Why I think Science is our only hope

Chucked into this world at birth, not having any say in the matter, we struggle to answer one simple question. What is it all about?

When I was a kid, I had no doubt in my mind what it was all about. There was a God up there in heaven who kept an eye on things. There was a Devil below us in hell who was a real mean and frightening dude. You had two angels hanging out of you, one your guardian angel who looked out for you while the other was a demon who tried to get you to do bad things. As long as you kept out of trouble and didn’t commit any really bad sins, then you’d be okay and would get to heaven at the end of your life. If you were bad you’d suffer for ever in the fires of hell. Mind you, at that age, I really couldn’t think of any sins that could be that bad. I mean, my confession for the first few years consisted of the same rhyme which my father told me to say at my first confession: Bless me father, for I have sinned, I told lies, was disrespectful to my parents and said a few bad words. That was it. Week in and week out, the priest gave me three Hail Mary’s to say for my penance and my soul was as white as snow once again.

However, as I grew older, other sins began to intrude. Questions arose in my mind and I began to have little niggling doubts about the whole affair. Even about God himself. But that period has no place in this article, except to say it led me torturously to atheism. I was a fully-fledged atheist for about the next forty odd years. However, even here doubts assailed me and today I live happily in agnostic land. To be honest, this is the only stance I personally can take. I don’t know whether there is a God or not. Maybe wishful thinking on my part hopes there is one, but I don’t know. And if that makes me sit on the fence, so what. To me it’s being honest.

So that brings me to my main theme: science is our only hope. Whatever else we know about this world, and admittedly there’s a lot we don’t know, the one constant for me has been the existence of science. A lot of people will jump up and down and proclaim that science knows nothing, that it is dangerous, that it brought us weapons of mass destruction and the ability to play God with our genes. I always like to ask somebody who says this, would they really like to go back and live during a time even as recent as the middle ages. Little or no hygiene, little and spurious medical knowledge, lands ravished by war and famine, little or no law. Even the rich, who may have been able to afford armies for protection, were unable to fend off disease. The black death killed off one third of the population of England alone.

Religion on the other hand has claimed to be about love and peace but is in fact responsible for mass murder, mayhem and war down through the centuries. Religion has brought us little comfort indeed. Science has brought us modern hospitals, modern disease control, proper hygiene. It has brought us modern technology, making our daily lives less of a drudge. It has brought us better food, clothes and standard of living.

I don’t want this article to be a discussion of science as against religion, but religion, in many people’s minds, does seem to be the other side of the coin. That’s simply not true. In fact science and religion have many things in common, the most important being that they are both systems which look to garner the truth. Religion says it already has the truth. But, come on! Does it? I don’t think so. Surely it cannot if one religion vehemently disagrees with another. Both can’t be right. Scientists sometimes say they are the only ones to have the truth. That’s not true either. But I will say, it tries honestly to get at the truth slowly and I think, surely. Maybe there is a God up there and maybe there isn’t. Whichever the fact of the matter, science will eventually come up with all the answers. At least physical answers. If there is a God, well, he’s taking a long time in coming.

Sometimes, science can be quite dogmatic, but even their lofty towers sometimes come crashing down. A new paradigm is formed and the old one whisked away. Perhaps we are on the cusp of some such revival today, as the speed of light, that bastion and pillar of absolute truth looks a little shaky. Personally I don’t believe the speed of light is threatened. The scientists, fastidious and all as they may have been, are mistaken. A slight misinterpretation of their results. Perhaps their measuring instruments are wrong, perhaps the software in them needs debugging. Then again it may be so. It won’t be the first time and certainly won’t be the last that some edifice of the scientific world has come crashing down as it did in the early part of the twentieth century with the overthrow of Newton’s theories. But scientists pick themselves up, dust themselves off and turn to new theories. It probably isn’t quite correct to say that Newton’s theories were overthrown, they were simply modified for higher speeds and higher masses. The theories still work for all intents and purposes today, but once we start travelling at speeds close to light or approach extremely heavy or dense masses, they need to be modified.

Now let’s have a brief look at medical science. From the time of Jesus Christ, who himself suffered an appalling death crucified on a Roman cross, the Christian world seemed hell bent on suffering. People were queuing up to be martyred for their faith. For example, Ignatius, a bishop of Antioch, wrote letters to his followers on his way to be devoured by wild beasts in the Colosseum in Rome around 108AD, begging them not to intervene as he wished to die in the service of his lord and God. And down through the ages, the church has praised suffering and have even invented a place called purgatory, so that people who led good lives would go through a bit of suffering after they died and before they entered heaven. I remember being at a funeral where the priest said proudly that he was a “purgatory man himself” and we shouldn’t think that our departed loved one would escape such a “beautiful cleansing of the soul”. And purgatory, mind you, wasn’t the sort of place you could sit around peacefully before finally being admitted to heaven. No, purgatory was exactly the same as hell where you were burned with unquenchable fire, the only difference being that you knew you would eventually get out unlike the poor suckers in hellfire.

Personally, I consider suffering an abomination and science is the only thing which has helped us immensely today to escape from it. Anaesthesia was only discovered in the nineteenth century. Before then if you needed a leg amputated, you were lucky to get a piece of wood in your mouth to bite down upon as the surgeon hacked through your bone. And it doesn’t bear to think about the millions of people throughout the ages who died in agony without the benefits of modern medicine. Science gave us that with no thanks to the priests who blabbered on about hell fire and such like.

We have taken the bull by the metaphorical horns and looked around the world. Initially we tried to make sense of it in a religious sense and ascribed everything to the gods. But as time went on, some curious men began to ask curious questions and some of them found that things didn’t quite appear as neat as first appeared. When the local witchdoctor, magician, priest prayed for rain, it didn’t always come. The harvest spoiled and people died. So the rain god either wasn’t bothering to answer our prayers or was angry with us. But maybe there isn’t a rain god at all! That would also be a reasonable and logical explanation for the lack of rain or whatever. So mankind started to become more sophisticated in his understanding of the universe he found himself in. There may indeed be a God, but he wasn’t interested in dealing with mundane daily events even if they resulted in hardship. Perhaps he dealt with business on a more spiritual plane. But still some people were not satisfied. The questions could all be answered simply by assuming the non-existence of God. And if he didn’t exist, then what? Perhaps we needed to started fending for ourselves. Stop looking to something in the sky for all the answers. Get down and do it ourselves. And so we did, and came up with science and medicine and all sorts of interesting ideas to help make life a little easier.

While the last paragraph is somewhat tongue in cheek, as a story, it isn’t far off the mark. But the religious institutions didn’t like that the ordinary man was beginning to see through their puff and smoke. Galileo was imprisoned for his view that the Earth went around the Sun rather than the other way round. The inquisition didn’t only go after heretics and witches. Anyone purporting a scientific theory which disagreed with the bible was threading on dangerous ground. While many great scientists and inventors were deeply devout and religious men, they still went ahead with their scientific exploration often with risk to their own freedom. For example, body snatching was practiced when doctors needed cadavers for study and dissection. As this was a crime till the mid-19th century, anybody caught were liable to be sent to prison. But needs must, and many took great risk for the advancement of medicine.

Of course, science has brought many bad things as well as good. The problem is that science itself is neutral, neither good nor bad. It is what we do with it which makes the difference. A kitchen knife is a very useful implement around food, but if you stick it in somebody’s throat it is being used for evil.

Something which often gets people incensed is the science of genetic engineering, particularly when applied to our crops. Why? Genetically-modified foods have the potential to solve many of the world’s hunger and malnutrition problems. They can help preserve and protect the environment by reducing reliance on pesticides and herbicides.

And others think playing around with genetics is playing God. I don’t see it that way. I believe it is incumbent on us to investigate this whole area. It gives us the potential to do away with life threatening diseases. It gives us the opportunity to eventually plan our own evolution. Make us into creatures better equipped to deal with our environment. Of course it also gives us the power to create monsters like ultimate fighting machines. Unfortunately there is always the stupid individual who will want to do things like that, particularly power crazed military types and their governments. But we have to take the bad with the good and the possibility of somebody doing something evil should not prevent others from doing good. Powerful technologies always have two sides and it is up to mankind to make sure, as far as possible, to put them to the better use for the benefit of the whole human race.

We can put science to good use. We can feed the world, eradicate hunger and poverty, control our environment and eventually leave this world altogether and take up our home in space where we really belong.

I know that science can be as dogmatic as religion. Today, for example, physics graduates who go against current string theory probably would damage their careers if they even got one because of their opposition. Science can have its high priests who can be as arrogant and dogmatic as any theologian or religious minister can be. Still, in my opinion, science is all we’ve really got.

I don’t advocate waiting on God to make things better. He hasn’t shown much signs of his existence and when you look around the world, at the appalling injustices which ravage our planet, we have to ask where is God. And I don’t believe that we should have faith and pray. If we’re going to make things better, we going to have to do it ourselves. Besides if God did exist and gave us the brainpower we have, wouldn’t his first question be: “Why didn’t we use it?”

And if we are playing God, why not? If we wait on God, we’re probably going to wait an awful long time.

Books

I have always read books. I can’t remember what the name of the first one was, but no doubt it was one of the collections of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. I can’t recall who wrote which today, but among my favourites were Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling. I also had a book of Aesop’s Fables which I loved, these clever little morality tales like the boy who called wolf too often. This always turned out to be false but one day when the real wolf appeared, nobody believed him.

When I was 7 years of age we moved from a flat in Rathmines to a new house in Raheny where I was to live till my early twenties. One of the first things my parents did was enrol me in the nearest library which was in Howth, about 5 miles away or a fourpenny bus ride. Every week I would take the bus out to the library to get another book, and sometimes twice a week, as being a junior member of the library I could only take one book at a time. Here I found books of every hue and I remember particularly liking the ones dealing with the great mythical heroes of Rome and Greece such as Hercules and Achilles. I took my first dip into non-fiction here with books on astronomy. There I learned about space, the planets and stars. Of course in those days we hadn’t sent probes to the Moon or Mars or Jupiter and many speculated about the possibility of Mars being inhabited by intelligent beings. I got a comic weekly called The Knockout which made great use of this ignorance to weave great tales of evil aliens inhabiting not only Mars but also Jupiter. The Jovian Whip was the weapon of choice on Jupiter I recall. I had often looked up at the night sky from our back garden and wondered what the stars were. Now I was beginning to learn a little. However my favourite books from those times were the Billy Bunter series by Frank Richards. Probably horrendously non politically correct today, but who cares, I loved them. Billy the “fat owl of the remove” as his so called friends nicknamed him, romped through about 30 or 40 books getting up to all sorts of mischief in Greyfriars School. Great stuff.

There were, of course, other books like Biggles or Just William, but by the time I was fourteen, when I could join the adult library, I was tiring of these. I can’t recall exactly what I started reading then, probably stuff like Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, both great tales, and I was also getting into science fiction which my father disapproved of. In fact I remember him writing to my English teacher at the time and asking him for a list of suitable books for young teenagers and I guess Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal was not what he was thinking of. I read this load of garbage when I was 20, more proud of the fact that I managed to buy it in Holy Catholic Ireland before the censor banned it than for its literary prowess. All about a sex change if you must know. Then one day in class, Shakespeare, as we had nicknamed this particular master, came over to me surreptitiously and quickly drew an envelope out of his pocket and gave it to me. “Give that to your father,” he whispered. This was the letter with the list of suitable books. I can’t recall what it contained now, except Desert Island by Daniel Defoe which I didn’t much like. It was pretty boring stuff or at least it was to me then. Maybe I’d think differently today.

