I know there’s a lot of depressing stuff in the News at the moment, such as the imminent nuclear war, but nothing has depressed me more than the recent religious survey. Less than half the population have any religious faith, and only 15% even say they’re Anglicans. I grew up in a Lancashire village just after the war when the vast majority were churchgoing Anglicans. Those that weren’t could be Methodists, Catholics whose ancestors had stuck with the old faith, or the odd atheist whose position was defined in opposition to Christianity. The community, 230 miles from London, was in direct line from that which developed 1300 years before when ancient Briton met Anglo-Saxon, perhaps with a bit of Dane thrown in early on. Yes, by then we had a picture-house, but the main entertainments were the church dances, the beetle and whist drives, and the annual gala (pronounced gayla as it should be), led by the prize silver band escorting the Queen of the May, where I won threepence for finishing third in the six-year olds race. A war had just finished and rationing was still on, but the mood had moved to one of hope.
This isn’t an anti-immigration piece: indeed I share the mourning for our past with reflective people from all colours and creeds I now talk to in London suburbs. Dog walkers of all ages form a group that thinks about what relationships mean. It isn’t an anti-liberal piece. I would have voted for nearly all the ‘progressive’ legislation passed since the sixties. It may be a piece with anti-metropolitan leanings but that’s not today’s concern. It’s not a piece to re-argue my view that theism is entirely rational, indeed more in line with the evidence from modern Physics and the theories from modern Maths than the alternatives of multiverses and actual infinities. It’s not about dualism or dual aspect monism, splitting the mental and physical, giving neither primacy, which I’ve also said enough on. It’s not saying we make reality, but it is saying that what we make is real.
The past is real. The universe is finite, a bit bigger than the universe of the six-year old me but finite. There’s no creator if it’s infinite, and if so nowhere to keep anything. No creator and there’s no sense of wonder to be felt when you look out at the night sky or across Ullswater to Helvellyn. What’s left is the frustration that the equations, all you then have by way of explanation, will never solve, with you wondering hopelessly why that’s the case. Now thank we all our God…
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