The Ontological Proof and Why I Think It’s Cobblers

I should probably lay a card on the table at this point. Whenever I’ve seen a theological ‘proof’ of God’s existence, I’ve always been overwhelmed by a sense of ‘Huh? That’s it?’. I know I’m not alone in that, and I also know that people are religious for all sorts of reasons and very, very few of those reasons are directly because of theological reasoning. I suspect, although obviously I can’t prove, there are more people who become agnostic, atheist or who stay away from religion because of theology, at least of the armchair variety, than those who become religious from a cold start because they were swung by an article by a theology professor. I know there’s a category of thoughtful person who finds a pre-existing religious belief strengthened by a well reasoned theological argument.

Now, I am not so arrogant to think that I’m cleverer than St Anselm. He was an extraordinary man who clearly had no truck with mysticism or obscurantism, and was keen to apply rational argument to theology. In the comments on Pharyngula and this blog after my Above Us Only Sky post, it’s clear that a lot of people assume the default value for humanity in the past was ‘superstitious chump’. Anselm is not some Dark Ages witch doctor. Step one: accept he’s smarter than you and thought about this longer than you have.

Here’s a paraphrase of his Ontological Argument for the existence of God, from the Proslogion, so dating from about 1078. For a thousand years, theologians have agreed that this argument, or at least one very like it, is one of the better proofs of God’s existence:

1. God is defined as ‘a being than which nothing greater can be conceived'.

2. Everyone understands the statement ‘God exists’, even if they do not agree with it.

3. So, everyone holds the concept of God in their brain. God ‘exists’ in at least that form.

4. I know what you’re thinking: things can exist in the imagination that definitely don’t exist in reality. This is obviously true.

5. And now you’re thinking ‘this is a complete cheat – you told me you were going to prove the existence of God, and this is some poxy thing about how God exists in our imagination, isn’t it? I wanted something real and if we only imagine a thing, it isn’t as good as if that thing is real. I can imagine a big pile of money, but I can’t spend imaginary money’.

6. But here’s the thing: so you accept we’ve got this God in our imagination and basically all his attributes are set to Infinity. God is the greatest being that can be imagined. And you’re thinking: ‘nothing can be imagined that’s greater than that, surely, by definition, that’s as far as we can take this?’. Well … there’s one thing greater still, and that’s that God, the one any fool can imagine, but now imagine He actually exists. Actual God Like That > Imagined God Like That. You just said that yourself, remember?

7. See that definition I gave in (1)? I just proved God exists.

I think I’ve represented Anselm’s argument fairly, if a little chattily, and I think I understand the argument. It is, after all, an argument designed by a clever man so that any fool can understand it.

Now, I know I’m not alone in this, I don’t read that and go: ‘Wow, the scales have fallen from my eyes, case closed, God exists’ … I go, ‘no, hang on, that’s got to be a load of old cobblers … hasn’t it?’.

Now, some people might go ‘Anselm’s the authority, this argument has been around for a thousand years, I agree it seems a bit dodgy, but who am I to argue?’. But that isn’t engaging with the argument, and Anselm was a clever man, and presumably he wanted people to engage with the argument, to try to scale its impregnable walls.

And that accounts for two of the reasons I like the idea of theology.

1. I want to know all these arguments and understand them, because when someone cleverer than me tells me something and I don’t understand it, I’m keen to learn.
2. They want me to argue with them, they’re inviting me to.

That second one is, truth be told, probably my main motivating force. I want to test these ideas, challenge them, smack them around a bit. And the fact remains: Anselm is cleverer than me, but I don’t find this argument satisfying at all. It’s … silly. Isn’t it?

So then I thought ‘why is it silly?’. Instinctively, it feels like sleight of hand – some bit of wordplay or bait and switch. And it gets my mind racing …

It’s surprisingly hard to explain what the flaw in the ontological argument actually is. It’s not any of the ones that look obvious. We can quibble with the definition of God in (1) and say “well, OK, this ‘greatest imaginable being’ exists, but that doesn’t mean he gave stone tablets to Moses, sent his only son down to Earth, dictated anything to Mohammed, and/or did whatever barmy thing it is that Mormons believe”. This is an extremely good point (and Anselm goes on to explain why it has to specifically be the Christian God), but ultimately it’s nitpicking, given that the ‘greatest imaginable being’ exists. I mean, if it’s not your God, it’s something that could steal your God’s lunch money. OK, this God might not be Jesus’s dad, Mr Dawkins, but if we can demonstrate He exists, you were more wrong than the Christians were.