Talking about books I like and don’t like, I remember when I was in my early twenties and reading Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. This charted a few days in the life of the central character, a teenage Holden Caulfield trying to come to terms with life and everything. I thought it was a great book. About 10 years later I read it again and thought it was childish and silly and couldn’t understand what I’d seen in it in the first place. The strange thing is that I read it again on a whim about 5 years ago and once again thought it was a great book. Maybe books change as you yourself change throughout life.

Anyway, shortly after I left school at 18 and getting my first job as a printer, I wanted to find out what all the great books were that I should read. I came across a volume The History of Western Literature by J B Priestley. At least I thought that was the name of it, but can only find a reference to a book by the same author, Literature and Western Man. I assume it is the same book, but no matter. This book discussed all the great works of Western literature, everything from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky. I read it from cover to cover, noting down most of the volumes mentioned. I then commenced to buy many of them and thus began a marathon session of classic reading. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, Confessions by Rousseau, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. There were many others too but I can’t mention them all otherwise this article would go on for ever. I liked most of them but some I found difficult and didn’t like at all, like Rousseau and Mann.

One of the classics which I particularly liked was Germinal by Emile Zola. This novel dealt with the exploitation of coal mining workers in a small French town. One of the most moving parts was the description of the old horse who had worked all his life in the mine and would die in the mine. He even knew the number of journeys he had to make every day in the pit and once that number was reached he would do no more and would have to be led back to his stable. And he would think of where he was born surrounded by large fields with something bright in the sky. In his old age he now had great difficulty recalling exactly what the sun looked like. For some reason I never forgot that description.

Another favourite was Wilkie Collins. I read two of his novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The latter is regarded as the precursor to modern detective novels and a darn good tale it was too, all about the stealing and eventual recovery of a precious diamond. The former tells the story of a young man meeting a strange woman in white one evening who appears to be in distress. He helps her but it turns out she had escaped from a mental asylum. The next day he travels to a household who have appointed him as a teacher where he finds one of the inhabitants bears a remarkable likeness to the women in white of the night before. The mystery gathers pace from there. I enjoyed the quaintness of the language of both these books setting them apart from the modern day thrillers and yet lending them an old fashioned sense of adventure. Page turners both of them.

Science fiction was a genre I was never really interested in because I found that these were the usual cowboy, thriller, fairy stories simply translated to outer space. However, there are a few imaginative writers for which this is certainly not true and who I would like to mention. I admired Isaac Asimov immensely. He wrote one of my favourite short stories The Last Question. Here two computer operatives, suitably bored, fed a question to their computer which basically asked how to prevent the universe running out of energy at the end of time. The computer comes back with the reply that there was insufficient data for a meaningful answer. Of course as time went on and computers became more and more powerful, eventually with one supercomputer controlling the whole world, then the whole galaxy, the reply was always the same. Eventually the energy in the universe wound down, man disappeared and all that was left was this super-duper computer sitting in hyperspace with nothing to do but churn over in its memory circuits the question of how to prevent the universe from dying. At last it had the answer and simply said “Let there be light!” That was some story, I can tell you. Asimov wrote much else in this class of fiction, including the famous I, Robot series of stories. This examined some of the eternal questions such as who or what made man. This took the form of one of the robots, who had intelligence built into them, asking who had made robots and decided that it was an almighty God robot. He wouldn’t believe, even when shown the factories where the robots were made, that they were made by humans. Of course Asimov wrote many other types of fiction, as well as science fact and many of his books on science contributed to my love of this subject.

Another such writer was Arthur C Clarke. His Childhood’s End was a stunning scenario of the end of our world. Here alien ships appeared in the skies of Earth, and as in so many other stories of this type, were not out to conquer us, but to help us make the transition between our “childhood” and our ascent into more superior beings. I recall with pleasure the scene where during a bullfight the whole audience felt the pain of the fatal sword thrust into the animal. These aliens were very much against cruelty to all animals whether man or beast and rightly so.

We mustn’t forget H G Wells. Even though he was writing during the first half of the 20th century he produced some marvellously inventive works, including The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. This last was made into a radio show by the great film director Orsen Welles and broadcast in America in the 1930s. This was so well done and had such an effect that many people tuning in after the programme had begun and missing the announcement that it was only a radio play, actually thought that New Jersey was under attack by alien forces. A certain amount of panic ensued but was not as bad as some news reports of the time would have us believe.

And then there was the great book Contact by Carl Sagan, a planetary specialist and physicist which made an attempt to relay a very factually, science based narrative about first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligent civilisation. Gone were the ridiculous scenarios of aliens arriving on Earth in an attempt to exterminate all human life or worse. In fact, the chances of UFO’s being alien craft is practically zero considering the banality of the reports people make on this subject and the fact that the incredible distances required to be crossed through interstellar space present such a formidable challenge that only a very advanced technological race could even consider the prospect. And as far as I’m concerned a sufficiently advanced race would long ago have given up the illusion of conquering inferior races. No, Contact dealt with the more realistic possibility of an alien probe left in orbit around the star Vega whose radio communication is picked up on Earth.

Other science fiction books I liked were Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which considers a possible future Earth where everybody is bred for a certain standard of living and live “perfect” lives under the influence of drugs and are thereby controlled so that nothing gets out of hand. Outside this environment and completely detached from it live the uncontrolled humans or savages. Of course the whole thing goes terribly wrong and whereas on the face of it, things seems ideal, in reality they are not and shows how much freedom itself means to mankind. The other great futuristic novel is 1984 by George Orwell. This is indeed a very bleak society with most people being ruled over by Big Brother. All information is tightly controlled and histories are changed and records altered as Big Brother decides. It is total mind control and not a society where anybody would ever wish to be. And it would be remiss of me not to mention that other great book by George Orwell, Animal Farm. This is told as an allegory with farm animals being the main characters. They decide to set up a communist system and eventually it is shown up for the sham that it is with some animals “more equal than others”. It implies that communist societies are little more than dictatorships which is very true.

In my late teens I got into the horror book. Besides reading the popular Pan Books of Horror which contained short ghoulish stories, some good, some bad, I also got hooked on Dennis Wheatley. His The Devil Rides Out is a classic tale of Satanism. Although somewhat dated today, it was a page turner at the time and very risqué. However, much better than that were the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe: The Pit and the pendulum, Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death to mention but a very few. These tales were superbly crafted and I loved the Gothic sense of old buildings from a bygone age which seemed to penetrate them.

Dracula by our own Bram Stoker was a story of evil told mostly through letters and diaries and popularised the undead vampire in literature. It’s a book well worth reading and dispels the myth that the vampire was a sexually driven creature as Hollywood wanted to portray. He was, as Stoker intended, an evil monster who preyed on both men and women to satisfy his blood lust. The Witching Hour by Anne Rice must be mentioned here. Her vampire novels pale into insignificance in comparison. Here was a great big book set in New Orleans about a family of witches. Not only is it a narrative set in the modern day city, but it is a history of this particular witch family stretching back to Scotland in the 16th century, narrated like a history of a royal family through the generations. Finally my favourite book in this oeuvre has to be The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. I must have read it at least six times over the years and what I liked most about this novel was its doubt by the Jesuit priest in diabolic possession and his attempts to explain it in terms of modern day science. Ultimately in the fiction itself the devil is real and the possession is real, but its attempts to put a modern psychological interpretation on this phenomenon makes the story far more realistic in so far as it can go.

One genre of writing which I never really liked were detective novels. I found Agatha Christie confusing and all over the place. However, one writer of such books was Arthur Conan Doyle whose famous creation Sherlock Holmes captivated me. I enjoyed his attention to detail and the way Holmes could tell almost the impossible from a stranger. This was quickly explained in logical detail by the author making it fairly obvious in hindsight. One of my favourite sayings of Sherlock Holmes was “All things being equal, when you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever is left must be the truth”. A great pity some of our physicists today wouldn’t take a leaf out of this book. It always struck me as strange that such an insightful man as Conan Doyle could have been so taken in by two young girls who faked photographs of fairies in their back garden in Cottingley.

Another favourite book, this time moving to court trials, was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This is about the serious issue of rape and racial inequality and is set in Alabama. Basically a black man is accused of raping a young white girl and the lawyer who defends him is the father of the child through whose eyes the story is related. A wonderful courtroom drama showing up the ignorance and bigotry of racists.

Over the years I’ve become very interested in history, something which no doubt would have horrified me in my teens as I had no love for it in school. But maybe that was because of the way they taught it. My inter cert years were learning the stuff by rote while my leaving cert years were crashingly boring. I particularly like church history, because after all most western European history is tied irrevocably to it. I hasten to add that I’m not leaving out the rest of the world, but this just happens to be the area of history I like. Although I usually read factual history books, a very powerful novel is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. It is actually a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the 14th century with the lead character, a Franciscan friar by the name of William of Baskerville, playing a sort of Sherlock Holmes in his efforts to solve the crimes. It is full of historical facts relating in great detail one of the great debates of the time, did Jesus Christ own his own clothes. While these matters may seem trivial, they are in fact deep questions. Because the Franciscans owned nothing following their leader St Francis of Assisi, a rich man who gave everything he owned away in order to follow Christ, their situation was the total opposite of the pope and cardinals of the church who lived in sumptuous luxury. Indeed the monks in the monastery itself lived a much better life than the peasants who lived in abject poverty in the surrounding countryside often depending on the charity of the monastery to get their daily food. And of course the Inquisition arrives at the monastery to liven thing up somewhat.

Another book which deals in a historical fictional sort of way is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Set in England in the years leading up to the second world war, it tells the story of a head butler and how he runs the house with a whole hierarchy of maids, housekeepers, under servants, under butlers, cooks and others. In parallel we have the owner of the house, Lord Darlington, who believes in pacifying the Nazis and does not recognise the evil they are about to unleash on the world. What draws me to the book is the insight it gives into the two class society where the servant class knew their place and kept to it, the rich knew theirs and all accepted this sorry state of affairs as if it had been ordained by God himself, which many believed it was.

Moving on to factual history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer is a massive tome of 1400 pages. When I read it in my late teens it was the biggest book I’d read to date. It was the first factual history book I’d ever read, other than the ones from school, and I wasn’t sure if I’d get through it. To my surprise it was extremely easy to read and was so interesting that I found it hard to put down and I completed it in no time. It certainly opened my eyes to the evils of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

While I’ve read a lot of modern history I particularly like to go back to the original sources. Hence I thoroughly enjoyed The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede. He was a monk living in an Northumbrian monastery who wrote his history in the 8th century. Besides the history he relates, the book gives an insight into the people and their beliefs of the time. He charmingly mixes in miracles with his narrative as if they were commonplace and the most natural thing in the world, but his actual history is regarded as fairly solid. Another writer in the same vein is Eusebius who wrote Church History. He was the bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and was writing in the 4th century. The work is the first surviving history of the Christian church covering the period from Christ himself to Eusebius’ own time. Once again it gives a clue into the methods and beliefs of people in that era. Interestingly it is written from a very personal point of view as the early church was only beginning to get its act together and hadn’t dealt sufficiently with many of the doctrines which would later define it, and Eusebius was getting his own point of view across. In fact a later historian of the 19th century would call Eusebius dishonest. For all that, and taking into account that early historians were not as fastidious as most of our modern ones, it is still a fascinating read.

