Segunda-feira, 7 de Agosto de 2006
By Douglas Adams. Transcript from his speech at Digital Biota 2, held at
Magdelene College Cambridge, in September 1998.
[...
Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point
of view on an awful lot of things, but let's try and see where our point of
view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an
evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he's begun to take a
little charge of; he's begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment
with the tools that he's made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to
make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates
compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to
occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by
some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and
finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take
a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place
where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those
genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we'll come and
we'll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who's a tool
maker, doesn't have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of
habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert--he even manages to live in
New York for heaven's sake--and the reason is that when he arrives in a new
environment he doesn't have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a
colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a
thicker coat, he says "I'll have it off him". Tools have enabled us to
think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that
fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end
of a happy day's tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases
him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in--mountains are great
because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the
bears can't get you; in front of him there's the forest--it's got nuts and
berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of
water--water's delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all
sorts of stuff with it; here's cousin Ug and he's caught a mammoth--mammoth's
are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones
to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it's
fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself,
'well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in' and then he asks
himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless
and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of
person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who
has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his
world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this? -- you can see why it's
a treacherous question. Early man thinks, 'Well, because there's only one sort
of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be
a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and
because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably
male'. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we
do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself ,
'If he made it, what did he make it for?' Now the real trap springs, because
early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things
that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely'
and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him
....]