The main objection over the years seems to be that ‘existing in reality’ is not necessarily superior to ‘existing in real life’. But I find that rather dispiriting. I understand the argument that ‘the perfect woman’ or ‘the best meal’ or ‘the greatest movie’ can all be imagined, and that the fun is in the argument, rather than the actuality. What would ‘the perfect woman’ be like? Well … different people are going to have different answers to that, to put it mildly, and I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to suggest that it rather depends on who you are and what you want from life. It’s entirely subjective. I don’t think it’s possible to have one universally agreed ‘perfect woman’ that exists. But I think that were the existence of a perfect woman possible, it would be better if she existed. I think existing is ‘greater’ than non-existing. Not necessarily ‘better’ in the sense of ‘more advantageous’ – it would be bad if the greatest virus we can imagine, for example, existed – but I think, instinctively, an actual thing is ‘greater’ than an imagined thing.

I think we agree that ‘the imagination’ and ‘real life’ are different things. It’s obviously more complicated than that – what each of us, individually, call ‘reality’ is our aggregated mental construct of sense data and blah blah so what counts as reality is more problematic than we usually blah blah – but Anselm, I and very probably you (unless you’re feeling particularly bloodyminded) would agree that ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ are antonyms for the sake of this argument. The point of the Proof, if you like, is that this God crosses to our side of the ‘reality barrier’.

So what else do I think? Well, it looks like we can quibble with (2). I can conceptualise stuff without any great clarity – I can imagine, say, ‘the next novel by Umberto Eco’, but I don’t even know the title, let alone the contents. It may never be written. Am I really ‘conceiving’ the novel, or is it just some sort of mental placeholder?

And it looks like choices have to be made – God can’t have conflicting attributes, he can’t be infinitely contemplative and infinitely impulsive. He can’t be both the greatest fighter and the greatest pacifist. There are non-divine attributes he can’t possess – he’s not the greatest worshipper, or the greatest non-divine being. Meanwhile, any attempt to go ‘oh, God can be everything and nothing, he’s so wonderful he is both the hottest and coldest thing possible simultaneously’ has the disadvantage that you can only possibly think that if you’re a simpering idiot who doesn’t know what very easy words mean. Anselm would hate you.

Another obvious objection: I could be completely wrong about what ‘greatness’ is, and the God in my head might have all sorts of attributes He shouldn’t. A lot of what the Greek and Norse gods got up to was reprehensible by today’s civilised standards. As St Yoda of Dagobah put it, ‘Great warrior? Wars not make one great’. Anselm has a bit of sleight-of-hand here: yes, ‘you’ are imagining that God, but the God in question is the greatest that ‘can be conceived’ … not just by you, but by anyone. You can be wrong, without implications for God. More than a little slippery, I think, but allowable.

This God’s existence seems to be dependent on the existence of something imagining it. Even the creationists concede that there was some time after the creation of existence but before beings with imaginations came along. So how did God exist then? But God wins that on a cunning loophole – at the beginning, he’s the only being who exists, so he’s unarguably the greatest thing that can be imagined, he just keeps it that way until He gives something else an imagination. I’m only sort of 85% convinced that argument makes any sense, even in its own terms, but if you accept the basic set up, I guess you have to accept that’s what happened. 

But, for me, (6) feels like the place where the shenanigans must be. If I can imagine a horse that, say, runs at a hundred miles an hour, and then it turns out that in real life there’s a horse that runs at a hundred miles an hour … well, it’s not the same horse, is it? It’s not my horse, but with one extra property, that of ‘existing’, stapled to it. It’s a different horse. It’s a coincidence, not something I conjured into existence. Isn’t that a problem?

So I went back and looked at the definition in (1). God’s defined as the greatest thing ‘that can be conceived’. The definition specifically says, then, that this is the biggest God that exists ‘in the mind’. That’s the only realm which the definition concerns itself with.

Imagine Anselm had asked ‘what’s the biggest volcano on Earth?’, and you’d answered, perhaps after checking Wikipedia like I did, ‘Mauna Loa’, and he’d said ‘a-ha, but Mount Olympus on Mars is much bigger’. You’d say ‘you said on Earth’, and he’d check his notes and say ‘Er … yes. You’re right. Sorry’. The existence of the biggest volcano on Earth has no bearing on volcanoes on Mars, and vice versa.

