Damaris Church

Spooked sample chapter

Chapter 1: Deliver Us from Evil

Nick Pollard

 

This sample chapter is taken from Spooked: Talking about the supernatural, edited by Tony Watkins and published by Damaris Books (an imprint of Authentic), May 2006.

 

It was Christmas Eve. This is the day on which, traditionally, husbands realise they still have not bought a present for their wives and make a mad dash for the shops. As I drove into the city-centre car park, I noticed two vehicles bumper to bumper across a parking space. They had both tried to grab that spot but, coming from different directions, they had met in the middle – and neither would give an inch. Within moments, their confrontation increased from honking horns, to revving engines, to shouting and swearing – even to threats of violence. Meanwhile, neither of the drivers had noticed that, all around them, parking spaces were becoming available (including the one that I parked in easily). They were missing them all.

As I walked away from my car to the shops, I reflected on how those men's behaviour had been such a clear picture of human nature. There in the car park was a demonstration, not just of the tendency for the evil of hostility and violence that each of us have, but also the way in which we can be so focused on one aspect of our environment that we miss so much of what is available all around us. The drivers saw each other, and they saw red, but they failed to see the available spaces around them. In the same way, many people see the physical world and they become so absorbed in it that they fail to recognise the spiritual, supernatural reality that is all around them.

In this book, we will help you to talk with people about the supernatural, we will see how entirely reasonable it is to talk about the supernatural as a reality, and we will see how this can relate easily to people's felt needs and desires. At the same time, we will also help you to talk about the relationship between the supernatural and evil. In particular, we will help you to talk with people about the nature of evil: what it is and whether it can be overcome.

Much of the way in which we will help you to talk about these issues will be through enabling you to think about how they are explored in contemporary films, books and television programmes. So let's start by looking at two film trilogies that both explore the nature of evil, but present very different perspectives: the Matrix trilogy and The Lord of the Rings.

Rather like the two men in their cars, many people will have watched these (and other) recent films in a way that misses much of the significance of the storylines. But with a little help from you, they will be able to think more deeply about them. As with all stories, whether expressed in films or books, if we think about them, we can tell quite a lot about the worldview of the author and the culture within which – and for which – he or she is writing. And this can help us to talk about and think about our own worldview, and that of our friends.

Balancing act

There are a number of similarities between The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings . They were both trilogies, and were both hugely successful at the box office. They were both broadly in the genre of fantasy adventure, telling the story of a quest towards a goal.[1] In both there are negative, destructive forces and personalities, which represent evil. And in both there are positive, creative forces and personalities, which represent good. Both trilogies build the narrative tension in a struggle between the good and the evil. And then, in both, this tension is finally released at the end when the goal is achieved and the story is resolved.

But what is significant is the difference in the way in which the story is resolved. Evil is dealt with in both trilogies, but in very different ways. In The Lord of the Rings , the resolution is achieved through good conquering evil, overcoming it, even destroying it. In the Matrix trilogy, on the other hand, there is a very different resolution: evil is not conquered or destroyed; rather it is balanced out by good.[2] These two different storylines demonstrate two very different views of evil and, indeed, two different underlying views about supernatural reality.

In the Matrix films, good and evil are presented as equal and opposite forces that co-exist in tension with one another. It is as if they are designed to be together and the world will only properly function if there is a balance between them. The problem arises when the equilibrium is disturbed. This is described very neatly by the character called the Oracle when she says that Neo (the representation of good) and Agent Smith (the representation of evil) are the result of ‘equations trying to balance themselves out.' Indeed, in the wider context, this is achieved in the climax of the film when Neo and the all of the artificial intelligence machines agree to abandon their hostilities and live in harmony. So, evil is not destroyed; it is simply brought into a balanced equilibrium with good.

This is a popular idea that has roots in many different philosophies and theologies. Take Neoplatonism, for example.[3] This is a complex (and, in some ways, ambiguous) philosophy, based upon a belief that there are different levels of being which co-exist together. Or look at Zoroastrianism,[4] which is a religious belief with two opposing good and evil deities – Ahura Mazda, meaning ‘wise Lord', and Anghra Mainyu, meaning ‘destructive spirit'.

