Monty Python and Philosophy (21 page)

Let us now return to the distinction between “conceivability” and “possibility” mentioned earlier. Although for St. Anselm’s argument I don’t think it matters very much whether God is defined as the greatest conceivable being or the greatest possible being, it is nonetheless an important distinction in philosophy. On the one hand, whether something is conceivable or inconceivable depends very much on the thinker. For example, what is conceivable to an intelligent man like the famous composer Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson (
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, Episode 1, “Whither Canada?”) is not necessarily conceivable to a Gumby brain specialist (see
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, Episode 32, “The War Against Pornography”). Conceivability varies from one individual to the next. On the other hand, not everything that is conceivable is possible. There is a certain sense of the term “possibility,” namely physical possibility, which is independent of the capabilities of individual thinkers, and depends only on physical laws. For example, Luigi Vercotti (
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, Episode 10, untitled) can conceive of Ron Obvious jumping the English Channel, digging a hole to Java, or running to Mercury. The fact that Luigi can conceive of these things certainly does not make them possible, as Ron’s failed attempts so laughably illustrate. While we’re on the topic, it should also be noted that conceivability and possibility often interact in interesting ways. For example, when something inconceivable to us turns out to be possible, we are often quite baffled to see it actually happen. This fact was put to productive use by the Confuse-A-Cat team in jarring a listless pet cat from out of its rut (
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, Episode 5, “Man’s
Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century”). Actually, in that episode, the Pythons take things even further. Some of the stunts pulled by the Confuse-A-Cat team were not only inconceivable, but physically impossible (although television makes anything look possible). As baffling as it is to see the inconceivable happen, it is even more baffling to witness something that is physically impossible! This is the stuff of miracles, but more on miracles later.

Another argument for the existence of God, a bit more intuitive than the Ontological Argument, is the Argument from Design. The Argument from Design says that the natural world provides evidence of creation by a rational God. What kinds of evidence are cited? Generally, evidence of order in the biological and physical worlds. Let us first consider the biological world. The biological variant of the Argument from Design states that the high degree to which plants and animals are adapted to their habitats and habits of life can hardly be due to chance. Besides, many of these adaptations are strikingly similar to the products of intelligent design by humans: the lens of an eye shares many features with the lens of a camera. Since human intelligence is known to be responsible for the design of man-made devices, by analogy, a divine intelligence must be responsible for the design of the far-more-complex adaptations of living things.

Now let us consider the physical world in general. The universe is chock full of orderly phenomena, as Eric Idle observes in “The Galaxy Song” from
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
:

The physical version of the Argument from Design states that all of this astronomical order and law-governed motion cannot have arisen due to chance, and therefore must have as its source a Higher Intelligence.

Today it is widely acknowledged throughout the world (and much of the United States) that Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection blew away the biological version of the Argument from Design. As the Pythons acknowledge in the title track to
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, “scientists say we’re just spiraling coils/ Of self-replicating DNA.” Blind variation in physical traits, some traits faring better than others in the struggle for existence, the encoding of traits in DNA, and their inheritance by offspring provide the basic ingredients for the evolution of adaptation by natural selection. A Divine Designer is not necessary to explain the presence of biological adaptations. Yet the physical version of the Argument from Design refuses to die. Many scientists and engineers today, while acknowledging that Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection has undercut the biological version of the argument, argue that the physical version of the Design Argument receives stronger and stronger support with each new theoretical advance in our understanding of the universe. Newton certainly thought so, as did Einstein, who wrote in
The World As I See It
(1934), pp. 267-68:

This quotation emphasizes another dimension to the Argument from Design. Not only does the universe afford us evidence of the
existence
of God, but of His
attributes
as well. God possesses an intelligence that in some vague way is like human intelligence, only more super. Hume, a big Newton fan, and himself very much impressed with the orderliness of the universe, was very dismissive of this argument. For one thing, to invoke a Divine Intelligence to explain the origin of order in the universe doesn’t seem to explain anything at all. It simply takes one mystery, the presence of order in the universe, and replaces it with
something equally mysterious, a Divine Intelligence (in Hume’s words, an “intelligent agent”). We might just as well ask where Divine Intelligence comes from. Clearly, Hume argues, this explanation gives no satisfaction. Yet even granting that the universe has a Creator, Hume was skeptical of the prospects of inferring His attributes from His creation. Where the orthodox Christian believer saw in nature evidence of God’s moral righteousness, benevolence, and omnipotence, Hume saw evidence of moral indifference. Monty Python captured Hume’s critique brilliantly on their
Contractual Obligation Album
in their mock hymn, “All Things Dull and Ugly”:

Hume believed that the Argument from Design did not derive its persuasiveness from observations of the imperfect world around us, but rather from weakly veiled appeals to church doctrine,
which preached the existence of a single, all-powerful, eternal, and benevolent God. Our observations of the world are influenced by our prior beliefs about God. In other words, when we look out at the world, we aren’t seeing evidence of God’s attributes in the world, rather, we are simply seeing the world through God-colored glasses, selectively ignoring all things dull, ugly, rude, and nasty. Hume thought that not very much about God can be inferred from his creation. To underscore his point, he ventured a number of hypotheses equally compatible with the observations. Perhaps, he mused, the universe is the work of many Gods. Or maybe it was initiated by a deity who has long since abandoned it to its own devices.