The sphere of Anselm’s definition of God is the imagination, the realm of mental conception. Real life is outside that jurisdiction. So let’s reword it to take into account the God Anselm actually wants to prove: ‘God is the greatest thing that exists in the imagination’ or ‘God is the greatest thing that you think is real’. But this wasn’t meant to be me dreaming of a really fast horse, it was meant to be about finding that horse in real life. We’re trying to find a God that, to put it crudely but in a way that I think we all understand, ‘crosses the reality barrier’, and this doesn’t do that. Anselm’s God exists – in our mind as the greatest being we can conceive plus imagining it also exists. An imaginary big sack of money is good, it’s even more fun if we imagine what we could spend it on, that’s even better … but it doesn’t mean we can spend that money.

And this satisfies me, because I think it hits on my key problem with the Ontological Argument. Even if we had concluded the proof holds, we can’t ‘spend’ Anselm’s God. What’s changed? Do we know what He wants, or how we should change our life? When we talk to Him, does He now talk back? We’ve hacked His password, so do we get to read his files? No.

And that’s the real ‘huh, that’s it?’ about the ontological proof: even if it’s true … it gives me no indication of how the universe is different or how I should moderate my behaviour. It doesn’t let me cure any sick kiddies, or paint better pictures, or interact better with other people or let me know if God wants women to be priests or what his definition of ‘marriage’ is. There’s an implicit second clause to that sentence that’s also needed: ‘God exists, so … ‘.

And I’m going to stress this – for a thousand years, a biographical dictionary’s worth of the great minds of humanity have looked at the ontological proof and most have concluded that even if it’s wrong, it’s logically consistent. I don’t think I crushed it in an afternoon and so we can forget about it, now. I don’t even think I came up with anything a freshman philosophy student couldn’t demolish in two minutes.

I do know that there’s a modern variant of the Ontological Proof, as seen in, say, the works of Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga, like Anselm, defines God as ‘the greatest’ (he phrases it ‘maximally powerful’). But, Plantinga recognises the obvious problem: you can’t be the ‘most hot’ and ‘most cold’. A God that had the greatest possible values of every attribute would find many attributes cancelling themselves out.

But Plantinga and the people who defend his Proof say that when we talk about God’s attributes, we talk about his potential. God can’t be both the hottest and the coldest, but he could be whichever of the two, if he wanted to. Whatever contest you have, God would win.

This is an example of what I call the ‘except God argument’.

Philosophers like Aquinas and Leibniz found another Proof, the ‘first cause’ argument utterly compelling:

1. It is a given that everything has a cause.
2. Anything without a cause can not exist.
3. God does not have a cause.
4. Something must have set everything in motion, and so existed before the ‘first cause’. The only possible qualified being is God.

Now, looking at that, you might spot that if (2) is true, and the definition of God in (3) is true, then the only possible conclusion is ‘God can not exist’. Instead, the theological tactic runs: ‘God is the only exception to this rule’. Not only that, the fact God is the exception to the rule is what makes him God. Leave aside the circular logic, which is what most people get bogged down in, just note this: no other being gets this privilege – they are measured by what they are and do. I admit I don’t understand why. I can imagine, say, a stone that might be the coldest object on Earth or the hottest, depending on where it happened to be. I wouldn’t point at that stone and say ‘this is both the hottest and coldest stone on Earth’.

Plantinga’s argument is merely an ‘except God’ argument. As soon as you say there’s one exception to the rule ‘anything without a cause can not exist’, why not just make the exception a single particle, a fluctuation in the quantum foam – or for that matter a magic singing pig? If you’re allowing one ‘uncaused cause’, then why not two or three of them? Why not fifty?

That said, I doubt my argument is original or all that robust. Anyway, even if I had somehow managed to blow up Anselm’s Death Star with a fluke shot, or somehow found a fatal flaw in the life’s work of Plantinga, a man reputed to be the greatest living theologian, I wouldn’t have disproved the existence of God.

All I did was identify why I found the Ontological Argument dissatisfying. I can now articulate my nagging doubt. And that’s something I can see as useful.

 

Pharyngulated

Well … I got Pharyngulated. My ‘Above Us Only Sky’ post was featured on PZ Myer’s blog Pharyngula, and five thousand people clicked on the link, many of those subscribed to the blog, and a very interesting discussion has ensued. Thanks to everyone who’s commented, and hello there.

This blog is essentially just me sharing some musings on bits of research or reading I’ve done, and drawing attention to work of mine that’s been published. It’s ‘things I thought were interesting’ kind of place, not one that’s got a specific theme. So, er … sorry about that.

