In his younger days, Brown used to be a rabidly enthusiastic Pentecostal Charismatic, and has since apologised for that, regrettably becoming a rabidly enthusiastic atheist along the lines of Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins. His main reason for his loss of faith he ascribes to discovering the non-historicity of the Bible, i.e. he believes that the Bible has been proved to be incapable of accurately describing historical events through editing of Gospels and key texts by various political factions within the Church.
The first thing that I consider is how illogical the "Once saved, always saved" doctrine is. One could argue that because Brown has lost his faith, he never was saved in the first place. But surely when he was a believer, he was convinced in himself that he was saved. If it is possible that one can believe honestly that one is saved and is loses the faith, then where is the certainty of our salvation? Answer: there can be no certainty in knowing that one is saved. One can certainly have hope in the Mercy and Loving-kindness of God that one is saved, but one needs to cooperate with this grace by cultivating the hope that we are given. One can only cultivate hope through the other two eternal remnants, i.e. Faith and Love. These three remain and feed each other.
That's the first aspect of Derren Brown I wanted to consider. The second, and larger aspect, I must confess rattled me. Brown contends that because I am clinging to a system of belief then I am not interacting with the world in its true reality, that I am forcing myself to see things in a particular way and to interpret happenings only in the framework of my belief system. With Dawkins he argues that I can only convince him of the presence of God if I show him some evidence that He exists, and clearly this evidence cannot be Biblical because of his problems with the Bible in its description of reality.
Why did this rattle me? Well, Brown is a very astute student of psychology and knows what to say in a way that will raise doubts in the mind. This I utterly applaud. It is good to have one's faith challenged and I am indeed grateful for the challenge that he provides. However, his main arguments against religion seem to involve attributing patterns to coincidences and not the miraculous.
He cites the behaviour of pigeons doomed to spend their lives in boxes, who end up performing "rituals" which make food appear, despite the fact that the food is administered according to the rules of the scientists studying them. Similarly, people too exhibit the same feature. I myself recognise that, as a schoolboy going to and from school, I used to try to change traffic lights with my mind, and it worked! Except it didn't because I associated the change in the traffic lights with my mental activity, rather than with the necessarily rigid timing system of the traffic lights, and the skilful driving of my father who modified his driving to take into account the myriad number of traffic lights between home and school. So I understand the phenomena that Brown is talking about.
The argument then is that ritual is nothing more than a primitive behaviour caused by the sporadic provision of resources - that the ritual some how provides the cause for an effect. Thus the atheist argument is that the effect that a given ritual is trying to achieve is largely coincidental.
It's true that you only need 23 people in a room for the chance of two of them to share a birthday to be greater than 0.5 (or 50%, but really, we shouldn't be expressing probabilities as percentages).
But consider the following ritual. Pick up a ball in your right hand, stretch out your right arm with the back of your right hand pointing upwards, open your right hand, and lo! the ball falls. (Note: I'm being deliberately precise here. Scientists require precision) Do this several times, and one notes that this always seems to happen, indeed with such a regularity that the fact that I am assuming that the ball falls seems a very reasonable assumption. However, how do I know that this will always happen? How do I know that this is merely a series of remarkable coincidences that have been observed by mankind ever since primitive man picked up a ball in his right hand and opened it? We would be foolish not to see a pattern there, wouldn't we?
My point is that all observed phenomena can be seen to be either the result of some scientific principle in action or as a collection of coincidences. It is how we make the decisions which phenomena are following rules and which are purely coincidental that shapes our understanding of the Universe around us. While Science may prescribe a systematic method for us to make those decisions based on observations, and follow logical reasoning, that very logical reasoning provides neither empirical evidence for a beginning and an end of the Reality it tries to describe. It is not even mathematical, since mathematics has a beginning, namely the objects for study and the axioms which tell us the rules. Science argues from the middle down into the microscopic and up into the macroscopic.
This does lead us onto the observability of God, and the actions that we attribute to His deity. Just how does God work in the world? If God exists, then why is there no conclusive evidence for His existence? Well, I hope that I've answered one idea that conclusive evidence for an omnipotent God would be evidence in the non-existence of an omnipotent God. But Brown does seem to have a point here. Something happens to us - perhaps we heal rather quickly from a serious illness. Now we have a choice, we can:
a) attribute this healing directly to God;
b) attribute this healing directly to the tendency of our bodies to heal itself;
c) attribute this healing to the ingenuity of science to provide a cure for this disease.
