Interview with Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman: About ten years ago I got very interested in the growth of these sort of home-based Christian groups. I wanted to find out how they worked, what they did, what motivated them and so on. I discovered a group that was holding regular meetings in one of the Oxford cinemas, and they’ve got an office in The Cornmarket in Oxford above a betting shop. So I went and knocked on the door and said I was interested. And it was very curious to talk to them, to talk to the chap in charge. But even more curious to go to this meeting on a Sunday in this big cinema in Broad Street, because here was quite a large group of people, all of whom were intensely bound together in sort of networks of fellowship and mutual aid: ‘So and so’s just had a baby – what can we do to help?’ That sort of thing. ‘So and so’s volunteered for baby sitting.’ All this sort of stuff. Everything was done by couples: Bob and Shirley, Tom and Mary, as if they didn’t have an individual existence but only a joint existence. And of course they had their own school, the King’s School, they call it.

It seemed to me that, invisible to the general population, certainly invisible to me before then, was a sort of secret welfare state, in effect. It was a strange thing because if you were in trouble there was instantly a dozen, two dozen, scores of people ready to help, keen and eager to help. You know, anything from babysitting to help with looking after a relative who was dying. All these people were there and ready to pitch in and help and so on. Which was fine and jolly good. But at the same time they went in for speaking in tongues in a rather self-conscious way. It was very odd, because they had this well-organised service, lasting about three hours, It was well organised because it seemed to be very casual and informal, and if the Spirit moved you, you went to the front and said something: ‘I’ve got a happy announcement – so and so’s had a baby. Isn’t it wonderful? Well done everybody.’ But you could see that it was very controlled and there were moments of excitement and emotional intensity, then again some friendly announcements, and so on.

There was a sort of controlling intelligence behind all this. At one point, during one of the moments of intensity, there were three or four chaps at the front, sort of praying. And one of them started going ‘gobbledygobbledy gobbledygobbledy’ and I thought, ‘Blimey, he’s gone mad. Oh no, he’s speaking in tongues.’ But the interesting thing was — because I’d never seen this before, as far as I was concerned it’s a lot of old fraud — as soon as the others saw him, you could see them [looking sideways at him] and then speaking in tongues themselves, or pretending to, because whether he was being moved in some strange way – maybe he was – they weren’t. They were doing what he was doing in order to join in. So it was a curious thing: here were these people doing all sorts of good things in a sort of social way, yet behaving entirely (it seemed to me) fraudulently when it came to that. I couldn’t get to grips with it. I was interested because I wanted to do a story, a novel against that sort of background but nothing came of it. It’s an experience which is just sort of there and hasn’t been used.

Tony Watkins: Filed away for future reference?

PP: Yes. Anyway, these people, it was plain had horizons that wide [hands close together]. They didn’t read anything other than Christian books; they didn’t listen to anything other than Christian music; they had no idea of the wider world. There was not a mention of anything other than Christian missions in Africa - that was the sole extent of their interest in the outside world. I knew from talking to this chap in the office above the betting shop that every attitude they had was filtered through several layers of what the Christian church would approve of before it got to you. It was about the time of a General Election and the Green Party were making a showing. I asked this chap, ‘What’s the attitude of your church to ecological issues, the Green Party and so on?’

‘Ah,' he said. 'Very interesting. Glad you asked me that. Did you see that party political broadcast on behalf of the green party the other night?’ I said I thought I had. ‘Because the interesting thing about it was that he asked everybody to believe, to be silent for a while, and let the spirit speak. Now if you’re not inviting Jesus to come into you that night, someone else will. These people are doing the Devil’s work.’

I expected, you see in my naivety, to have an answer on the lines of: ‘What do you think about ecological issues?’ ‘Well, the church teaches that we are the stewards of the world, that God’s put us in the world to look after it, it’s our responsibility and so on.' Not a bit of it. I thought, ‘Well, this is a bit odd.’ But anyway, that’s obviously not the background you come from.

