The Science of Discworld IV

are everywhere: in the water, the trees, the clouds. They have shamans, tribal ‘doctors’. In 2011, Ian gained an interesting insight into shamans when visiting a Cambodian village. A child was ill, and the shaman was performing a ceremony to expel bad spirits and restore her health. The interesting part was that the tribe had sent her to a conventional doctor the day before, who had put her on a course of antibiotics. Naturally, the shaman had to ratify this with the right ceremony, thereby making it possible to take the credit. The villagers presumably saw little difference between the antibiotics and the ritual – but someone in the tribe, perhaps the headman or one of his two wives, had the sense to try both. Human- and universe-centred thinking in an unholy alliance.
    The world’s major religions dismiss animism on the grounds that belief in several gods – polytheism – is ridiculous. The intelligent way to go is monotheism, belief in one god. (Or, in the case of Unitarianism, belief in
at most
one god.) But is monotheism the great step forward that is so unquestioningly assumed?
    It has a definite attraction: unification. It assigns all of the universe’s puzzling features to a single cause. Belief in one god is less off-putting than belief in dozens. It’s even consistent with Occam’s razor.
    If you want to invoke Thomas Aquinas’s ontological argument for the existence of God, in his
Summa Theologica
, monotheism is unavoidable. There, he invites us to consider ‘the greatest conceivable being’. If it did not exist, then there would have to be a greater conceivable being: one that did exist. That surely is greater than a non-existent greatest being. So God exists, QED. Moreover, He is unique: you can’t have two greatest beings. Each would have to be greater than the other.
    Logicians and mathematicians are painfully aware, however, that this argument is flawed. Before you can use a characterisation of some entity to deduce its properties, you have to provide
independent
proof that such an entity exists.
    The classic example is a proof that the largest whole number is 1. Consider the largest whole number. Its square is at least as big, so it must equal its square. The only whole numbers like that are 0 and 1, of which 1 is larger. QED. Except, 1 is clearly not the largest whole number. For instance, 2 is bigger.
    Oops.
    What’s wrong? The proof assumes that there
is
a largest whole number. If it exists, everything else is correct, and it has to be 1. But since that makes no sense, the proof must be wrong, and that implies that it doesn’t exist.
    So, in order to use the ontological argument to infer the existence of the greatest conceivable being, we must first establish that such a being exists,
without
simply referring to the definition. So what the argument proves is ‘If God exists, then God exists’.
    Congratulations.
    At any rate, whatever advantages monotheism may possess, being a consequence of the ontological argument is not one of them.
    Monotheism’s supposed great triumph, unification, may actually be its greatest flaw. Assigning all puzzling phenomena to the same causes is a standard philosophical error, the equation of unknowns. Asimov put it this way: if you don’t understand UFOs, telepathy orghosts, then UFOs must be piloted by telepathic ghosts. This way of thinking invents a label and attaches it to all mysteries, closing them off in the same way. It claims the same cause for all of them, which robs that cause of any explanatory force.
    If you are a Cambodian animist, believing in a spirit for every natural phenomenon, you are aware that different phenomena may have different explanations. What explains water is not the same as what explains a tree. This can be a starting point for finding out more. But if you are a monotheist, offering the same explanation of
everything
you don’t understand – whatever it is, and equally applicable even if it were totally different – then you are just closing down lines of enquiry, advancing the same facile answer to every mystery.
    How many people, in today’s scientific and technical world, have beliefs that are consonant with the kind of world they live in? How many understand about microwave ovens, why aeroplanes can stay up, about how electricity is distributed to houses (and don’t expect electricity from unconnected sockets in their wall), and how milk comes from cows, not from supermarkets? What proportion of people do