Brown rejects (a) because there is no proof that God exists, and thus any attribution of healing to God is speculative and that there is no evidence for the direct interaction of any deity, nor is there any method of testing this empirically. Thus, says Brown, it is foolish to take up proposition (a) since that means we can only be interpreting our healing intrinsically from our belief system rather than extrinsically from the fact that our bodies always make every effort to heal themselves (i.e. statement (b) ), and we have some understanding of various causes and effects that medicines provide (i.e. statement (c) ). However, God may well have effected the healing through (b) and (c) through millions of unobserved influences (i.e. they may have been observable but their significance was not deemed important enough for the time and trouble detailed study) in the universe which have accumulated to the effect that you are now free from illness. In this sense "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test" is not a commandment, but rather a statement of fact. God just doesn't fit into a test-tube!
But I do agree with Brown - there is no conclusive evidence for the existence of God, i.e. evidence which cannot be disputed. The existence and nature of the universe lead me to conclude that God exists, though I recognise myself and my understanding to be far too small to work out how He puts his plans to effect. I have no problem with the scientific explanation that there was a Big Bang, or that I owe my existence to ape-like beings. However, I attribute the responsibility of the cause of these events solely at the feet of God. Nor do I believe that having a religious belief imposes limits on our trying to understand our Reality. There are aspects of Science which are dangerous for humanity - research with human embryos, the race to build nuclear arms to name two - and Science must always be done in a way that holds nothing but the deepest respect for the Human Condition. But ultimately there will always be a mystery to Life which the human spirit is bound to explore and we should be attempting to make our further discoveries for they will always provide something to wonder at, and Christians like me will attribute them to the wonders of God (sorry Derren). God's presence will always remain a Mystery.
But then, this is still not all that Brown and Dawkins are saying! So far I agree with them - scientific evidence for the existence of God is non-existent. But the only conclusion we can draw from that is that we cannot draw any conclusions about the existence of God. That is not what Brown and Dawkins are saying, they are saying "there is no God." They are atheists, not agnostics.
And now we reach an interesting little problem. Scientists demand proof that there is a God. Fine! I can't supply that proof, indeed, that proof cannot exist. That's okay. However, scientists should also be demanding proof that there isn't a God. Now Brown and Dawkins will now have us believe that it is not their responsibility to provide a proof, that the burden of proof is on those who claim that there is a God. But that's not the problem. They have made a definite statement that requires evidence. If Science cannot find proof of God's existence, then that does not mean that they have proved that He doesn't exist.
This now puts Brown and Dawkins into the position of proving a negative.
As a mathematician, I have often proved negative statements. Here's one.
Proposition There is no largest prime number.
For the less mathematically inclined, a prime number is a number that has precisely two unequal factors - itself and 1. So, for example, 3 can only be expressed as 1 x 3.
Proof
Assume: that N is the largest prime number.
Now let
M = 2 x 3 x 5 x 7 x 11 x ... x N + 1. Notice that M is strictly bigger than N.
I.e. M is the number formed by multiplying all the prime numbers up to N together and then adding 1.
Now we notice that
- 2 does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1;
- 3 does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1;
- 5 does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1;
and so on until,
- N does not divide into M exactly; it leaves remainder 1.
thus we notice that any prime less than N does not divide N exactly, but leaves remainder 1.
So either M is prime, or is divisible by a prime that is none of 2, 3, 5, ... N.
Thus we have shown that either M is a prime strictly bigger than N, or is divisible by a prime that is strictly bigger than N.
But!
We assumed that N was the largest prime number and we have arrived at the existence of prime numbers strictly bigger than N. This is a contradiction and the only place where our error can have occurred is in making the assumption that there is a largest prime number. QED.
So we have shown that there is no largest prime number. We have proved a negative.
This technique is called reductio ad absurdam. It is a well-founded mathematical technique used to prove the non-existence of certain quantities.
The method works as follows:
1) assume the contrary;
2) using that assumption, make rational deductions until you reach an impossibility which can only have occurred because you made that assumption.
So to prove the non-existence of God, all we need to do is to start with the hypothesis that God exists and logically deduce that this results in a contradiction.
Professor Dawkins and Mr. Brown: there's the method, now off you go...
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