The second-most-visited page after the one Professor Myers linked to was the enigmatic (that is to say dead link) ‘Fixing Jesus’. It’s the title of a science fiction novel I’m working on, I can’t really say much more about it than that. Um, it has a religious theme. You guessed that from the title, though, yes? The first line is ‘I wasn’t sure if I should have the last cookie, so I asked Jesus and He told me it was OK, so I had the last cookie’, and if you want to read the second sentence, and you happen to be a publisher, then my agent’s contact details are to the right of this paragraph.

OK … well, I wasn’t really expecting to write about theology, but I have been reading up on the subject. Mainly for Fixing Jesus research, and for the latest version of a novel that’s been on the backburner so long it was originally pitched as a Virgin Worlds back in 1997, which is called Anything Except Paluxy, because I wanted to call it Paluxy and my editor Rebecca Levene said I could call it anything except Paluxy, and her wish is my command.

But also because a couple of years back, a new meme started doing the rounds: that Richard Dawkins didn’t understand theology, because he hadn’t studied it, and so he was unqualified to discuss it and was guilty of howling theological errors. The natural reaction of many was, to paraphrase – it’s that man again – PZ Myers’ Courtier’s Reply, that if you understand the Emperor to have no clothes, it’s a waste of time studying invisible stitching techniques.

Studying, reading and acquiring knowledge are all good things. But all knowledge is not equal, and not all fields are worthy of equal dedication. While it’s good to have curiosity, an imagination and an open mind, sometimes a little learning is precisely the amount you need to make a judgement call.

I have not studied, for example, homeopathy. Like a lot of people, I used to think homeopathy was some sort of herbal medicine, something to do with essential oils or something. I found out a little about how homeopathy works, and that’s all I really need to know. I admit I may be wrong about homeopathy. If I am, there would be a vast number of much bigger, much more important things I would also have to be wrong about first, any number of Maginot lines that would already have had to be breached by a blitzkrieg of bullshit. ‘Causality’, for example, can’t exist in a world consistent with homeopathy, and I think, on balance, causality exists. ‘Numbers’, that’s another a concept incompatible with homeopathy. I think there is such a thing as mathematics.

Theology, unlike homeopathy, isn’t something invented in 1796 by a quack who also thought most diseases were caused by drinking coffee. Theology is a broad-ranging discipline, ‘the study of divine things’, and it can fairly be said that, in times gone by at least, theology occupied and even preoccupied some of the greatest minds of history. I don’t think you need to believe or worship any or  all of the the gods under discussion to be interested in them, or to understand that belief in gods has been a rather important factor in human history and culture.

The awkward fact was that I hadn’t studied any modern theology, so I shouldn’t really dismiss an entire body of human endeavour without any effort to engage with it. So I set about reading, studying, asking your actual theologians things. This wasn’t formal study, and I knew all along that the results were going to be idiosyncratic and incomplete. But I found out a number of interesting things, these things weren’t at all what I expected going in, and I found the process rewarding.

I wasn’t planning to share, and, like I say, please don’t take what I write as anything more than my impressions and responses. I’m going to be perfectly honest: my main motivation in posting what I’ll post is for people to take me to task and show me the errors of my ways in the comments. I’m far happier learning than teaching. So … in a few days, once I’ve written it up, we’ll start with my thoughts on the Ontological Proof of God.

Hmmm, I just heard an odd sound. I guess that’s what five thousand people not clicking on a link sounds like …

Above Us Only Sky

I may be wrong about this, but I think there is a theological issue that, when we consider the whole sweep of human history, troubled a far higher proportion of the human population from far earlier and for far longer than any single other question. It’s not a question we ask today.

It’s not ‘does God exist?’ – there have always been people who haven’t believed in the gods, but until extremely recently, the vast majority of people have taken it completely for granted that there was at least one god around at some point. It’s not ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’ – if you believe in more than one god, it’s because those gods are warring; if you believe in one god it’s because that god wills it; if you don’t believe in gods, it’s a foolish question.

I don’t know this for certain, because we have to look back a long way to see when it was first asked – we have to rely on interpretations of Neolithic art (at least twelve thousand years old), we have to depend on reconstructions of the Copper Age (seven thousand years ago), we have to look at paleolinguistics, the study of how ancient languages spread and developed. It was an idea that it seems was carved into stone seven thousand years before the Ten Commandments were. We know it was a question that was still being seriously considered by at least one major culture until about five hundred years ago. The symbolism survives today, in both Western and Eastern religious belief.