There used to be a programme on BBC radio called Desert Island Discs. A well-known person from the world of the arts was interviewed and asked which eight records he or she would take with them if they were to be stranded on a desert island. The presenter at the time, Roy Plomley, would always ask at the end of the show what book they would bring, besides Shakespeare and the bible. It always amused me that Shakespeare and the bible were givens. In those days I would have taken neither. Today however I’d be happy enough with the bible.

It really is an incredible book. However, I’d take one of the more modern translations rather than the famous King James Version. This version has beautiful language, but like Shakespeare, unless you are familiar with it, it’s difficult going. The book itself is divided into the old and new testaments. The old begins with the book of Genesis, the account of the creation of the world, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. If you read it carefully you’ll find two creation stories which differ considerably. Not only is the order of creation different, in the first story there isn’t even mention of God’s command not to eat of the tree of life. In the mid-19th century a manuscript was discovered called the Epic of Gilgamesh which has a flood story remarkably akin to the version in Genesis with Noah. It turns out that there are many flood stories from ancient times, so it seems to have been a common thread between ancient peoples. The second book in the old testament is Exodus which tells of the escape of the Israelites from Egypt, the plagues sent by God to convince the Pharaoh to allow his people to leave, Moses, the ten commandments, the building of the ark of the covenant. More books follow, Leviticus, a book of the law, Numbers, so called because it begins with a census, and Deuteronomy which contains more law. These first five books are together called the Pentateuch or the Torah. I admit some of these books are quite boring, but others contain great stories and would certainly while away some of the lonely days and nights of a desert island. The rest of the old testament contains books of prophets like Daniel and Isaiah, Psalms and Proverbs, and a very bloody Jewish history. The new testament contains the four gospels, Acts of the Apostles, various letters of St Paul and others and of course the film maker’s dream, The Book of Revelation. This last was written by St John on the island of Patmos and is full of wild imagery, messages for seven churches, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven cups of the wrath of God, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the unleashing of Satan on earth, the final battle of Armageddon. They say Patmos is full of magic mushrooms and reading Revelation, I’d reckon St John must have had his fill.

The bible is a book which would certainly keep you going, a book of exciting tales and great wisdom, a lot of blood and tribulation, a book of hope. I resisted reading it for forty years, but once I took the plunge, it was a journey whose offshoots continue to this day.

I hope you have enjoyed my little trip through literature. I hasten to add that the books mentioned are my own choice and some of them people will love and others people will hate. There are many other books I could have mentioned, but there is not the space nor the time. And now with modern technology on us, maybe the day of the book is over. Maybe we shall take our kindles or similar devices and read online. Maybe eventually our brains will be plugged into the internet and reading will be a thing of the past. But for an old timer like myself, I’m glad I was around when books were read.

The God of the Gaps

Today, with all our technological and scientific knowledge, have we finally managed to lay the myth of God in the ground? Many aeons ago when man finally emerged as a fully developed conscious being called Homo Sapiens, at some point he developed or found religion. In fact some studies show that the Neanderthals, a separate species (some say subspecies) to Homo Sapiens also developed religion as evidenced by their burial rituals. The Neanderthals died out leaving mankind to shape the future. Whatever the case may actually be, religion developed incredibly early in the evolution of Homo Sapiens.

Everything was religious to him. There were gods everywhere. Gods of the wind, the trees, the sun, the moon. You name it, there was a god for it. As man emerged, he understand practically nothing of his environment. So somehow the idea of gods who controlled the elements came about. And this was thousands of years before the bible was even written. Modern humans evolved around fifty thousand years ago while the bible was probably written only about three and a half thousand years ago.

And even when the earliest books of the bible were being composed we can see that man still attributed everything to God. As the shift from polytheism to monotheism took a lot of time, even early biblical tales include more than one god. The first commandant, which talks about God being the Lord and God of all and you must not put other gods before him, implies that people believed in other gods which were inferior to their God. Even today the belief in angels and saints implies lesser gods.

It wasn’t till the 16th century that modern experimental science began to develop. Before then many philosophers like Aristotle, Plato or Socrates made logical assumptions with no basis in fact. For example Aristotle said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, a statement repudiated when Galileo performed his famous experiments. Aristotle and company did not use empirical evidence. Science changed all that by demanding that experiments be done and only on the outcome of the experiment could theories be developed. Even then it took some considerable time for the scientific method we know today to develop. Astrology was believed in by many scientists and much science was really a mixture of magic and experiment. Giordano Bruno, one of the men credited with the realisation that the Sun rather than the Earth was at the centre of our solar system, was basically a black magician.

However, by the time of the 18th century and the “Age of Enlightenment” science was well on the way to hard-nosed experiment which had been spear headed by such luminaries as Newton, Descartes, Pascal and Leibnitz during the 17th century. The majority of these scientists, it should be pointed out, were deeply religious people and they considered their science only confirmed their beliefs. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries where more and more scientists began questioning these religious ideas that religion began to take second place to science and belief in a deity began to decrease.

It could be argued that Charles Darwin was the main instigator in the withdrawal of science from religion. He began to question the historicity of the bible, especially after his return from the famous voyage of the Beagle where he had studied the natural history of the places he visited and collected many specimens. However, his theory of evolution for the first time seriously questioned the whole idea of man being created directly by God. Instead he had evolved from lower mammals. A great mainstay in the whole theology of God had been shown to rest on shifting sand.

Now things changed and as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced that “God was Dead”, those who would not let God die were being forced back into a smaller corner. Of course they didn’t just lie down and give up. In Tennessee a law was enacted making it illegal to teach the theory of evolution. This was in 1925. John Scopes, a teacher, was brought to trial for disobeying this law and was found guilty but got off on a technicality.

And even further back, in 1860, a debate took place at the Oxford University Museum on the theory of evolution. While a number of prominent scientists and philosophers took part it is best remembered for some remarks which in all probability were never uttered, but it’s a good story and sums up the mood. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce spoke against evolution and asked Thomas Huxley who argued in defense of evolution whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he considered himself descended from a monkey. Huxley retorted that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.

Even today, the argument rumbles on with Creationism and Intelligent Design as two theories purporting to prove that God created man exactly as it says in the bible. I actually heard to my astonishment a Creationist scientist on a television program some time ago stating while science can prove or disprove certain things, once it disagreed with the bible, then the bible won hands down. At this point the mind boggles.

However, many theists today are happy to accept that evolution is the way God progressed his creation. Also most people no longer believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, so now we can go back to the beginning of the universe itself. In the first half of the last century two theories held sway, the Big Bang which said that the universe exploded into existence about 13 or so billion years ago while the Steady State said that the universe had always existed. Unfortunately for the latter theory, in 1964 the faint echo of the Big Bang was detected. Even Pope Pius XII celebrated this fact as it gave credence to the possibility that God perhaps lit the touch paper.

Is this the last gap that God can inhabit today? Unfortunately not. He has been squeezed out of that position as well. It used to be thought that for every effect there had to be a cause. What caused the Big Bang? Well, obviously it had to be God, hadn’t it? Well, not really because you can go on to ask what caused God. So what is more logical, the big bang somehow caused itself, or God caused himself. Or slightly differently, the big bang came out of a previous universe which had its own big bang with these cosmic events going back infinitely in time. So again with a hint of the steady state theory raising its head, the universe was always there. Or God was always there. Why take that extra step? We don’t need God to explain it.

But if that’s the case why do we find that the constants in the universe like the ratio of an electron to a proton, the strength of gravity, the strength of the other forces like electromagnetism, are so finely tuned. If any of these constants or forces were slightly different we could not exist. The universe would be empty. In fact, the universe as we know it could not exist. Doesn’t this look like some sort of designer at work?

No, because what we like to call the multiverse today, that is, universe following universe infinitely back in time will each have had their forces set up in different ways totally at random. It just happens that finally we get an universe which has just the right ingredients to allow the existence of us. The laws of probability; it just had to happen at some point.

So at last God has nowhere left to hide. There are no more gaps left to fill which He might squeeze into. He’s gone. We’ve dealt him a mortal blow. Well, actually He was never there in the first place. Science has triumphed and can explain everything and goes marching off into the sunset.

Yet some will still ask why, if God does not exist, do we have this hunger for Him. This need. And, of course, what about the soul?

Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist from Ontario has the answer to that question. And he thinks he can prove it too. When early man first realised that he was doomed to die it must have come as a bit of a shock. In order for him to be able to accept this, evolution contrived a neat little trick which caused our brains to sometimes have hallucinations and make us believe we were privy to an apparition from the heavens. Yes, God came down to us and told us it was all right, because when we died, we would not cease to exist, but continue on in an afterlife. We had a soul. This eased the apprehension of death, not only in early humans, but in mankind today as well. In order to demonstrate this, he uses what is called a God Helmet. A volunteer dons this helmet and is isolated in a completely dark room. His eyes are covered and there is absolutely no sound. After a while a magnetic field is applied to the helmet which activates a part of the brain called the temporal lobe. When volunteers are questioned afterward, they report that they entered a mystical state, felt a presence or had visions of one or more figures. Persinger claims these can explain all the reported instances involving the appearance of God, angels and saints down through the ages.

I think, just because volunteers using the God Helmet may experience these visions or whatever you want to call them, doesn’t necessarily prove that somebody who went through a religious experience or theophany simply had exactly the same experience. Schizophrenics can hear voices in their heads, but this doesn’t mean that the voices you and I hear every day are coming from our minds. They are, in the sense that the mind interprets the vibrations from our ear caused by another human voice, but the source is another person speaking to us. Similarly a mystic may have a vision of God which could be a real vision. Because the God Helmet may produce a similar sensation doesn’t negate the possibility of the other.

There are those who also suggest that we are living in a computer simulation and once again they have proof! Well, a reasonable suggestion as to why we might be in such a simulation. Science has found that everything in this universe is digital. We are made of atoms, so there is either an atom at this position or there isn’t. Digital. Even space itself is made up of virtual particles. So in essence a virtual particle can appear here or not. Digital. But as space is really combined with time in a space-time continuum, then time itself is made up of discrete bits. Once again digital. In theory it is possible for a very powerful computer to simulate a complex universe with life in it. So perhaps we are exactly that.

Once again a very interesting idea, but personally I don’t buy it. Why? Because it means that if this is true, then there is someone or something running the simulation – our creator. Or maybe even a human from our future. The speculations can be endless, but it still leaves that damnable question. Maybe we are a computer simulation, but what about our simulation operator. Is he also a simulation in an even bigger simulation? And if so, what about his operator. This sounds very familiar territory. Just like who made God.

The bottom line is, why is there something rather than nothing? Of course that still doesn’t mean there is a God! So we’re simply going around the mulberry bush again.

One thing which has always struck me is the fact that today we think we know so much. Actually, we thought we knew everything about a hundred years ago. In fact, going even further back, Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician and astronomer, had famously replied when questioned as to what God’s place was in the universe that he had no need of such a hypothesis. And in the early 20th century some scientists were of the opinion that all that remained for science to do was to calculate out to the next few places of decimals and everything would be sown up. Then relativity and quantum mechanics arrived to blow that idea right out of the water.

Today we still struggle with our theories and have the audacity, some might say, to theorise about the beginning of our known universe and even what went before. Whatever our theories heading into the future will be, one thing is for sure. Our past theories were wrong. Our present theories are wrong. And no doubt our future ones will be wrong too. Maybe we will hit on the right ones in time. Maybe we won’t.

So, to sum up, I guess science has answers, rightly or wrongly, which have now squeezed God out of existence. There are other explanations which may or may not be true. Maybe the universe just popped into existence or was always there. Maybe God was always there.

