An Argument with a Jehovah’s Witness about God and Religion.

Yesterday a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on my door. Anyone else would have shooed them away, but I think talking to Witnesses often offers an opportunity to do a bit of chaffering with God-worshippers.

The older of the men asked whether I believed in God. I shook my head quietly - more to indicate that I'd rather not talk about this. But I knew that Witnesses are a tenacious lot, they were not going let go just like that, so far as they were concerned I might as well be a future Witness.

The man asked what my opinions were about evolution. I answered that evolution is a more plausible way of explaining how everything came to be than 'creation.' Now the man did something unexpected, he opened his Bible and gently removed a feather from within its pages.

Jehovah’s Witness: I ask this question from people I talk to. This feather belonged to a bird, any idea what the bird was?

Me: (Without hesitation) A pigeon, I believe.

Witness: Ah, well you are the first person to get this right. Congratulations. And do you know which part of a pigeon the feather came from?

Me: From the wing (that was pretty obvious, if you knew anything about birds).

Witness: And that’s true too, it’s a pinion feather. Do you know why I brought it out?

Me: (I thought I must wax clever-cleverer now) Because you want to prove to me that there is an Intelligence behind everything, every design.

Jehovah’s Witness: And that is exactly what I want to do.

Me: Okay.

Witness: (Carefully kneading the feather) You see how intricate this feather is, how beautiful. (The witness stopped here, dipped his hand into his bag, brought out a magnifying glass, and gave it to me). Now use that glass to look at the feather. Look at the construction of it, the craft, the woof and warp.

Me: (I took the glass and feather, studied the feather for a few moments and returned both).

Jehovah’s Witness: Don’t you see how perfectly made the feather is? Can you make this feather, or even something close to it?

Me: No. I can’t make the feather, any more than I can make an iPad. I believe the latter was made by a man called Steve Jobs - with the help of his many brilliant assistants.

Witness: Steve Jobs made the iPad, but God made the feather.

Me: Oh, I get it now. So how do you know anyone called God made the feather? After all, I easily knew Steve Jobs made the iPad – or at least he showed it to the world as something that came from his technological stable. I would not be so trivial as to demand that God should come out and tell us that he made the feather. And you know, the God you believe in might as well have made the beautiful feather you are holding there.

Witness: (The man looked bemused) It’s not just the God I believe in, but the true and only God, the Intelligent Designer.

Me: Have you read Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker?

Jehovah's Witness: No. I am not interested in anything written by Dawkins. God is not blind, he sees everything and makes beautiful things like the feather.

Me: All right. And he is also the God who made a beautiful thing like a newborn baby.

Witness: (Now growing more confident) Yes, God made babies too. Don’t you see how wonderful the whole process of procreation is? From conception to birth, and the perfect baby that comes of it.

Me: (The Socrates in me began to kick in) Every newborn is not actually perfectly made, I am sorry. A lot of babies are born with disabilities, and some of these disabilities are so extreme and cruel that they belie the hand of any intelligent designer. And there are still-born babies too. Who would kill what they burdened a woman with for nine months? Moloch? God?

Witness: But…

Me: You would not tell me that the not-so-perfect babies were made as foils for the perfect ones, would you? To show that God could make something as perfect as a ‘normal’ baby.

Witness: But God moves in mysterious ways.

Me: I know that. (Now I thought it was time to factor in theodicy, ‘the problem of evil.’) You see, I came from Nigeria and many of the roads in the country are hotspots of some of the most gruesome crashes. When I was about twenty I was travelling through a motorway with my dad and we ran into the smouldering wake of a pile-up - six vehicles had formed large ball of crash-point. Upwards of a dozen people died, their crushed bodies were flung here and there. Then I saw the baby, you wouldn’t know what it was until you got closer. It was a most dreadful sight, I had never seen anything like that, the gore, the monstrous mangling of the poor innocent baby. Imagine the suffering, the agony this child who was no more than a couple of months old would have gone through in its last moments.

Jehovah’s Witness: Well, I think we should go now.

Me: (I said to them even as they left) Don’t you have copies of Awake to sell? (And I truly wanted to buy the magazine).

Witness: Next time.

As the two Jehovah’s Witnesses moved off, I remembered what Ivan Karamazov said to his godly brother Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov:

‘Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little tormented breast with her tiny fist … and weep her sanguine meek, unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?

No, I can’t understand it. Nor can Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov. Nor can the two Jehovah’s witnesses who scarpered before I could ask them this Karamazovian question.

All right, I think I went a bit far. I could just have told the Witnesses that a baby is perfect and adorable until it begins to suffer from colic and stomach cramps, keeping its parents up for most of the night. An intelligent Designer would not lay a baby open to colic pains a few days after it was born.