The ultimate theological question is: ‘Where does the Sun go at night?’.

The answer that so many civilisations agreed for so long was: ‘The Sun is driven by one of the gods, and at night it goes under the Earth to fight a battle. There is at least some risk that the god will lose this battle, and so the Sun may not rise tomorrow’. It’s something the human race understood was a cast iron fact before they knew how to cast iron. It survived as the working model twenty-five times longer than the four hundred years we’ve understood the Earth goes around the Sun. It was understood to be the literal truth, not some metaphor or piece of symbolism.

This idea spread with ancient man across the Middle East, India, into Europe. It was a belief – in some form – held simultaneously in Scandinavia, Indonesia and pre-Columbian America. From the late Stone Age, well into the Iron Age, surviving into late Roman, Aztec and, in vestigal form, modern Hindu and Christian belief there was consensus. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, there’s a very exciting sequence where Gilgamesh finds the tunnel the Sun goes down into at night and races along it, with the setting Sun barrelling after him like that giant rock at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This was a religious outlook held for far longer and by a far higher proportion of the human race then living than has ever believed ‘there is only one god’, ‘the god I worship created the universe’ or ‘God’s a paragon of virtue’. It’s a religious belief that can rightfully be said to have been ‘universal’, in the parochial sense human beings use the word. For thousands of years, it appears that all human beings believed it.

The vestiges of this belief still pervade our language, our image of God and to some extent our thought. One of the ways we can see how pervasive the idea was is that it survives in our languages. There are many processes by which languages diverge, but we can see one in action when we ask why Americans call cars ‘automobiles’ and lifts ‘elevators’ … it’s because those are things invented after the split with Britain, so they came up with their own words. Paleolinguistics looks at the similarities and differences between languages and can be used (with due caution) to infer when things are invented – we can see by collating what different languages call them, for example, that ‘wheel’ far predates ‘spokes’, that ‘equine’ predates ‘saddle’ and far predates ‘stirrups’. Some scholars believe we can pinpoint when different types of sword and spear were invented by looking at what different peoples called them. There are some words that are truly ancient – the words for ‘I’, ‘two’ and so on. 

Seven thousand years ago, in what we now call the Proto-Indo-European culture of the Middle East, the God that pulled the Sun through the sky was called something like Dyeusphaeter. It’s a name older than the Sanskrit language, which later rendered it as Dyaus Pita. It’s the origin of the names Jupiter and Zeus, and many other Sun gods in many other cultures – Dyaus of early Indian mythology, Ahura Mazda in Persia (the first monotheistic God), Astwatz, Dispater. In German it was Deiwos, that became Tiwaz – which is where we get the word ‘Tuesday’. The Latin word ‘deus’ – which is the ancestor of the English word ‘deity’ – derives from it, but this isn’t some word English borrowed from Latin, it massively predates that, so that two almost completely unrelated languages, Welsh and Persian, have similar words for God: ‘Duw’ and ‘Deva’. The first half of the name became the English word ‘divine’ (and possibly ‘day’, although that’s disputed), and ‘Phaeter’ became ‘father’, so modern English would render the name as ‘day-father’, which is sometimes personified as ‘Father Sky’.

Many of the gods people worship today share memes with Dyeusphaeter. One of the trendiest religions in first century Rome was the cult of Sol Invictus, ‘the undefeated Sun’, and the main feast day was to celebrate the end of winter, which was also the birthday of the God – December 25th (he was born of a virgin). Sol Invictus had a golden crown, a halo, and it’s possible to track the early Christian iconography and writings as they starting those elements into their own beliefs. It’s not because of Sol Invictus that Christians go to church on Sunday – that was taken from another rival cult, that of Mithras (and the day of the sabbath was the source of much dispute among Christians until the Council of Laodicea in 364).

Traditional images of the Christian God and Jesus himself owe a lot to Father Sky. Day-father was the God of the day, clearly one of the most important and powerful (although by no means the only god or the most powerful), and was associated with all the benefits the Sun brings. But half the time, at night, he wasn’t there. And in many places in the world the days were much shorter in the winter and longer in the summer. This was profoundly troubling – how could the influence of such a self-evidently powerful God ebb and flow like that?

