Not previously published on Wayfarer’s .
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Click the link above for source (BBC Radio 4 “Today”, 12/12/11 @ 8:20) See also this link for more details. In the dialogue below, Sarah is Sarah Montague, interviewing on behalf of the BBC; John is John Humphrys, senior programme presenter.
SARAH: What is the greatest invention of all time? Ask that question 20 years ago and you might have a different answer than you would today. Ask it 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, and you most certainly would.
Samantha Weinberg considers the options in an article for the magazine from intelligent life Magazine. But she only considers tangible inventions, not ideas. She joins us here in the studio, as does Graham Farmelo, who’s a senior fellow at the Science Museum. Good morning to you both.
Samantha Weinberg, do you think you can only play this game on what’s the greatest invention if you do exclude ideas and only concentrate on things?
SAMANTHA: I think every game has rules, and those are the rules that I set. I think in many cases, actual tangible inventions have been the forces that propelled us into a different state and moved us forward. But mostly—often they do come with ideas. I’m not excluding ideas … I’ve excluded them in the article because it was fun and this was the game we were playing. I’m not saying ideas aren’t important. I’m just saying they’re ideas. I was talking about invention.
SARAH: Graham Farmelo, you’d like to include the ideas …?
GRAHAM: Oh yes! I think ideas are fundamentally more important than things. If you look at the really big ideas—democracy, social justice—these are huge, huge things that shape society. Ultimately things are the fripperies of civilisation, rather than the driving force.
SAMANTHA: I know but they’re ideas. I’m talking about inventions. There is a difference, maybe it’s semantics, but …
GRAHAM: OK, yeah, yeah …
SARAH: It’s more than semantics, though. It just makes the game very complicated if you’re including ideas as well as things.
GRAHAM: Yes, well you know, somebody had to invent the idea of democracy. Somebody had to invent the idea of doing science, or doing mathematics. I’m saying that those things are fundamentally important. They don’t just arise naturally, these things. They are human constructs and they’re terribly important.
SARAH: OK, though I suppose you could say that somebody invented the idea of Father Christmas, which is an interesting idea you use in your article, Samantha Weinberg, and children I guess would probably vote for that, as their best invention.
GRAHAM: Well, this time in the morning I’d probably vote for the espresso machine. (laughter)
SAMANTHA: To get here, we had to come in a car and that had wheels. We wouldn’t have been here. We wouldn’t be drinking our coffee …
JOHN: … stuck in a traffic jam, with our wheels!
SARAH: So if we play the game now, first of all without ideas, what is the greatest invention of all time?
SAMANTHA: Well, I’ve argued in the piece for the World Wide Web. I’m talking about sitting here now, the thing which has the most power, that has the greatest—it’s transformed our life in every single sense. It’s the Web, and that’s only been around for 22 years. I’m arguing for the power of the Web—in medicine, in writing, in human communication and friendship …
SARAH: … in democracy!
SAMANTHA: In democracy, exactly, it’s fanned the flames of democracy in so many countries …
JOHN: Graham Farmelo?
GRAHAM: Good choice, but I’d go for the printing press. I mean, in terms of what went before, and what went afterwards, that was absolutely transformative. I think it’s too soon to say, by the way …
SARAH: Which needed paper …
GRAHAM: I think paper’s a good choice too. The idea of printing ideas, and distributing them …
SARAH: OK. In a sense it’s similar to the idea of the Web, obviously a bit more restricted. OK can we—Round 2 of the game, include ideas, what are the answers?
SAMANTHA: Still the Web.
GRAHAM: I will go for democracy.
SAMANTHA: Well, I’m not sure it always works.
GRAHAM: I beg your pardon?
SARAH (louder): She’s not sure it always works!
GRAHAM: That’s certainly a good question to ask in this studio, I agree …
SARAH: What about mathematics?
GRAHAM: I would say in terms of the way our society’s driven today it’s important to argue that mathematics, right back to our number system—you couldn’t do any of it. You couldn’t drive your car, you wouldn’t have the Internet if you didn’t have a mathematical organisation underpinning it. So all right, you’ve persuaded me, Sarah.
I didn’t need to think to participate in this game. An answer popped into my head straight away from an unknown source. I tend to trust such answers more than those arrived at via conscious reason, for those are easily corrupted. But before I tell you my own answer, please join the game and think of your own answer. The BBC site offers links to Facebook and Twitter for listeners’ input. So please think now for yourself before you read on.
I think the greatest invention, the biggest idea in the history of our species, is God. That’s something the BBC would never allow on its airwaves. God belongs in its designated God-slots, which I’m sure its founding charter insists upon and which occur mainly on Sunday, apart from little pockets of religion, such as The Daily Service, 09:45 Radio 4 long wave, and Choral Evensong, Radio 3 Wednesday afternoons at 15:30. The rest of the time its loyalties lie with Science, Progress and Liberal Materialism.
One virtue of my nomination is its to invite offence or ridicule from everyone. Progressives want to ignore the fact that God was ever invented. Believers deny that God was ‘invented’. They insist that God invented me.
Then I thought “God, or gods? which do I mean?” But that was a more rational thought, less valuable than the intuition. Of course I meant God! I was brought up in a culture of God-belief, even though I never quite shared it. Atheism itself is witness to this God-belief. Take that away and it has nothing to say.*
So now, the intuition having spoken in all its starkness and purity from my unconscious yet culture-shaped mind, how do I justify it rationally? How do I explain its ‘why’? The answer is quite interesting, and relevant to us all. Emerging as a new species, homo sapiens finds itself vulnerable in the universe, blessed and burdened equally with the gift of consciousness and fear of death. It looks at the sky and perhaps has a sense of immensity. It looks at everything and finds itself able to ask the question ‘why’? Despite the enormity of the struggle for survival, it finds itself unable to be satisfied with merely surviving. It looks within as well as without, finds an intricate world there, full of impulses, imaginings, reactions.