There is a scene in Terry Gilliam’s opening animation sequence to
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
where God is shown vacillating between two possible earths, one spherical and the other cubical. Opting for the spherical one, he tosses it off to one side whereupon it promptly cracks open. Hume had invoked a similar image in
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
to emphasize that a number of different creation scenarios were consistent with our observations of the world around us:

From the context of the passage, it is clear that Hume did not sincerely entertain this proposition or several of the others he mentions. Rather, he sought to illustrate that what we are able to observe of the world around us does little to illuminate such remote questions as the existence and attributes of the Creator, if there is one.

What religion would be complete without its miracles? Well, certainly not Christianity. One of the most important arguments for Christianity is founded on such miracles as the Virgin Birth, the
Resurrection, and the miracles performed by Jesus Christ and described in the New Testament by the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. According to these accounts, Jesus brought about events completely outside the natural order of things, such as turning water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the blind, the lepers, and even the impotent (the number of different kinds of miracles Jesus performed depends on which Evangelist you consult). What can we conclude from all this? A miracle is often cited as a sign that the person performing it is either Divine or Divinely empowered. Let’s grant that only God can confer supernatural powers, and let’s further assume that He would never give those powers to someone who would misrepresent Him. Then the words of a miracle-worker such as Jesus should be accepted as revelations of Divine Wisdom (a version of this argument may be found in John 3: 2). That, in a nutshell, is the Argument from Miracles.

This raises the question, was Brian Cohen divine? Let’s take a look at his miracles. In
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
, each “miracle” Brian performs leads to greater conviction on the part of his followers that his every utterance is Divinely sanctioned. His first miracle is to be “taken up” into heaven, only to be spotted in full sprint moments later. For his next miracle, he causes a juniper bush to bring forth juniper berries. Later he miraculously restores the power of speech to Simon, a hermit of eighteen years (by landing on his foot, that is). As evidence of Brian’s divinity mounts, his words are received by the devoted throng as Divine revelation. His exasperated plea for the crowd to “fuck off ” is treated as an invitation to ritual: “How shall we fuck off, O Lord?”

Of course, we know, as do Brian, Simon the Hermit, and everyone else who is not in a devotional stupor, that the purported miracles are nothing of the sort. Which of these events lies outside the natural order? Temporarily disappearing from view when running through a crowded marketplace? Juniper bushes bearing juniper berries? Yelping over a foot injury? The answer is none of the above. Eyewitnesses believe them to be miracles, yet clearly they are not. This is the starting point for a critique raised by Hume in his essay “Of Miracles.”
⁶⁴
Eyewitnesses are
often wrong. And as weak as the evidence from the reports of eyewitnesses might be, it certainly gets no stronger as it travels through the grapevine, as anyone knows who has ever sent a story around a circle. Moreover, a miracle is by definition outside the natural order, and hence has the weight of every contrary event stacked against it. For every report of water being turned to wine, we have countless reports of water remaining water. The less probable an event is, Hume says, the more suspicious we should be of claims that it happened. From errors on the part of the witness, to mistakes or deception at each link in the chain of human testimony, there are countless ways that a report of a miracle could be mistaken. Ultimately, Hume says, the only condition under which we should accept someone’s testimony of a miracle is if it would be even more miraculous if they were wrong!

It was central to Hume’s philosophy that questions of existence, which he called “matters of fact,” could never be settled by abstract reasoning alone (we saw this earlier in the critique of the Ontological Argument: a being cannot simply be defined into existence). Knowledge of what exists is always rooted in experience. Nonetheless, as is well-illustrated by the eyewitness accounts of Brian Cohen’s “miracles,” experience is a fallible source of knowledge. Hume readily acknowledged that we can be mistaken about what our senses are telling us.

Hume’s examination of the Ontological, Design, and Miracle arguments found each of them severely lacking. Yet for all of his attention to the reasons for religious belief, Hume was convinced that elegant argumentation had little to do with why most people actually believed. To answer that question required an inquiry not into the
reasons
for religious belief, but rather its
causes
. In his
Natural History of Religion
, Hume fingered a rather simple and age-old cause of religious belief: fear.

Hume argued that people everywhere are afraid of the forces which affect their lives but are beyond their control. They call these forces Gods and seek to appease them through religious worship. Over time, the number of Gods has decreased, but the
same story holds. In
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, the school chaplain leads the young lads in a hymn that essentially beseeches the Almighty not to cook and eat his loyal flock: “O Father, please don’t boil us.” And in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
, God himself chastises King Arthur for his fearful groveling and supplication. These views of religion fit very well with Hume’s analysis.