Whatever the truth of the matter, I think if there is a God and another existence in a spiritual world, I don’t think we will ever find proof of it in this life. Physical matter and spirit are two very different things. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is only physical matter and no such thing as spirit. Perhaps science is our only hope.

But I don’t believe it is quite so simple. I have a niggling feeling that there has to be something more than a universe which was always there, something more than a computer simulation, something more than our minds making us think there is something else there rather than have us face the bleakness of death. Do not go gentle into that good night. Then again, maybe I’m engaging in wishful thinking. I guess that is why I’m an agnostic and proud to be such.

Ardglass – A Reminiscence

When I was a kid in the 1950’s my parents took my brother and myself to Ardglass, a little fishing village in County Down, every year for our holidays. This lasted a month and was something we looked forward to throughout the year. School over, summer holidays begun and Ardglass. Excitement mounted as the great day dawned when we packed our bags and took the bus into Amiens Street station in Dublin to board the Belfast train. I grabbed the seat nearest the window while my brother grabbed the seat opposite. Our smiling mother happily sat in the aisle seat. Now we could settle back, watch the black smoke from the steam engine pulling our carriages drift through the air as we hurtled by fields and hedges on our way.

At Dundalk the customs men boarded and we had to open our suitcases for these agents of the Queen. After a brief rummage, the customs officer gave us a smile as he closed over the case, marked it with chalk and moved on. This was just a part of the journey, I didn’t question it and I didn’t care about it.

Our Uncle Billy usually collected us from the Belfast station. My mother insisted we called him Uncle Noel but we called him what he wanted us to call him and that was Uncle Billy. He was always a cheerful man and talked in his thick Northern accent all the way to Rosetta Park where he lived with his parents, Granddad and Grandma, his sister Auntie Eithne and our two cousins Michael and Gerald.

Here we would stay for a night before being whisked off to Ardglass the next day. We always travelled in one of those big black cabs typical of London and in later years I often wondered if my mother really paid for such a mode of transport as Ardglass was about 30 miles from Belfast. I only found out in later life that my grandfather was a director of O'Kanes Funerals and we got those trips for free travelling in one of their limousines. You learn something every day, I guess.

At last we entered familiar territory and pulled up outside the house my grandfather owned. I leapt out of the taxi and hurried along the crazy type paving from the old iron gate to the front door. Naturally I then had to wait for my mother to catch up with the key. Once inside the house I had to do a full inspection as if to remind myself of its layout and to make sure everything was as it should be. Off the little narrow hallway the first door on the right led into the main living room which stretched the length of the house right to its magnificent bay window at the back which overlooked the bay, the harbour, the lighthouse and the large grassy knoll on the far side of the waters called Ardtole.

Then across the hall to the door on the left which led into the dining area and kitchen. Upstairs there was a small landing with bedrooms on either side. Two large front bedrooms and a smaller one at the back opposite the bathroom. This smaller room was the scene of my ghostly experiences as related in my article of November 2010 “Ghosts”.

Halfway up the stairs was a little window where on a sunny morning I would come down in my pyjamas and bare feet, to sit and feel the heat of the sun pouring through the window as it danced its way across the sparkling waters of the bay. At the bottom of the stairway was an imposing door with a large key. Turning the key and entering forbidden territory with creepy steps leading down into a cellar, against one wall of which lay a massive wooden beam. This was the beginning of an adventure when I was a little older where my Ardglass friend George, my cousin Peter and myself hauled this piece of wood out of the cellar into our backyard and down to the back wall over which the sea lapped at high tide. We turfed the wood into the water in hopes of making some kind of boat which proved impossible as the damn thing kept turning over. So we let it go and forgot about it. Until some days later while walking along the harbour we noticed a group of men staring down at something in the water. It was our massive log which some other men were dragging out of the sea. We said nothing but surreptitiously walked on.

I must mention the little backyard over which the great bay window stood. It was sort of crazy paved like the front and led down to a little wall. Over this wall were the rocks which I often ran over, swift as a mountain goat as my mother used to say. At high tide the water covered these rocks. And even better, on a wild windy day, waves would crash into our yard spreading their foam every which way to our great amusement watching from our vantage point safe inside the bay window.

But first things first. After the house inspection and my mother’s attempt to get me to eat something, I quickly donned my swimming gear and ran out the front gate, past the house next to us and straight down to the beach. Into the water where I happily jumped up and down, splashing furiously and trying to dog paddle. I hadn’t any idea of how to swim properly, but I didn’t care. This was the life.

Then it was time for my first visit to the local shops to spend some of my holiday money. Wallace’s, the newsagent, was my first port of call. Here I could purchase some comics from Mrs Wallace, the kindly old lady behind the counter. Then a door or two down I could buy a cool ice cream from Charlie Mulhall, who appeared to sell everything from fishing tackle to bubble gum. Mulhall’s also had a little place where teenagers could congregate and listen to the latest pop tunes on the jukebox. Here, one year, was where I convinced my cousin to spend half of his holiday money on Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock, a record I loved. My aunt gave out hell to me for getting Tim to spend his money, but as far as I was concerned, he had spent it. I might have urged him on, but I didn’t make him do it. Honest!

Moving around the end of the town by Jordan’s Castle, brought you up to the High Street. Here was a nice little shop, called Rooney’s. Mrs Rooney had farthing, halfpenny, penny, threepenny and sixpenny boxes. Every sweet in these delightful containers cost exactly what its name suggested. I remember once finding a farthing on the beach and running up to Rooney’s and asking for the farthing box. I choose a single item and proceeded to pay for it with my new found farthing. But Mrs Rooney wasn’t having any of it. I had to choose at least two items from this box and pay a halfpenny for them or get nothing. I therefore came away with naught. I hadn’t heard of such a thing as legal tender and the apparent fact that farthings were no longer members of this financial milieu. My father explained it to me, muttering something to my mother about the mean old biddy. I flung the farthing over our back wall into the sea.

The first day almost over, it was time to retire to one of the chairs set in the bay window and read some comics before bed.

The month went slowly by, day after glorious day, no school, swimming and playing on the beach, making new friends and doing what young boys do on holiday. I tried fishing from the harbour once, but found I wasn’t very good at it and a fishing career came to a grinding halt. My mother was better as she caught two herring. Sometimes my father would give me some money and an empty bucket and haul me out of bed at the crack of dawn (something you don’t mind when on holidays) to go down to the harbour as the fishing fleet returned from a busy night and ask the fishermen for some of the catch. They’d fill the pail with mackerel and herring and I’d hand over the money. Probably enough for a few pints. Somehow I don’t think you’d find that happening today. Once one of them called me over and showed me what looked like a baby octopus.

“Watch,” he said as he dropped it into the water.

I watched, fascinated, as it vanished with incredible speed darting into the murky depths.

Every Sunday we went to mass in the little church on the High Street. One memorable Sunday in July 1961 the parish priest Father McKee said the mass. Earlier that week, the American astronauts had returned from a space mission and landed in the Atlantic Ocean. However, the capsule hatch blew off prematurely, but luckily nobody was injured or drowned as could have been the case. Anyway, Father McKee during his sermon mentioned the incident using words to the effect that the top popped off his egg. This, for some reason, sent me into uncontrollable fits of laughter which I couldn’t control, despite the stern finger of my father digging me in the ribs. Coming out of mass I overheard one old guy saying to another, “Sure, did ye hear the young lad from Dublin laughing?” That was the funniest mass I have ever been at.

One incident I’ll never forget happened one summer evening when we went to the pictures. Milligan’s, a family who according to my mother owned half of Ardglass (unlikely I suspect) and also ran a shop on the High Street, sometimes used a hall they had to show films. My friends were all going and it was a cowboy film which was always something to look forward to. In those days, the main film was never shown on its own, there was also a B movie beforehand. So, settling down in my seat with a bag of sweets in my hand, the lights went down and the B movie began. “The Mummy” with Boris Karloff. I had never seen a horror film before and sat with fear mounting slowly at first as one of the characters found himself walking through this creepy cave, dark and very eerie. With the music getting louder and scarier, he came across a tomb containing a mummy. This horror suddenly moved and began crawling out of its sarcophagus. Bag of sweets went flying, I leapt up bursting into tears with the terror and literally ran out of the cinema. I tore down the High Street, down by the steps which led to the lower street, looking neither left nor right till I arrived home and was able, between gasps of breath, to relate the sheer abomination I had just witnessed. It took me years before I could watch another horror film.

Another day, my friend George, my cousin Peter and myself headed up to the Ardglass golf club. We had decided to do a bit of caddying to try and bolster up our summer finances. Unsure of how to go about it, we hung around outside the clubhouse for a while. It wasn’t long before a number of cars pulled up and out stepped four men who looked like golfers. This was confirmed as they opened the car boot and took out two sets of golf bags. This was our cue and up we ran and asked them if they needed any caddies.

“I suppose we do,” smiled one of the men, “how much do you charge?”

“Whatever you can afford,” I replied.

The golfers laughed, “Well, there are only two of us playing and therefore we’ll only need two of you.”

“But maybe one of us could just hold the flag pole,” I suggested hopefully, “We won’t charge for that.”

They laughed again, “Well, okay then.”

So George and myself grabbed a golf bag each, while Peter became the honorary flag pole man. It was an easy job, the sun was shining and the wind was minimal. The golfers would call out the number of the golf stick they wanted and we would hand it to them. And when we reached the point on the green where the flag pole would need removing while they took their shot, Peter duly performed his duty.

One strange incident occurred. Around the ninth or tenth hole, the two guys quickly ushered us into a small copse of trees while the other two mystery men accompanying them started running around in an odd fashion.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We just need to take a rest here for a few minutes,” I was told, “So let’s do that, and be very quiet.”

“Is this part of the game?”

“Yes,” came the whispered reply.

A few minutes later everything resumed as if nothing had happened.

When I got home that evening I proudly told my mother that George and I had earned a half crown each caddying and they even gave Peter one and six even though he didn’t do very much. My mother smiled and asked me who it was I caddied for. I told her I didn’t know, just some nice men. One of those men, she told me, was Mr Brian Faulkner, a very important man in the government. I shrugged my shoulders as the name meant nothing to a twelve year old boy. Of course, today I wonder about that. How did my mother know? And was that the reason for the strange goings on among the trees? Had there been a security incident? Unfortunately, I’ll never know.

So Ardglass afforded me great holidays mixed with a little espionage! And suddenly I was sixteen years of age and no longer wanted to be seen dead with my parents in a little sleepy village in Northern Ireland. So that was the end of my idyllic holidays in Ardglass. Looking back, teenagers appreciate nothing but girls and music, but that I suppose is how it should be.

Last year I went back to Ardglass for a long weekend. It was strange to think, as I walked its familiar streets and stood outside the old house, long sold, that it was nearly fifty years ago that I spent my last holiday here.

So I walked the length and breadth of the place. Milligan’s hall, the scene of “The Mummy” is falling down now. Rooney’s shop, with its farthing boxes, is also gone. But Charlie Mulhall’s shop is still going strong, run by Charlie’s two sons. One of them, Willie, paints a lot and is very well known, especially for his portraits of music stars. You should check out his website. We had a long conversation with him, and I purchased a painting of Ardglass which is now proudly displayed in my house.

The rest of the place looks remarkably as it did, except with a few new shops and other bits and pieces. The biggest change for me was at the back of the old house. The bay window is gone and there is a new marina, so running over the rocks is no longer an option.

