DIVINE DECEPTIONS

When I was a child, one of my Christmas presents was a box of magic tricks.  You could make a magic wand rise by virtue of the rubber band concealed behind it.  And so on.  A little booklet contained the data for a dozen card tricks.  It was fun, but also deflating in a way.  The card tricks that seemed so baffling became trivial once one understood how they worked.  And with everything else in the box, there was the issue that all the tricks relied on deception.  It was fine when your audience knew that to be the case.  But what if they didn’t?  Endless grounds for manipulation of the gullible.

     The sort of thing I mean occurs in King Solomon’s Mines.  Foreknowing that there will be a solar eclipse, the English adventurers declare that they will black out the Sun.  In a good cause – to help a rightful claimant secure his throne – but a result achieved, none the less, by what is effectively a lie. 

     The downside of such tactics against the credulous can be seen in Rudyard Kipling’s novella The Man Who Would Be King.   Dravot is assumed to be a god until he bleeds; whereupon the priests realise that he is nothing but a human.  With attendant consequences.  

 

A similar sort of assumption underlies the God-of-Gaps argument, or the rejection of miracles.  Things were once assumed to be miraculous, or explicable only by the presence of God; but now we know better.  As knowledge increases, so the role of God diminishes.  One day there will be no need for God at all.  But is this a valid comparison with the magic box, or isn’t it? 

     Take the case of the rainbow.  It was thought, so the argument runs, to be God’s covenant with Noah.  But now we know it to be caused by the splitting of white sunlight into component colours by raindrops.  Refraction, wavelengths etc.  We must abandon the idea of the covenant.

     Or  must we?  For are we comparing like with like?

     What is actually implied, after all?   That the rainbow did not exist before the Flood?  Then there really would be a case to answer.  Or is it simply that the rainbow is now made into a promise?  If  that is the issue, then knowing how a rainbow is formed is irrelevant to its covenantal significance.

     When Verdi composed Nabucco, the song of the Hebrew slaves achieved a symbolic significance for  the subject Italians against their Austrian oppressors.  That they whistled it could not prove subversion: they were simply whistling a catchy tune they knew from Nabucco.  And knowing a lot about music, how Verdi composed, when it was written, and in what key: none of that would have made the slightest difference as to whether or not the song was symbolic.  

     You can be powerfully moved by a painting, even if you know nothing about the mechanics of art.  Knowing the stages of composition, the nature of the pigments, the artistic school within which the work arose etc, does not mean that the picture no longer exists.  And it need not alter in any way the emotional effect it has on you.  

 

Something similar (technically, a debate about Realism and Nominalism) is at work with the Witch in C S Lewis’ The Silver Chair:  The hanging lamp reminds the trapped Narnians of the Sun.  But the Sun is an illusion.  Because you see the lamp, you imagine the existence of something like it, but greater.  Lions, equally, do not exist.  Because you have seen a cat, you imagine a bigger, more powerful version; but simply imagining it does not mean that it exists. 

     Because we know about human fathers, we imagine a divine one.  This  was the sort of argument against God and Heaven posited by Feuerbach: taken up enthusiastically – and more famously – by Marx and Freud.

     It cuts two ways, of course,  Because we get thirsty may be the proof that water is an illusion.  Or it may be the proof that we are creatures who need to sustain ourselves by drinking.  The hunger for God may prove God to be an illusion; or it may suggest that we were not created for spiritual self-sufficiency.

     Lewis’ Silver-Chair argument, of course, it is only an analogy.  The sceptic will counter that we have seen  real lions, and we have seen the Sun.  We have not seen God.

     To which the Christian may reply that there were those who did, when Christ once walked the Earth. 

     And for the rest of us, the question is not “If?", but “When?”