Instinctively, now, we know that it’s always day somewhere on Earth. We’re so used to seeing, say, live TV pictures from the other side of the planet and if it’s night where we are, it’s day there. I don’t think we need empirical evidence of that, as such, it’s almost instinctive. Just something we know. We must all have acquired the information, but at such an early age it essentially counts as innate. We also know that it’s not ‘the Sun on the other side of the world’, as such, that’s how it appears from Earth. We orbit the Sun, not vice versa. Were people really so stupid in the olden days that they couldn’t work any of that out? We all know that everyone used to think the world is flat. We’re all wrong, as it happens. We all know that the Catholic church were dumb and so blinded by ignorance that they refused to believe the Earth went round the Sun even when Galileo heroically confronted them with science and declared otherwise. Coming to understand why we’re wrong about that, too, why it’s almost exactly the opposite, is pretty exciting and I’m sure I’ll talk about that at some point.

So here’s an interesting question: when did the human race discover that the Sun was simply on the other side of the world at night? And more to the point, when was that discovery widely accepted? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. I think, bottom line, the person who deduces it first is Hipparchus, in around 135BC. I can’t even begin to work out when it was generally known, or intuitive. Clearly, some remnants of Solar Chariot religions survived beyond that, and clearly earlier astronomical theories dispense with the idea of the Sun crashing into the sea or slotting into a tunnel every night. I can’t answer the question ‘when was the latest someone could suggest a god moves the Sun across the sky without everyone just laughing at them?’. In the West … well … here’s Bill O’Reilly, United States of America, 2011, and he’s not saying exactly the same thing … but he’s not saying something that’s all that different, either. Whether he knows it or not, he believes in Dyeusphaeter’s Solar Chariot, via Aristotle, via the Catholic Church. 

Before we get too smug, none of us have quite escaped the myth. There’s a famous science fiction story that has a character on the Moon, looking at the Earth wistfully noting ‘just to think, it’s Spring back on Earth right now’. It takes most people at least a few moments to see the problem with that sentence – it’s an astronaut literally viewing the whole world, but unable to escape the old, limited worldview.

We know where the Sun goes at night. It’s settled law, now. There will be people who say it doesn’t count as a theological question. But understanding that it was a theological question – for at least three, possibly five, times longer than we’ve had any Christian theology – is important to bear in mind. It’s easy to dismiss the Solar Chariot as primitive superstition borne from ignorance, and to say that it doesn’t need to be studied in any great depth … well, yes. But isn’t that what the Courtier’s Reply says about modern theology? I admire the people who came up with the story of the Sun Chariot. They were trying to explain the world, and their explanation made sense of the empirical evidence. They were extrapolating what they knew and saw. These were not stupid people, they were extremely smart people tackling huge, huge problem. It’s amazing they even worked out where they might begin to try answering. I don’t hesitate to call them wrong, I don’t take the view that they were right in their own way, but they were wrong for the right reasons. They were thinking in what we’d arrogantly call a ‘modern’ way – looking at the evidence. They were wrong.

I admire the people who dismantled the Sun Chariot more. They had the courage to continue asking the questions, and to ask new and reframed questions. It took many thousands of years, but we got to what we now see is inarguably ‘the right answer’. We know that the answer operates on a scale far larger and far smaller than the human, but which human beings could readily understand by observing and deducing a few common, simple processes. That, ultimately, the answer was actually rather straightforward.

And it’s an answer you can use. It leads to further discoveries, to practical inventions. Frankly, the heavens are much more enticing without divine traffic whizzing around like space debris. And we’ve been there now, sent up our own space chariots. We use them every day to see around the world, and to explore a universe that’s a far larger, richer, grander, older and stranger place than the old religions had us believe.

Both groups of thinkers shared the same impulse: they wanted an explanation. Modern theology often seems abstract to the point of distraction, about things completely beyond the human capacity to understand, not just beyond science, but beyond the limits of human thought. ‘Life’ and ‘the divine purpose’ and ‘the greater good’ are so big and seem so confusing and inherently paradoxical that it’s impossible even to expect we might ever understand them. But we have to understand right from the outset that theologians in the past told us the same things about disease, harvests and the weather – equally vast, immensely important parts of our experience (and also all things attributed, for most of human history, solely to the capricious nature of the gods).

I think it’s an awkward fact for theology that, as far as I can see, a lot of theological issues have been conclusively solved, but all of them were solved outside the field. I don’t see this changing – one of the vibrant issues across a number of academic disciplines, including theology, is the very broad area of ‘consciousness’. I very strongly suspect we’ll see key breakthroughs in my lifetime, a real shift of understanding about what constitutes awareness, consciousness, intelligence, how these things can originate, how to define them and so on – but these breakthroughs will almost certainly come from the computer science departments, from the evolutionary biologists. It’s hard to see how they might even come from a theology department.