TW: No. I come from an evangelical church that isn’t very charismatic but I spent a year in a church like that during a gap year after I left school and I was very well cared for. The church that I’m involved in takes the Bible very seriously. The Bible, we believe, is God’s communication to us so we take it seriously, it’s our final criterion. But there’s a whole lot of life out there and we want to be making the connections between the two. Because if, as I believe, we’re created in God’s image, and culture ultimately is God’s invention, then all of life should be involved in this - including the books I read and so on.

PP: There are several questions I want to ask you about that.

TW: I’m supposed to be interviewing you.

PP: Well, we’ll get on to that in a minute. If everything we do is a result of God’s will, what about Nazism; what about the extermination of the Jews? Is that God’s will?

TW: Well, that’s one of the hardest questions. The general problem of suffering is the hardest question for any worldview.

PP: Because if what we do is, you know, we do it because we’re the children of God, and because we’re created in God’s image and therefore what we do, and all our culture, is in fact the work of God’s will . . .

TW: That’s not quite what I’m saying. Culture ultimately is God’s invention. God is the originator of culture, but human beings are rebels against God, and therefore we twist it to our own agenda. Clearly the vast majority of people, whatever their faith, are not consciously seeking to work out the will of God in their lives and what they do and so on. So I wouldn’t want to say that Nazism and the extermination of the Jews was because of somebody who believed they were working God’s will out. Hitler was basically a Nietzschean, wasn’t he, with some spiritual philosophy, but at root he was a Nietzschean. But why those kinds of things happen is a killer question. My belief is that God has given us freedom, and that freedom is a dangerous thing. Freedom’s a fabulous thing but it’s also a dangerous thing.

PP: According to the Bible, God didn’t give us freedom, we took it. Man’s first disobedience.

TW: Alright, but before that we were given freedom, there was a genuine freedom.

PP: Really? I thought he said, ‘Don’t eat that . . . ’

TW: You’re free to eat from any tree in the garden. You’re free to do anything. There was one restriction and one restriction only. And they did go for that one thing. So yes, there was one restriction; it wasn’t a complete freedom, but there was genuine freedom.

PP: I don’t see it like that. I see the story as being a story of pets’ rebellion. But they don’t want to be pets any more, they want to have responsibility.

There’s another question I was going to ask you, which is, to what extent is the Bible metaphor? In other words, how literally can you take it?

TW: It depends which bit of it . . .

PP: Well, does it have to be creation in six days?

TW: Right, you’ve got to be sensitive to the genre question first. The Bible is stuffed full of different kinds of genres, and therefore they have different kinds of requirements in terms of interpretation . . .

PP: Well, that’s an advance on those people in the cinema.

TW: Genesis 1 is a very tricky passage because it’s written in a unique style of Hebrew. We can’t actually even confidently identify whether it’s prose or poetry. It seems to be in a class of its own somewhere between the two and there is nothing else to compare with it. So, it seems to me that when you get to verse 4 of chapter 2 of Genesis you get the little phrase appearing ‘This is the account of . . . ’ and the first one is, ‘This is the account of the heavens and the earth . . . ’ That phrase appears ten times through the rest of the book of Genesis dividing into two halves, the first half finishing at the end of chapter 11, just before the story of Abraham starts. And in each half you have a major story, then a minor story - often a genealogy - then a major story, then a minor story then a major story. Genesis 1 is outside all that, and it’s very structured but not quite poetry. Obviously you know that numbers are very important to the Hebrews and there are particular phrases that repeat, usually in multiples of seven. Within the six days (the seventh day is in chapter 2) you’ve got two halves. You’ve got light and darkness, sea and sky, and land in the first three days. Then in the second set of three days you’ve got stars to fill the space, if you like; fish and birds to fill the sea and sky; and animals to populate the land. And with that kind of very literary structure, it seems to me that what we have is a literary structure whose purpose is primarily theological, not to teach us timescales — a theological tract is not quite the right word, but a theological treatise for the early people of Israel to understand who they were in relation to God as opposed to the other creation accounts of the Babylonians, Egyptians and so on, some of which saw seven as an unlucky number — the Babylonians saw seven as an unlucky number; that was their equivalent of thirteen. So here we are working on a seven day principle and God establishing this principle of rest every seventh day. But I think it’s a literary structure.

