometimes called ‘supernatural’, but the belief that paranormal events occur is secular opinion, not religious conviction. Animal magnetism was thought to be paranormal until it was shown to be normal hypnotism, so it may be that the word ‘paranormal’ excludes anything whose existence can be demonstrated, but that does not make it equivalent to ‘sacred’.

The saying “You can’t prove a negative”, may be true in some abstract philosophical sense, but at the common-sense level, it is not unusual to prove a negative. A child suspects that there is a wolf under the bed, the parent searches under the bed with a torch, and all agree that there is no wolf there. A prosecution alleges that the accused had part of a brick in his pocket, a forensic scientist testifies that there is no brick dust in the pocket, and the court accepts that the prosecution is false. A peculiarity in the orbit of Mercury was attributed to a hypothetical planet Vulcan, telescopes were trained on the places where Vulcan might be seen, and as it was not seen it was deemed not to exist. In general, if we look for something in the right place and do not find it, we have proved a negative. We may carry on searching for the paranormal, because we do not quite know where to look for it. But if a man sincerely claims that he is Napoleon, and there is no evidence to support his claim, he may properly be diagnosed as deluded.

Scientists and secular-minded philosophers, in ancient and Renaissance times, accepted the existence of objects like sprites and dæmons, living things which cannot (usually) be detected by sight or sound. They were thought of as natural objects, not supernatural. As Iamblichus (245-326) put it, ‘The governance of Gods is all-embracing and unrestricted. That of Dæmons is limited in time and place’. Socrates, in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, speaks of a “daimonion” which warns him against mistakes, but never tells him what to do. The Renaissance scientist Paracelsus (1493-1541) classified nature spirits, or “elementals”, according to the elements which they inhabited: gnomes, undines, salamanders, and sylphs, inhabiting respectively earth, water, fire, and air. Paracelsus argued that miner’s lung was caused by dust in the air, and not by angry gnomes, as rival physicians claimed.

Modern scientists do not study sprites and dæmons. Ancient scientists, being members of the slave-owning class, did only mental work and left the physical work to others. Consequently, they were brilliant in astronomy and geometry, but in the study of living things, where they relied on reports from others, they were assiduous but unreliable. Aristotle’s History of Animals was accepted as the standard zoological authority two thousand years after his death, but is not without errors. He stated, for instance, that women have fewer teeth than men, which is evidence that he did not personally count anyone’s teeth. They included sprites and dæmons in their compilations along with other things they heard about.

A change in scientific practice came with younger contemporaries of Paracelsus, such as Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) who ruled that students of anatomy should not leave servants to dissect cadavers, but do it themselves, and Ulisse Aldrovandus (1522-1605) who began the practice of personally collecting and preserving specimens. Modern biology ignores sprites and dæmons, not because they do not exist, but because, even if they exist, they cannot be checked. Disappointingly, the spirit collection in the Natural History Museum is not a collection of spirits, but a collection of corpses preserved in alcohol.

Some religious delusions

The word ‘universe’ is used with at least three different meanings: (sense 1) everything including God, in the title of the Roman Catholic periodical The Universe; (sense 2) the space-time continuum we inhabit, in ‘the universe is about 14 billion years old’; and (sense 3) a particular set of physical constants, in ‘the multiverse is the hypothetical set of possible universes’. Multiple meanings may cause arguments at cross-purposes, as in ‘We can’t explain the universe (sense 1)’, ‘Yes we can; the universe (sense 2) was made by God’. So the word ‘universe’ will not be used in the rest of this essay.

In mathematics, proof that something cannot be done is reckoned as good as doing it. Fermat’s last theorem, for instance, does not show how three positive integers greater than two can be made to satisfy a particular equation, but proves that it cannot be done. The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, in Human knowledge, its scope and limits (1948), sets out what may be called a philosophical theorem, a proof that it is impossible to answer the question ‘why is there anything and not nothing?’ To explain something is to describe it in terms of other things. By definition, there are no other things than the whole of existence. Therefore the whole of existence cannot be explained.

