How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [20]
Cube: Was I not taught below that when I saw a line and inferred a plane, I in reality saw a third unrecognized dimension, not the same as brightness, called “height”? And does it not now follow that, in this region, when I see a plane and infer a solid, I really see a fourth unrecognized dimension? … [A]nd besides this, there is the argument from analogy of figures.
Sphere Analogy! Nonsense: what analogy?
Cube … [I]n one dimension, did not a moving point produce a line with two terminal points? In two dimensions, did not a moving line produce a square with four terminal points? In three dimensions, did not a moving square produce … a cube, with eight terminal points? And in four dimensions shall not a moving cube—alas, for analogy, and alas for the progress of truth, if it be not so—shall not, I say, the motion of a divine cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points? Behold the infallible confirmation of the series, 2, 4, 8, 16; is not this a geometrical progression?
The Sphere, now fit to be tied, will have nothing to do with this bohemian heresy, so he promptly thrusts the Cube back into Flatland where he becomes, once again, a lowly two-dimensional square. The story closes with the Square in prison, locked up after he attempted to explain to his fellow Flatlanders what divine dimensions he had experienced: “Prometheus up in Spaceland was bound for bringing down fire for mortals, but I—poor Flatland Prometheus—lie here in prison for bringing down nothing to my countrymen.”
Like the Cube’s impudent challenge to use the Sphere’s own analogies to argue for yet a higher dimension, the proofs of God can themselves be used to consider the possibility of another being still higher, ad infinitum. Like the two-dimensional Flatlanders who could not grasp the nature of three-dimensionality despite ironclad logic and reasoning, God’s existence or nonexistence cannot possibly be understood in human terms. What cannot be understood, cannot be proved. What is unprovable is insoluble.
When I was a believer it was always my understanding from reading the Bible that religious belief is ultimately based on faith. In fact, my own “leap of faith,” like the Square’s transformation into a Cube, had nothing to do with logical proofs and mathematical reasoning. Is that not how most people come to believe in God? Is that not what it means to believe in God? Does this not help explain, in part, why, in the most secular society in history, when God is supposedly dead, belief in Him has never been so high?
Chapter 2
IS GOD DEAD?
Why Nietzsche and Time Magazine Were Wrong
God is dead.
—Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead.
—God
Somewhere, on some long-forgotten bathroom wall, a wag scrawled the above graffito. Though it may be too clever by half, it is a telling remark about our times that despite the fact God has been declared dead numerous times, He seems always to have the final word.
It was barely more than a century ago that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche penned the words for which he has become so famous in a book considered by philosophers to be his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. After ten years in mountainous solitude, Zarathustra descends to mingle among men and there discovers a holy man who tells him, “I make songs and sing them, and when I make songs I laugh, I cry and I hum: in this way I praise God.” He then inquires of Zarathustra: “But what gift do you bring us?” Zarathustra replies: “What have I to give you? Nay, let me go, lest I take something away from you!”
And so they separated, the old one and the man, laughing as two boys laugh. But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: Is it possible that the