But then, of course, it gets difficult when you get into chapters 2 and 3 where you have these very curious things like the talking serpent and the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which sound more like apocalyptic elements that you’d expect in Revelation. And yet because that phrase, ‘This is the account of . . . ’ goes through the rest of the book of Genesis where it is clearly intended to be taken as history – and I believe it should be – I think there’s something historical going on in that first section starting at verse 4 of chapter 2. I’m not entirely certain what it is. I do believe that Adam and Eve were historical characters — Jesus saw them as historical characters and I think they were.

PP: Jesus saw the world as flat too.

TW: Why did Jesus think the world was flat?

PP: Everybody did then.

TW: Well, yes. When did the Greeks work out the world was round? Yes, it’s an interesting question whether Jesus saw the world as flat.

PP: You ask the average Palestinian and they would have said it was flat.

TW: Yes but I don’t think Jesus would have given the same answer. I think he had a slightly different level of knowledge but we’ll leave that on one side for the moment. What my suspicion is – and it is only a suspicion because they’re clearly very difficult questions surrounding this – is that the position you end up with those early chapters of Genesis, to some extent, depends on what difficult questions you’re prepared to live with and say, ‘I don’t know the answer to that.’ Adam could have been, if you like, the head of humanity with some special degree of responsibility. But I do think he was a historical character.

PP: Do you believe the earth is only six thousand years old?

TW: No.

PP: So the fossil record is accurate?

TW: I think so. Clearly there are questions around interpreting the fossil record . . .

PP: Oh yes, there are problems with it of course, but by and large it’s accurate . . .

TW: Some of the dating mechanisms are used to correlate the other dating mechanisms that we use primarily. My background is physics so I’ve done a little thinking about it because it was an issue of huge concern to me. But Christians down through history have had one of five basic understandings of those early chapters of Genesis – people who are really trying to do justice to the text and say, 'Yes we believe this is God’s Word to us' but they have different ways of understanding it, from the young earth position exemplified by Archbishop Ussher, who was good in some respects but to try and date the creation of the earth to 9.00 am on the 27th October 4004 BC or whenever it was, is pushing it a little bit. But he was bringing a particular theological agenda to it, to try to make it fit. He made the sums work to fit his particular agenda which, personally, I think, is untenable.

For myself, I am quite happy to accept the possibility of the timescales and mechanisms of Darwinian evolution – up to a point. There are huge questions over the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution, but for me at present, there’s not a huge amount of doubt that some kind of process like that could have happened. The difference between me and Richard Dawkins would not be in terms of the mechanisms but whether there’s any direction to it or not.

PP: Have you come across John Polkinghorne?

TW: Yes, he has a wonderful little phrase: ‘God is the guarantor of the Schroedinger Equation’ — a bit of mathematics I had to contend with in my physics degree, it’s about quantum physics . . .

PP: The one about the cat?

TW: Yes, he was the guy with the cat experiment.

PP: CAT + BOX = PUZZLE

TW: Yes, why didn’t we put it like that in my exams? But maybe I wouldn’t have got the marks for it.

PP: So God guarantees this?

TW: Yes, what he’s saying is that the way the world works is an expression of God’s character. It’s not so much that God necessarily created in six days of instantaneous creation, but the whole process works because God is behind it and underpinning it . . .

PP: Well now, you see, this to me is the perfect example of what I’ve come to call epicycles. You remember that the difficulty with the Ptolomaic universe was that observation didn’t really correlate with the [assumption] that things were going round in perfect circles: sometimes they’d go fast, sometimes they’d go slow, sometime they’d seem to go backwards for a bit. And it took a lot of difficult working out by a lot of clever people but eventually they thought, 'Well, supposing they go round in perfect circles in little loops, in epicycles, that would account for it. Wonderful. Great.' And then time went on and observations were proved and that didn’t quite work out. So they said, 'Suppose we have epicycles around epicycles?' Then along came Kepler – was it? – or Copernicus, who said, ‘Well, just change the focus a little bit. Imagine we’re going round the sun, there’s no need for the epicycles at all, all is clear.’ And so it was until somebody else realised that actually we’re going in ellipses and not in circles, and then it was quite clear.

TW: That was Kepler.