Indeed, there are subtle indications of a particular link to one such ancient worldview in the film. The Oracle wears earrings with the yin/yang symbol[5] on them. This well-known Chinese symbol represents the two supposed cosmic forces of creative energy from which everything originates. ‘Yin' represents dark, femininity and receptivity; ‘yang' represents light, masculinity and activity. The symbol that combines the two together represents the notion that everything originates from, and depends upon, the interaction of these opposite and complementary principles. It is an important aspect of the Matrix trilogy, especially in The Matrix Revolutions . In the original Chinese philosophy of Taoism, yang and yin do not represent good and evil as we understand it. To call yang ‘good' and yin ‘evil' would be to misrepresent this ancient worldview. However, whatever the reality, the fact is that many people today think that yin and yang are good and evil. So, when they then equate the (correct) yin/yang concept of interaction and mutual dependence with this (incorrect) representation of good and evil, they absorb the idea that good and evil are equal and opposite forces that co-exist in tension with one another.

This view of evil is one which is increasingly popular in our culture. It is often expressed in conversations by people who say, ‘You can't have good without evil.' What they mean by this is that good and evil must exist together in some form of balance. This concept pops up in various forms in many popular films and television programmes. Star Wars , for example, contains the prophecy of the one who will ‘restore balance to the force'. Meanwhile, Buffy the Vampire Slayer contains the character Whistler, whose duty is to maintain the balance between good and evil.

Conflicting views

On the other hand, the storyline of The Lord of the Rings presents a very different view of the conflict between good and evil. Here, evil is recognised as a corruption of good. In the story, we see how good people's hearts can be turned to evil. Such is the power of the ring that has corrupted Gollum, and threatens to do the same to Frodo. Gollum is the devious, scheming pathetic character who is trying to get his hands on the ‘precious' ring. But Gollum wasn't always like that. He was once a young hobbit-like creature called Smeagol who enjoyed his life with his cousin Deagol. One day, while fishing, Deagol saw something shiny in the water, pulled it out and found it was a beautiful gold ring. Without even knowing what this ring could do, Smeagol was overcome with a desire to own it himself, and he murdered his cousin so he could take it. Thus began the descent of Smeagol, as his good nature was corrupted into evil.

Similarly, once Frodo has the ring, he, too, is often tempted to use its magical powers and we see the potential of its power to corrupt him. But Frodo resists and, when someone is required to take the ring to the place where it can be destroyed, it is Frodo who steps forward. Thus begins his long journey, which we watch throughout the trilogy. It is clear that the goal of the story is not to somehow find a balance between good and evil, but rather to overcome evil and destroy it. Thus, in the film, they are not looking for a way in which good and evil uses of the ring can co-exist together. They know that this is not possible. The ring – and the evil that it represents – must be completely destroyed. This view of evil is much more consistent with the biblical Christian understanding of good and evil. This is not surprising since Tolkein was a Christian and was writing in, and for, a largely Christian culture.

In Christian theology, evil is recognised as a perversion of goodness. Evil is parasitic upon good. Accordingly, evil is not a fundamental reality; it has not always existed. It came about through the corruption of good, when angels and then humans turned away from God. Therefore, according to this understanding of evil, it cannot exist on its own. And it does not need to exist at all. Despite what people popularly express, according to Christian theology, you can have good without evil.

Good news about good

This is a great message for us all to know. It is a wonderful story for us to tell people. But when we do so, we need to be clear about what we mean. In Christian theology, the victory of good over evil is brought about by God. It is made possible because of Jesus' death on the cross, not by what we have done or can do. We will see elements of this victory becoming apparent in our own lives as God works in our hearts through his Holy Spirit, and we will see elements of it in this world as we pray for it and obey God's call to ‘do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with [our] God' (Mic. 6:8). But it is not up to us to seek to destroy evil in our own strength. Part of this story was brought to many people's attention in the recent popular film adaptation of C.S. Lewis's classic story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . Here, Aslan the lion provides a representation of Jesus when he willingly gives himself to be killed by the White Witch. However, the victory that this death brings is then worked out in a physical battle in which the children take sword and bow to destroy the forces of evil.

Perhaps there are parallels here with President George Bush's use of the term ‘axis of evil' when he referred to Iraq and its allies. Having identified this ‘evil', he then invaded with guns and bombs in his attempt to destroy it. And perhaps there are parallels with the cases of children harmed, or even killed, by people claiming that the child was possessed by evil and needed to have it driven out. There have recently been high-profile stories of cases where an apparent attempt at exorcism led to injury or death of the child. The exorcists said they were seeking to destroy evil – but in fact they were destroying the life of the child. The tragic nature of such events were brought to many more people's attention through the recent film The Exorcism of Emily Rose (based on a true story[6]). In this story, a priest is accused of negligence resulting in the death of a young college student who thought that she was possessed and turned to him to have the demons exorcised.

