‘Imagine this scenario, if you will.
‘It’s Thursday night. You’re excitedly heading off on a date with a new connection, but the car breaks down on the way to the restaurant. It’s just “one of those things”, you say, and you call the lady to apologise. You rearrange for the next night. Friday comes, you drive to the restaurant, but a storm floods the road. You’re embarrassed, you’re apologetic, you try it one more time. On Saturday night you reverse off your drive when a drunk ice-cream van driver veers into the back of you and totally writes your car off. As the car spins, you can hear the guy’s stereo playing. Elvis is singing “Sheeeee’s the Devil in Disguise”.
‘You call the girl, you talk about it, but by now she decides to write the relationship off. Because despite these events being total accidents, she thinks you’re the most unreliable fella in the world. Even if it wasn’t your fault, you obviously invite bad luck. While you, on the other hand, happily agree not to proceed. Because you’re wondering if the universe is trying to tell you something, i.e. stay the hell away from that devil woman. She’s cursed.
‘But the fact is, there’s no cosmic force at work in this scenario. You’re neither lucky nor unlucky. You’re just experiencing the randomness of the universe.
‘Only our brain cannot handle that interpretation because it isn’t comfortable with chaos. Instead, we’ve evolved into pattern-making machines. We read deep meaning into any old stuff.’
He paused for a moment to take a sip of water, the gulp making a little but embarrassing squelch across the microphone. Which is when he saw the woman a few rows back, in a black jacket. Her big collar was sticking up like Count Duckula. She had a tiny laptop open in front of her, small enough for an Ewok. She tapped at it with thin fingers. In the glow of the screen Matt could see her eyes which rolled up to meet his … she was glaring at him.
He cleared his throat. She glared some more. He went on.
‘Sometimes this pattern making is good for us,’ he said, ‘We hear a growl in the woods at night and our brain says it’s probably time to leave. Now maybe there’s nothing to actually fear at all (perhaps it’s your wife’s gut rumbling) but that little horror narrative that plays in our head has probably saved our ancestors from a lot of hungry panthers. Yet the thing about apophenia is that we can’t seem to switch it off. We’re obsessed with the idea that essentially random events have some sort of huge, cosmic meaning. We see the Devil’s face in the billowing dust from 9/11, and shudder. We find the perfect parking space at the supermarket and thank God for the blessing.
‘The conspiracy theorist, the alien abductee, the religious fundamentalist, the talent show contestant. They all swim regularly in the murky pools of apophenia. And let’s be honest … my fellow atheists do it too. We argue God can’t exist because the Crusades were “evil” or that systematic child abuse is “wrong”, as if such concepts reflected a fixed framework outside of ourselves. But even our sense of morality springs from little more than the current consensus of the human tribe. Even those morals could change, if a society willed it.’
He’d been scanning the crowd, trying to catch every eye. Something a lecturer friend had always taught him to do, but he found his gaze falling on the woman again. She was pressing her lips together and shaking her head with disgust. She looked down at the little laptop and tapped something out.
‘Knowing there are no frameworks or designs beyond ourselves can bring a sense of liberation to some, despair to others or shoulder-shrugging indifference to the rest. But if life is meaningless, does it mean that our inventions of meaning don’t matter? Not by a long shot. Let’s melt when we watch our children sleep, why not? Let’s marvel at the sheer space inside an atom. Great. And let’s make laws that reflect our commonly agreed morality. Fine.
‘But let’s accept that you and I are little more than machines of instinct that must eat, sleep and reproduce, and that our insistence on meta-narratives, be they religious or secular, are literally just that. They’re big old stories that help us sleep at night. Yet what wonderful stories they can be …’
The woman tutted. A quick suck of the tongue from the roof of her mouth to make a sound loud enough for people to notice. Pop. Matt shrugged, smiled at her and carried on.
‘I may not be a doctor doctor, but I have a very real prognosis. The human race has a severe case of apophenia. We think we are part of a plan, but we’re not. We can ignore that. We can let it freak us out. We can even let it throw us into a maelstrom of loneliness and despair. But I have another suggestion. Why don’t we let that knowledge spur us on to do something truly brave and wonderfully human?
‘Let us learn to find the inherent beauty of an essentially incoherent universe. It will take training. Your brain won’t like it. But your life will love you for it.
‘Perhaps then we won’t assume the bad news at the doctor’s shows that a deity is displeased with us. We might not trample