OF GOD AND GARDENS | More Intelligent Life
In 1944 John Wisdom, an aptly named British philosopher, wrote a parable about a garden. It took up just a few paragraphs of an intricate essay in a professional journal, but it seeded a controversy that ran for a good few years before subsiding into the mulch of abandoned philosophical debates. […]
The parable went like this. “Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees…They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer…insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.”
It seems that no evidence could make the man who believes in a gardener concede that he was wrong. […] But the parable of the gardener did raise an unsettlingly powerful point about the nature of faith. If you believe something, shouldn’t it be possible to say what would make that belief true or false? What is the content of your so-called belief in the existence of a God, or of a gardener, if you cannot say what difference his presence or absence would make to the world?
December 26, 2009, 9:16pm
