Like a lot of liberal Christians, I'm highly tickled by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett and their ilk, writers who can never leave off having a go at religion. Their neat cynicism is such a refreshing change from the pious and usually ignorant waffle that gets disgorged from your average pulpit on a Sunday - though not when I'm in it of course :) Adams, to whom I came first, always struck me as more of an agnostic than he cared to admit or perhaps was even aware. Self-professed atheist he might be, but if there was nothing in this God stuff why couldn't he leave it alone? Religious speculation punctuates the Hitchhiker books; the first Dirk Gently story surely exposes Adams' own anxieties about the afterlife or absence thereof through the Gordon Way character who is killed but doesn't know what to do next, while in the inferior sequel Norse gods are central to the plot.
I suspect that history will pronounce Pratchett's literary achievement to be greater than Adams' as it manifestly is in terms of bulk: the Discworld man has continued to publish his chronicles of Discworld at reliably regular intervals, never hindered by the writer's block that plagued Adams. Nonetheless it was Adams who blazed the trail, creating a market for comic, philosophically adult, fantasy fiction; and Pratchett, like his forerunner, also delighted in mocking religion while at the same time drawing heavily on it for themes and character traits.
One assumed that Pratchett would take his scepticism with him to the grave. Not so.
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
More, Terry, more: that's the authentic voice of contemporary scepticism, and your books are full of it. However, the article (published by the Daily Mail in June 2008) continues more earnestly.
But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should.
It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this.
He goes on to describe what is technically known as the oceanic experience (I've had one, they are sublime and unforgettable, no more mockable than Mozart or Leonardo: they feel like brief intimations of that utter, transcendent perfection otherwise known as heaven)
what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?
More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?
Me, actually - the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.
It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.
I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.
If you don't find that moving you are reading the wrong blog. I'd want to discuss that penultimate sentence with Pratchett: the oceanic experience doesn't "require" formal worship - my own was certainly not Christocentric in content, more pagan in the strict sense (but then I love the natural world) - but it may draw worship from you, you want to mark your thankfulness for the occurrence. And what it "rewards" is not so much intelligence as openness to possibility. But my graver concern is that while he's been playing with religious questions all his life, he only gets a religious experience after he's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's: and of course any form of dementia, even in its mildest stages, can alter perception. The possibility that it's some kind of psychic abberration has to be registered.
The sceptic in me wonders if the oceanic experience is not some kind of release mechanism, universal in humans, the brain's way of coping with certain varieties of stress. Being told that you have dementia might be overwhelming but Pratchett, with more books yet to write, needs the sense that "all will be well" in order not to give up - so his brain generates it for him. I'm seeing a parallel with the way in which, when you're faced with a situation that calls for extreme bravery, the body floods with adrenalin of which one consequence is that you don't back off just because something you are doing (e.g. rescuing someone from a fire) is causing you great pain and distress. You don't feel it until the danger has passed, then it hurts. Hey, I've got a degenerative condition, I'm losing my mind here, I'm going to die. Cue reassuring experience from brain - don't worry, it will be fine in the end. So I can still function, for a while.
It's odd that I, an ordained Christian minister, find myself challenging a sceptic's apparent "conversion" on the grounds it may have a purely psychological basis. What I'm not challenging is Pratchett's reference to "an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking." That there is such an order gets close to one of the central convictions in my faith; which I would lose if Stephen Hawking, or whoever, convinced me that they had grasped it.
I'm not holding my breath. Hawking is a genius, but then so was Newton, who could write with honest humility:
I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me
Pratchett would get that. I'm not sure that Hawking does.
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