It has language for the outward things, words forged to express the things needed to live together in family, hunting-team and tribe. When it tries to express the inward things, it discovers poetry, and yearnings, and the makings of myths. When uttered, these myths become powerful: not just as yarns, like the tale of “how we slew the Mammoth”, or “how our ancestor discovered this land, and defeated the tribe that laid claim to it before”, but “how All This came about”. And most particularly, there are the wise sayings of seers, in whose eyes shines the light of some joy not known to all, which they try to talk about in parables.
*Later, I reflected that not all regions of the world may have a culture based on one God. But that merely reflects the subjectivity and cultural relativity of this game. Samantha Weinberg who invented it thinks that the greatest invention was launched 22 years ago. Graham in the discussion above was trying to say that it was too early to say whether the Web is the greatest invention ever. Perhaps with God, we might want to say it’s too late, that the once-great idea has outlived its usefulness. But here we are in this generation, still hugely affected by an Idea which has not yet been satisfactorily supplanted.
My nomination does not imply any belief on my own part, but it does imply my rejection of most atheist propaganda. For example, it’s true that the Spanish Inquisition was directly inspired by the Roman Catholic interpretation of how men should behave before God. But the Spanish Inquisition is not implicit in the idea of God. The idea has been bent in every direction, used for every purpose, embraced by every kind of person. But it is still a great and necessary one, to get us here.
a wayfarer’s notes 
I think inventing a deity was a cop out to cover up for the fact that someone didn’t know the answer. Most likely a man, since you know how much we hate not having an answer. And, since one line of bullsnap leads to another…. Well, there you go.I think the greatest invention of all time was a written language. But it should have come with a warning label to prevent misuse.
Well, written language is a worthy contender. But jumping to the conclusion that God is all bullsnap is a major copout. There’s a lot of it about, I agree, but that is just froth on the real stuff, the real idea, which has longevity, and ain’t dead yet.
Sounds like one of our conversations.If we’re talking inventions in the restricted sense that Samantha means, as in technological things, then I’d have to say something about harnessing the power of electricity. I think that’s changed the world even more than the Web. Does that count as one thing?Anyway, if we’re talking invention in the broader sense, then I’d agree that God, or Rev’s answer of written language, are both pretty good.
I wonder if God is not so much an invention of humanity as something to be discovered within ourselves, an instinct that we need to survive. Without it, or something like it, most people would be unable to bear the knowledge of their own mortality and frailty. This knowledge is itself a product of our consciousness and reason. In this sense it may be literally true that without God (or god) we could not exist, as we would have become extinct through out own lack of will to survive as a species.
CIngram, I think you are absolutely right! I deliberately abstained from such further probing, leaving the space clear, as it were; for God belongs to each of us, as idea and as experience.More than with any other topic, the idea and the inner experience are not automatically congruent.In a sense God is like mathematics, don’t you think? We wonder whether to say invention or discovery. What we discover is something inside ourselves. We invent a way of expressing it. The more we find ourselves able to express it, there more there is to discover. Which is also like poetry. In Christianity there is the idea that ‘the Word became flesh’. Before that could happen, the inchoate had to be objectified into words.
Yes, Bryan, and how many conversations we have had, and how frustrated we have each been, in almost perfect symmetry! Electricity has certainly played its magical part in changing the world. And then there is something I want to say about ‘changing the world’ which may engender that feeling of frustration all over again.I suddenly feel how traumatic it is for the human animal, every time the world changes. Another solution, another problem. ‘Most problems are caused by solutions’, as I quoted the other day from Eric Sevareid. For change destroys the good as well as the bad.Which you could also say about ideas of God. Those 19th century missionaries in Africa were destroyers, and not just of ‘ignorance’. And it had been the Arabs before them, with their introduction of Islam …
And yet it seems that more evil has been done by men wearing the veil of “doing godly deeds” than by any other. Opium and coca were also thought to be “miracle drugs” when first discovered. And, used in very small controlled doses, they are indeed handy to have around. But when you let the teeming masses have anything uncontrolled, they run amok with it.
You make an important point about the evil done by men wearing the veil of “doing godly deeds”. We should remember that evil itself as we see it in our cultures (yours especially) is an invention of religion; so it is appropriate that those who live by the sword should be held account for its misuse.Are you implying that the idea of God has increased the amount of evil in the world, and that the eradication of this idea would make the world a safer and pleasanter place? Then you join the populous ranks who have Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as their spokesmen.But they are fighting a war, and therefore see nothing but enemies. I praise them for targeting the wolves in sheep’s clothing.From my point of view one reason for God being the greatest invention of all time is to provide comfort and hope to the weak. Ultimately we are all weak, when we approach death, but we don’t all need comfort. Hitchens has a terminal illness as we speak but he’s consciously defiant, a warrior and role-model for his cause.The justification for persecuting the idea of God, as the atheists see it, is to make way for the brave new world of technology, control of nature, and humanist utopia. It’s a rivalry. Buddha in a well-known story sought enlightenment (seen as victory over the sufferings of this world) after the shock of being confronted with old age, disease and death.Scientists and other prophets of material paradise offer their own remedies, but the best they could do is reverse the catastrophes they have fuelled so far. I personally think it is too late for that.This might sound as though I’m taking sides. But I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.
Unfortunately, removing that from the equation would no longer fix anything. The damage has been done. The genie will no longer fit in the bottle.
Not following you, Rev. Removing what from the equation?
I’m guessing he means God.