The other thing that comes out of that vision of the universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely, and rather worryingly, of nothing. Wherever you look there is nothing with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light. But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth. So that was, if you like, macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the first age of sand.

The next age of sand is the microscopic one. We put glass lenses into microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the universe. Then we began to understand that when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to actually something, but only the probability that there may something there.

One way or another, this is a deeply misleading universe. Wherever we look, it’s beginning to be extremely alarming and extremely upsetting to our sense of who we are—great, strapping, physical people living in a universe that exists almost entirely for us—that it just isn’t the case. At this point we still divining from this all sorts of fundamental principles, recognising the way that gravity works, the way that strong and weak nuclear forces work, recognising the nature of matter, the nature of particles and so on, but having got those fundamentals, we’re still not very good at figuring out how it works, because the maths is really rather tricky. So we tend to come up with almost a clockwork view of the way it all works because that’s the best our math can manage. I don’t mean in any way to disparage Newton, because I guess he was the first person who saw that there were principles at work that were different from anything we actually saw around us. His first law of motion—that something will remain in its position of either rest or motion until some other force works on it—is something that none of us, living in a gravity well, in a gas envelope, had ever seen, because everything we move comes to a halt. It was only through very, very careful watching and observing and measuring and divining the principles underlying what we could all see happening that he came up with the principles that we all know and recognise as being the laws of motion, but nevertheless it is, by modern terms, still a somewhat clockwork view of the universe. As I say, I don’t mean that to sound disparaging in any way at all, because his achievements, as we all know, were absolutely monumental, but it still kind of doesn’t make sense to us.

Now there are all sorts of entities we are also aware of, as well as particles, forces, tables, chairs, rocks, and so on, that are almost invisible to science; almost invisible, because science has almost nothing to say about them whatsoever. I’m talking about dogs and cats and cows and each other. We living things are so far beyond the purview of anything science can actually say, almost beyond even recognising ourselves as things that science might be expected to have something to say about.

I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and figuring out the way the universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try to take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; “life,” something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God-given—and that’s the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it’s yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of universe and we’re not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn’t read well. But also, we have no opportunity to see this stuff at work. In a sense Darwin was like Newton in that he was the first person to see underlying principles really were not at all obvious, from the everyday world in which he lived. We had to think very hard to understand the nature of what was happening around us, and we had no clear obvious everyday examples of evolution to point to. Even today that persists as a slightly tricky problem if you’re trying to persuade somebody who doesn’t believe in all this evolution stuff and wants you to show him an example—they are hard to find in terms of everyday observation.

So we come to the third age of sand. In the third age of sand we discover something else we can make out of sand—silicon. We make the silicon chip—and suddenly what opens up to us is a universe not of fundamental particles and fundamental forces, but of the things that were missing in that picture that told us how they work; what the silicon chip revealed to us was the process. The silicon chip enables us to do mathematics tremendously fast, to model the—as it turns out—very, very simple processes that are analogous to life in terms of their simplicity; iteration, looping, branching, the feedback loop that lies at the heart of everything you do on a computer and at the heart of everything that happens in evolution—that is, the output stage of one generation becomes the input stage of the next. Suddenly we have a working model—not for a while, because early machines are terribly slow and clunky—but gradually we accumulate a working model of this thing that previously we could only guess at or deduce—and you had to be a pretty sharp and a pretty clear thinker even to divine it happening when it was far from obvious and indeed counterintuitive, particularly to as proud a species as we.

The computer forms a third age of perspective, because suddenly it enables us to see how life works. Now, that is an extraordinarily important point because it becomes self-evident that life, that all forms of complexity, do not flow downward, they flow upward, and there’s a whole grammar that anybody who is used to using computers is now familiar with, which means that evolution is no longer a particular thing, because anybody who’s ever looked at the way a computer program works, knows that very, very simple iterative pieces of code, each line of which is tremendously straightforward, give rise to enormously complex phenomena in a computer—and by enormously complex phenomena, I mean a word-processing program just as much as I mean Tierra or Creatures.

