"There once was a family of mice who lived inside a piano,
knowing nothing of the world outside it.
When it was played, the sound would fill their little universe.
They liked the idea that there was
some giant invisible player creating the music.
One day, one of the mice decided to explore the piano.
When he returned, he told the other mice he’d discovered
how the music was really made.
He’d found wires of different lengths
which vibrated to make up the different notes.
Most of the mice began to revise their ideas about their universe,
though a few still believed in the invisible player.
Then one day, another mouse went exploring inside the piano.
When she returned, she told the other mice she’d discovered
how the music was really made.
She’d found a row of huge hammers,
which struck the wires to make them vibrate.
Most of the mice now felt they had a comprehensive model
of a purely mechanical universe.
And while some still believed in the giant invisible player,
he was generally dismissed as a myth. But the pianist played on."
This was a story sent to me recently,
as an illustration of the futility of scientific enquiry
into the workings of the universe.
I’d already seen it told in various forums,
including a church sermon, a debate about belief,
even a proselytising religious worksheet aimed at school children,
where the pupils were encouraged to validate its message.
For many atheists, like myself,
there’s a strikingly obvious problem with the story.
But for many theists, it’ll go unnoticed.
I’ll demonstrate the problem later on,
but I dare say when I was a theist myself,
I wouldn’t’ve noticed it either.
In fact, I can attest to going along with
countless allegorical stories like this, back in the day.
It can be difficult for some atheists
who’ve not experienced religious indoctrination
to grasp how allegories like these
could ever have any significant influence over people.
To those atheists, religious allegories are just stories.
But to the theist, they’re much more.
The power of stories has long been recognised.
Stretching back into the earliest human records,
stories have been used to structure ideas, to communicate,
to teach, to galvanise, or simply to entertain.
If we didn’t already suspect it to be the case,
research supports the idea that stories can have
a ‘transporting’ effect on us, which dulls our critical processes
and opens us up to substantial manipulation of our real-word beliefs.
In a study into persuasion,
Green and Brock found that subjects who felt more transported by a story —
more hooked into its narrative —
later identified fewer flaws in the story,
expressed beliefs more consistent with the story,
and gave more favourable evaluations of the story’s protagonists.
Appel and Richter note that when we engage with a story,
we cross over into an imaginary world.
This affects our emotional processing,
as we begin to experience empathy and identification
with the characters presented to us.
It also affects our cognitive processing.
We’re kind to stories. We play by their rules.
And our responses can become substantially framed
by the standards of the imaginary world,
rather than those of the real world.
If the story is engaging enough to us,
dubious ideas can be smuggled into our belief system
without our awareness, under a blanket of appealing narrative.
Appel and Richter got subjects to read fictional passages
seeded with false information, and found an immediate effect,
with subjects’ attitudes shifting in line with the false information.
But beyond that, they saw a larger delayed effect,
called a sleeper effect, where subjects tested two weeks later
showed even more pronounced changes in their beliefs,
consistent with the false information,
as well as a higher level of certainty in those beliefs.
In many ways, the process being described here
echoes the parasitic breeding of the cuckoo.
The cuckoo lays its egg in the nest
of another bird while it’s not looking.
The host bird will then vigorously defend the egg
as if it was its own, even when the cuckoo chick hatches
and pushes the hosts’ own young out of the nest.
It’s no coincidence that stories are by far
the dominant mode of expression in religion.
The language of faith is not scientific enquiry.
The daily and weekly congregations gather
with no intention of assessing their ideas
against a systematic set of criteria
designed to eliminate personal biasses.
In fact, those individuals who do cast a critical eye
will soon become the target of an escalating schedule of disapproval.
The language of faith is not logical argument.
Even to this day, if I mentioned any of the deductive offerings
of theologians like Anselm, Augustine and Aquinas,
most — if not all — of the christians in my personal life
wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
Religion lives in stories:
allegories, parables, sermons, personal testimonies.
Stories told with passion and force.
Heroic narratives. Cautionary tales. Cataclysmic revelations.
As theists, these stories transport us.
And in that transported state, all manner of ideas
can be inserted into our belief systems without resistance.
As atheists, religious stories don’t transport us.
We process the ideas these stories contain in a sober state,
and the flaws often leap out at us.
As theists, we tend not to be transported
by the stories of other religions.
We tend to assess them with detachment ....
although the lines can begin to blur for us
when the stories of other religions stray close to ours
or, conversely, when the stories of our own religion stray too far away.
When I was twelve, and believed in a christian deity called Yahweh,
a christian speaker came to our school to give a talk.
