God and Mr Fry

Thank God for Stephen Fry. Actually, let’s leave God out of it. It’s Stephen Fry himself I want to thank. When I despair at the human race, often it’s the example of his wisdom, humour and intelligence that gives me hope. If I were Galactus, he’d be the main reason I decided not to eat your planet. In this interview with Gay Byrne on RTÉ One, Mr Fry is on brilliant and blistering form. He adduces his reasons for believing that, if God exists, He is ‘monstrous, evil, capricious, mean-minded, and stupid’.

Let’s start with ‘if God exists’. On one level, all gods are real. I’m arm in arm with Alan Moore when he says he believes in fairies. Odin and Thor have always felt more real to me than the Biblical deities, though. Probably that kind of preference has nothing to do with the universe and everything to do with how our childhood selves related to our parents – although even that implies religion is a free choice, which can hardly be true when so many are indoctrinated into their family’s beliefs from the time they can speak.

In any case, that category of belief is not what we’re considering here. I’m not talking about a God as real as Humbert Humbert or Lizzie Bennet or Mr Toad. It’s that other reality we’re discussing now, the one that can stub your toe or launch a rocket to the Moon. Most people are uncouth in their beliefs. Their minds aren’t comfortable with the abstract. Not content with God being as real as love, truth, beauty, they want Him to be real in the way that wellington boots and wisdom teeth are real. So that’s the God we’ll talk about.

How did it all come into being? We can evoke the idea of a mind hanging in the nothingness – but minds are complex things, much more complex than suns and planets. Some metaquantum aberration, a blip inside which a quindecillion tonnes of superstring unfolded, is easier to grasp as the primum mobile and considerably more likely. But hang on there. Occam’s Razor is a guide, not a rule. I can’t be certain that atheism is more reasonable than deism, and so I simply say that I’m an agnostic.

We agreed to let God into this Gedankenexperiment. Okay, so where and why did He come into the picture? Supposedly He was needed originally to answer the question of why we are here at all. Declaring that everything exists because of God is no explanation, mind you. It just sweeps the question under the carpet of what is not known. However, this 28 billion parsec-sized parcel of spacetime – and indeed spacetime itself – may only be part of a much larger or even infinite reality, possibly with one or more cosmic intelligences in the strata from which our local reality arose. For all that I doubt it, I can’t prove our universe wasn’t created by an intelligent designer. For the sake of argument, we’re saying it was. What then can we deduce about the creator from His creation?

The God that spoke to Moses and Muhammad appears to have shared the moral code, social priorities, and knowledge of the physical world that Moses and Muhammad themselves had. But that’s not the God we’re trying to intuit from the universe around us. It’s more than far-fetched to imagine that our God would take a personal interest in one small group of people at one time in history, and then couch whatever user’s manual points He deemed important in the form of legalistic rules communicated via the local power hierarchy. Anything He has to say, He could tell all mankind unequivocally by writing it on the Moon in a metalanguage. ‘Angels spoke to me,’ is no reason to take anybody’s word for anything, whether it happened yesterday or two thousand years ago. If that’s the kind of God you’re willing to conceive of, there’s no good reason not to choose the God of the Aztecs or of the Mesopotamians. One billion people can be wrong – or right; their numbers and their conviction make no difference.

So put that aside. Suppose you had never heard any theories of God, and were just starting to look around and figure out what He might be like. For a start, if you were God, you wouldn’t build a thing like the universe in the way you would a wristwatch. You’d specify laws, the way a game designer does. You’d say the electron is a class with these attributes. Then you’d start it going: ‘Let there be plasma’ – not light, that took another 400,000 years – and you’d see what kind of a universe emerged from your rules. Maybe you’d hope for life, maybe you’d observe it as a happy accident. Or maybe life wasn’t what interested you in the first place.

Wait. Didn’t God already know everything that was to come? As an omnipotent being, He could run the entire simulation in his mind. But we don’t know that our God is omnipotent, only that He is (or was) capable of initiating the beginning of the universe and possibly setting or tweaking the laws that govern it. And a perfect simulation is indistinguishable from reality in any case. So here it is, finally, 13.8 billion years later: the thin film of water and air around a ball of rock that interests us.

Now, it’s a mistake to see all this from the top down. (That is if we insist on putting ourselves arbitrarily at ‘the top’.) We cannot make the universe in our image, we have to see it as it is – not a place of dietary and marriage rules, of ethics and prohibitions and cruel medieval punishments, but a place of simple physical processes, working away on a level more primitive than ants. The God we’re reading from the things He made seems more concerned with weevils than with evil, and quite right too. Evil is a human construct, and a clumsy one at that. How could an entity that doesn’t live in our social world even have an opinion on human morality – any more than we conceive of morality among the sparrows?

So if we start with the God of the Big Bang rather than the God of the Good Book, I can’t agree with Stephen Fry that He is monstrous and mean-minded. Ebola and earthquakes are just the way the universe is. I don’t think we could honestly expect a real creator of worlds to trouble Himself about whether one species burrows into the eyes of another species. In fact, if you take our human partiality out of the equation, it’s kind of cool. You can imagine Him thinking, ‘I set this in motion, but the emergent effects are awesome.’

Of course, Mr Fry is not answering Mr Byrne’s question from a deist perspective. He is addressing the question of what we should make of the world if the God of the Old Testament is in charge of it. This is a God we are told is concerned about human life – as well as being very bothered about what we eat, what we wear, and who we have sex with. Quite obviously such a God, if He were any more credible than a Dungeons and Dragons monster, would indeed be unworthy of respect. Fortunately mankind has had teachers like Jesus and Buddha to ameliorate primitive religious doctrine with a kinder message. But honestly, if you were properly brought up, you don’t need them to tell you anything. Our opinion about whether the universe has a creator or not has nothing to do with morality, just as the laws the police enforce have nothing to do with why I don’t commit robbery and murder.

So, like Fry, I’d reject that strict and jealous God’s offer of paradise because it would not be any paradise I’d want to live in. His bribe of an afterlife, if it were anything but an infantile dream, is deserving of mere contempt. The power to create and destroy gives no man or deity the right to enforce an ethical code. That you can only find in your own heart.