PP: Now this business about God guaranteeing the Schroedinger Equation and other attempts to bring God into the place from which he’s absent – apparently – which reached a peak, I think for me, with Simone Weil who said something like ‘God whose very presence is felt in terms of his absence’ or something. I mean, a piece of such screaming nonsense, logically. I mean, how can a person be felt in terms of his absence? Absolute bollocks. That’s an epicycle. It’s an attempt – a ridiculous attempt – to bring all the resources of a profound intellect to bear on something that won’t bear that weight. So it’s an epicycle. It’s a way of accounting for something. Whereas if you make the sort of Copernican jump and think, ‘Well, instead of trying to account for the fact that God is everywhere but you can’t see him, so what’s he doing?’ say, ‘Well, God isn’t there.’ The need for epicycles vanishes. It’s a smooth, easy cycle. Take God out of it and you don’t need epicycles.

TW: But that’s very much a fundamental worldview question isn’t it? If you think there’s no God in the picture then that kind of reasoning appears to be epicyclical. It’s quite a good analogy. But if you think, 'No, actually I think there is a God there,’ and ask ‘What is the way God works?’ then it seems to me that . . .

PP: Well, then you constantly have to adjust to more and more discoveries about geology, to more and more developments in the moral sphere so that we come to see that slaughtering all our enemies isn’t really the best way of behaving despite the fact that God seems to say it is. So you constantly have to adjust, you see. You’re constantly having to adjust, put another epicycle in to make this relate this to that. Just do away with God and everything is much clearer, much simpler.

TW: No, that’s not how I see it at all.

PP: I didn’t think it would be. But that’s how I see it.

TW: Yes, I can understand that’s how it appears. But I do think that is such a fundamental worldview thing that it affects the way that you view everything. To me, it’s not about making adjustments, but rather, here is God working in consistent ways . . .

PP: But where is God? You say, ‘Here is God.’ But where is he? He’s not!

TW: Everywhere.

PP: No.

TW: You’re very adamant that God is not there. But sometimes you’ve said that you’re an agnostic because you talk about this little pinprick of light, don’t you, and there’s no evidence for God in the pinprick of light that is all you know.

PP: Well, of course, in the scale of things that I don’t know – the scale of things I do know is this little pinprick of light . . . Out there in the darkness, of course, who’s to say there’s isn’t anything else an agnostic isn’t sure about? But whenever anybody talks about God, the first question that crops up in my mind is, ‘Why are you bringing God into it? Why do you need to?’ There’s no evidence for it. You must be doing it for some other reason. What’s your psychological need to say that God is there, God is here? What is the need? I don’t feel it you see.

TW: Well, that’s very interesting. For me it doesn’t come down to a sense of psychological need. For me, originally it came down to: ‘I think there is evidence for God – probably in four or five different areas. Firstly, the fact that there is a world that works on orderly principles. One of the basic tenets of science is that the world works in an ordered way. So it’s reasonable to do an experiment here in Oxford and get the same results as an experiment in Bolivia or wherever. And that actually is an article of faith of science . . .

PP: But isn’t it possible to have universes in which things don’t happen in ordered ways, and that the fact that we’re sitting here in an ordered one means that out of the uncountable billions of possible universes, there’s bound to be one in which things happen like this?

TW: That’s a very unsatisfying argument it seems to me. Because . . . we’ll just hold that there for a moment. Can we come back to that one?

PP: I’m sorry, I’m hijacking this. I should be answering your questions rather than asking mine.

TW: There is a creation which works in very ordered ways and is incredibly finely balanced. Now it could be, as Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, says in Just Six Universes, that there could be multiple universes and we just happen to be in the one that works. But he does recognise that the balances are so fine it pushes you to one of three conclusions. One is, that this is it; this is all there is; there is only this universe. It just happened to have worked. It’s amazing but we’re just lucky. The second one is that it’s balanced this way because there is a designer behind it. And the third one is that maybe this one works and others don’t, which is what you’re suggesting. And he says, he doesn’t want to contemplate the idea of a designer, therefore he’s going to embrace the idea of multiple universes. But he’s honest enough to say that both of these are very difficult hypotheses. Both of these are not disprovable at some level or other. You can’t disprove the existence of God; you can’t disprove the existence of other universes. Neither can you prove them. They’re elements of faith.

