Authors: Unknown
And
Mummy is the best since the world began,
And
Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan -
But
they can't See Binker.
Binker's
always talking, 'cos I'm teaching him to speak
He
sometimes likes to do it in a funny sort of squeak,
And
he sometimes likes to do it in a hoodling sort of roar . . .
And
I have to do it for him 'cos his throat is rather sore.
Oh,
Daddy is clever, he's a clever sort of man,
And
Mummy knows all that anybody can,
And
Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan -
But
they don't Know Binker.
Binker's
brave as lions when we're running in the park;
Binker's
brave as tigers when we're lying in the dark;
Binker's
brave as elephants. He never, never cries . . .
Except
(like other people) when the soap gets in his eyes.
Oh,
Daddy is Daddy, he's a Daddy sort of man,
And
Mummy is as Mummy as anybody can,
And
Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan . . .
But
they're not Like Binker.
Binker
isn't greedy, but he does like things to eat,
So I
have to say to people when they're giving me a sweet,
'Oh,
Binker wants a chocolate, so could you give me two?'
And
then I eat it for him, 'cos his teeth are rather new.
Well,
I'm very fond of Daddy, but he hasn't time to play,
And
I'm very fond of Mummy, but she sometimes goes away,
And
I'm often cross with Nanny when she wants to brush my
hair
. . . But Binker's always Binker, and is certain to be there.
a.
a. milne,
Now We Are Six*
*
Reproduced by permission of the A. A. Milne Estate.
Is
the imaginary-friend phenomenon a higher illusion, in a different
category from ordinary childhood make-believe? My own experience is not
much help here. Like many parents, my mother kept
a notebook of my childish sayings. In addition to simple pretendings
(now I'm the man in the moon ... an accelerator ... a Babylonian) I was
evidently fond of second-order pretendings (now I'm an owl pretending
to be a waterwheel) which might be reflexive (now I'm a little boy
pretending to be Richard). I never once believed I really was any of
those things, and I think that is normally true of childhood
make-believe games. But I didn't have a Binker. If the testimony of
their adult selves is to be believed, at least some of those normal
children who have imaginary friends really do believe they exist, and,
in some cases, see them as clear and vivid hallucinations. I suspect
that the Binker phenomenon of childhood may be a good model for
understanding theistic belief in adults. I do not know whether
psychologists have studied it from this point of view, but it would be
a worthwhile piece of research. Companion and confidant, a Binker for
life: that is surely one role that God plays - one gap that might be
left if God were to go.
Another
child, a girl, had a 'little purple man', who seemed to her a real and
visible presence, and who would manifest himself, sparkling out of the
air, with a gentle tinkling sound. He visited her regularly, especially
when she felt lonely, but with decreasing frequency as she grew older.
On a particular day just before she went to kindergarten, the little
purple man came to her, heralded by his usual tinkling fanfare, and
announced that he would not be visiting her any more. This saddened
her, but the little purple man told her that she was getting bigger now
and wouldn't need him in the future. He must leave her now, so that he
could look after other children. He promised her that he would come
back to her if ever she
really
needed him. He did
return to her, many years later in a dream, when she had a personal
crisis and was trying to decide what to do with her life. The door of
her bedroom opened and a cartload of books appeared, pushed into the
room by ... the little purple man. She interpreted this as advice that
she should go to university - advice that she took and later judged to
be good. The story makes me almost tearful, and it brings me as close
as I shall probably come to understanding the consoling and counselling
role of imaginary gods in people's lives. A being may exist only in the
imagination, yet still seem completely real to the child, and still
give real comfort and good advice. Perhaps even better: imaginary
friends
- and imaginary gods - have the time and patience to devote all their
attention to the sufferer. And they are much cheaper than psychiatrists
or professional counsellors.
