Do you believe in God? Ghosts? Free will? Evolution? Intelligent design? Ancient aliens? Life after death? Oblivion? I do - and I don't. You see, I've devised a new belief system as likely to fox a magistrate as it is a four-year-old child. It occurred to me how irrational it is to believe in anything totally, especially since the laws of physics have broken down and renowned physicists don't know whether we are living in a universe of our own imagination or whether we are the play-things of a higher intelligence. And apparently, our steady old reliable universe is now a layered multiverse.
According to hirsute Japanese-American theoretical physicist, Dr Michio Kaku, I may be sitting in my office right now, but I could also simultaneously be in the middle of a desert and at the bottom of an ocean with flesh-eating monsters swimming around - and through - my unsuspecting head. Luckily I wouldn't be able see, hear, touch or smell these monsters, nor they me, as their atoms would be vibrating at a different frequency from my own.
If all this is true, you are probably thinking to yourself, then could there not be a blue cheese moon occupying the same space as our own moon? It's possible, but that's not for here.
So where does all this uncertainty leave Belief? For me, the solution is simple. I no longer say I believe in one thing and disavow another. I give a percentage of credibility to each and every idea. If an idea seems plausible, I may give it 60% credibility, if it sounds outlandish I'll merit it with a lowly 12%.
Needless to say, once I got into this new mode of thinking, the world became a far more unreasonable place. I found humans, with their unconditional faith in one thing and rejection of another, were having trouble fitting in with me. And some began really to rub me up the wrong way.
Geneticist Richard Dawkins wrote a very interesting book called The Selfish Gene. I even read most of it. Later, he went off the rails, academically speaking, and wrote The God Delusion. And I can only assume it was Satan himself who possessed Dawkins to write this book, likely in order to discredit all his previous scientific work and bring humanity back to religion and the belief in God and His nemesis, the Devil. But I'm speculating.
Professor Dawkins' argument, as far as I can recall, is that God doesn't exist because the Old Testament stories are crazy fairy tales featuring grossly immoral people masquerading as saints. Since the book's publication, Dawkins has popped up all over the place preaching fanatically about the inexistence of the reality of an abstract concept. The man is like a dog with a bone. He will not let it drop. If only Dawkins had adopted my system, he could have saved himself much polemical angst. But the question remains: what exactly is accountable for the man's fundamentalism?
Perhaps Dawkins believes in the trite and erroneous notion that religion is at the root of all war, and that by campaigning against the former he can help to eradicate the latter. You could thus argue that it is he who is suffering from a God delusion. And most wars that I know of were fought over land and resources, or the fear of domination by the other. 'War is a Racket', wrote Major Gen. Smedley D Butler. And if religion does play a part, it is simply a convenient way of identifying the enemy.
No, Dawkins cannot be that shallow. I sense a psychological defence mechanism brought on by the cabin fever and monomania to which many scientists are prone. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, get out and about, metaphysically speaking.
Nobel Prize winner, Max Planck wrote:
'There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.'
Then there's the measurement problem, which seems to confirm the above. What this means, as far as I can fathom, is that atoms behave differently when being observed by people; or, you could say, influenced by consciousness. In short, consciousness affects matter and may even be responsible for its existence. Therefore, if you are keen on the idea of an afterlife, your best bet would be to believe in it.
Now, Dawkins may have got a theological bee in his bonnet, but we can be sure that when he closes his eyes at night and drifts off into fairyland, there will be one Being notable for His absence. You see, I have never met anyone who has dreamed about God. I'm sure there are those who claim to have done, but I would give their story a feeble 2% credibility. It would be counterproductive to create beings with free will and then allow them to dream about you since they would constantly be trying to interpret what it was you wanted them to do.
There is one exception to my new custom of affording percentages of credibility, and that applies to God Himself. In the case of His existence I prefer to afford 100% credibility. After all, His belief in me may be holding my atoms together. I would rather err on the side of caution just in case He is a vengeful God - and I'd say there's a good 50% chance of that.
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