It’s Christmas time, and that means the annual debate about whether we can take Jesus out of Yuletide once and for all – and just hand the festival over to Coca-Cola and Amazon. For those in a blended household, incorporating atheist Social Democrats voters and closet Fianna Fáil Mass-goers, there will be some added spice to discussions this year.
Expect the movie adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These to crop up. (Have we reached peak church-bashing? Discuss.) The commercialisation of First Communion may also feature in family argument bingo.
And, then, there’s that hoary old chestnut: if Christianity didn’t exist, how would we know right from wrong?
In an attempt to promote some peace and understanding between the secular and the spiritual, the Unthinkable column has synthesised hundreds of years of philosophising about whether or not God exists – and what, if anything, hangs on it – in the form of a jaunty Christmas carol.
Yes, the Tara Street sherry bottle was opened a bit early this year. So apologies to readers expecting the traditional Opinion article format. We’ve gone for more of a Hegelian dialectic vibe, with backing singers. Hit it, Heidegger!
On the first day of Christmas, Plato said to me:
The physical world is not ultimate reality.
On the second day of Christmas, proof that your will is free:
Decartes’s dualism,
Separating mind from body.
On the third day of Christmas comes physiology:
Brain scans a scanning,
Research suggesting,
Free will is just mythology.
On the fourth day of Christmas, Pascal wagers me:
Fortune awaits in heaven,
These odds are good,
To hedge your bets,
Keep the faith even if it seems sussy.
On the fifth day of Christmas, the world’s major religion held there to be:
Five golden rules,
Formulas saying the same thing,
To Muslim, Jew, Buddhist;
Christian and Confucian;
Treat others as you wish them to treat thee.
On the sixth day of Christmas, a work of psychology:
Significantly, telling readers,
Fine, don’t believe in God,
But you risk a shallow life,
Lacking the will to believe -
This from William James,
Brother of the author Henry.
On the seventh day of Christmas, a speech in Trinity:
Schrödinger’s 1943 lecture,
On building blocks of nature.
Find the God particle!
Discovered in 2012, the Higgs boson,
Proved nothing regarding God,
Yet to panpsychists,
Quantum physics holds the key.
On the eighth day of Christmas, we hear from George Berkeley:
Eight trees a standing,
One tree a falling,
No one was watching,
So ... did it fall?
To be is to be seen, said Berkeley,
If God stopped looking we’d be gone.
Speaking of which,
What happened to my library?
On the ninth day of Christmas, Nietzsche said with glee:
Nihilism;
Eat, drink and be merry;
Sever links with your family;
Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Said if God is dead,
Then anything goes,
To hell with the lot of you.
Weed out the Greens, added Michael O’Leary.
On the tenth day of Christmas, up popped on my feed:
Tweet from Richard Dawkins,
2.9 million followers,
Hates preachers a preaching,
And religion a teaching,
Why does it need repeating?
Five horsemen of new atheism!
Counting Stephen Hawking,
Sam Harris, Dan Dennett,
Christopher Hitchens said it too,
Religious faith is just stupidity.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, apropos a deity,
Limerick’s Elizabeth Anscombe,
Said morality can’t work without one;
Logic can prove God’s existence,
Theologising philosophers insisted;
St Anselm claimed not to be spoofing,
Six arguments he gave for proving.
Five from Thomas Aquinas,
Fourteen from Kurt Gödel,
Three from Mary Astell,
All their arguments deducing,
God exists necessarily.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, seeking harmony:
The physicist Richard Feynman,
Asked people to put differences behind them,
Tentatively, we hear his pleadings,
Look at what unites us human beings,
You have your God and I’ve none,
Your enemy is still some mother’s son,
So set your pride to one side, and;
Find common ground,
Forget about who wins,
There need not be,
So much hostility,
Let’s “not argue ... [over] why we agree, if we agree”.
Happy Christmas, Irish Times philosophisers!