God and Spider Dunstan.

For the last several weeks I have been accommodated at the expense of the Australian government in a setting that has allowed me to have regular conversations with persons of a religious bent. Actual priests, ministers and reverends as well as some well-meaning if somewhat pious chaps who choose to adopt the appellation “lay” as they are without official registration in their respective churches.

I am always fond of chatting with someone that disagrees with me on a topic that interests me. It's always possible that I might be wrong and it's usually the case that even if I am not corrected, I am given something to think about. As a devout atheist, I find religion endlessly fascinating and these conversations, while they have not for some time provided me with any additional existential enlightenment, do often cast additional light on the nature of religions, religiosity and its devotees.

It's exceedingly rare these days that Christian believers will argue from a biblical standpoint. While this might be surprising - they are hesitant to use a book they consider divinely inspired - it is entirely understandable when you read through some of the contradictions, absurdities and immoralities that the bible argues, expounds and holds true. I'll provide a quick example or two of these before moving on.

The bible is very clearly a book written by men and men with an agenda. The New Testament's agenda is the promotion of Christ-worship and more especially of the Pauline branch of Christ-worship. The 4 main stories of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were chosen from several to form what we currently call the gospels at (I believe - I don't have my internet at present) the Council of Nicea in around 300AD.

That is to say that the final story of the Nazarene's life was not agreed until nearly 300 years after he died. Rather like concluding the definitive biography of JS Bach around about now. It would, for instance, be a struggle to interview any of contemporaries.

We know with some certainty that the books were written in the order Mark around 50-70AD, then Matthew and Luke at about the same time around 70-90AD and finally John around 100-120AD. When you know this and you read them in the order they were written rather the order that they are usually published, you begin to see something interesting; the stories gets progressively more fanciful over time.

Perhaps the most important and most fanciful of the gospel stories is the story of the resurrection, so perhaps this is the one place where you would expect to see a fairly strict concordance between the four gospels but alas, no.

The first gospel, Mark is the shortest and in it's original form (the verses after 16:8 are a later addition) it says the two Marys and Salome went to the tomb and found that the rock had been rolled away. Some kid is sitting inside and tells them that Jesus came back to life, which gives them the screaming heebie-jeebies, and they don't tell anyone what happened. That's it. The question of how Mark found out about it is left unanswered. Presumably he developed a close enough relationship with one of the ladies in question that they let their secret be known.

The second and third gospels (Matthew and Luke) tell a story that is a little more elaborate. Matthew says that two Marys (he's not sure which ones) went to the tomb and there was an earthquake and an angel rolled the stone away. The angel told them that Jesus came back from the dead and while that did give them the willies, they were pretty happy about it too. They rushed off to tell the disciples about it. Luke leaves the names out of it and just says that these women and those women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away, angels being unnecessary in that case. Two blokes wearing shiny clothes turn up and tell them that Jesus has come back from the dead and these women don't get the willies at all but are pretty much down with the whole thing. They rush off to tell everyone about it.

Then we come to John, who is to gospels what James Cameron is to movies. According to John, the story is much more elaborate with only one Mary finding the tomb empty but then she rushes off and brings back a couple of the disciples. One of these disciples is named only as the one "whom Jesus loved" which is either a dead giveaway of Jesus' sexual preferences or a suggestion that the big J wasn't fond of most of the disciples. John goes on to detail several fascinating factoids on the location of various bits of cloth before sending everyone but Mary home without any of them thinking to look into the tomb. Doh! We then have two angels appearing magically to Mary and then Jesus himself rocks up disguised as a gardener.

So we can already see that the gospels can't all be infallible because only one of them can be right on the subject of the resurrection, but you can see the same progressive elaboration and exaggeration in many of the bible stories that are shared between all four gospels (there are many that aren't) and you can't help but wonder whether they were simply trying to go one-up on the guy who'd written the gospel immediately prior.

There are plenty more examples of the bible being internally contradictory (there are TWO creation stories for heaven's sake, one after the other - Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-9) and plenty where it is simply immoral (God killing children because they made fun of a prophet by calling him baldy 2 Kings 2:23-25, a raped virgin being forced to marry her attacker Deuteronomy 22:28-29) and other areas where it is simply comedic (in the space of just two verses Genesis 9:20-21, Noah becomes a farmer, grows grapes, makes wine, gets pissed and passes out naked in his tent) so you can see why none of my interlocutors are keen to argue from a biblical standpoint.

Instead what I usually hear is something along the lines of one of the following;

·          This thing is a really good thing and I don't know how it happened, therefore God dunnit.

·          This thing is a really strange thing and I don't know how it happened, therefore God dunnit.

·          Stuff happened that nobody knows how it happened, therefore God dunnit.

·          Stuff exists, therefore someone must have created stuff, therefore God dunnit.

The first three of these are what is generally known as the "God of the gaps" argument. Essentially it goes like this: I find this thing really awesome and incredibly cool so I reckon God dunnit and you can't tell me otherwise. There are things we understand and things we don't understand. Anything we don't understand: GODDUNNIT!

A few thousand years ago the awesome and cool things that we didn't understand included the Sun coming up every morning and the rain coming at the same time each year. As these things were explained and as the human race's understanding of the world increased, we began to shrink down the number of things that were assigned to the GODDUNNIT category. Diseases used to be GODDUNIT and cows with two heads and mountains and floods and meteors and so on and so forth. All of these have moved quietly out of the GODDUNNIT category and into the 'oh, I see' category.

