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Douglas Adams:

“Isn’t it enough to see that the garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Andrew Wilson:

Douglas Adams called himself a radical atheist, and this was his way of saying that belief in a creator was unnecessary. If you come across a beautiful garden, then the right response is to appreciate its beauty for its own sake, rather than inventing all sorts of mythical creatures and pretending they live there. That, he argued, is what people do when they believe in God. They encounter a world that is very beautiful, filled with incredibly complex and magnificent creatures, and what they should do is appreciate it for what it is.

But instead, they invent fairies – gods – to hide all over it, in the branches of the trees and under the toadstools, and then they worship these gods, when they should be focusing on the beauty. This, Douglas Adams was saying, is ridiculous. Why not just admire the garden.

You have to be careful with parables, though. They can backfire. Here’s what it made me think: of course a beautiful garden would not make me believe in fairies (which is probably why no sane adult in the world believes in fairies). But it might make me believe in a gardener. Wouldn’t you think? A beautiful garden might well make me believe that someone of intelligence and skill – in other words, some sort of mind – had given their time to planting, ordering and cultivating this particular patch of land, so that it became a beautiful garden rather than a tumbledown scrubland.

That’s the whole point. When we find matter in an unsorted, unproductive mess, we don’t tend to imagine that intelligent beings are responsible. Left to their own devices, things in nature tend to get more disordered: gardens grow weeds, snowmen melt, bedrooms become messy, bicycles rust, and so on. So when we find an ugly piece of land where the grass is overgrown and the flowers are dying, we generally conclude that nobody’s been looking after it. There is no mind supervising the matter.

Beautiful gardens, on the other hand, are a different story. They display such order and beauty that we immediately see a mind behind the matter. Nobody in their right mind walks through the gardens at Versailles and thinks they just happened to come about that way; we all know that a very skilled and intelligent gardener has been hard at work, trimming borders and arranging flowers, probably over many years. The Versailles gardens don’t make you believe in fairies, but if you saw them and said you didn’t believe in gardeners, you’d be laughed off the stage.

Perhaps it’s the same with the earth. If you came across a place that had bucked the trend towards disorder, a place where total chaos had turned into astonishing order and beauty, rather than the other way around – where, for instance, you started with a Bang and ended up with a brain – you might think that some mind, some sort of gardener was behind it all. Maybe Douglas Adams spoke better than he knew.

– Andrew Wilson,  If God Then What: Wondering Aloud About Truth, Origins & Redemption, 67-9.

Check out my interview with Andrew here.

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