But the harbour and bay look much the same with Ardtole still nestling across the water. Jordan’s castle keeps its ancient watch and the golf links attracts its patrons as it did in my day. The graveyard at the back of the church has filled up some more, including some of my relations, sad to tell. But for all the time lost between then and now, it still retains its strong attraction for me. I feel strangely at home in this little village. But maybe as a man gets old, he starts to think on his youth, and no more happier times were spent but right here, in Ardglass, County Down.

What Next for Mankind?

About 5 billion years ago, our solar system was formed from the gravitational collapse of a giant cloud of dust, molecules and atoms, much of which was left over from the Big Bang itself. A small amount, however, was generated by the death of giant stars as they blew themselves to pieces in what is called a supernova. When things began to settle down from the violence of the creation, the solar system consisted of our Sun with 8 attendant planets (the ninth, Pluto, has been demoted to a dwarf planet), an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, comets, meteors and other sundry bits and pieces. Initially the Earth was awash with volcanic and earthquake activity as it cooled down, but eventually it became relatively stable although even today volcanic and seismic activity continues.

So, how long more can mankind continue to live on the Earth? Baring the possibility of humanity blowing itself to bits or destroying the environment, we must consider our Sun as the most likely cause of Earth’s demise. The Sun will continue to burn at its present rate for another 5 billion years. It will supply all our energy needs during that time and assuming we don’t do something daft, will also continue to sustain us. However after that time has expired the Sun will begin to go through a number of changes where it will eventually expand into what is called a red giant. This means that its outer surface will expand almost to the distance of the Earth. If we are inside that expansion the complete planet will be utterly destroyed. If we remain outside it, the atmosphere and oceans will be boiled off and everything on the surface will be burned to a crisp. We had better be gone by then.

Of course, we have only been around on this planet for about 200 thousand years and while we made some pretty major advances early on (discovery of fire, the wheel etc.) our technology has really only taken off since the late middle ages. Since that time it has progressed in leaps and bounds to our electronic computer age today. We have managed to send a man as far as the Moon, which is less than a quarter of a million miles away, a dot in the ocean in comparison to the distance to our second nearest star, Proxima Centauri, a mere 25 million million miles. And that was by putting him in a little capsule on top of a massive rocket and hurling him upwards into space.

Looking on the bright side we still have a long, long time to figure out how to get permanently off of this planet. We have already taken the first steps, by building the international space station. But it is a tiny step, and the worry is that with the world in a financial mess, there’s not much money around where people are prepared to invest in long term projects. Of course, the whole idea that we should run our affairs tied up in money and power is ridiculous but that’s another article. In the meantime we have to have an optimistic outlook that we’ll get to our goals eventually.

Wrapped up with the idea of leaving planet Earth is the concept of reaching another planet and colonising it. Or even terraforming Mars. That in itself is an interesting concept and certainly a tremendous challenge. How could we transform the hostile atmosphere and environment of Mars into an Earth like state? The main changes required would be the building up of the atmosphere to make it breathable for humans, increasing the temperature and preventing the atmosphere leaking away into space. We could start by importing a very large quantity of water which in theory could be obtained from ice asteroids or the icy moons of Jupiter or other planets as there does not seem to be enough of the substance frozen in the Martian poles. Once there was enough water to form an ocean or two, plant life such as plankton could be introduced into the newly formed sea. This would start converting the atmosphere from its present format to oxygen. These things will be possible in the future even if the technology is a little beyond us at present.

But we don’t need to go to another planet. Why shouldn’t we use the concept of O’Neill cylinders? Gerard O’Neill was a professor of physics at Princeton and in a 1976 book he proposed the idea. Using materials from the moon he envisioned building a huge cylinder in space about 5 miles in diameter and about 20 miles long. This would rotate in order to create an artificial gravity while humans could live on its inner surface. This could accommodate hundreds of thousands of people. Other designs could house even more people. And not only would these massive space stations of the future be able to hold so many people, they would not have to stay in the one place, or even orbit one star. They could travel slowly through space which would mean that after many generations the descendants of the first intrepid space farers could reach planets orbiting distant stars. In the meantime the inhabitants of these colonies could live their lives exactly as they did on Earth, working and raising their families.

So this may be the way we will visit and perhaps colonise other planets, assuming of course nobody is already living there. We won’t have to invent the warp engine or any of the other extremely futuristic projects to travel between the stars. While I do believe the application of science will one day be able to overcome the light speed barrier, it will take a very long time in my estimation. One of the ideas on how the warp engine actually operates is that of bending spacetime. The spaceship stays in a bubble of normal space while the space in front and behind is stretched and condensed. In this way the ship rides this wave so to speak. As it takes massive amounts of mass or energy to bend space (even Earth bends it by an incredibly tiny amount) it will be many centuries before we even begin to develop that sort of technology. Of course all this bending of spacetime is only theory. We have no clue if it can ever work in practice. In the meantime all we need is patience as we slowly move through space in our O’Neill cylinders.

Other ideas like moving through the universe involve the use of wormholes. Regions of space light years distant from each other could be connected by a wormhole. Going through the wormhole takes us pretty well instantaneously between the two regions. The analogy is with an apple. To get from one side of the apple to the other, an insect for example, would have to go around the surface. However, if a worm bored a hole through the centre of the apple, this would be a much shorter path between two widely separated areas of the apple. Scientists like to give exotic names to their ideas. Again we would need to be a highly advanced technological civilisation before even attempting such a feat.

And of course we mustn’t forget the old Star Trek favourite, the transporter. The idea that a machine can take your body and send it through space and time to another machine in a different place is quite mind boggling. This to my mind is an even more advanced concept than the wormhole. There are two ways it might work. First, the machine reads the precise position of every atom in your body. Immediately we run into the uncertainty principle, but let’s ignore that. This transporter has a computer with massive memory capable of recording where every single atom in your body belongs, that’s 7000 trillion trillion atoms, more than there are stars in the observable universe. That’s some computing power. Of course with clever algorithms we need remember much less than that, but it is still an awesome feat. Then the machine teleports this information to its sister machine some other place and hence reconstructs you, with all your atoms in the correct position. Now the first transporter has to kill you otherwise there will be two copies of you. The other method is to deconstruct you in the first place (it could still be called murder), send your actual atoms as energy to the other machine and reconstruct you. The question also arises whether the reconstructed you is really you. Of course a more advanced transporter doesn’t need a second machine to work. It can put you down anywhere. Notwithstanding that some scientist recently said that a device like that in Star Trek could be invented within the next 100 years, I think that is rubbish. This technology won’t be invented within the next 1000 years. Then again all guesses as to what the future may bring are usually wrong.

So what will it be like living in an O’Neill cylinder? As the cylinder is spinning an artificial gravity, equivalent to that on Earth, will be created due to the centrifugal force generated by the spin, much like on fairground rides. Therefore, living on the inner surface, you will feel weight, objects will fall if dropped and everything will behave as if on the surface of a planet. However, if we look up we won’t see a normal sky. Instead we will see the buildings, open spaces, fields and so on in use by the people on the opposite side of the cylinder, just as they will see us on our side. Probably in strips along the length of the cylinder will be massive glass windows through which we will see the stars outside although only when the lighting system within the cylinder will have been shut down. We will need to have light and dark cycles to simulate the pattern of day and night on Earth. We will have to have seasons with artificial sunshine, and we will need to fabricate our own wind and rain. The dream of controlling the weather will become reality here. We will need to have sufficient space devoted to farming with real seeds producing real food. We will even be able to take holidays to other parts of the cylinder. Perhaps we can have mountainous regions, forested regions, vast savannahs all populated with their own animals.

O’Neill cylinders may be well and good but others see a different future for mankind. They cite evolution and the fact that we are still evolving. And with the rise and progress of genetic engineering it is not inconceivable that we can nudge our evolution forward and in ways we ourselves may wish. In theory we could increase our intelligence, enhance our bodies so they become disease free, become stronger, faster, live longer. In effect there is probably no limit on our capabilities. Some people may say that is messing with nature and it should not be done. Making ourselves likes gods. But all I can say about that is if it can be done, now or in the future, we’re going to do it.

We could evolve our bodies to be able to survive in different atmospheres which would mean we won’t have to try terraforming Mars or other planets. We could even survive in the cold vacuum of outer space itself. This would mean we don’t have to create artificial atmospheres in our O’Neill cylinders. Make ourselves to fit the environment rather than making the environment to fit us.

What about incorporating some machine parts into our bodies? Of course that is already being done with artificial limbs, hips, pacemakers and so on. But what about a radio transmitter and receiver made of bio material inserted into our brains? This, for example, would allow connection to a massive knowledge bank where anything we might want to know would simply require thinking about it. Sort of being wired up to the internet without having to use a computer.

However, the main challenge we have as a race of humankind is the ability to be able to put wars and hatred to one side. We need to grow up. And fast. The Earth is not going to be able to support us as we are. We simply cannot continue to plunder its resources and pollute its environment. We cannot continue to overpopulate it. We have to sit down and take a long hard look at ourselves. Do we want to head for the stars eventually? And that urge is in our blood. After all we came from the stars. Most of the atoms of which we are composed were cooked inside a star long ago. So let’s put our puny differences aside, stand together and head for the great unknown. Otherwise we might as well blow the planet to pieces right now.

Theophany

I’ve always enjoyed dreaming. I’ve had some beautiful dreams, some mediocre dreams, some frightening dreams, and some nasty dreams. With the exception of the nasty ones, I enjoy them all.

Nothing, however, prepared me for the dream I had last night. I suppose you could call it a theophany, a type of dream where God himself appears. Now, being an agnostic and not a particularly good sort of guy, I was sort of surprised that he should bother his head to appear to me. The famous old question pops to mind, why me? But I guess I have to accept it. He just came walking into my dream, long white hair and beard flowing, looking exactly like Michelangelo portrayed him in the Sistine chapel.

“I want a word with you,” he said.

Well, I certainly wanted a word with him. I’d often thought that if the God thing were true, on my death I would love to be able to sit down and ask him questions. Hard questions. So now it looked like I might get my chance.

Turns out that he wanted the same thing, the chance to explain himself a little. Why and why to me, he wouldn’t answer. Just smiled and said, “Why not?”

I suppose different people might have different questions they might want to address to the creator of the universe, but I wanted to ask him the really basic ones. Like who made God?

The argument of cause from effect is one of the more convincing arguments about the existence of God until you look a little more closely. Everything has a cause. Your existence is caused by your parents, whose existence in turn was caused by their parents. And on we go. So what caused the universe itself? Surely it had to be caused by something. Well, we can say it was caused by God who is the unmoved mover. But the logical step is surely to ask what caused God? Why stop at God and assume he is uncaused? So basically it is as absurd to say that the universe was uncaused as it is to say that God is uncaused. Does that imply if I don’t believe in God then I have to accept that the universe is uncaused? It just is, so to speak?

This is a question where the issue of infinity comes into play and humans can’t get their heads around that. Therefore, why should we even begin to think we can get our heads around the whole area of where the universe came from, not to mind about God?

Of course with current advances in cosmology and physics, there are opinions about how exactly the universe came into play. One idea is that the Big Bang, generally thought to kick our current universe off was in turned caused by the collapse of a universe which came into existence before our own. Quite possibly a universe which was not as complex as ours and probably didn’t harbour any intelligent life. This in turn had a universe preceding it which was even simpler. And so back to a time when an initial quantum disturbance (whatever that might mean) just popped into existence. This simplest of universes collapsed on itself giving birth to a slightly less simple universe and so on.

