an undoubted source of fury to atheist fundamentalists like Dawkins and Hitchens: a staggering 69% of Americans believe religion needs to play a bigger role in people’s lives, with only 15% arguing it should play a smaller role. Another poll, from 200316, found that more than a quarter of those who say they are not Christian nonetheless believe in the resurrection of Christ and the virgin birth. A Gallup poll in May 2007 showed a slight drop in belief in God, down to 86%, although when the question was rephrased to include belief in a higher power it bounced back to nearly 90%. But we all know Americans are the most “religious” westerners. What about the rest of us in the English-speaking world? A UMR research poll in New Zealand in September 200717that directly compared the May 07 US Gallup poll shows only 56% downunder believe in God, and only 48% believe in Heaven, compared with 81% of Americans. Seventy percent of Americans believe the Devil exists, while only 26% of New Zealanders buy into that. When researchers broke down the “God” question the same way Gallup had, 46% of New Zealanders professed a belief in “God”, while a staggering 31% opted to believe in the New Age concept of “a universal spirit or higher power”. Then there is the question of ‘Why?’. Why do we believe in God? Time magazine put it another way: “Which came first, God or the need for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above, or did evolution instill in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather into the communities essential to keeping the species going?”18 Examine the last part of that statement for a moment. It’s the idea that evolution created the idea of God in our heads. Yet evolution is supposed to be purposeless and randomly-caused. How could a single-celled organism know in advance that in
order to succeed it needed to believe in an imaginary friend called ‘God’? The idea seems more farcical and fraught with contradictions than simply believing in God himself, but it has led to what some scientists are calling their theory of “the God Gene” – the idea that humans are programmed to believe in God. “Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocuspocus, there is a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it,” says Time. “It’s hard enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and cheating pay such rich dividends. It’s harder still when there’s no moral cop walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best and, not incidentally, give us a sense that there’s someone awake in the cosmic house when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we’re here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine. And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods – and millenniums of holy wars prove that we do – the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely outweigh the bloodshed.” These, then, are some of the questions this book sets out to answer. Is there a rational basis for believing in God? Did humans simply invent the concept of God? Is belief in God, whether fiction or fact, scientifically necessary for us as a species in order for us to avoid slaughtering each other? Are all gods and religions created equal, or is it possible that some are either better or closer to the truth than others? Can belief in God be reconciled with scientific discoveries? As you can see, it promises to be an intriguing journey. THE DIVINITY CODE by Ian Wishart, Howling At The Moon Publishing, 2007. $29.90 from Whitcoulls, Borders, Dymocks, Paper Plus, Take Note, Paper Power, Wadsworths and all other good bookstores
REFERENCES 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal 2. http://www.usask.ca/geology/classes/geol206/iceoceans.html 3. ibid 4. http://www.s8int.com/water1.html 5. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0528 _ 020528 sunkencities _ 2.html 6. http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=1176 7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/2804257.stm 8. Rising sea levels are not the only determinant involved. As the sunken remains 700 metres below the Caribbean suggest, tectonics can play a definitive role 9. These “artists” pulled the same stunt with the 2004 discovery of the ‘hobbit skeletons’ on Indonesia’s Flores Island, by drawing them as small humans with chimpanzee heads, even though the skulls are so close to ours in style that there is a heated dispute in the scientific community about whether the hobbits are indeed a different species or just a dwarf race of modern humans. Every time artists draw ancient humans as part-ape, they are guessing, based entirely on their own belief in Darwinism 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal 11. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/science/19speech.html Another discovery late October 2007 confirms Neanderthals had the FOXP2 gene necessary for human speech, identical to the one the rest of us have, and apparently they had it from about 350,000 years ago, throwing evolutionary theory into disarray, again 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial _ Age 13. The answer from Axialists will initially be that the earliest records of a written
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Book of Psalms date to the sixth century BC, which means the ideas could have been borrowed from Zoroastrianism during the captivity. The answer is simplistic however. With Jerusalem captured, the temple destroyed and its inhabitants bundled off to a foreign land, it is easy to see why we no longer have physical copies of manuscripts dating back to the time of Moses or King David. However, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest the older books of the Old Testament were well known to Jews at the time of the captivity, and that they were not changed. Firstly, the Jews held fast to their Jewishness and what little they had been left with. Rather than widely integrating into Persian society they were mindful of the previous great captivity in Egypt nearly a thousand years earlier, and the need to preserve their beliefs and culture through this time. Having been warned by their prophets repeatedly about the dangers of worshipping false gods, and that the captivity was a punishment for Jewish disobedience, it stretches credulity to believe that the Jews then would further anger their God by importing foreign religious beliefs into what was left of Judaism. Secondly, portions of the Psalms are quoted in other preExile books like 1 and 2 Samuel. Thirdly, the internal evidence in many of the earliest psalms – the words used and events referred to – clearly place them between 1000 BC and 900 BC in origin. 14. Survey of Old Testament Introduction, Gleason Archer, Moody, 1994, pp. 503-515 15. www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99945,00.html 16. www.harrisinteractive.com/harris _ poll/index.asp?PID=359 17. http://www.umr.co.nz/Media/FinalMorality-Religion-Evolution-NZ _ USComparisonSep07.pdf 18. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995465,00.html