Believing in Derren

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I watched an episode of Derren Brown last night – the one in which he induces a religious experience in an atheist scientist through a fifteen minute conversation. By very skilfully and consciously making subliminal suggestions, implementing body language techniques, tapping the table at certain points to create associations between concepts he stimulated a powerful experience in the woman. She welled with emotion, seemingly spontaneously, and burst into tears. She felt she had been hit by a huge wave of love.

Derren’s emphasis in the show was on how a religious experience can be incited by non-supernatural means (without the need for a God to be present in other words). He makes a very good point and I always find his work fascinating. What he demonstrates again and again about the suggestibility of the human animal is, I feel, incredibly useful information when it comes to understanding ourselves as a species.

Yet it also seems to me that he is missing a rather huge piece of the puzzle too.
 

There is a line in the Watchmen movie that really struck me – when Dr Manhattan says that the term miracle doesn’t make any sense because, patently: “…only what can happen does happen.” Such an elegant statement. To refute the existence of the impossible is merely to create a conceptual finger trap. If a thing exists then its existence is possible. If the existence of a thing is impossible then it does not exist. It’s an isolated nugget of logic.

When Derren Brown demonstrates that a person can have a religious experience precipitated by a non-supernatural cause he is showing us something useful, but it’s an isolated nugget of logic that is already well explored. Of course there is no supernatural cause of religious experiences. There is no supernatural cause of anything. If one were to ever actually prove the existence of ghosts then one would inevitably find they were perfectly natural, as opposed to supernatural, otherwise they wouldn’t occur in the first place. If one were to ever scientifically prove the existence of God then one would find that God was an absolutely inevitable and natural phenomenon. The word ‘supernatural’ doesn’t have a place in the physical sciences. Only what can happen does happen.

Good folk such as Derren Brown and Richard Dawkins debunk the existence of God in the same way they would debunk the existence of Father Christmas. It is true that there are children all around the globe who actually do believe in a supernatural man with a big white beard who brings them presents once a year, and yes, they are generally destined to grow up and shed that belief. When Derren Brown and Richard Dawkins put their time and energy into debunking the existence of God the kind of God they are talking about is the bearded man in the clouds who abuses his children. They probably see themselves as good-natured chaps who are simply helping deluded people to grow up.

And that’s not so terrible a thing to put ones energy into, what with religious wars and so on. If a few fundamentalists can be turned away from hate and violence by some simply reasoned logic then that has to be worth the effort, surely. But I wonder how many fundamentalists, who genuinely do think of God on that man-in-the-clouds level, are ever persuaded by Dawkins and Brown.

When I watch Derren’s efforts I get the feeling I am watching the results of a lot of time, energy, money and cleverness going in to sending a message that is going to be got by those who got it already, and not got by those who he would like to get it. It would be interesting to find out how many believers are actually turned.

I often wonder what Derren thinks of spiritual beliefs (as distinct from religious beliefs) that are more sophisticated than those of the Father Christmas disciples. There are some profound spiritual thinkers out there in the world. I’d so love to see Derren and Dawkins sit down for tea with somebody lucid, somebody who sees the spirituality in the sciences and the science in spirituality. Mr Brown is clearly an intelligent, thoughtful and sincere man. Rather than see him labouring over an exploration of the question of whether Father Christmas exists or not I’d like to see him put his sincere energy into the question of whether the Spirit of Christmas exists, and what does that question even mean?

It’s time to move on from debunking the existence of bearded men and talk about spirit, and what is real and not real. In his programme Derren was careful to emphasize that the woman he talked to did have a real experience, but that she created it herself. Let’s leave aside the pleasing irony that her experience was induced by a bearded man and take a look at Derren’s claim there…

…her experience was real, but was created by herself.

Perhaps Derren Brown understands more about spirit and spirituality than he knows he knows.

I tend to find that somewhere, between two extremes of opinion, I find a place that is interesting to me.

Like Derren Brown, I would like to see the proponents of all things spiritual and New Agey take an interest in the human animal’s capacity to believe what it or others want it to believe, to see patterns in randomness, to respond to hypnotic, social and psychological cues and subliminal stimulus – this is all such valuable information for anybody professing to be interested in truly knowing themselves. And likewise, I would like to see Mr Brown look at his own activities from a different perspective, at least for a little while…

Derren goes to a great deal of trouble to point out that when somebody experiences one of his illusions as real they are being tricked. When somebody sees the face of a homunculus in the pattern created by leaves in a photograph they are seeing something that isn’t actually there. The experience of seeing the homunculus is real but the homunculus itself is not. In what way is this different from Derren himself believing he is talking to an actual person when he practises his suggestion techniques on her? He recognises a pattern in the atoms that make up her face and he invests his own belief in the idea that he is seeing something that is actually there. But is he seeing what is actually there? What can be said to have reality here: the woman he is talking to, or his experience of the woman he is talking to, or his belief about his experience of talking to a woman?

You may think I am being ludicrously and wilfully obtuse now, making painful contortions in order to make a point, but please consider…recognising patterns in the seemingly chaotic flood of stimulus we experience each moment and attaching meaning, forming beliefs about them, is pretty much the only reality any of us know. It’s what we do. There isn’t anything else to do!

When Derren looks at a woman he is talking to and tells himself , “This is a woman I am talking to,” he is describing his experience, not some absolute truth. What is going on right in front of his face is so much more than his description covers. “This is a woman I am talking to,” doesn’t go anywhere near describing the truth of what is really sitting there in front of him, even in the pure scientific terms that atheists appreciate so much. I would like to suggest that what is sitting there in front of Derren is so far beyond the understanding capabilities of his human mind that describing it as “This is a woman I am talking to,” is as close to the truth as “That man just pulled a rabbit out of a previously empty hat.” Derren is interpreting the stimulus he is receiving and calling it whatever makes most sense to him, or what he would like to make most sense to him.

When it comes to the practicalities of daily existence this kind of simplification is highly useful. One can go to the shop and buy a loaf of bread. It’s good. It’s great. But when it comes to talking about the nature of existence, the experience of love and the meaning of God it becomes an isolated little nugget of logic that refuses to integrate with what is around it and can only describe very little of what is there. It ceases to be enough…

…except for those who have faith in it.

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All of that notwithstanding, bearded man or not, I do believe in him.

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