Frequently Asked Questions: Does the author believe in God?

Many people have asked, since I wrote Gods Before Kings, if I believe in God. When answering this question I find it necessary to reframe the idea that humans and gods are separate things.

If we are looking for truth then the starting point must be that humans have always believed in gods. No one can dispute that. For as long as we have had minds there have been gods.

Why is that?

At this point we have to start conjecturing. What causes this phenomenon?

Let’s have a look at something a bit different. Speech.

The similarity of language to gods is that humans have always invented their own language and gods/god when forming a tribe, nation or localised group. Wherever you look you will find both, not just one of them. There is a reason for this.

Way back in the early sixties, Noam Chomsky proposed that the human brain contained a dedicated speech centre. It was a adaptation of the primal brain given that the evolutionary advantage of humans was that they could work in groups. That explains why there are lots of us today but no mastodons.

Humans work best when there are lots of them, not alone. They form family groups and those groups coalesce into tribes or nations, definable by what language they speak. Co-operation of the group is maximised through communication.

But language alone does not complete a tribe or nation.

Humans have inbuilt desires that are hard to understand, like the pigeon story in Gods Before Kings, desires arise from seemingly nowhere. Humans desire a partner, they seek assurance about the future, they bond over the abstracting of shared emotions into concepts. Those abstractions work best at all levels of intelligence by using gods as a way to bond people together. If they all believe in the same god then that god will be able to fill all those needs of its people. If not, then add another one, as happens in the story.

So what if the same held true for gods as it does for speech?

What if part of brain is dedicated to a desire to believe, to surrender to a common set of shared abstractions that explain existence?

This is what I believe, because the evidence is there in our history. I say it in the prologue-

Gods formed over the city like rain clouds gathering under low pressure.

There is no doubt in my mind that in ancient society, gods appeared wherever you had a congregation of people.

The choice of early Uruk as the setting for this book makes the examination of religion easier because it was a society where the cross currents of civilisation had not yet muddied the heavens.

I was surprised, when I started my obsession with early Mesopotamia, that gods were local to a city. Almost like how football teams are also local to a city. And there are direct parallels to that there I won’t go into now.

These localised gods continued for Millenia. Greek cities adopted their own. But then we have things like the goddess Athena of Athens adorning New York harbour and the whole thing gets more nebulous and difficult to understand.

The twist in the line of history, and I am considering writing by second novel on this twist, was the invention of ‘a portable religion’ by the Judeans and Israelites who were exiled to Babylon.

This was no small thing.

These exiled people learned how to preserve their language and religion. At least some of them. Not everyone returned to Judea after the 90 years of exile. But those who did had never seen their land before. And they brought back with them a strong law, a strong culture and a strong religion. Christianity and Islam sprang from this common root stock and these are the hybridised religions we think of today, not the local pantheistic gods we started out with.

A far cry from the beginnings of gods.

The idea that a god that could go anywhere was revolutionary. And at the same time, maybe even a logical progression. As people started to become more mobile, as traders travelled or armies went around conquering, then the localisation of a god became problematic for people a long way from home.

I have thought about these things my whole life.

So, do I believe in gods? Yes.

Is there a particular god I believe in? No.

Do gods exist? In as much as anything that lives in our minds, Yes.

But unlike others, I have no problem that other people do believe as it is almost human to do so. And there is the problem for atheists like me. What happens to people who don’t believe?

Carl Jung noted that with the break down of Christianity after the First World War there was a marked increase in flying saucer sightings, belief in werewolves, vampires, and the super natural. The lesson to be learned being that if the intellectuals of a society get up enough steam to tear the accepted religion of the time down then people will start investing their own. In some ways that moves the population back to square one like a nightmarish game of snakes and ladders and society becomes less cohesive as a result.

So to me it doesn’t matter that people like Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais go around using their clever observations to prove god doesn’t exist. Because when all that noise dies down, there is still a hunger in the human soul to believe, to surrender, and to understand.

No such problem for the people in Gods before Kings.

There is a beautiful, (and after studying, I found not entirely accurate), quote by David Bowie at the beginning of the biopic ‘Moonage Daydream’ and I’ll finish with it.

At the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead and that man had killed him.

This created an arrogance with man that he himself was God. But as God, all he could seem to produce was disaster.

That led to a terrifying confusion: for if we could not take the place of God, how could we fill the space we had created within ourselves?