But come on, what caused the initial quantum ripple to appear? And we’re back to the same old roundabout. It reminds me of the story of a wise old sage who was asked the question what holds the earth up. He said the earth rested on the back of an elephant. But what holds the elephant up? The elephant stands on the back of a giant turtle. The sage knew, of course, where the questions were leading, and continued that it was turtles all the way down from there.

I think, says God, you just have to accept that I am!

Not very satisfactory at all, but he wasn’t budging from his position. I wondered if God himself really knew the answer to this greatest of mysteries. Maybe there are things even he doesn’t know.

So I suppose the next best question was why did he make the universe?

You try sitting in eternity with nothing else to do and see what happens. A rather terse answer I thought, but I guess it was easy to see his point of view. Wouldn’t making a universe and seeing how it turned out be a really challenging thing to do?

So what about us? Humanity? Well, says he, something like that was at the back of my mind, but I was a little surprised how it turned out. Evolution began on some planets which eventually led to life and intelligence.

So we’re not the only intelligent species in the universe? He replied with a smile, of course not. Wouldn’t it be an awful waste of space if the whole shebang was created just for you? You haven’t managed to contact any of them yet, but you can take my word for it that the universe is teeming with life, intelligent and otherwise.

What about evil and suffering? Why all this suffering?

Ah, I knew you’d get around to that. I know the existence of evil is one of the greatest reasons why people reject me. I could say it was a toss-up between you having free will or not having free will. But that’s a rather lame answer. I could also say unless you experience evil you can never know good. But then you’ll say why do I allow children to suffer. Let me assure you, I don’t allow anybody to suffer. I don’t will any of the bad things to happen either. I created this universe and allowed it to run its course. You do know that many scientists say that even a tiny adjustment to any of the constants in the universe, such as the ratio of the proton to the electron, would cause it to be lifeless? In fact, it’s the only way I could have created the universe. You have to remember God can’t do things which are impossible. Further you should consider the ratio of a little bit of pain over a minute time span in the great scheme of things as against an eternity without pain. I realise this isn’t satisfactory, but it’s the best I can offer.

No doubt it’s tied up with the suffering bit, but why death? Couldn’t you have made us immortal and live in happiness all the time? Like angels, although I doubt they exist.

Well, angels do exist but not as you imagine them. You don’t have a guardian angel, for example. They were not created by me but have been around as long as I have, which in your mind you might call eternity. While they are almost equal in every way to myself, they simply lack one power and that is creation. However, when you die they will help you to adjust to the next level and so on, but I’ll speak about that shortly.

I can also tell you that devils don’t exist. It would be a pointless creation. So no war in heaven, I’m afraid. In fact, the only rebellious creatures are made of flesh and blood. And as I mentioned earlier, you are not the only creatures to inhabit the universe. As a flesh and blood being, you go through a life of learning in order to prepare for a life beyond. And yes, that means going through death. But death is nothing to be afraid of. It’s a preparation for the next life but you’ll only see that from the other side. And I know that many people learn nothing in this present life, but there are very many who do. They are simply further on the road to their final destination. I’ll speak more about this later when you ask me about heaven and hell.

Well then, I guess there’s no time like the present. What about heaven and hell? Do they exist?

Yes and no. Listen, a lot of religions believe that if you are good in this life you go straight to heaven in the next life. But think about it. You cannot go from this extremely limited life straight into eternity. The transformation would be too much to take. In fact it would spiritually kill you. When you leave this life you do enter an afterlife but this is only the first of many. This afterlife which can last a short or long time depending on the person, is a time for contemplation of your time in what I like to call your earthly life. This earthly life is the first of many lives you will experience. The second life is what you call the afterlife. This is where you might experience heaven or hell, but it is not physical. Imagine you have done something very wrong to somebody and you are genuinely sorry for it. You experience remorse. This is what the afterlife is like as you look over what you did with and in your own life. You will feel remorse for the things you did which hurt others. So for example a really bad person will experience huge remorse, maybe almost unbearable. While a really good person will not experience anything like this. Nobody is perfect of course, and all will go through this process. But it is not all about dealing with your earthly life, it is about preparation for further lives to come.

I reminded him that he had already said there were no devils. So who was responsible for evil? He replied that evil was simply the negation of good. Some people do choose evil and we shouldn’t try to blame evil on some being like Satan. We are ourselves to blame for evil. Just look around at the wars going on even today. Look at the history books and the human race has been busily killing for centuries. No wonder the bible wisely says that when the Jews were defeated and hauled off to Babylon, they had only themselves to blame. Like the Americans today have only themselves to blame for 9/11. That is not to say they deserve it, but look what they have done in the third world and elsewhere. You can’t do what you want and get away with it.

But this might be well and good, but what about the evils of an earthquake, or a tsunami? Surely man can’t be blamed for them. Of course not, but as I’ve pointed out before, the universe is as it is. There was no better way to do it. Remember this world you are living on is far from stable. It is only about four and a half billion years old. It is still cooling down from its birth pangs and will continue to suffer earthquakes and volcanoes and other natural phenomena well into the future. In fact, I can tell you that mankind will have long left this planet for outer space before the planet cools sufficiently to be totally stable, and then it will die.

Does science contradict religion? This whole area has been a bone of contention for many long years. Scientists seeming to line up on the atheist side with theologians and their comrades lining up on the theist side. This has been going on since the days of Galileo if not longer, but has come into prominence particularly since Charles Darwin and others introduced the idea of evolution. This rumbles on today with the creationists and literal interpreters of the bible insisting that the earth is only about six thousand years old while the scientists saying the earth is four and a half billion years old. Unfortunately for the creationists they are wrong. It is strange that they accept the literal words written in an ancient book. The bible was written by men trying to make sense of the universe they found themselves in. They knew nothing of modern science. And neither could you expect them to.

If you look carefully enough you will find that when men used their intelligence to consider and discuss the difficulties faced by scientists and theologians, they often found themselves in close agreement. After all if two disciplines are searching for truth, and there is only one truth, they both can’t find different things.

One of the most famous cases of religion going against science is the story of Galileo. He said that the earth revolved around the sun. This contradicted certain passages in the bible which implied that the earth was stable and the sun revolved around it. Well, in those days that’s what everybody thought and the writers of these particular sections of the bible were no different. Nicolaus Copernicus, an astronomer, first proposed the theory of heliocentricity in the early sixteenth century. Johannes Kepler, another astronomer and mathematician, published a work which expanded on Copernicus’ work which found a welcome reception among some Jesuits known for their scientific achievements. Of course, the heliocentric theory seemed to contradict the bible which was a very sensitive issue for the church. Besides the protestant reformation was in full swing and when Galileo went to Rome to see Pope Paul V, he turned the matter over to the Holy Office (in other words, the inquisition). They issued a condemnation of the theory, but that was all it was. No further action was taken or expected to be taken. Unfortunately Galileo was a stubborn man and at his insistence Cardinal Bellarmine, one of the most influential Jesuit theologians of the day, issued a certification which forbade Galileo to hold or defend his theory, but did allow him to conjecture it. In fact, he was granted permission to write a book on the subject. And a new pope, Urban VIII, advised him to simply present arguments for and against heliocentricity. Unfortunately Galileo wrote the book using two characters to argue both sides of the case. Arguing the case against the theory was the character Simplicio. The pope thought he was being made fun of. Besides Galileo attacked one of the Jesuit astronomers to boot and hence the famous trial took place where Galileo was placed under house arrest. Contrary to some opinion, he was never tortured and was looked after very well for the rest of his life. Not that that forgives his treatment, but at the end of the day it was all a bit of a misunderstanding really.

I was reasonably happy with God’s answer as I know there are many religious people who are very open to science. Unfortunately there are many who have closed minds. But that’s the nature of people and you’ll find people who are very open to new ideas and people who are closed to them in every strata of society.

So I thought I’d get a glimpse into some current scientific investigations. For example, are there extra dimensions to our universe? Is time travel possible? But he wasn’t having any of it. He said that it is for us to find out and that the seeking of knowledge is one of the greatest gifts we have and which actually plays a very large part in keeping the human race going. It is one of the defining characteristics of the human race.

So I asked him about free will. I told him I was pretty sure we didn’t have it. Maybe we can make a choice between going for a walk and not going for a walk but after that there didn’t seem to be much evidence for it. I mean we don’t get to choose where we are born which has a huge effect on our lives: what religion we are, what colour we are, whether we are rich or poor and so on. We don’t really get to choose what our likes and dislikes are: I didn’t decide one day to read up on science and religion rather than politics or business. I just like those subjects and don’t like the other ones. Also, do really evil people choose to be evil? Can a child molester help himself? Does he even know it is wrong. We’ve all heard about people who have no conscience. Surely that’s not something they can help.

He looked at me and said, with what I can only describe as an authority and wisdom beyond my understanding, ultimately each individual knows what is right or wrong. And even a man without a conscience knows deep down. He may choose to ignore this, but he knows. And that is probably the most important aspect of free will which you all have. True, you don’t choose your birthplace or circumstances but in the great scheme of things this is not important. You are a human being made in the image of myself. Of course when I say image, I am not speaking physically but spiritually.

So why do you keep yourself such a secret? Why don’t you tell people you exist? He smiled and said that if he were to stand on a mountain top and proclaim his glory, half the world would still not believe. Besides, this is a journey for each and every man. Each person must take this trip alone. People ask who they are. Well, they know who they are. They are humans descended from other humans who in turn are standing at the head of a long chain of evolution stretching back more than 3 billion years when the first one-celled creatures appeared. And even they are products of a molecular evolutionary process stretching even further back. You are only at the very beginning and as I pointed out earlier, your quest for knowledge and understanding are one of your main driving forces. But you have to give it time. To understand everything now would simply destroy you. Your minds simply couldn’t take it. You must be patient. Knock and it shall be opened to you, but I never said how long it would take.

Tell me about Jesus Christ. Was he your son? Did he have to suffer so much? Did he actually rise from the dead?

Forget all about the holy trinity stuff. That again was something thought up by the early church in an attempt to understand. In order to show mankind a glimpse of the way he should be going, you could call it a clue, I myself came upon this earth as a man and I was called Jesus Christ. I preached basically that the kingdom of God is within all of you. You don’t need God to tell you how to live your life, you already know it, but many of you ignore it. Look, it’s the most logical thing in the world. Do unto others what you would have them do to you. If only everybody would follow that simple concept, think how much better things could be. I realise that in itself won’t stop earthquakes, illness, disease and so forth. But these things are in your own hands. Look how far you have come in the few millennia you have been on this planet. You can now cure many ills, you are living much longer, your science has taken you far and to the moon. On the other hand you should be ashamed that you have not cured hunger and starvation for 13% of humanity which is an estimated 925 million hungry people. You still seem incapable of settling serious disputes without killing each other. You still seem to have an incredible lust for money and power. Do you not stop to think that all this ends at the grave? You can’t take it with you. You ignore what is more important. And don’t say it’s just the other fellow. Take responsibility for your own actions. Think about what you do. You’re not as innocent as you think. But I’m not here to castigate. I’m here to teach.

I suffered as a human as many humans suffered in the name of justice throughout history. Today in western countries I would be ignored as a rabble rouser. In less democratic countries I would just vanish. But 2000 years ago the world didn’t have human rights organisations. A troublemaker in Jerusalem was simply crucified by the Romans. Problem solved. I didn’t choose to die in that way, but I knew it would be like that. But the most important thing was for me to get my message through. It has reached some of you, but sadly has missed too many. And yes, I did rise from the grave. It’s no big deal. But it wasn’t as effective as when I came into a little room among a group of terrified men and women and gave them the courage to get up and go out and preach fearlessly my message to the world. Of course, as with everything in human hands, it kind of got out of control. Paul was one of the hardest working of my followers, making my name known far and wide, but it was really the Roman emperor Constantine whose decision to embrace Christianity, as my sect became known, which converted the entire Roman world. Some centuries later the catholic church became so powerful that they really moved away from my simple gospel and became as corrupt as any group could be. In the twentieth century the only pope to come even close to where he should be was John XXIII. Unfortunately John Paul II put paid to that and hurled the church back into the middle ages once again where it has become stuck.