Faith in the dock

With such films and such true news stories circulating in our culture, perhaps it is not surprising that many then take the view that this kind of religious belief in the supernatural is itself evil. Indeed, they propose that any belief in the supernatural is damaging to us because it stops us from seeing the world as it really is – a natural material world. One such person is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is an enthusiastic advocate of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and has written about this at length. But he doesn't just stop there – he moves on to argue that an alternative belief in divine creation is not only untrue, but also deeply damaging to people and to our world.

He has expressed this view in many lectures and books, but he particularly brought it into popular culture in his two-part look at religion, called The Root of all Evil? [7] In these programmes, he challenged what he describes as a process of non-thinking called faith. He is astonished that people today still believe in religion, despite the knowledge about rational, scientific truth. In the first programme, he took the viewer on a tour of believers from the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. He sought to show that, although religions may preach morality, peace and hope, in fact they bring intolerance, violence and destruction. Therefore, he said, ‘the war between good and evil is really just the war between two evils.'

As always, the ideas which Richard Dawkins propounds have a great effect upon people. But they suffer from the same set of logical fallacies which he falls into time after time.[8] For example, his accusation that religious belief in the supernatural is evil suffers from the logical fallacy known as ‘self-contradiction'. This fallacy points out that a statement cannot be true if it contradicts itself. For example, imagine I tell you that, ‘I cannot speak a word of English.' That statement cannot possibly be true, since I am speaking English in order to make the statement. Thus the statement contradicts itself and cannot be true.

When Dawkins argues that we evolved through survival of the fittest and that religious belief is evil, he, too, is contradicting himself. By claiming that religious belief is evil, he is assuming that evil is a real meaningful concept. Thus, he is arguing that a moral right and a moral wrong actually exist. But can he do that if he believes that we have evolved, through unguided, undirected, natural selection of random mutations? There are many philosophers who say that he can't. They point out that the concepts of right, wrong, good and evil only make sense if God exists. This is sometimes expressed in what is called the ‘Moral Argument for God' which might be expressed as follows:

• Activities such as torturing babies for fun are objectively morally wrong and we really ought not to do them

• Therefore, because of this and other examples, we can know that there are certain things that are objectively morally wrong and we really ought not to do them

Before moving on, we need to unpack the three concepts in that sentence: the concepts of morally wrong, objectively and ought :

• If there is something that is morally wrong then there must be a moral law-giver. This is because something cannot be right or wrong without someone or something (whether outside or inside of us) declaring that thing to be right or wrong.

• If the right or wrong is objective , then the moral law-giver must be outside of ourselves and must be infinite. This is because the fact that it is objective means that it goes beyond individual human preference or personality or culture. Therefore, it cannot be finite like us human beings – it must be infinite.

• Finally, if we ought to obey that law then the infinite law-giver must be personal. This is because if we ought to do something, it means that we must be obligated to do it – and we cannot be obligated to something impersonal, only something personal.

So, the argument continues:

• The fact that there are certain things that are objectively morally wrong, and we ought not to do them, means that there must be a personal, infinite moral law-giver

• That is, there must be a God

Now, whatever we think of the conclusiveness of that moral argument for God, we can see what will happen if we turn it round the other way. Let's work from Dawkins's supposed non-existence of God to see whether he can then believe in the existence of a real right and wrong, let alone the concept of something being evil.

Ignoring the evidence

According to Dawkins, we evolved by survival of the fittest. Therefore, there can be no one to obligate us such that we really ought to do or not do something. Of course, we might have evolved in such a way that we happen to not do something, or we might live in a society in which other people have evolved such that they try to force us not to do something. But we cannot really be obligated not to do it. In an atheistic evolutionary world, things just are the way they are. If there was no purpose in our evolution, there can be no concept of the way things ‘ought to be'.

What is more, if our evolution took place solely through the entirely natural selection of random mutations, then there can be no objective source of right and wrong.[9] We can talk about how things are for some people, and compare that with how they are for other people. We can even talk about how things make us better fitted for survival. But we can never talk about whether things are objectively morally right or wrong. If there was no design behind our evolution, then there can be no objective template against which to judge anything as absolutely right or wrong. Therefore, if Dawkins is right to believe that there is no God, then there can be no real law-giver, because there is no real right and wrong, and no one to whom we are really obligated. So, how can Dawkins talk about anything being evil? Surely, even any use of that term contradicts his belief about reality.