Did
gods, in their role as consolers and counsellors, evolve from binkers,
by a sort of psychological 'paedomorphosis' ? Paedo-morphosis is the
retention into adulthood of childhood characteristics. Pekinese dogs
have paedomorphic faces: the adults look like puppies. It is a
well-known pattern in evolution, widely accepted as important for the
development of such human characteristics as our bulbous forehead and
short jaws. Evolutionists have described us as juvenile apes, and it is
certainly true that juvenile chimpanzees and gorillas look more like
humans than adult ones do. Could religions have evolved originally by
gradual postponement, over generations, of the moment in life when
children gave up their binkers - just as we slowed down, during
evolution, the flattening of our foreheads and the protrusion of our
jaws?
I
suppose, for completeness, we should consider the reverse possibility.
Rather than gods evolving from ancestral binkers, could binkers have
evolved from ancestral gods? This seems to me less likely. I was led to
think about it while reading the American psychologist Julian Jaynes's
The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
a
book that is as strange as its title suggests. It is one of those books
that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing
in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.
Jaynes
notes that many people perceive their own thought processes as a kind
of dialogue between the 'self and another internal protagonist inside
the head. Nowadays we understand that both 'voices' are our own - or if
we don't we are treated as mentally ill. This happened, briefly, to
Evelyn Waugh. Never one to mince words, Waugh remarked to a friend: 'I
haven't seen you for a long time, but then I've seen so few people
because - did you know? - I went mad.' After his recovery, Waugh wrote
a novel,
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold,
which
described his hallucinatory period, and the voices that he heard.
Jaynes's
suggestion is that some time before 1000 BC people in general were
unaware that the second voice - the Gilbert Pinfold
voice - came from within themselves. They thought the Pinfold voice was
a god: Apollo, say, or Astarte or Yahweh or, more probably, a minor
household god, offering them advice or orders. Jaynes even located the
voices of the gods in the opposite hemisphere of the brain from the one
that controls audible speech. The 'breakdown of the bicameral' mind
was, for Jaynes, a historical transition. It was the moment in history
when it dawned on people that the external voices that they seemed to
be hearing were really internal. Jaynes even goes so far as to define
this historical transition as the dawning of human consciousness.
There
is an ancient Egyptian inscription about the creator god Ptah, which
describes the various other gods as variations of Ptah's 'voice' or
'tongue'. Modern translations reject the literal 'voice' and interpret
the other gods as 'objectified conceptions of [Ptah's] mind'. Jaynes
dismisses such educated readings, preferring to take the literal
meaning seriously. The gods were hallucinated voices, speaking inside
people's heads. Jaynes further suggests that such gods evolved from
memories of dead kings, who still, in a manner of speaking, retained
control over their subjects via imagined voices in their heads. Whether
or not you find his thesis plausible, Jaynes's book is intriguing
enough to earn its mention in a book on religion.
Now,
to the possibility I raised of borrowing from Jaynes to construct a
theory that gods and binkers are developmentally related, but the
opposite way around from the paedomorphosis theory. It amounts to the
suggestion that the breakdown of the bicameral mind didn't happen
suddenly in history, but was a progressive pulling back into childhood
of the moment when hallucinated voices and apparitions were rumbled as
not real. In a kind of reversal of the paedomorphosis hypothesis, the
hallucinated gods disappeared from adult minds first, then were pulled
back earlier and earlier into childhood, until today they survive only
in the Binker or little purple man phenomenon. The problem with this
version of the theory is that it doesn't explain the persistence of
gods into adulthood today.
It
might be better not to treat gods as ancestral to binkers, or vice
versa, but rather to see both as by-products of the same psychological
predisposition. Gods and binkers have in common the power to comfort,
and provide a vivid sounding board for trying
out ideas. We have not moved far from Chapter 5's psychological
by-product theory of the evolution of religion.
It
is time to face up to the important role that God plays in consoling
us; and the humanitarian challenge, if he does not exist, to put
something in his place. Many people who concede that God probably
doesn't exist, and that he is not necessary for morality, still come
back with what they often regard as a trump card: the alleged
psychological or emotional
need
for a god. If you
take religion away, people truculently ask, what are you going to put
in its place? What have you to offer the dying patients, the weeping
bereaved, the lonely Eleanor Rigbys for whom God is their only friend?
