The GOD Delusion (56 page)

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BOOK: The GOD Delusion

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There
is another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two
except that it has yet two more carbon atoms in its main chain. A dog
that had never met capric acid would perhaps have no more trouble
imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining
a trumpet playing one note higher than we have heard a trumpet play
before. It seems to me entirely reasonable to guess that a dog, or a
rhinoceros, might treat mixtures of smells as harmonious chords.
Perhaps there are discords. Probably not melodies, for melodies are
built up of notes that start or stop abruptly with accurate timing,
unlike smells. Or perhaps dogs and rhinos smell in colour. The argument
would be the same as for the bats.

Once
again, the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our
brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived
hues - what philosophers call qualia - have no intrinsic connection
with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that
are
available
to the brain, when it constructs its
model of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially
salient to the animal concerned. In our case, or that of a bird, that
means light of different wavelengths. In a bat's case, I have
speculated, it might be surfaces of different echoic properties or
textures, perhaps red for shiny, blue for velvety, green for abrasive.
And in a dog's or a rhino's case, why should it not be smells? The
power to imagine the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or
a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle, is one of the privileges science
grants us when it tugs at the black cloth of our burka and shows us the
wider range of what is out there for our delight.

The
metaphor of Middle World - of the intermediate range of phenomena that
the narrow slit in our burka permits us to see -applies to yet other
scales or 'spectrums'. We can construct a scale of improbabilities,
with a similarly narrow window through which our intuition and
imagination are capable of going. At one extreme of the spectrum of
improbabilities are those would-be events that we call impossible.
Miracles are events that are extremely improbable. A statue of a
madonna could wave its hand at us. The atoms that make up its
crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth. Because there
are so many of them, and because there is no agreed preference in their
direction of motion, the hand, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock
steady. But the jiggling atoms in the hand
could
all
just
happen
to move in the same direction at the
same time. And again. And again ... In this case the hand would move,
and we'd see it waving at us. It could happen, but the odds against
are so great that, if you had set out writing the number at the origin
of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeroes to this
day. The power to calculate such odds - the power to quantify the
near-impossible rather than just throw up our hands in despair - is
another example of the liberating benefactions of science to the human
spirit.

Evolution
in Middle World has ill equipped us to handle very improbable events.
But in the vastness of astronomical space, or geological time, events
that seem impossible in Middle World turn out to be inevitable. Science
flings open the narrow window through which we are accustomed to
viewing the spectrum of possibilities. We are liberated by calculation
and reason to visit regions of possibility that had once seemed out of
bounds or inhabited by dragons. We have already made use of this
widening of the window in Chapter 4, where we considered the
improbability of the origin of life and how even a near-impossible
chemical event must come to pass given enough planet years to play
with; and where we considered the spectrum of possible universes, each
with its own set of laws and constants, and the anthropic necessity of
finding ourselves in one of the minority of friendly places.

How
should we interpret Haldane's 'queerer than we can suppose'? Queerer
than can,
in principle,
be supposed? Or just
queerer than we can suppose, given the limitation of our brains'
evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and
practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black
burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive - as well as just
mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and the
very fast? I genuinely don't know the answer, but I am thrilled to be
alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of
understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are
no limits.

APPENDIX

A
partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in
escaping from religion

I
intend to keep an updated version of this list on the website of the
Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science:
www.richarddawkins.net. I apologize for limiting the list below largely
to the English-speaking world.

USA

American
Atheists

PO
Box 5733, Parsippany, NJ 07054-6733

Voicemail:
1-908-276-7300

Fax:
1-908-276-7402

The GOD Delusion (56 page)

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