We live now in and era where our understanding of the world, indeed of the universe is extraordinary in its depth and perhaps the most extraordinary thing is our detailed understanding of the things we don't know. Which - in Rumsfeld speak - is the known unknowns. The GODDUNNIT arguers are these days reduced to arguing that we don't know what atoms are made of or, if they are a little more savvy (we do know what atoms are made of) that we don't know why electrons behave the way they do or even that Schrödinger's cat is a dead giveaway that GODDUNNIT. Schrödinger and his cat don't have a lot to say on this case because, in the case of Schrödinger, he is dead and in the case of his cat, it is locked in a box with a pellet of poison and we don't know whether it’s dead or alive.

I do sometimes gently point out that we have been wrong about the GODDUNNIT explanation on every single occasion in the past, so we might just be wrong about it again. I suggest gently that it just doesn't seem to stack up as a convincing argument to me. This carries little weight with the religious side and they simply insist that while there are unknowns, there is a space for their God. The incredible shrinking God I suppose.

The other argument that I tend to see a lot is that stuff exists therefore someone must have created stuff. Almost invariably this line of thought leads to the big bang and when I point out that we do in fact know that all the stuff was created with the big bang, they announce triumphantly "Well what happened before the big bang?" At think stage I will generally point out that nothing happened before the big bang, because the universe was created with time not in time.  I will then pause expectantly, hoping that my religious friend will either acknowledge the point and make a counter argument or will ask me to clarify further. Needless to say, I am always disappointed.

I have never yet been queried on what is meant by "the universe was created with time not in time" because the interlocutor will generally ignore any point that I might make and will repeatedly leap back to the idea that the universe was created and therefore it must have a creator, repeating it over and over as if it were an incantation. They will state this conclusion with a raised eyebrow and smile brimming with confidence and it will often be prefaced with the words "ah yes" as in "Ah yes, but if the universe was created, then there must be a creator…"

The last two paragraphs actually cover a lot of ground in a very small period of time and they need to be explained further. Before I do though I would caution you that at this point I do not generally devolve the discussion into violence and rain down upon my foe a volley of punches. I leave that sort of thing for the Christian God to do. No, at this stage my usual reaction is to remind myself of the adage that one should not argue with an idiot as they will bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

The first point is that the idea that the universe was created with time, not in time is a tricky one. What it means is that time itself did not exist before the big bang. When I think about this for a long time it gives me a headache, so I caution you to use an egg timer to ration the amount of time you spend thinking about it. Time (apparently) is the fourth dimension, meaning that we have three dimensions in space and one dimension in time. This gives me an even worse headache. Physicists of note assure me that there is no special reason why there can't be more dimensions in both time and space. Thinking about this for too long generally leads to heavy drinking and psychotropic drugs followed by a long period of rehab.

In terms of what happened at the time of the big bang, we actually know a great deal. A large number of physicists with goatee beards, Star Trek t-shirts and poor social skills are quite fascinated with what happened just after the big bang. I should explain here that while you and I might consider "5 minutes later" to be the same as "just after" and anything less than "one minute later" to be the same as "immediately after”, these guys are pretty full on. We know with a great deal of certainty exactly what happened immediately after the big bang where "immediately after" is defined in seconds by writing a decimal point followed by writing zeroes until your hand is tired and then writing the numeral 1. At present there are about 50 zeroes. That’s 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.

So we know what the universe looked like one gazillionth of a second after the big bang but what about one gazillionth before the big bang? Well we can't know because there was no time then. See? I told you it's headache inducing. The universe, including all three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time were created all at the same time.

We know about the universe a gazillionth of a second after the big bang because the universe has left us plenty of clues. We don't know about it before because any possible clues are wiped out by the big bang and the creation of time. It means, among other things, that even if there was a cause, there is no way to know what it was because it is completely outside our universe.

So the argument from the religious will go that we can't know and therefore GODDUNNIT. They will prevaricate on this point by using terminology such as "higher power" or "supreme being" but there is no question that they really mean GODDUNNIT and I have to concede at this point because it is indeed possible I suppose that a being from outside our dimensions was involved in some way with the creation of the universe. Whether that being was supreme or otherwise and indeed whether the act of creation was deliberate or accidental cannot be known at all.

What we can be pretty certain of is that this supreme being, if it in fact exists, bears absolutely no resemblance to any of the gods that mankind has created over the last 10,000 years or so. It is a supreme being that made no imprint of the world beyond kicking off the big bang and continues to have no impact on our lives. There is not the slightest shred of evidence that the being is in any way interested in our tiny lump of rock let along the carbon-based bipedal life forms that roam around it wondering whether the being exists.

Indeed the only evidence that I have yet been able to find for a supreme being is the fact, faithful reader, that you have read this far. Thank you so much for your attention.

For those of you asking about my literary efforts, I have to confess that the novella that I planned to release has indeed been written and it’s called “Spider Dunstan’s Teeth”. Sadly, after circulating it to a few readers I find that it has been greeted with responses that are, shall we say, lukewarm. Some of them might be used as an illustration of the phrase "damning with faint praise". For that reason, I could not bear to charge money for it and hence I have not released it. If you are especially keen to read it anyway, send me a request by email and I will send it to you. Your payment will be that you actually read it and give me a review here at my blog. I am actually very confident that you wont read it, but hey, we will both feel better about the world.