His self-contradiction doesn't stop there, however. In the programmes, he repeated his regular criticism of religious faith as being ‘belief without, even in spite of, evidence'. This seems to be his own made-up definition of faith – and certainly not one that any theologian would use! He also called people only to believe something if there was scientific evidence for it. By scientific evidence he means some form of experiment that enables us to test the belief in some empirical way. Boiled down to its basic form, Dawkins is saying, ‘Only believe something if there is scientific evidence that it is true.'

Unfortunately, yet again Dawkins falls into the fallacy of self-contradiction. When telling us, ‘only believe something if there is scientific evidence that it is true,' he is telling us to believe something (that we should only believe something if there is scientific evidence that it is true). Now, we might reasonably ask him to tell us what scientific evidence he can give us for this belief. Can he provide some scientific evidence for the truth of the statement that we should ‘only believe something if there is scientific evidence that it is true'? Of course, he is unable to give us any. That statement is not verifiable scientifically. It is an expression of his belief – a statement of his faith.

This means nothing to me

Dawkins is not alone in this self-contradiction. In the last century, there was a group of people who fell into this trap. They called themselves the Vienna Circle. They were a number of academics who met in Vienna University in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly under the instigation of Moritz Schlick. They gave birth to the philosophy known as logical positivism with its central belief in the verification principle . This principle argued that no statement is meaningful if it cannot be verified empirically.[10]

Of course, since then, many philosophers have recognized that their statement of the verification principle was self-contradictory, since the principle itself could not be verified empirically. But that did not stop them from using it to launch attacks on religious beliefs in general – and on belief in the supernatural in particular. They argued that, thanks to the verification principle, a belief in the supernatural is meaningless. They didn't worry about whether it was true or false; as far as they were concerned, it simply did not make sense.

And although many philosophers today would not accept this logical positivist rejection of belief in the supernatural, the fact that Dawkins receives so much air time for essentially the same argument means that it is still a live issue in our contemporary popular culture.

That is bad news in the sense that it means many people are absorbing Dawkins's view that the supernatural does not exist and that religious belief is evil. But it is also good news in that it means that people are ready and willing to talk about the supernatural in general, and evil in particular. And we have a lot we can talk with them about in this area – much of which is covered in the pages of this book.

 

Notes

[1] More than simply being fantasy adventure, they both fit very well with the fundamental structure of a hero myth as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949). He said that all such tales are expressions of what he called the ‘Monomyth'. In fact, The Matrix seems to have been very deliberately drawing on Campbell's ideas. For more on this, see Steve Couch (ed.), Matrix Revelations: A thinking fan's guide to the Matrix trilogy (Damaris, 2003) p. 39–41, 192

[2] See Tony Watkins, ‘Red Pill, Blue Pill: Conclusion' in Steve Couch (ed.), Matrix Revelations , p. 199–207

[3] Neoplatonism was shaped by Plotinus (c. 205–270 AD) and then modified by many others. Plotinus took the philosophy of Plato (c. 428–348 BC) and combined it together with Pythagorean, Aristotelian and Stoic thought. For more information, see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism

[4] An ancient Persian religion based on the teachings of Zoroaster (although this is the Greek version of his name – he was actually known as Zarathushtra). For more information, see www.avesta.org and www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

[5] It is properly called the Taijitu.

[6] For more on this film, see chapter six.

[7] The Root of All Evil?, Channel 4, 9 and 16 January 2006

[8] For an article identifying a range of Dawkins logical fallacies see Peter S. Williams, ‘Darwin's Rottweiler and the Public Understanding of Scientism', Access Research Network – www.arn.org/docs/williams/pw_dawkinsfallacies.htm.

[9] This is not to say that a process of evolution is incompatible with the existence of God, but that Dawkins only sees it in atheistic terms. Whether or not God did create through a process of evolution (neither blind nor unguided, because not entirely ‘natural') is another question entirely.

[10] To understand more about logical positivism and the problems with the verification principle, see chapter nine.

 

© Damaris Trust, 2005. All rights reserved. This sample chapter may not be reproduced in any format or medium.

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