But I don’t really want to go down that road now, besides it’s time for me to take my leave and let you wake up and think on what I’ve said.

And that was it. I woke up filled with thoughts about this most unusual of dreams. Questions which I hadn’t asked but should have, came flooding into my head. But then I started thinking about the answers I had actually got and thought maybe I didn’t do so bad after all.

So what do you think? Did I ask the questions you might have asked? But you know the whole thing is made up. I never had such a dream. I would like to have such a dream. I would like nothing better than to put these questions to God. But, he doesn’t exist, does he? If not, I’ll never be able to question him. Then again, I’m not an out and out atheist. I’m agnostic. I don’t know if God exists or not. I sure hope he does and if he does exist, then maybe one day…

A Trip to Israel

In February 2009 myself and my two sons went on the trip of a lifetime to Israel. Over the previous 10 years or so I had become fascinated with the study of the bible from a historical point of view and to my surprise I was treated to a week in Jerusalem for my 60th birthday. In one sense the timing was good as the war in Gaza was raging and hence the influx of visitors to the Holy Land had considerably diminished allowing us easy access to all the usual sites without them being crammed with visitors like ourselves.

We landed in Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv at about four o’clock in the morning. As it was the Sabbath day, all normal modes of transport were not operating and so we had to take a special taxi from there to Jerusalem. These taxis take about 8 people and they just wait till full before starting their journey. We sat for about half an hour before the final passenger boarded and then we took off out of a very normal looking, modern day airport, back into history. I have to say I felt great excitement and anticipation in this land about which I had read so much. It was here that King David (the most famous of Jewish kings) had killed the giant Goliath (that most famous of Philistine warriors) with a single shot from his sling. Here the Ark of the Covenant had resided until finally lost sometime during the 6th century BC. Here the Jewish people were conquered many times over throughout their history, but especially by the Babylonians. Here in this land their great temple was destroyed not once, but twice. First by the Babylonians in the 6th century BC and then by the Romans in 70AD. It has never been rebuilt. Here we have the complete destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fall of Jericho (when those walls came tumbling down). The stories of Samson and Delilah, the wisdom of Solomon and the visit of the Queen of Sheba. Some of the stories may not be true and even some of the characters may not have existed, but many of them did. David certainly did and was king of his people whether or not he killed Goliath. The Ark existed and was carried around by the Israelites for many years before finally ending up in the great temple in Jerusalem. The Babylonians inflicted a great defeat on the Jews and brought them into exile for many years. Jericho is a real city, existing today as in the past, although the story of it’s walls crashing to the ground at the sounding of trumpets on Joshua’s order is surely apocryphal. Not to mention the fact that Jesus Christ, the most famous character in western civilization, also walked on this soil.

But no matter, separating history from legend is fascinating and the strange thing is that quite a lot of what is spoken about in the Bible and which many scholars shrugged off as not historical has turned out to be fact. For example many assumed Sodom never existed but now excavations have shown evidence of this ancient city, that at least it existed. In fact, a similar tale can be related about the city of Troy from whence came the famous Helen. Initially it was thought to be a fictional city in the story by Homer, but subsequently was actually found.

Anyway, here I was, in a taxi travelling through the land of Israel towards Jerusalem. Brought to mind the lines from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Then I saw the signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English pointing towards Jerusalem. At this point I knew I was really in this fantastic land. That may seem strange to say, but no matter what way you look at it, my whole Irish Catholic culture, whether as a believer or atheist, comes directly from this place. Maybe it took a slight detour via Rome, but it’s origins are right here.

Then suddenly we were stopping outside our hostel, the YMCA, right opposite the most well known hotel in Israel, the King David, a part of which was blown up by a militant Zionist group in 1946. But we were too tired to care, having being travelling from early morning the day before. We got to our room and crashed out.

However, later that morning we rose, eager to hit the old town of Jerusalem. We couldn’t see it from our window as the King David Hotel was in the way. After consulting our map and finding the route to the old city, we headed out of the hostel and crossed the road. Deftly dodging the taxi drivers touting for business, we made our way round the side of the King David and down a seriously hilly road. At the bottom we were rewarded with a first view of Jerusalem. For this we had come so far. It was magnificent even though we could only see one of the main walls and the Jaffa Gate across the valley. It reminded me forcibly of the woodcut I reproduce above of the pilgrims’ first sight of Jerusalem under the escort of the Knights Templar.

We entered by the Jaffa Gate, which had been built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. At this time Jerusalem was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and it was due to Sultan Suleiman that the present walls of Jerusalem were built. So passing through this gate we passed by the original brickwork and mortar built by the Moslems nearly 500 years ago. The first thing we did was to breakfast at a little café inside the old city. So now we had to decide what to do next. There was such a choice, but we thought the best idea was to walk the walls themselves and so get an overview of the city. There are a number of different walks you can do, but we took the route from the Jaffa Gate round by the Damascus Gate to the Lion’s Gate. In hindsight this was the better of the two routes we could have chosen as it indeed gave us a great overview of the old city, including the Church of the holy Sepulchre which contains Calvary and the tomb of Jesus. Also the beautiful golden Dome of the Rock, one of the most iconic sights of Jerusalem, the Islamic shrine built on the Temple Mount.

It was a hot sunny day and remarkably few people were on the wall. We were able to take our ease and take in the sights. At the Damascus Gate we paused, listening to and watching the hubbub of people shopping in the market below. Much to our surprise we also noticed some Irish graffiti on a building “Tiocfaidh ar lá o saoirse”. I don’t know what it means but guess at something like “Our freedom will come one day”. Continuing along the walls we could see the Garden of Gethsemane in the distance across the Kidron Valley and the Mount of Olives, one of the places from which Christ is supposed to have ascended into heaven.

And suddenly right in our path comes a snake. He must have been about two feet long, a big guy. We managed to get one photo of him before he vanished over the edge of the wall.

We came down from the wall at the Lion’s Gate which is close to the point where the Via Dolorosa begins, the traditional path of Christ from where Pilot condemned him to death and ending at Calvary and his tomb. Of course, as modern scholars now point out, this is in the wrong place, but as with most things from the gospels there is more than one place commemorating where these events are supposed to have occurred.

No matter, after passing by the Church of the Condemnation and the Church of the Flagellation (what fantastic names) we came upon an intriguing little sign which simply pointed to the house of Mary, the mother of Jesus. This was at the side of the Church of St Anne which is a beautiful 12th century Crusader church erected over the traditional site of the birthplace of Anne who is the mother of Mary. Descending a flight of narrow steps I arrived in a small grotto type place which is supposed to be the house. A small little place, I guess it could have been anybody’s, but tradition has it as being the house of Anne and Joachim, the parents of Mary.

The church itself is supposed to have been designed for Gregorian chant and the acoustics are so perfect that many pilgrim groups come to sing in the church. We were privileged to be there during just such a performance by a group of black Americans. Their rich voices soared in that place and boy, was it a treat.

The church itself is next to the Bethesda Pool, believed to be the site where Jesus healed a paralytic. Here can be seen the ruins of a Roman temple to the god of medicine and also the remains of a Byzantine church built over the temple as well as the pool itself.

Afterwards we continued along the Via Dolorosa and spotted a group of pilgrims praying the Stations of the Cross. We decided to join them as they would surely lead us directly to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Which is exactly what happened. The present church houses both the Hill of Calvary and the tomb of Christ.

This is a fascinating building with a long history. Sometime after the crucifixion the site became a place of Christian veneration. However, after the Jewish revolt in 70AD the city of Jerusalem was totally destroyed by the Romans. Hadrian then rebuilt the city calling it Aelia Capitolina around 135AD but forbade Jews or Christians to enter it. He even constructed a pagan temple on the site of the present church.

However, all this changed after the emperor Constantine became a Christian. Legend has it that he was exposed to Christianity by his mother, Helena, but it was only before an important battle that Constantine, looking at the sun, saw a cross of light with the words “By this win”. He therefore commanded his troops to wear a Christian symbol on their shields and hence won the battle of Milvian Bridge, which gave him the emperorship of the West. Sometime afterwards he instructed Helena to go to Jerusalem, destroy the pagan temple, begin excavations and build a church on the site. She is alleged to have found not only the Hill of Calvary but also a tomb close by which was declared to be the tomb of Jesus. The church was built on the site but was damaged by fire in 916 and again in 966 during a riot. Finally it was completely destroyed in 1009. However it was rebuilt in 1048. Later the church was renovated and added to in the 12th century by the crusaders and again renovated by the Franciscans in the 16th century. It was severely damaged again by fire at the beginning of the 19th century and to this day is continually being excavated and renovated.

At present the principal custodians of the church are the Eastern Orthodox, the Armenian Christians and the Catholic Church. Others have a share in smaller areas. Unfortunately these groups continue to squabble and fight each other. In 2008 a fist fight broke out when a monk was ejected by some rivals.

However, the day we visited all was peaceful and calm. There is a strange palpable power in the place (perhaps wish fulfilment, I don’t know) and sitting quietly in one corner I noticed several people being overcome with tears. All reason and logic goes out the window and one sits and contemplates. Could it all be true? Was the Son of God really crucified only yards from where I sat? Whatever the theology, a human man was certainly crucified and buried here and whether he wanted to or not, it is because of him that the vast edifice of Western Christianity has shaped our history for more than two millennia. So there is an atmosphere of potent energy within the church, felt by believer and non-believer alike.

After a while I got up and went down some steps which led to the tomb. I queued for a short time as it only holds about three or four people and the priests like to keep things moving. But I was able to remain inside for a few minutes once again immersed in the great questions. After that we headed back to our hotel for a nice evening meal and some scoops.

The next day we decided to take a taxi up to the Mount of Olives and walk back down across the Kidron Valley to Jerusalem where we had a tour booked along Herod’s wall. Even though the driver tried to get us to change our minds and take a trip to Bethlehem instead, he turned out to be a very friendly character, a Palestinian and gave us advise on how to mind our money. I was actually touched when he shook my hand and gave us a blessing as we left his cab. Compared to him the surly curator of the Chapel of the Ascension which we visited first was most unfriendly as we paid our small entrance fee.

As with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, there is quite a history behind this small round structure, but the present building is from Crusader times. Not an impressive place, the most interesting part is a small stone frame surrounding a rock with the supposed impression of the last footprint of Christ before he ascended to heaven. I have to say, it looked nothing like the shape of a foot to me.

After that we started to walk down the Mount of Olives to the Garden of Gethsemane. On this sunny warm day, the garden looked very serene, belying it’s terrible trauma of the night before Christ died. Today it is fenced off so you can’t walk through it, although you can stretch your hand in to touch the rough bark of the olive trees. Some say that it still contains olive trees which are approximately 2000 years old. But that is unlikely although they probably are descendants of the original trees. We continued our journey visiting the Church of All Nations which is very modern having been built at the beginning of the 20th century using funds donated by many countries around the world, hence it’s name. Being right beside the Garden of Gethsemane, it claims to contain the place where Jesus is supposed to have prayed on the night of his arrest.

