over a trembling boy and made him repeat the belief, until it was so deeply engrained that soon the angel had become a friend to which to turn to, when fear of this de-sexed person grew intolerable, and he wet himself, in front of all the class. It was fear and authority that drummed the whole dogma into the mind of an innocent child. That child did not want to believe in hell and its eternal fires. He knew what it was like to get a simple burn from a candle and the pain caused him to cry. How could he imagine an eternity of such pain, for committing a mortal sin, and being unlucky enough to die, without gaining the forgiveness of confession. The priest held such heaven and earthly powers for the child. Every word he uttered had to be believed. Soon the child's mind is full of religious nonsense that has the aura of a certain truth - that cannot even be questioned. The child's natural inquisitiveness has been strangled and choked.
I use strong words because I am angry when I think back on what my religious upbringing has been. It did not come from the home but from the school. The school, which should have been a place of learning where the child becomes enchanted with knowledge, becomes a place to be feared. It becomes a dark place, where the main purpose seems to be the indoctrination of tender minds in the strict dogma of a manic church. I was given over to an institution by my parents, just like all the children. It was accepted that the priests, nuns and brothers could do as they liked with our minds. They filled them with fear and negative thoughts of sin. They made us feel we were unworthy sinners, and that heaven was not meant for the likes of us. We would be lucky to spend a half eternity in the fires of a lonely purgatory. We became automatons, robotically chanting prayers and catechism. We were forced not to question, when the real aim of education should be to foster a healthy scepticism. No one dared ask the many questions that the dogma continually raised in our innocent minds. Why did Abraham have the heartlessness to be ready to kill his own son? But we knew that heartlessness and religion were bed fellows. The brothers showed no mercy with the stick as they viciously beat the dogma into us.
I shiver even now at the memories of it all. It was a dark time in Ireland during the fifties and sixties. Television had not yet come and the influence of the outside world was minimal. The church reigned supreme over family and society. I know what it is like to live under a totalitarian regime. True, they did not take you away and torture you openly. No. It was worse. They did it surreptitiously. When you were a child, as a student in their care, they could beat you senseless and nobody dared complain. Later as an adult, they wielded their power more covertly. They shamed you by their words, and you were ostracised. Their word was enough to get you that job, or not. The level of control over your life was complete. You had to get their permission to marry, and once married you had to remain so, at their insistence, no matter how bad the union turned out. They lorded over birth, education, marriage and death.
All this led to levels of hypocrisy that were obscene. People outwardly complied but inwardly behaved according to their own desires. As long as the outer show was in line with their behavioural norms, the inner morality was not of concern. Two worlds developed - one of external piety, the other brutish and defiled. Children born out of wedlock were hushed away to orphanages as if they were society's effluent. Sex was dirty and purely for producing new babies that were fodder for the next generation of psychologically, stunted individuals.
That era in the history of my country is gone but its memory remains scarred on the minds of so many of that generation. Even now, having embraced atheism for nearly thirty five years, the old inbredded guilt complexes return to me, in different situations. The fear of institutional authority is still there. The claustrophobia of organisations and groupings is still there. It is why I am basically a loner. It is why I am a vehement free thinker. Maybe it is why I am here now.
My difficulty is really a personal experience, one where my exposure to organised religion has been particularly unhappy. For all that, I try to keep an open mind about the spirituality of religion, and why there is an evident need for it even in the modern world. For a philosopher, a basic question has to be whether God exists. From a rational point of view, the question, like all questions, cannot be totally ruled out. But using the same rational latitude, I could say that, for instance, blue rabbits exist. That doesn't lead me anywhere because the probability in both cases might be so incredibly small that it would take, perhaps, billions of years to prove. But there is no reason for blue rabbits to exist. Is there a reason for god to exist?
This issue was dealt with by philosophers down the ages. Aristotle's argument for God was that of the First Cause - if you go back through the train of cause and effect, there must have been a first cause to originate movement. This first cause is itself unmoved and must therefore be an eternal substance. So, the Aristotelian reason for God is to get the whole universe moving. It certainly is a rational reason but is it sufficient? I think not because in answering one question - what got the whole shebang moving - it raises an infinity of other questions - what is God like, where did he come from, what is his purpose and on and on. In effect, the conception of God just replaces one set of questions by a matching set of questions, and we are no farther along.
Of course, the Greek gods were much different from the Jewish Yahweh or Christian or Islamic God. The Jews saw God as Creator of all things, and that reasoning was taken into both Christian and Islamic faiths. The idea of god as creator is not too far removed from that the Aristotelian view, and suffered from the same deficiencies.
It was St. Anselm, in the eleventh century, who invented the 'ontological' argument for the existence of God. He defines God as the greatest possible object of thought. If such an object of thought does not exist, then another, exactly like it, that does exist, is greater. Therefore, the greatest of all objects of thought must exist, since, otherwise, another still greater, would be possible. Therefore God exists, according to St. Anselm. This is using pure logic to prove the existence of God, but it depends upon the premise that there is a link between thinking about something, and existence. It also depends on first defining what God is - the essence of God is his being the greatest possible object of thought. Even St. Thomas Aquinas couldn't accept that the essence of God can be known, and refuted the ontological argument.
The ontological argument is difficult to understand. It centres around the concepts of essence and existence. For example, Hamlet does not exist but has a certain essence, say broodiness. Essence does not imply existence. Kant argued against the ontological argument by proposing that existence is not a property or predicate in itself, but rather a precondition for something to have properties. In effect, he maintained that existence doesn't add to the totality of essence, and therefore confounds St. Anselm's ontological argument. Kant's refutation rests on the question of whether existence is a predicate or not, and is not totally conclusive. The problem with the ontological argument is that it is very difficult to disprove conclusively. It is simply a logical play of words.
However the weakness lies in the definition of these words. What does existence mean to me, in my modern perspective of science and knowledge. Both at the microscopic and the cosmological scale there is no unique existence. In the quantum level of space there is an infinity of existences, each weighted with a probability that only realises an outcome when a measurement or observation is made. There are multiple existences, and therefore there must be multiple ontological gods for each existence. A measurement or observation fixes not only the state but the postulated ontological god. The prospect of an infinity of gods is a much greater disproof of the ontological argument that defines only one supreme being as possible. Likewise at the cosmological scale, where the Big Bang is like a small bubble universe in a vast sea of foam of infinities of parallel universes - each universe must have its own ontological god, and there arises the same problem of an infinity of gods. If anything the modern theories of science propose something more akin to the myriad of gods of Greece and Rome. Maybe it is polytheism, that w
ill be the religion of the future. The ontological god must by definition be monotheistic.
The idea of monotheism - of there being only one supreme being - has had a far shorter history in humanity's religious yearning than one would think. It is essentially a modern - in a relative sense - mindset but, other than for historical reasons, has no great rational basis. So if I were a religious person, my knowledge of modern scientific theory should lead me towards polytheism.
But those are old philosophical arguments for the existence of god. Let me look inward and try to decipher my personal view. If I were to believe in a god, it would have to be a pantheistic god, embedded deep in nature. I find wonder at the sheer beauty of existence. Is this not evidence of some greater designer, overseeing the natural and physical laws that create such awe-inspiring sights, the sky on a clear frosty night with its billions of twinkling lights coming from the vast space-time of the cosmos, the sight of bluebells under an apple tree in early summer? We can all list a history of such beautiful experiences, each a