God Will Not Help Nigeria Until... (1)

Sometime ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about an agnostic advert splashed on the sides of London buses for a month: There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy yourself. I cannot remember suggesting such a message should be taken to Nigeria, but someone who read the piece had put that gloss on it, he took in earnest a whimsical iffy question I asked whether such a message would have any meaning at all in Nigeria. We all know that for a country as self-deceptively and misnominally secular as Nigeria, such a message would be taken with the sort of schmaltzy hysteria that many Nigerians display when confronted with what they consider as godlessness.

Paid advertisements along such agnostic lines have also been used in other places across the western world. But even beyond the anger and righteous fury such messages might raise in a place like Nigeria, it would be no more than superfluous. This sort of dialectical luxury would be lost on a lot of people in Lagos, for instance. It is not for nothing that serious theological hairsplitting is sometimes called ‘higher criticism’. But then something that I thought would have been fine on the friezes of ‘Fashola’s buses’ had also occurred to me: THERE IS GOD, BUT HE OR SHE OR IT WILL NOT HELP NIGERIA. This marginally Hegelian bee-in-the-brain stung me a few days ago when I again read another article in a Nigerian newspaper finished with the adjuration: May God help us.  While I do understand the automatism of this declaration, it has always interested me – it nibbles at my secular sensibility. Does anyone really think there is any god that helps any country to achieve anything?

Let us take the oldest paradigm used by some Judaeo-Christian naïfs – a raggle-taggle of honorary Zionists, mostly – to shore up God extending his blessing over a nation. Israel has often been seen as a country which has achieved something because of being smiled upon by God. Those who advance this infantile Talmud-ish argument, Christians and Judaists alike, appear to have over-interpreted their bible (and torah), as most Christians do. In that highly historiographed Jewish storybook, the ‘Israelite’ saga is one infused with many chops and changes, laden with as many victories as adversities. The word diaspora, dispersal, is often used for the scattering of Jews from Palestine following defeats at the hands of the Babylonians and persecutions by Romans. It wasn’t until 1948 after six million Jews had been crushed by the Hitler-driven juggernaut of the Second World War that the state of modern Israel was born. It is not beyond questioning, or is it, why God allowed ‘his own people’ to be slaughtered in millions? Well, maybe it is explainable by the cosy theology that God needs to set trials and tribulations before his loved ones – to test their faith, the great alibi of Job’s Syndrome. And the modern state of Israel has achieved so much not by hanging onto spiritual manna from the clouds or having a direct communication with God through a conduit that travels from their synagogues to heaven, they have achieved significant autarky by sheer hardheadedness, determination, drive and brilliance.

Frenchman Simon-Pierre Laplace, who flourished in the 18^th century, remains one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known. Upon presenting the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, with a copy of his book on celestial mechanics, Napoleon asked Laplace where in his mathematical work could he detect the ‘hand of God'. As if returning a careful repartee, Laplace replied, ‘I have no need for that hypothesis,’ God being ‘that hypothesis’. Now Laplace did not exactly set out to dismiss God as an entity or non-entity (that was not his concern), he was only stating that what he understood, or was made to understand, to be God had no place in, and contributed nothing to, how he reached his conclusions. Laplace’s ‘conclusions’ are variegated, substantial and timeless. The Frenchman lent his name to more than a dozen mathematical formulations which have largely extended the span of the ‘Agent Intellect.’ This separation of God and intellect has been the driving force of Western scientific advancement – in the same way that the separation of Church and state is often the rule in statecraft.

Nor had Einstein any need for the God hypothesis when he was working out Special and General Theories of Relativity. I picked Einstein’s name deliberately. A lot of Christians have latched on to his God does not throw dice and other ambiguities to assume that he was religious. A godly Einstein, though pragmatically pointless, would have constituted a polemical vainglory for religionists. But contrary to what some would like to believe, Einstein was a secular, open-minded scientist who saw nothing wrong with using God to garnish purely atheological conclusions. Anyway, since even a lush-leaved towering tree like Einstein – an iroko, we might call him in Yoruba – would not make a forest, it would not have mattered whether Einstein was religious or not. For some time now only about five percent of first-rate scientists believe in any sort of creative god. Just as no one needed any prayer before inventing something as simple as a clothes-peg, so will prayer be unnecessary before a comprehensive cure is found for AIDS. The phrase, Genius is ninety-nine percent hard work, one percent inspiration, supposedly said by Thomas Edison, has been overused through the years, and there seems to be some truth in the declaration.

Before anyone would use the homeopathic fallacy of the one percent coming from God and then percolating into the ninety-nine percent with grand effect, I would say that in a theological sense, numinous – divine – inspiration is not likely to produce something as unscriptural and as useful as the contraceptive and a million other things. 
A couple of years ago, the renowned American biologist Craig J Venter, with the help of his team, announced that he has been able to produce artificial life in his institute, a life nipped from a molecular mess otherwise called ‘Darwinian soup’, something other scientists quickly recognised as probably how it may all have begun several billion years ago. Since it was impossible for Darwin or Venter or even that Jewish demiurge called Yahweh to have put the ‘soup’ together all those light years ago, the condiments must have self-selected, as molecules and proteins do. This is something that may put the final nail on the chronological coffin in which Adam and Eve have lain for some time in the commonsensical world. And all right, ‘divine inspiration’ prods people to speak in tongues, to spew gibberish, it provides delusionary balm and helps a Nigerian pastor, for instance, to perfect the act of selling pseudoscriptural snake oil and making massive money from it. What else does it do? I am not sure because if it did more than what I listed above in place like Nigeria, the country would have become a technoscientific wonderland today, a paragon of futuristic innovativeness, full of prayerly, if inventive, geniuses.

   How far are we from the world – some 40 years ago – in which a friend of a great-uncle, an elderly man, coming in from a searing tropical sun, exclaimed the glory of God when a twirling ceiling fan cooled his sultry hairless head and licked the sweat on his tubby torso?  A few months later, I heard an old woman endlessly glorify God when she beheld a colour TV that my dad just bought. And today one still hears the wellnigh racialised idiocy that while ‘white people’ use their witchcraft to make things like computers and phones, we (Africans?) use ours to kill people – as if every one of us is a kind of witch sinking his or her Dracula fangs into everyone around in a witch-kill-witch world. Should anyone be told that witchcraft, like its twin kin, religion or superstition, has nothing to do with the invention of the television and how it works? In reality, there are only computers, televisions, cars and other ‘miracles’ of science and technology on one side and, on the other side, their makers: boffins and scientific ‘wizards’ by whom the uninitiated are bewitched.