As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know’. Whenever we find ourselves concluding that a question is just too large to ever answer, I think it’s instructive to remind ourselves that we solved the biggest problem of them all: where the Sun’s hiding at night.

Thought for the Day

Alan Moore’s Thought for the Day, broadcast on the Today programme earlier,via the Today website, which I think, whatever our own religious beliefs, represents a refreshing change from the usual fare.

Here’s a picture of Glycon by Alan Moore himself:

The definitive article on the subject of the snake god is by Steve Moore, and appeared in Fortean Times over the summer.

 

Ichabod – Now Available

Ichabod, a comic written by me, drawn by Karla Diaz and edited and co-created by Hans Christian Vang is now available, and can be bought here.

It’s an all ages spooky mystery comic, set soon after Ichabod Crane flees Sleepy Hollow in terror, and it looks gorgeous. Take a look at the creepy demons hiding on this page:

 

 

 

Regrettably, I’m not on commission

Last week, my agent Jessica posted a blog post asking if writers used visual diagramming when they were plotting their work. I do and I don’t – it all depends on the project and the problem I need to solve.

One thing I’ve never used before is special software designed to help me plan a novel. I’ve tried. It ought to be easy to take all the various mad ideas, snippets of research and notes that occur to you when you’re in the middle of something else, feed them into the laptop in a way that allows me to move them around. I mean, how hard can it be? I’m not asking for a Bat-Computer that takes those ideas and plops out a punchcard with the synopsis for a novel on it. I just want a way to organise information. Computers are good at storing and moving around information, right?

When I’ve given writing software a go in the past, it’s always been incredibly convoluted and complicated. It takes longer to enter the information the programs require than it does just to go off and do it yourself. ‘Enter the scene number, all the characters, the location, the time, cite the research, list the themes.’ Hey, if I knew all that, I wouldn’t need the software. The point is to organise and process the semi-random ideas and jottings into something more formal. And so I’ve always ended up switching off the targeting computer and using notebooks and index cards, corkboards and handwritten lists.

Anyway, inspired by the blog post, I decided to go looking for something that would suit me. Something really simple, that basically just moves virtual index cards around a virtual corkboard, allowed me to organise them, group them and so on. If you can find a painting of Sarah Palin as Sinestro riding a dinosaur on the internet, then you ought to be able to find a program that does that, right?

I found one: VUE.

Really nice and simple. Open source and free. I’ve been using it a few days, and it’s great. Exactly what I was after, right down to the way that as I’m working out what I want it to do, I’m already working out how I’d get it to do it. Everyone’s working method is different, but this really works for me.

Oh, go on then:

The Earliest Piece of Alan Moore Merchandise?

Another Alan Moore related item. Hang on, I just read a book about improving search engine results. I’m meant to put in lots of searchable terms. Let’s start again. Here’s another item from Alan Moore, co-creator of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, friend of Steve Moore, creator of Abslom Daak Dalek Killer (author of the novel Somnium, which just came out and I’ve just started) . Er … Scarlett Johannsson private pics, Sarah Palin, free iPad 3. That should do it.

This, I think, is the very first piece of Alan Moore spin off merchandise: a poster offered by the Backstreet Bugle, an underground magazine that Moore contributed material to just before (and just after) his first professional sales.

It’s a panel from St Pancras Panda, usually described as a Paddington Bear pastiche, but it’s really Alan Moore being mean to a sweet little panda. God looks oddly familiar.

Note that this is an advert for the poster, not the poster itself. If anyone bought the poster, they could now make quite a tidy return on their 50p investment, I think.

This is via

The Really, Really Missing Alan Moore

Here’s a list of Alan Moore projects that have been mentioned but never seen the light of day. This doesn’t include work like Nightjar, Lux Brevis, Twilight, the opera with the Gorillaz and so on that has surfaced in a number of places (usually books about Moore like the excellent The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, Yuggoth Cultures, Kimota! or Storyteller). Nor does it include things that are forthcoming, even if they’ve been forthcoming for a while by this point.

These are the Alan Moore projects that have been alluded to in interviews or merely hinted at. Obviously, some of these didn’t get past the passing thought stage, but a substantial amount of work was apparently completed on others.

As with my article on Moore’s music, this is a work in progress and any and all comments are welcome. Um, yes, it would have been really helpful if I’d included the sources for some of these.

