The Science of Discworld II

Even more: it knew how to pass all this knowledge on to the next generation. Abraham knew that his own tiny intelligence was nothing compared to this majestic something . So he reified it, and gave it a name: Jehovah, which means ‘that which is’. So far, so good, but then he made a simple but intellectually fatal error. He fell for the trapof ‘ontic dumping’.
    Nice phrase. What does it mean? Ontology is the study of knowledge. Not knowledge itself, just its study. One important way to firm up new knowledge is to invent new words. For instance, when you make an arrow, someone has to produce the sharp pointy thing that sits at its business end. They chip it from flint or cast it in bronze; either way, you can’t go on forever referring to it as ‘the sharp pointy thing on the end of an arrow’. So you cast around for a metaphor, and you remember that the thing that sits at the business end of a person or animal is called its head. So you invent the term ‘arrow-head’.
    You have now dumped the knowledge of what the flint or bronze gadget is into a name. We say ‘dumped’, because for most purposes you don’t need to recall where the name came from. Arrowhead (no hyphen) has now become a thing in its own right, not a property possessed in relation to an arrow.
    The human mind is a storytelling device, a metaphor machine: ontic dumping comes naturally to creatures like us. It’s how our language works, how our minds work. It’s a trick we use to simplify things that would otherwise be incomprehensible. It is the linguistic analogue of a political hierarchy as a way for one person to control millions. As a side effect, ontically dumped words wallow in associations. We are seldom conscious of these, except when we occasionally stop and ask something like ‘What on Earth does “gossamer” mean?’ Then we rush off to the dictionary and discover that it probably (no one ever knows these things for sure) comes from ‘goose summer’. What’s that got to do with fine threads that float on the breeze? Well, in a summer when geese abound, a good summer, you find a lot of these fine spider-silk threads hanging in the air …
    Subconsciously, though, we are all too aware of the dark associations several layers down in the ontic-dumping hierarchy. So words, which ought to be abstract labels, are smeared all over with their own (often irrelevant) stories.
    Abraham, then, was overawed by ‘that which is’, and he ontically dumped it into a word, Jehovah. Which quickly became a thing, indeed, a person . That’s another of our habits, personifying things. So Abraham made the tiny step from ‘there is something outside us thatis greater than ourselves’ to ‘there is some one outside us who is greater than ourselves’. He had looked on the burgeoning extelligence of his own culture, and before his eyes it turned into God.
    And that made so much sense. It explained so much else. Instead of the world being like it was for reasons he couldn’t understand – even though that greater something clearly understood it perfectly well – he now saw that the world was like that because God had made it that way. The rain fell not because some tawdry idol rain-god made it fall; Abraham was too smart to believe that . It fell because that awesome God whose presence could be seen everywhere made it fall. And he, Abraham, couldn’t hope to understand the Mind of God, so of course he couldn’t predict when it would rain.
    We have used Abraham here as a placeholder. Choose your religion, choose your founder, adapt the story to fit. We’re not saying that we know that the birth of Judaism happened the way we’ve just explained. That was just a story, probably no more true than Winnie-the-Pooh and the honey. But just as Pooh in the rabbit-hole teaches us about greed, so Abraham’s ontic dumping points to a plausible route whereby sane, sensitive people can be led from their own private spiritual feelings to reify a natural process into an unfathomable Being.
    This reification has had many positive consequences. People take notice of the wishes of unfathomable, all-powerful Beings. Religious teachings often lay down guidelines (laws, commandments) for acceptable behaviour towards other people. To be sure, there are many disagreements between the different religions, or between sects within a given religion,