richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

A R G U M ENTS F O R G O D ' S E X I S T E N C E 91
had I been both impressionable and religiously brought up, I
wonder what words the wind might have spoken.
On another occasion, when I was about the same age, I saw a
giant round face gazing, with unspeakable malevolence, out
through the window of an otherwise ordinary house in a seaside
village. In trepidation, I approached until I was close enough to see
what it really was: just a vaguely face-like pattern created by the
chance fall of the curtains. The face itself, and its evil mien, had
been constructed in my fearful child's brain. On 11 September
2001, pious people thought they saw the face of Satan in the smoke
rising from the Twin Towers: a superstition backed by a photograph
which was published on the Internet and widely circulated.
Constructing models is something the human brain is very good
at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake
we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination.
As Chapter 10 will show, children who have 'imaginary
friends' sometimes see them clearly, exactly as if they were real. If
we are gullible, we don't recognize hallucination or lucid dreaming
for what it is and we claim to have seen or heard a ghost; or an
angel; or God; or - especially if we happen to be young, female and
Catholic - the Virgin Mary. Such visions and manifestations are
certainly not good grounds for believing that ghosts or angels, gods
or virgins, are actually there.
On the face of it mass visions, such as the report that seventy
thousand pilgrims at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 saw the sun 'tear
itself from the heavens and come crashing down upon the
multitude', 49 are harder to write off. It is not easy to explain how
seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination. But it
is even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of
the world, outside Fatima, seeing it too - and not just seeing it, but
feeling it as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system, including
acceleration forces sufficient to hurl everybody into space.
David Hume's pithy test for a miracle comes irresistibly to mind:
'No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the
testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.'
It may seem improbable that seventy thousand people could
simultaneously be deluded, or could simultaneously collude in a