violence.
Now that extelligence has become better organised, with such things as internet search engines to help us navigate through overwhelming quantities of information, we can look back and see the beginnings of rationality among the Egyptians and the Greeks; then to some extent among the Romans and the Hebrews; then the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Rationality, and the beginnings of science, Bacon and Descartes, began to take over from theology as a way to run life, at least for a few people – those who wrote the tracts, anyway. From steam-power and canals and trains, via the industrial revolution, this led to the modern world.
However, religions remained as a backdrop to the play. Priests were always there to give their blessings, or to curse advances in rationality. Galileo, persecuted by the Church for his belief that the Earth went round the Sun, stands for thousands of such episodes. The Catholic Church has recently admitted it was in the wrong on that occasion, though rather grudgingly, and with growing ambivalence. But what about all the others, minor and major?
Among Western people, a solid proportion are now basically rational in their approach to life and its problems, but about 30% run their lives in strict accordance with religious tenets of one kind or another. Nothing like that many regularly attend churches or synagogues, but most Muslims go to mosques. The majority don’t give the way they should live a lot of thought; they run their daily lives as a matter of habit, conditioned by whim … Is that really too pessimistic a statement? How many people get home from work, turn the television on and their minds off?
Mobile phones and the internet are helping, but the attitude to these is often closer to religion than rational: they are seen as supernatural, worked by demons, perhaps. You know what we mean, if you come from the era before mobile phones: they’re miraculous. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote: ‘Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This was the main theme of The Science of Discworld, especially in Benford’s alternative form ‘Technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced’.
Many Cambodians, especially those in the hill tribes, are animists. They believe that spirits are everywhere: in the water, the trees, the clouds. They have shamans, tribal ‘doctors’. In 2011, Ian gained an interesting insight into shamans when visiting a Cambodian village. A child was ill, and the shaman was performing a ceremony to expel bad spirits and restore her health. The interesting part was that the tribe had sent her to a conventional doctor the day before, who had put her on a course of antibiotics. Naturally, the shaman had to ratify this with the right ceremony, thereby making it possible to take the credit. The villagers presumably saw little difference between the antibiotics and the ritual – but someone in the tribe, perhaps the headman or one of his two wives, had the sense to try both. Human- and universe-centred thinking in an unholy alliance.
The world’s major religions dismiss animism on the grounds that belief in several gods – polytheism – is ridiculous. The intelligent way to go is monotheism, belief in one god. (Or, in the case of Unitarianism, belief in at most one god.) But is monotheism the great step forward that is so unquestioningly assumed?
It has a definite attraction: unification. It assigns all of the universe’s puzzling features to a single cause. Belief in one god is less off-putting than belief in dozens. It’s even consistent with Occam’s razor.
If you want to invoke Thomas Aquinas’s ontological argument for the existence of God, in his Summa Theologica, monotheism is unavoidable. There, he invites us to consider ‘the greatest conceivable being’. If it did not exist, then there would have to be a greater conceivable being: one that did exist. That surely is greater than a non-existent greatest being. So God exists, QED. Moreover, He is unique: you can’t have two greatest beings. Each would have to be greater than the other.
Logicians and mathematicians are painfully aware, however, that this argument is flawed. Before you can use a characterisation of some entity to deduce its properties, you have to provide independent proof that such an entity exists.
The classic example is a proof that the largest whole number is 1. Consider the largest whole number. Its square is at least as big, so it must equal its square. The only whole numbers like that are 0 and 1, of which 1 is larger. QED. Except, 1