Graham Lappin

On the subject of religion, I openly admit I am confused. Perhaps confused in the wrong word - undecided might be better. Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion classifies people’s belief in a deity on a sliding scale from the religious devout to the absolute atheist. On this sliding scale, I guess I sit somewhere towards the atheist but overall, if religion where likened to British politics, I would probably have to sit with the Liberal Democrats.

Convention would therefore have me classified as an agnostic but I am not sure I fit even this description. It is not that I have doubts about the existence of some supernatural overseer, it’s just that I see nothing upon which to base such a belief, which is not quite the same thing. Our very existence is subjugated upon an extremely finely tuned Universe. Take Planck’s constant as an example. In those fragments of time as the Universe inflated after the Big Bang, in that fleeting moment of the Universe’s history where it was a mere quantum speck, so Planck’s Constant popped out at 6.58211899 x 10-6 electron Volt seconds. If it had popped out at a slightly different value, then the fabric of the atomic Universe in which we currently live would have crumbled away and we would not be here to debate religion, or anything else.

Some would cite the very existence of a Universe that sits on such a knife edge as evidence for the presence of a higher deity. Others would cite the Anthropic Principle, in that the coincidence of the Universe’s existence is what allows us to perceive it. Theoretically, we may live in one bubble within a foam of many Universes - the Multiverse - where conditions just happen to be right for us to be here. And yet, the theist would repost by asking how a Multiverse came about and claim that God designed the laws which brought them all into being, as indeed why should there be any laws of any Multiverse at all. And so the arguments go round in circles.

On balance therefore, logic dictates that there is no need for a supernatural designer and that the probability of there being one is very small. These conclusions, somewhat ironically drawn upon the very physical laws that a deity, should it exist, would have designed.

Louis Pasteur said that the greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so. Something stirs within the basement of my brain and so much wants the existence of God to be true. Whatever it is, there is clearly some evolutionary drive, or perhaps just an accident of consciousness that impels us in this direction.