Cold comfort

At a time when crafted, high-minded polemics are putting the boot into religion, and riding high in the best-seller lists, it is poignant that the agonising abduction of Maddy McCann underlines that still, for any of us thrust into the nightmare of utter impotence at the hands of a kidnapping or simple disappearance, the concept of God is still the only emollient on offer. The arguments forcefully and persuasively put by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and most recently Christopher Hitchens in his book God is not Great, present an unforgiving logic in situations such as these.

The role of religion as a palliative to human insecurity is indeed something of a theological flashpoint. In a bizarre coming together, Dawkins recently singled out Britain's latest national treasure, Peter Kay, for the treatment. Kay, hardly a presence on this particular battlefield, had admitted religion was a comfort to him. "I believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting."

Claiming he'd been ambushed for a quote in response to Kay's admission, Dawkins nevertheless retorted "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?". With Kay a fellow nominee for a literary award, Dawkins felt obliged to apologise. Although somewhat disigenuously. Professor Dawkins is as on-record as it is possible to be, saying the notion of religion as comfort is akin to a child craving a dummy. It is hard for atheists to argue this isn't so. The logic may be strong, but for the believer, prayer prolongs hope. For the unbeliever, the only truth is the facts as they are. Hope is born out of speculation. Nothing more. Therein lies a fairly brutal difference.

As a parent I find the agony of the McCann's hard to bear. In the absense of any development in the whole affair, the endless scrutiny of what they should or should not have done merely picks at an open sore. The realisation that the odds of a happy ending are long sap the spirit. But, and this is a horrendous but, should those odds transpire, where does that leave prayer? Countless millions surely would have committed to their God their hopes of a happy ending. The circumstances of such an outcome for many believers will, in their minds, confirm their prayers to have been answered. They will, in their joy, ignore completely the capricious nature of the deity who chose such an outcome. Just as they would ignore the deaf ears onto which previous and future prayer will have fallen.

This is surely part of human nature. I was educated by Jesuits from age 9 to 18. Around 12 I was convinced of the creation of God by man. The fabulousness of the churches and icons and men who dominated my life had conspired, up to then, to convince me, until I realised that that alone was why I believed. Hitchens had a similar epiphany at 9 when sold a line by a well meaning teacher that God had made plants green because that made them easy on the eye. Clearly to him, as it was to me, a sizemic step in logic.

However, despite my revelation at 12, I still trusted a strange phenomena I had experienced all my childhood, whereby I would get an inexplicable, pronounced ringing in my ears as a warning of impending trouble. And past my epiphany, this was still a reliable, although not entirely comforting, sop.

Almost without fail, as long as I could remember, this random ringing would precede some sort of painful punishment, whether at home or at school. The phenomenon stopped, or at least became noticeably infrequent, when I reached my late teens. Whatever it was, as an inexplicable experience it was depressingly reliable, and, until 12, I had thought it might be evidence of God.

Once that had vanished, another false prophet emerged in my early 20s. I began to seek reason in dreams. When I was 10, my father and I had been approaching London on the M4 when I witnessed the crash of flight BEA which, pre-Lockerbie, had been the largest civil aviation disaster in our history. Some years later, I began to have regular dreams about plane crashes. The dreams were never scary, more exciting, even beautiful. I was usually the witness of a benign yet awful disaster, but occasionally a passenger, albeit one who could casually hop off the doomed aircraft as if alighting from a slowing tram. The very repetition of these dreams led me to look into various interpretations and most claimed such dreams to be classed as 'dreams of contradiction'. As such they were apparently portents of good fortune. And over the years, almost always, they have been. This childish reality sits uneasily with my innate atheism, and a psychologist might argue that the invented reasoning for my regular dream subject had led me to invert the experience and the rationale.

It is no different with prayer, only we, or rather those praying are trying to manufacture a reality that explains a cause and effect. I've never tried to explain the ringing in my ears or the plane crash dreams because they are irrational and a product of faith. That faith is borne out of the inexplicable and coincidence. The terrible fact is that a Liverpool football fan's prayers for victory in Athens are no more effective to the outcome than those millions of prayers being said for Maddy and her family. The best that can be said for prayer is its statement of solidarity which gives comfort to the family. God doesn't come into it.