In the Q & A after his main speech, someone asked him about hell.
He smiled and said, ‘Hell isn’t what you think it is.’
It’s perhaps worth noting at this point that
a knowing smile doesn’t actually require knowledge —
just a mouth.
He then announced that heaven and hell were in fact exactly the same.
He said that both places were packed with huge long tables,
lined with bowls of amazing stew.
Everyone had their own spoon and was free
to eat as much as they liked,
as the food would never run out.
The only problem was the spoons were twice the length of their arms,
so they couldn’t bring it to their mouths.
And indeed when you looked around hell,
the damned were all starving and emaciated.
But when you looked around heaven,
where the spoons were just as long,
everyone was well fed and healthy.
The speaker then invited the audience to guess why.
Hands shot up, and one boy answered
that the people in heaven fed each other.
Well, it was hardly applied physics, was it.
The speaker nodded sagely.
As a fellow christian, sitting in that audience, I was bemused.
This was categorically not what hell was like.
Hell was the everlasting fire,
into which the damned would be thrown on judgement day,
and from which there was no escape.
As I left the talk I wasn’t sure whether
the speaker had committed blasphemy by misrepresenting hell.
But I did know his long spoon story was an incoherent mess.
There seemed to be an implicit assumption in the story
that feeding someone else implied empathy, charity, generosity, love —
and that it was for the lack of these qualities that the folks in hell starved.
But feeding someone else neither implied nor necessitated any of these traits.
Cooperation is observed throughout the natural world.
A remarkable example can be seen among hermit crabs,
who use abandoned shells as a home.
As they grow, they have to find progressively larger shells to contain them.
When a large unused shell washes up on a beach,
hermit crabs of all sizes can be seen to gather round it,
and sort themselves into a cue of ascending size.
They’ll each then move into the next larger shell,
leaving the smallest shell empty.
Do they behave this way because they’re aspiring
to some moral or religious virtue? Of course not.
They’ve learned to cooperate because it brings mutual benefit.
Just like we have. Even at the age of twelve,
I knew full well that the most greedy, self-serving individuals
would be among the first to feed each other with those long spoons,
not out of love for their fellow human
but because they recognised what was good for them.
As such, according to the division suggested in the story of the long spoons,
these uncharitable folks would be in heaven, not hell.
The depth of wisdom this story hinted at
was nothing more than a wafer-thin veneer.
The speaker wanted it both ways.
He wanted to present hell as a place beyond reproach;
an unappreciated utopia, overflowing with food enough for everyone.
But at the same time, he needed it be a place of agonising torture.
In order to try and reconcile these irreconcilable extremes,
he was forced to populate hell
with suicidally uncooperative cartoon characters —
and hope the audience was all too swept up to notice.
I wasn’t swept up.
It was too significant a departure from the fiery pit
in which I’d been coerced to believe.
But clearly, others were.
Members of a school christian group to which I belonged
had been very inspired by the speaker
and readily took on this new definition of hell.
In view of the long-lasting manipulative potential of stories,
Appel and Richter end their paper by proposing that
further research is needed on strategies that people can use
to actively prevent information in fictional narratives
changing their real-world beliefs.
Just knowing about the power of stories
is a good first step toward immunisation.
Another step might be to reconsider
some of the stories we’ve found persuasive,
and think about what exactly they persuaded us of;
perhaps play around with the details,
to highlight the elements we’ve let slip by with noticing.
Which brings us back to the mice and the piano.
"There once was a different family of mice
who lived inside a different piano.
The sound would fill their little universe.
They liked the idea that there was
some giant invisible player creating the music.
The pianist sometimes played with seven other musicians,
forming an octet.
One day some of the young mice went exploring inside the piano.
When they returned, they told the old mice
that they’d discovered wires that vibrated
when struck by giant hammers
to produce some of the notes in the music.
But this only accounted for one of the sounds they heard.
They suggested that maybe there were
many giant invisible players,
each in charge of a different sound
and all playing together in harmony.
But the old mice scoffed at this preposterous notion.
No. There could only be one invisible player.
To the old mice, it pointed to one conclusion:
their beloved invisible player must simply be even larger,
more complex and more mysterious than they’d ever imagined.
They’d previously conceptualised him as a giant mouse,
but if he was a mouse, he must have hundreds of legs.
Perhaps he was so powerful,
he didn’t even have a body, just a mind.
Yes that was it. The music was made
by a single powerful disembodied mind.
But the octet played on.”
So, listening to this story, have you become a polytheist?
If not, why not?
After all, if it’s true of mice and pianos, ergo it must be true of life.