PP: Well, to an extent they’re an element of faith. But hasn’t David Deutsch demonstrated through his analysis of the double slit experiment that there seems to be some evidence for multiple universes.

TW: I’m really not convinced by that. Having said that, I’ve been out of teaching physics for a few years but I’m really not convinced. But it’s a very hot issue in the world of physics right now . . .

PP: I know.

TW: Some would see David Deutsch as really out on a limb with what he’s saying; others wouldn’t. It is the big issue. I think there are philosophical issues. If they are actually separate universes, then what sense is there in talking about connections between the universes? If there are connections then they are not actually separate universes; they are one thing, not multiple things. So you haven’t actually solved the problem. Even if you accept the idea that there are multiple universes, as Stephen Hawking said in Black Holes and Baby Universes . . . In the first book he seems to be saying, ‘The mind of God is that there is no God’; if the universe has no beginning and no end, what is there for an infinitely lazy creator to do? . . . But in Black Holes and Baby Universes he gets a little more reflective about these kinds of issues and says: supposing I come up with my theory of everything, what is it that makes a universe for these equations to govern. Why is there something there? ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations? I don't know the answer to that.’

PP: Well, that is the basic question: Why is there something rather than nothing? That is an unsolvable question.

TW: And we’ve both got an unsolvable mystery on our hands. Here are you saying, ‘There is no God.’ Where has matter come from? Has matter eternally existed? It’s a bit uncomfortable to talk in those terms. Has energy eternally existed? Something has always been there – you don’t get something out of nothing. Even the something out of nothing inflationary Big Bang theories still start with a quantum vacuum – there’s still a lot of energy floating around before something happens. My unsolvable problem is, ‘Where does God come from?’ Many is the person who’s not a Christian asks ‘Where does God come from?’ Richard Dawkins always likes to come out with this one. It’s a good but unanswerable question. If there is no God, where does matter come from? It’s a good but unanswerable question. My understanding of God as creator explains the existence of matter. If matter or energy is the basic reality then you’re forced to say that there’s a psychological reason for people to invent the idea of God.

PP: Well, I don’t find that difficult really. There are evolutionary adaptive arguments for seeing that it was useful at some stage, or advantageous at some stage, to invent this great being because that helps the human psyche cohere. So I don’t find that difficult to go along with.

TW: I don’t find that convincing. Matt Ridley talks about that in his books doesn’t he?

PP: Believing something doesn’t make it true.

TW: And not believing in something doesn’t make it untrue.

PP: Absolutely.

TW: The psychological basis for belief in God was really popularised by Freud. But Feuerbach and Schleiermacher, a theologian, before that were talking about some kind of emotional need for God, and projecting the idea of a father onto a cosmic plane. Freud really took that and ran with it. Freud has to a large extent been discredited in all except English and drama departments, media studies courses. He’s barely mentioned on psychology courses because he’s been discredited scientifically.

PP: Yes. You see, what Freud did was tell a very good story. A hell of a good yarn, the Oedipus complex. It’s a wonderful story about the unconscious mind. Oh, a wonderful yarn.

TW: It just doesn’t fit with reality.

PP: Exactly.

TW: It’s all very well saying, I have this longing for a father figure, therefore I project that need onto some cosmic plane. The trouble with that kind of argument is that it can be turned round too. I have this unconscious longing for there not to be someone to whom I am ultimately accountable, and therefore I’ll project his absence onto a cosmic plane. So there are some tough questions.

For me, another important factor in believing in God is the sense of a personal experience of God. Yes, you can explain it away psychologically but it feels to me like something profound happened that is difficult to explain.

PP: Well, that, of course, is impossible to confront or argue with. It’s also, of course, impossible to take it as conclusive evidence.

TW: It’s not conclusive evidence.

PP: It’s emotional.

TW: It can’t be conclusive evidence in our conversation. It can be significant evidence in my coming to terms with everything. But I think it’s unfair to say ‘You should believe in God because I have an experience of him. Now the real crunch for me is the person of Jesus, and this is one of the qustions I wanted to ask you.’

PP: OK, go ahead.

Read part two of this interview

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