So, in roughly chronological order:

Before he had work accepted, Moore submitted a number of ideas to 2000AD for Future Shocks, as well as drawing up plans for an elaborate space opera (I’d speculate that some of that involved the Qys and Warpsmiths, characters from Moore’s earliest amateur work that ended up in Warrior and Marvelman, but I’d stress that’s a guess on my part).

He had plans for more Doctor Who Monthly back up stories set on ancient Gallifrey and was ‘next in line’ to write the main Doctor Who strip.

Brian Bolland and Moore worked on a Batman/Judge Dredd crossover around 1984, with Moore writing about eight pages.

Halo Jones was originally intended to run for ten books, only three were published.

In Warrior 8, it’s announced that there will be one-off 40 page specials featuring Marvelman and V for Vendetta.

Moore mentioned in a 1985 interview that a V for Vendetta TV series was being prepared for Channel Four. Rumour has it that some footage was shot and lurks in the Channel Four vaults, but I strongly suspect rumour is wrong about that.

When he was working for DC, he pitched/considered writing (with Dave Gibbons) Challengers of the Unknown, Martian Manhunter (which got as far as sketches), Tommy Tomorrow, Captain Marvel; (with Kevin O’Neill) Bizarro World; (with unknown/no artist in mind) Lois Lane, The Demon, Justice League of America and Metal Men.

There’s the original Dodgem Logic, an anthology series that would feature a different standalone story every issue. These would have included a biographical comic about Aubrey Beardsley and a spoof of the comic convention scene, Convention Tension.

Moore and Dave Gibbons talked about a Watchmen prequel series, Minutemen. Dave Gibbons said (in an interview with Paul Duncan for Arkensword 22, conducted on 11 July 1987) that ‘we now have a categorical assurance from DC that they won’t do anything with Watchmen characters unless Alan & I are the ones doing it’. So, that’s that, and I guess Dr Manhattan was wrong when he said nothing ever ends.

Around that time, Moore broke ties with DC. He was under contract to write a Mr Monster/Swamp Thing crossover and was keen to do so.

Moore turned down the chance to write the twenty-fifth anniversary Doctor Who story, and the script for Robocop 2. Whether these count as ‘Moore projects’ is debatable, as he seems to have turned them down flat.

Only the first two issues of the ten part Big Numbers were ever released. A third was completed. Therein hangs a tale too long for this post. Moore scripted five issues, and there’s a detailed plot breakdown in Storyteller. There was also some work done to adapt/complete it for television.

The Battle – another book with Oscar Zarate, mentioned in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore.

‘A Walk Down the Street In Eight Different Genres’ – a short story discussed with Oscar Zarate which replayed the same events, as seen through the lens of different genre conventions. (Mentioned in The Comics Journal 139)

Moore has ‘thought about’ writing a Twin Peaks comic.

The 1963 miniseries was meant to wrap up with the 1963 Annual, featuring Moore’s characters fighting the stars of the Image books.

Moore apparently wrote a Cerebus script, possibly for issue 301. (see Andrew Hickey’s comment below).

There are two missing novels. The first is Yuggoth Cultures, a Lovecraft-inspired piece.

The second is A Grammar, a psychogeographical work about a path between Northampton and the Welsh border, or a train track between the East Coast and Cardiff, depending which interview you read.

A CD Rom computer game co-created with Dave Gibbons.

Moore promised us a double-CD album of Kaballah-inspired techno dance music in 1997.

An Alan Moore/Neil Gaiman anthology series.

The ‘how to’ guide to magic, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book is forthcoming. That book appears to be a mixture of comics, illustrations text pieces and so on. Originally, Moore talked in terms of it being a comic book.

There are a number of unmade scripts from Moore’s Extreme Studios period – the finale of Supreme (apparently out later this year); a Warchild miniseries; an unknown number of issues of Youngblood and two issues of Glory.

Moore planned a prose book, Comet Rangers, to be heavily illustrated by Jim Lee and published by ABC.

Three unused Tomorrow Stories serials – Limbo, Pearl of the Deep and (thanks to Greg McElhatton, see comments below), The Soul with art by John Coulthart.

Melinda Gebbie has mentioned a couple of times that she’s done some work adapting the performance piece Angel Passage into comic book form. Moore has mentioned that Jose Villarrubia will be adapting The Book of Copulations (from The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels performance piece).

I’ll be posting pictures of kittens next

Halo Jones … on TV

The internet is wonderful, isn’t it? Here’s a clip from a 1989 TV show that featured an excerpt from a stage adaptation of Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. The 1989 fashions are, of course, now almost as wacky as the 50th century ones. The performance starts at around 2:25.