From the Mount of Olives, it is possible to take in the whole panorama of the old city of Jerusalem surrounded by it’s walls and dominated by the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock. The old city is surprisingly small, it’s surrounding walls stretch only for about 2.5 miles. But looking at it stretched out in all it’s glory, the most amazing thing about it is the mass of history it encapsulates and the fact that it is a most sacred city to three of the world’s largest religions: Jews, Muslims and Christians.

We walked down into the Kidron Valley which separates the Mount of Olives from the old city itself. Walking through this valley we came upon some very ancient monuments, more than two thousand years old and it struck me forcibly that Christ must have seen these too as he was dragged to Jerusalem from the Garden of Gethsemane as this is the only route he could have taken.

Entering into the old city, we headed for the Western (or Wailing) Wall. It is the remains of the wall which surrounded the Jewish Temple and is one of the most sacred places for Jews today, as it is the closest they can now get to the Holy of Holies where God himself was supposed to have dwelt before the total destruction of the temple by the Romans around 70AD as mentioned above. One part of the wall is sectioned off for women, while we entered the men’s section (orthodox Jewry being very male dominated, even today). We were given a little skullcap made from cardboard to wear as a mark of respect and were allowed to go anywhere we wished. It is daunting to think that this wall was erected by King Herod the Great about 19BC. Some of the stones weigh up to 8 tons each with one in particular weighing in excess of 500 tons. How the builders moved and positioned them is just incredible. Of course I had to touch the wall itself and again the shear weight of history comes through. And crammed into every crevice were scraps of paper which hold prayers and petitions from devout Jews.

A large part of the wall continues underground and as we had booked a tour of this area in advance, we headed for the entrance to this fascinating historical guide. Suffice it to say that the walk took us through thousands of years of history in the footsteps of Herod, Solomon, David and others. At the end of the tour we exited into the Muslim quarter of the old city. This exit was only opened in the late 1980’s and caused a riot at the time. I remember walking along the street and had been one of the last to leave the tunnel. I noticed a young guy walking quite closely behind me and didn’t particularly feel at ease with it. I stopped and motioned for him to go ahead which he did, although giving me a funny look. Next thing I notice he was in conversation with my sons up ahead, so I caught up wondering what was going on. It turns out he was a member of Israeli security, part of whose job is to make sure that the visitors are safe on leaving the tour. I have to say I didn’t feel particularly unsafe, but I guess nothing is taken for granted in Israel.

Either that same day or the next day, I can’t remember which, we paid a visit to the Dome of the Rock. This is an Islamic shrine located on the Temple Mount one side of which is the Western Wall. This is a magnificent building, octagonal in shape with a massive golden dome on the roof. The gold was added by King Hussein of Jordan in 1993. Unfortunately, due to the Gaza war, we were not allowed inside the building. The Muslim curator explained, almost apologetically, that only Muslims could enter the building at this time. This was a great pity.

Another day we headed out of the old city and went to Mount Zion. Here, besides lots of churches commemorating one thing or another, we found a crusader built castle which houses the room of the last supper. Of course this cannot be the actual site as this was only built in the 12th century, but many scholars say it is probably the correct area. But it’s something for the visitors to see. Coming from this we came to another building which supposedly housed the tomb of David. We were stopped on the way in by a little man indicating that we needed to wear a skullcap, which were available from him for a small fee. We proceeded to enter the room with the tomb of David which a lot of scholars say is not where David rests at all. Anyway, once inside the door we were amused to find a box full of skullcaps which could be borrowed for free. So the little guy had taken us for a ride. Well, we didn’t lose much and it looked like he needed the money. Then he started telling us about the place, and we said we didn’t need a guide but found it difficult to get rid of him. At last when we were leaving he put his hand out for money and I told him we hadn’t asked for his services and he could take a hike. He turned quite nasty and called us filthy people. I just laughed and shrugged my shoulders but he sure as hell wasn’t getting another penny out of us.

Overall in the holy land we weren’t bothered by guys trying to get hired. Mostly we just ignored them and they quickly got the message. A few would persist trying out different languages on us, but we usually started speaking the little Irish we knew and they soon went away. Once I saw a taxi driver really hassling these two old folk and as I passed I noticed that they looked quite frightened. I stopped and said to the man, under my breath, “Just ignore him and walk away”. He took my advice and they walked with me a short way leaving the taxi driver shouting something after us. They turned out to be an American couple and they thanked me for my help. I said it was nothing and advised them to just keep walking if anybody bothered them. I have to add that I found the vast majority of the people we dealt with very friendly and even though there were soldiers walking around with guns hanging out of them all over the place, I never felt safer in a foreign city.

While visiting Mount Zion we also took the time to visit Oscar Schindler’s grave. It is a custom in Jewish graveyards that visitors place a stone on the tomb of people they visit. Schindler’s grave is packed with stones which is a mark of the respect the Jewish people felt for this German “Nazi” who helped so many of their people during the war.

As with many other places in the Holy Land, there is a second site which purports to be the room of the last supper. This time it is inside the old city of Jerusalem. It is not a place you can just walk into and we had to find ourselves a guide. I think our guide turned out to be an Armenian nun and she opened up the place for us. It was a beautiful old church in the Armenian quarter. The nun began to regale us with miracle stories and eventually we had to ask her if we could see the last supper room. She brought us downstairs and turned on the lights, explaining that the street level was lower in those days and while this room was below ground now, in Jesus’ time it was on the second floor. It was a small room, sparsely furnished with some pictures and a small altar. Going back upstairs I asked her if she could speak Aramaic, the language that Christ spoke. She said yes and offered to sing the Our Father in Aramaic, which she did. Although interesting, I would have preferred if she had simply recited it as I wanted to hear what the language itself sounded like, although I suppose I could just watch Mel Gibson’s film, Passion of the Christ, to hear it.

During our week in Jerusalem we hired a car for one day. While tourists are not allowed to drive hired cars in the Palestinian areas, we are allowed to drive on one designated Israeli controlled road through the West Bank. On our way, we were flagged down by an Israeli soldier weighed down with a heavy automatic machine gun. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years of age and asked us where we were going. We told him, Masada. “Okay,” he says, “Can I have a lift? I’m going as far as Qumran which is just down the road.” Well, what do you say to a guy asking for a lift who’s toting a machine gun? I guess you say yes. So he got into the back of the car, hauling his automatic with him. He turned out to be a very nice guy and we chatted in general about Israel and tourism. We thought it mightn’t be a good idea to ask him for a go of his gun!

Having left our guest at Qumran (where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered) we continued on to Masada. This is a fortress built by Herod the Great and sits on top of a massive rock plateau which rises out of the surrounding landscape to a height of about 1300 feet on the side closest to the Dead Sea and about 300 feet on the other side. It is an ideal place for defence as access is difficult and dangerous. A few years before the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD the small Roman garrison at Masada was overcome by a group of Jewish rebels and their numbers were much enlarged after the destruction of the city by more rebels fleeing from the battle. For about two years these rebels raided and harassed the Romans until Flavius Silva, a Roman general marched against Masada. Well defended and almost impossible to attack directly, Masada held out against the Roman siege. Eventually the Romans built a ramp up the side of Masada and hauled a battering ram up to the walls where they eventually gained entry. However, when the Romans entered Masada, they found all the men, women and children dead. The Jews had decided to commit mass suicide rather than be taken by their sworn enemy.

My two sons braved the hour long walk up the side of Masada along the so called Snake Path. I, on the other hand, took the cable car. The view from the top is stunning, the Dead Sea below (it’s the lowest point on Earth at 1200 feet below sea level) and the land of Jordan in the distance. The remains of Roman siege camps are also easily seen in the landscape below. The basic structure of the fortress can still be seen today, the walls, the remains of the houses and storerooms, the massive water cisterns, and Herod’s palace. Of course the ramp built by the Romans is still there, but it doesn’t look as impressive as it must have done originally as a lot of it looks to have collapsed.

After a few hours walking around the Masada fortress we got in the car and drove to one of the areas where you can take a dip in the Dead Sea. As this is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world it is impossible to actually swim in it. You simply wade out and sit down. You cannot sink. It is a most amazing experience, as your arms, upper back and legs are pushed above the surface and you can sit quite happily in the gently undulating current. Very relaxing indeed. Of course you are strongly advised to take a good cold shower on emerging as the salt can sting badly.

After this somewhat exhilarating experience we drove to Ein Gedi, an oasis in the Israeli desert, which is also a sanctuary for many types of plant, bird and animal species. It is a wooded hilly area with at least one river flowing through it where we sat and watched the hyrax (rock badger) jumping from rock to rock, sometimes in groups of five or six. Here we also saw the hoopoe, Israel’s national bird, a most colourful character with a beautiful crown of feathers on it’s head. Here it was, in old testament times, that King David hid from King Saul.

On another day, we walked around the more modern city of Jerusalem. Here we visited the Garden Tomb. Because some doubts were raised during the 19th century about the authenticity of the traditional sites of Golgotha and the tomb of Christ, some scholars searched for other possible places. A number of them suggested what is now referred to as the Garden Tomb as a more likely spot. This is situated outside the old city walls near the Damascus Gate. Here was found a rocky escarpment which resembles the face of a skull. A rock hewn tomb was found close by. While this is a beautiful and serene place, the majority of scholars today do not think it is the site of Christ’s crucifixion or tomb.

Moving on we walked through an ultra-Orthodox Jewish area. Visitors to this part of Jerusalem, while welcome at certain times, are asked to respect the values of the people living here and to dress and act appropriately. It was an interesting place to visit as we saw no other tourists there that day and everybody else was dressed in the traditional black coats and hat, with their long bushy sideburns and beards. We didn’t notice any women either.

Finally on one of the days, we split up and went our separate ways. Andrew went to visit the botanic gardens and then the Knesset, the Jewish parliament. Unfortunately for him the Knesset was closed that day so he went to the Israel Museum instead. Daniel went to the zoo and got some great photos. I went to the Jewish Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem. This is Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the holocaust and comprises a history museum, a museum of holocaust art, memorial sites, a synagogue, as well as an education centre, a research centre, library, archives and a publishing house. The history museum was very impressive (if you can give such a description to pictures and videos of death). It contained thousands of pictures, film clips, testimonies of survivors including condemnations of those countries (including the Vatican) who stood by and did nothing while the concentration camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere carried on their evil work. One of the exhibits outside in the grounds which affected me most was the Cattle Car Memorial. This is an original working German railway cattle car which actually carried Jewish victims to their deaths in one of the concentration camps. Over a hundred people were crammed into this car so tightly they couldn’t sit down. The journey could last days and they had no food or water. If they needed to relieve themselves they had to do it on the spot. It was hell on earth. I stood for a long time just staring at this railway truck and tried to imagine the horror but could not. What I could conjure up in my mind was indeed horrible, but I’m sure nothing like the pain and terror these people must have suffered. I came away unable to grasp fully how inhumane man can be to his fellow beings. A very sad place, but a powerful reminder of a period of history we should never forget.

Finally, bidding the holy city farewell, we took a train to Tel Aviv, a modern bustling city founded in 1909. Even here you cannot escape the grasp of history as, while strolling on the beach, I came across and read the monument in memory of the Altalena, a ship shelled by the Israeli provisional government in 1948.

And even today Israel is still a troubled land. For more than two thousand years the Jewish people have been persecuted and mostly by so called Christian peoples. For how much longer must that terrible curse in Matthew “His blood be upon us and our children” reverberate and give excuse to anti-Semitism? I pray it won’t be long.