A famous comedian, Ricky Gervais (who I personally admit, I do have an appreciation for), is one of the world’s most outspoken atheists.
The reason I bring him up here, is nothing I have against him as an individual, but a statement he made in an interview I came across, where he was asked something along the lines of;
“Why don’t you believe in God, if all the science you trust and believe in is from what you read in books, how is that any different from someone who reads and trusts the Bible?”.
In response, Ricky says;
“If you took every holy book, every holy book there’s ever been, every religious book, every bit of spirituality, and hid them or destroyed them it wouldn’t come back… If you took every science book and destroyed that, in a thousand years’ time, those science books would be back exactly the same, because the tests would always turn out the same. Those religious books would either never exist or they’d be totally different, because there’s no test”.
The audience watching the interview were all quite impressed and applauded this seemingly intelligent argument. And indeed, on the surface, it would seem to be quite reasonable… but in my view, this argument supports religion and faith, more than it opposes it.
I like to playfully call this statement the “Gervais Hypothesis”.
In essence, Ricky is stating that because the history of the Bible, the miracles, the stories, the interactions with God, can’t be replicated, and would be lost to time, it would prove it to be pure fiction, whereas if we lost all knowledge of science, we would eventually rediscover it, and therefore solidifies its reality as tangible fact.
What we must first address, is that what Ricky proposes is a fallacy of false equivalence.
As an example, if we were to apply this reasoning to an event in history, such as World War I, if we were to burn all history books of the Great War, destroy all videos, photographs, every trace, deleting even from people’s minds, would that then disprove World War I? Well no, of course not. It would merely be a loss of the recording of a specific event. But it would not then disprove World War I, nor would it in turn disprove that all wars are myths.
In turn, religious books and stories are citations of moments in history, but if all such books were destroyed, religion and spirituality would still live on and would even be rediscovered in the same manners.
Religion itself, according to the atheistic paradigm, came out of the vacuum of the imaginations or observations of men. Religion and theology is a universal human experience in all cultures since the dawn of man. As I stated in my other article, human belief in the supernatural is founded in an observation of ontological reality.
Whether it be Buddhism, Hinduism, Gnosticism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Dualism, Daoism, Theism, all these systems, though variable, would always return in some form, even if their surface labels were to differ, for that is what we have already experienced throughout the history of human culture.
Hence, Ricky’s hypothesis has already been demonstrated to work in favour of religion and spirituality. Whilst “specific events” would be lost to time, the overarching shared principles of deity, spirituality, supernaturalism, afterlife, and philosophic Idealism, has been “lost and found” one-thousand times over from the dawn of man in various cultures, in the manner that Ricky’s argument proposes that science would be rediscovered one-thousand times over.
Whilst we could argue “specific religions and faith systems” would be lost, and hence one might find validity in Ricky’s position of the notion of a “one true faith and God”, this would not disprove the notion of the supernatural or divine in itself, for such things are a universally shared human experience.
But in the event of the attempted destruction of a specific faith system and all of its scriptures… who is to say that the said God of the faith would not act? Or speak out? We must admit, that we are presuming an outcome of an event that has yet to happen. And because we have yet to test if whether God would act in the event of the destruction of all religions and their holy writings, one cannot assert any kind of notion. But if indeed, mankind did attempt such, and God did at that moment speak out, then we will have experienced a testable hypothesis.
So indeed, I ‘dare’ the world of antitheists to attempt to all together destroy all religion, all records, all writings, and all adherents of faith forever, in order that we may see what will happen.
- “I’ll build my Congregation on this bedrock so that the gates of the place of the dead won’t overpower it” – Matthew 16:18
But who is to say that such a thing has not already happened in our history?
The fact of the matter is… ancient faith systems, especially the Abrahamic faiths of ancient Hebrew Judaism and in turn Christianity, have not been lost, but somehow have been miraculously preserved despite the ‘attempts’ to crush them and make them but remnants of forgotten history, whether by cultural amalgamation or direct persecution.
The Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Soviets, the Communists, the Nazis, the domineering powers of their eras. All attempted to crush Judaism and in turn Christianity from the face of the Earth, but all of them, despite being superior to the nation of Israel and the sects of Christianity in every material way, never found success, and in turn, we have historical writings claiming that in many of these moments of what looked to be the end of it all, God came down and acted.
In this, there is something to respect and consider, in that all attempts by superior empires and secular forces to systematically destroy the faith and religion of Jews and Christians both, for at least over 4000 years, since the dawn of the Bronze Age, through the Roman era, down to the modern day, have always been brought to a stop, and that’s more than can be said of many other ancient religions, cultures or faith systems which have been lost to time, to the extent that there are ones that likely existed that we do not even know the names nor existence of, and yet died to time, without the need of intentional destruction.
Therefore, both the miraculous endurance of these faiths over thousands of years of cultural shifts and attempts to destroy said faiths, and the continual shared core principles and beliefs of religiosity and the supernatural in all cultures since the time men could make fire, is in itself, a demonstration of the “Gervais hypothesis” in action, in favour for the notion of religion and spirituality, just as it is with the universal human experience and learning of the sciences since ancient times.
Proselyte of Yah 