The
first thing to say in response to this is something that should need no
saying. Religion's power to console doesn't make it true. Even if we
make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that
belief in God's existence is completely essential to human
psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were
despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst -
none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence
that religious belief is true. It might be evidence in favour of the
desirability of convincing yourself that God exists, even if he
doesn't. As I've already mentioned, Dennett, in
Breaking the
Spell,
makes the distinction between belief in God and
belief in belief: the belief that it is desirable to believe, even if
the belief itself is false: 'Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief
(Mark 9: 24). The faithful are encouraged to
profess
belief,
whether they are convinced by it or not. Maybe if you repeat something
often enough, you will succeed in convincing yourself of its truth. I
think we all know people who enjoy the idea of religious faith, and
resent attacks on it, while reluctantly admitting that they don't have
it themselves.
Since
reading of Dennett's distinction, I have found occasion to use it again
and again. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the majority
of atheists I know disguise their atheism behind a pious facade. They
do not believe in anything supernatural themselves, but retain a vague
soft spot for irrational belief. They believe in belief. It is amazing
how many people seemingly cannot tell the difference between 'X is
true' and 'It is desirable that people should believe that X is true'.
Or maybe they don't really fall for this logical error, but simply rate
truth as unimportant compared with human feelings. I don't want to
decry human feelings. But let's be clear, in any particular
conversation, what we are talking about: feelings, or truth. Both may
be important, but they are not the same thing.
In
any case, my hypothetical concession was extravagant and wrong. I know
of no evidence that atheists have any general tendency towards unhappy,
angst-ridden despond. Some atheists are happy. Others are miserable.
Similarly, some Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are
miserable, while others are happy. There may be statistical evidence
bearing on the relationship between happiness and belief (or unbelief),
but I doubt if it is a strong effect, one way or the other. I find it
more interesting to ask whether there is any good
reason
to
feel depressed if we live without God. I shall end this book by
arguing, on the contrary, that it is an understatement to say that one
can lead a happy and fulfilled life without supernatural religion.
First, though, I must examine the claims of religion to offer
consolation.
Consolation,
according to the
Shorter Oxford Dictionary,
is the
alleviation of sorrow or mental distress. I shall divide consolation
into two types.
1.
Direct physical consolation.
A man stuck for the
night on a bare mountain may find comfort in a large, warm St Bernard
dog, not forgetting, of course, the brandy barrel around its neck. A
weeping child may be consoled by the embrace of strong arms wrapped
around her and reassuring words whispered in her ear.
2.
Consolation by discovery of a previously unappreciated fact,
or a previously undiscovered way of looking at existing facts.
A
woman whose husband has been killed in war may be consoled
by the discovery that she is pregnant by him, or that he died a hero.
We can also get consolation through discovering a new way of thinking
about a situation. A philosopher points out that there is nothing
special about the moment when an old man dies. The child that he once
was 'died' long ago, not by suddenly ceasing to live but by growing up.
Each of Shakespeare's seven ages of man 'dies' by slowly morphing into
the next. From this point of view, the moment when the old man finally
expires is no different from the slow 'deaths' throughout his life.
154
A man who does not relish the prospect of his own death may find this
changed perspective consoling. Or maybe not, but it is an example of
consolation through reflection. Mark Twain's dismissal of the fear of
death is another: 'I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions
and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the
slightest inconvenience from it.' The
apergu
changes
nothing about the fact of our inevitable death. But we have been
offered a different way of looking at that inevitability and we may
find it consoling. Thomas Jefferson, too, had no fear of death and he
seems to have believed in no kind of afterlife. By Christopher
Hitchens's account, 'As his days began to wane, Jefferson more than
once wrote to friends that he faced the approaching end without either
hope or fear. This was as much as to say, in the most unmistakable
terms, that he was not a Christian.'