Nothing to Be Frightened Of Read Online Free PDF

rope into the island compound where the lions and tigers are kept. As he descended, he shouted across to the gawping crowds. One witness quoted him as saying, “Who believes in God will be unharmed by lions”; another, the more challenging, “God will save me, if He exists.” The metaphysical provocateur reached the ground, took off his shoes, and walked towards the animals; whereupon an irritated lioness knocked him down, and bit through his carotid artery. Does this prove a) the man was mad; b) God does not exist; c) God does exist, but won’t be lured into the open by such cheap tricks; d) God does exist, and has just demonstrated that He is an ironist; e) none of the above?
    And here is the bet made to sound almost not like a bet: “Go on, believe! It does no harm.” This weak-tea version, the weary murmur of a man with a metaphysical headache, comes from Wittgenstein’s notebooks. If you were the Deity, you might be a little unimpressed by such lukewarm endorsement. But there are times, probably, when “it does no harm”—except for not being true, which some might find irreducible, unnegotiable harm.
    As an example: some twenty years before he wrote this note, Wittgenstein worked as a schoolmaster in several remote villages of lower Austria. The locals found him austere and eccentric, yet devoted to his pupils; also willing, despite his own religious doubts, to begin and end each day with the paternoster. While teaching at Trattenbach, Wittgenstein took his pupils on a study trip to Vienna. The nearest station was at Gloggnitz, twelve miles away, so the trip began with a pedagogic hike through the intervening forest, with the children being asked to identify plants and stones they had studied in class. In Vienna, they spent two days doing the same with examples of architecture and technology. Then they took the train back to Gloggnitz. By the time it arrived, night was falling. They set off on their return twelve-mile hike. Wittgenstein, sensing that many of the children were frightened, went from one to the other, saying quietly, “Are you afraid? Well, then, you must think only about God.” They were, quite literally, in a dark wood. Go on, believe! It does no harm. And presumably it didn’t. A nonexistent God will at least protect you from nonexistent elves and sprites and wood demons, even if not from existent wolves and bears (and lionesses).
    A Wittgenstein scholar suggests that while the philosopher was not “a religious person,” there was in him “in some sense, the possibility of religion”; though his idea of it was less to do with belief in a creator than with a sense of sin and a desire for judgement. He thought that “Life can educate one to a belief in God”—this is one of his last notes. He also imagined himself being asked the question of whether or not he would survive death, and replying that he couldn’t say: not for the reasons you or I might give, but because “I haven’t a clear idea of what I am saying when I’m saying ‘I don’t cease to exist.’” I shouldn’t think many of us do, except for fundamentalist self-immolators expecting very specific rewards. Though what it means, rather than what it might imply, is surely within our grasp.

Chapter 6

    If I called myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance. How can we be sure that we know enough to know? As twenty-first-century neo-Darwinian materialists, convinced that the meaning and mechanism of life have only been fully clear since the year 1859, we hold ourselves categorically wiser than those credulous kneebenders who, a speck of time away, believed in divine purpose, an ordered world, resurrection and a Last Judgement. But although we are more informed, we are no more evolved, and certainly no more intelligent than them. What convinces us that our knowledge is so final?
    My mother would have