From this story, we can see that the universe
is obviously the work of many beings working together.
You wouldn’t want to be like the stubborn old mice
who had to invent some incoherent nonsense
about a disembodied mind, just to preserve their false beliefs.
"There once was another family of mice
who lived inside a clockwork piano in an old, abandoned house.
Its inventor had constructed the piano decades ago
and had long since died by the time the mice’s ancestors had moved in.
Every so often his music would start up automatically
and play through its cycle.
The mice were comforted by the idea
that there was a giant invisible player.
But in fact they were all alone.”
So, after hearing this, who now believes
there was a creator god who set up the universe
but then died before we came along?
No? But the story proves that’s exactly what happened.
Didn’t you get the story?
Didn’t you comprehend its deeper meaning?
"There once was yet another family of mice
who lived inside yet another piano.
When it was played, the sound would fill their little universe.
They liked the idea that there was
some giant invisible player creating the music.
One day, as the pianist played,
he heard a strange scratching noise and opened the piano lid.
When he looked inside his precious piano,
to his horror, he saw it was covered in mouse shit.
He immediately phoned the exterminators."
You get the point. Like so many other allegories,
what makes the story of the mice and piano worthless
is that you can use it to justify any conceivable religion you like.
Just as circular arguments fallaciously smuggle into their premises
the thing they set out to prove in the conclusion,
circular allegories like the mice and piano
present deities as self-evident
in order to illustrate that deities are self-evident.
But deities are not self-evident,
which is self-evident from the fact that
members of different religious groups each believe
that their conflicting descriptions of deities are self-evident.
No one knows the entire explanation of the universe.
But so far humankind has managed to piece together some of it.
And we’re continually discovering more.
What lies beyond our knowledge can simply be labelled ‘We don’t know’.
Well that’s the honest and accurate way to label it, isn’t it?
There’s no false claim in that label;
no assumption; no bias; no prejudice.
Nothing that would colour our enquiries.
The same can’t be said when we label the unknown:
Odin, Hermes, Hanuman, Yahweh, Anubis
or any other of the panorama of deities
humans have proposed over the millennia.
This is no longer open enquiry.
We’re no longer following the evidence
or the argument wherever they lead.
We’re instead leading the evidence and the argument
where we want them to go.
Let’s think for a moment about the sheer perversity of doing this.
Imagine that between you and the answers
to the ultimate nature of the universe lies a maze.
There are trails of evidence in the form of tiny breadcrumbs
which will guide you through the maze.
With enough focus and persistence,
the breadcrumbs can be detected and followed,
and eventually you will find those ultimate answers.
Now imagine walking through the maze
throwing your own breadcrumbs ahead of you
down a path you’ve already decided to walk.
Because that’s exactly what you’re doing
when you decide in advance the nature of the universe.
And like all those before you who wanted the universe to fit
their preconceived fantasy, rather than get to know it on its own terms,
you are dooming yourself to a dead end.
We don’t know everything about the universe.
But the parts we do know certainly didn’t come from religion,
and the pseudo-wisdom of its stories.
Stories that taught us the sun had one setting place,
and that the stars in the sky were small enough
to fall down on the Earth like figs falling from a shaken fig tree.
Stories that taught us
to see diseases like leprosy as curses and divine punishments;
to take hallucinations and seizures as signs of demonic possession.
Stories that led to countless thousands of women
being defined as witches possessing nonexistent magical powers —
leading to their torture and murder in the witch hunts.
When we brace ourselves to look with an unflinching eye
at exactly the kind of superstitious swamp
in which we would now be living
if we’d relied on religion as a source of knowledge,
then the true power of stories becomes disturbingly apparent.
Wherever we’ve made progress,
it’s always been through the exploration and observation of our universe;
by men and women who possessed the drive,
the discipline and often the courage
to contradict the supposed wisdom of stories.
Some atheists describe the stories in the holy books as fairy stories.
And that might sting.
But the comparison is nonetheless worth reflection.
You don’t come away from fairy stories
believing in sorcerers, goblins, talking dragons, magic porridge bowls.
You come away thinking about the choices the characters made.
Stories can have great value
in describing human feelings, motivations and behaviour.
Seeing human or non-human characters in challenging situations
can give us insight into our own natures and expand our choices.
But stories cannot be used to prove the existence of supernatural phenomena.
So if, when you look at your beliefs about reality,
you do find fairytale notions among them — talking snakes,
people living for days inside giant fish,
demon-possessed pigs,
afterlives full of servants and juicy virgins —
have a think about how those ideas got planted there.
Because if you believe in these things, I guarantee you:
someone’s been telling stories.