From end of the World Blues-Ian McEwan: Ultimately apocalyptic belief is a function of faith, that luminous inner conviction that needs no recourse to evidence. It’s customary to pose against immoveable faith, the engines of reason, but in this instance I would prefer another delightful human impulse, curiosity, the hallmark of mental freedom. Organised religion has always had, and I put this mildly, a troubled relationship with curiosity. Islam’s distrust at least in the past 200 years is best expressed by its attitude to those whose faith falls away, to apostates who are drawn to other religions or to none at all. In recent times, in 1975 the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Bin Baz in a fatwa quoted by (inaudible) ruled as follows, “Those who claim that the earth is round and moving round the sun are apostates and their blood can be shed and their property can be taken in the name of God”. Ten years later he did finally rescind this judgment you’ll be relieved to hear. Mainstream Islamic routinely prescribes punishment for apostates that range from ostracism to beatings to death. To enter one of the many websites where Muslim apostates anonymously exchange views is to encounter a world of brave and terrified men and women who have succumbed to their disaffection or their intellectual curiosity and Christians should not feel smug. The first commandment on pain of death if we were to take the matter literally, is “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. In the 4th Century, St Augustine put the matter well for Christianity and its view prevailed for a long time. He wrote, “There is another form of temptation even more fraught with danger, this is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature which are beyond our understanding which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”. And yet it is curiosity, scientific curiosity, human curiosity that has delivered us genuine testable knowledge of the world and contributed to our understanding of our place within it and our nature and our condition. I would argue that this knowledge has a beauty of its own and it can be terrifying. We are barely beginning to grasp the implications of what we have relatively recently learned. And what exactly have we learned. I’m drawing here and adapting somewhat an essay Steven Pinker wrote for his ideal of a university. Among other things we have learned that our planet is a minute speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate commonsense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and small; that precious and widely held beliefs when subjected to empirical tests are often cruelly falsified but we cannot create energy or use it without loss. As things stand after more than a century of direct or indirect research in a number of fields we have no evidence at all that the future can be predicted or projects any traces into the presence. Better to look directly to the past, to its junkyard of unrealised futures for it is curiosity about history that should give end-time believers reasonable pause when they reflect that they stand on a continuum, a long and unvarying thousand year tradition that has fantasised imminent salvation for themselves and perdition for the rest. On one of the countless end-time rapture sites that litter the Web, there is a section devoted to frequently asked questions. One is, when the Lord comes, what will happen to the children of other faiths? The answer is, you’ll be glad to know, is staunch. Ungodly parents only bring judgment to their children. In the light of this, one might conclude that end-time faith is probably immune to the lessons of history as it is to fundamental human decency. If we do destroy ourselves, we can assume that the general reaction will be terror and grief with the pointlessness of it all rather than rapture. Within living memory, we have come very close to extinguishing our civilisation when in October 1962 Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba confronted a blockade by the US Navy and the world waited to discover whether Kruschev would order his convoy home. It is not for nothing that one of the symptoms in a developing psychosis noted and described by psychiatrists is “religiosity.” Have we really reached the stage in public affairs when it really is no longer too obvious to say that all the evidence of the past and all the promptings of our precious rationality suggests that our future is not fixed? We have no reason to believe that there are dates inscribed in heaven or hell, we may yet destroy ourselves, we may scrape through. Confronting that uncertainty is the obligation of our maturity, our only spur to wise action. The believers should know in their hearts by now that even if they are right and there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is as all the daily tragedies, all the dead children attest, a very reluctant intervener. The rest of us in the absence of any evidence to the contrary know that it is highly improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, it hardly matters who is wrong, there will be no-one to save us but ourselves.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 05:28:01 +0000
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