Religious believers, however, often purport to explain the whole of existence. They say that the whole of existence consists of two parts, which may be called the Creator and the created, or the sacred and the profane, or Eternity and the world, and that one part brought the other part into being. And they suffer from the delusion that they explain the whole of existence by saying it is in two parts.

Anyone who argues with religious apologists is likely to meet this delusion in some form. I offer couple of anecdotes from my own experience.

At Ramadhan, a group of smiling lads from the local mosque were handing out a leaflet, written by someone whose word they evidently respected. It summarised the complexities of the cosmos, as seen through telescopes and analysed by astrophysicists, and ended by saying this proved the existence of Allah. The idea, that Allah produces all the complexities of the physical cosmos, adds to the complexity, but the author and distributors of the leaflet evidently believe that it simplifies understanding.

On another occasion, two young men came to my door, explaining that they were from the local Anglican church, conducting a survey of religious beliefs in the locality. I told them I was an atheist. One of the young men snapped ‘That’s ridiculous! Where do you think you come from?’ I said ‘Where do you think God comes from?’ (I omitted the middle part of the argument, assuming he would be familiar with it).  He was furious, and I thought he was going to belt me, until the other chap, gently but firmly, led his poor deluded colleague away.

I have spoken with religious people who understand and agree with Russell’s philosophical theorem, but believe nevertheless that existence is divided into the Eternal Creator and the created world. This in itself is not deluded, but if a creation story is not intended as an explanation of origins, it is difficult to see the point of it. Perhaps creation myths are deluded in principle.

Many adherents of the Christian religion believe that God combines infinite power, infinite knowledge, and infinite love. Yet the world is full of pain and misery. It is part of the meaning of love, that if someone we love is in pain, and we know about the pain, and have the power to stop the pain, we will stop it. So why does the all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God allow pain and misery to continue? This question is known to theologians as ‘the Problem of Pain’.

The story in the Book of Genesis is that God created the first humans with the ability to disobey His orders, and when they made use of this ability, this made Him so angry that he imposed pain and misery on the world. So it appears that God is either not all-knowing, because He did not predict what would happen, or not all-loving, because He knew what would happen and imposed the penalty anyway. The originators of the story may have been content with this, because the God they envisioned may have been subject to errors and emotions like a human, only more powerful. But with the God of modern theologians, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, the Problem of Pain remains.

A possible solution is that believers have to think God is all-loving because he is not. God is often referred to as a King, and the subjects of kings always tell them that they are benevolent. The Roman Emperor Caligula was a capricious sadist, but it seems that every subject who spoke to him would mention that he was kind and loving, partly perhaps in the hope that this might encourage him to be kind and loving, but mostly in the knowledge that anyone who failed to mention it was in danger of horrible punishment. In the case of God, it is judicious not only to tell him that he is kind and loving, but actually to think that he is kind and loving, because he knows what you are thinking.

An intended solution to the Problem of Pain is presented by G.K. Chesterton in the last chapter of The Man who was Thursday (1908). Chesterton, a fat, wine-loving, extrovert humorist, does not conform to the conventional image of a mystic, but he was a mystic, and is now revered as such by people currently campaigning for his beatification. In Chapter 12 of The Man who was Thursday, it emerges that all the members of the anarchist central command, the Council of Days, are police spies. It looks as if the story has been told, and in the next chapter Chesterton’s famous wit gives way to unfunny whimsy, so although the book is widely read, many readers get no further than Chapter 12. Those who read on to the end, however, learn in Chapter 15 that they have been reading a mystical tract in the form of a comic adventure story.

The Council of Days are revealed to be archangels. ‘The real anarchist’, the embodiment of evil, appears and makes a speech about how much he has suffered. ‘[The Archangel] Gabriel sprang to his feet. “I see everything”, he cried, “everything there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? ... For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of Days. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer. ... No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered’.”’

In other words, the all-loving God does not use his infinite power to stop suffering, because He is involved in a competition, to decide who is most efficient at inflicting suffering. And that is intended as a solution to the Problem of Pain. Not being a mystic or a theologian, I cannot tell whether it is deluded, or just nasty.