The Science of Discworld II

Murphy’s Law and nice Disneyesque animations. We don’t buy any of it for real causality.
    Joseph Needham brought light to this kind of confusion. He pointed out, in the introduction to his truly gigantic History of Science in China , that the reason why China never developed science as the West knows it is that they never espoused monotheism. In polytheistic philosophies, it isn’t very sensible to search for the cause of something, like a thunderstorm, say: you’re liable to get a very contingent answer involving several incidents in the love lives of the gods, and an explanation of the provenance of thunderbolts that verges on the ridiculous. 4
    Monotheists, however, by which we mean someone like Abraham, to whom we shall return later, reckon that God had a consistent set of ideas and causalities in mind when he set the universe up. One set of ideas. If you expect your one God to be consistent, then it’s worth asking how those causalities relate to each other: for example, ‘black clouds and rain will be associated with thunderstorms when …’ whatever. The monotheist can predict the weather, even if rather badly. But the polytheist needs a theopsychologist and a precise account of what the gods are up to at the moment. She needs to know whether a tiff between two gods will result in a thunderstorm. So scientific causality is compatible with God-causality, but not with gods-causality.
    Monotheists, moreover, have a built-in intolerance. The position that there is only one truth, only one avenue to the one God, sets each monotheistic religion in opposition to all others. There is no room for manoeuvre, no way to tolerate the manifest errors of people who believe in some other god. So monotheism laid the foundation for the Inquisition, and for intemperate Christianity through the ages from the crusades through to African and Polynesian missionaries. ‘I have the story, and it is the only one’ is characteristic of many cults, all of them intolerant.
    Faiths, of course, do get along. But they get along because of the hammering they have taken at the hands of science, material development and better education. They get along because of wise people within them who recognise the commonality of humanity. Where there are too few wise people, you get Northern Ireland. If you are lucky.
    If the future is not fixed, but malleable, and we can predict the effects of our present behaviour, however badly, then predicting the future can be self-defeating. And that can even be the reason for predicting it.
    Most of the Biblical prophets seem, like many science-fiction authors today, to be warning against what might happen if we go on as we are doing. So they succeed when their prophecy is not correct, because people heed it and change their actions. We can understand that; even though the prophecy didn’t come true, we can all see that it might have done: it has given us a better idea of the phase space that the future of our culture lives in.
    What about the gypsy who prophesies that a tall dark man will come into your life, thus making you receptive to all those future tall dark men? (if tall dark men interest you, of course; it’s up to you.) This could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, the opposite of the stories told by Biblical prophets. It’s a story that the recipient is sympathetic to, wants to happen.
    There are said to be only seven basic story plots, so perhaps our minds are much less varied than we think, so that the newspaper astrologer and the fortune-teller are navigating a much smaller phase space of human experience than we thought. This would account for so many people feeling that the predictions show deep insight.
    But when astronomers predict the future, and get it right , people are, paradoxically, much less impressed. When they predict eclipses correctly, every time, this seems less meaningful than the astrologers nearly getting many people right, sometimes. Remember Y2K, the prophecy that planes would fall out of the sky soon after the year 2000 dawned and your toaster wouldn’t work? That prophecy cost the world several billion dollars in work to avert the problem – and it didn’t happen. A waste of time, then? Not at all. It didn’t happen because people took precautions. If they hadn’t done, the cost would have been muchhigher. It was a Biblical prophecy: ‘If this goes on …’ And, lo, the multitude heeded.
    This