I can remember the first time I ever read a programming manual, many, many years ago. I’d first started to encounter computers in about 1983, and I wanted to know a little bit more about them, so I decided to learn something about programming. I bought a C manual and I read through the first two or three chapters, which took me about a week. At the end it said, “Congratulations, you have now written the letter a on the screen!” I thought, “Well, I must have misunderstood something here, because it was a huge, huge amount of work to do that, so what if I now want to write a b?” The process of programming, the speed and the means by which enormous simplicity gives rise to enormously complex results, was not part of my mental grammar at that point. It is now—and it is increasingly part of all our mental grammars, because we are used to the way computers work.

So, suddenly, evolution ceases to be such a real problem to get hold of. It’s rather like the following scenario: One Tuesday a person is spotted in a street in London, doing something criminal. Two detectives are investigating, trying to work out what happened. One of them is a twentieth-century detective and the other, by the marvels of science fiction, is a nineteenth-century detective. The problem is this: The person who was clearly seen and identified on the street in London on Tuesday was seen by someone else, an equally reliable witness, on the street in Santa Fe on the same Tuesday. How could that possibly be? The nineteenth-century detective could only think it was by some sort of magical intervention. Now, the twentieth-century detective may not be able to say, “He took BA flight this and then United flight that”—he may not be able to figure out exactly which way he did it, or by which route he traveled, but it’s not a problem. It doesn’t bother him; he just says, “He got there by plane. I don’t know which plane and it may be a little tricky to find out, but there’s no essential mystery.” We’re used to idea of jet travel. We don’t know whether the criminal flew BA 178, or UA 270, or whatever, but we know roughly how it was done. I suspect that as we become more and more conversant with the role a computer plays and the way in which the computer models the process of enormously simple elements giving rise to enormously complex results, then the idea of life being an emergent phenomenon will become easier and easier to swallow. We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early stages of this planet, but it’s not a mystery.

So what we have arrived at here—and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it’s really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us—is “Is there really a universe that is not designed from the top downward, but from the bottom upward? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?” It has always struck me as being bizarre that the idea of God as a creator was considered sufficient explanation for the complexity we see around us, because it simply doesn’t explain where he came from. If we imagine a designer, that implies a design, and that therefore each thing he designs or causes to be designed is a level simpler than him- or herself, then you have to ask, “What is the level above the designer?” There is one peculiar model of the universe that has turtles all the way down, but here we have gods all the way up. It really isn’t a very good answer—but a bottom-up solution, on the other hand, that rests on the incredibly powerful tautology that “anything that happens, happens,” clearly gives you a very simple and powerful answer that needs no other explanation whatsoever.

But here’s the interesting thing. I said I wanted to ask, “Is there an artificial God?” and this is where I want to address the question of why the idea of a God is so persuasive. I’ve already explained where I feel this kind of illusion comes from in the first place; it comes from a falseness in our perspective, because we are not taking into account that we are evolved beings, beings who have evolved into a particular landscape, into a particular environment with a particular set of skills and views of the world that have enabled us to survive and thrive rather successfully. But there seems to be an even more powerful idea than that, and this is the idea I want to propose, which is that the spot at the top of the pyramid that we previously said was whence everything flowed, may not actually be vacant just because we say the flow doesn’t go that way.

Let me explain what I mean by this. We have created in the world in which we live all kinds of things; we have changed our world in all kinds of ways. That’s very, very clear. We have built the room we’re in, and we’ve built all sorts of complex stuff like computers and so on, but we’ve also constructed all kinds of fictitious entities that are enormously powerful. So do say, “That’s a bad idea, it’s stupid—we should simply get rid of it?” Well, here’s another fictitious entity—money. Money is a completely fictitious entity, but it’s very powerful in our world we all have wallets, which have got notes in them, but what can those notes do? You can’t breed them, you can’t stir-fry them, you can’t live in them, there’s absolutely nothing you can with them that’s any use, other than exchange them with each other—and as soon as we exchange them with each other, all sorts of powerful things happen, because it’s a fiction that we’ve all subscribed to. We don’t think this is wrong or right, good or bad; but the thing is that if money vanished, the entire cooperative structure that we have would implode, but if we were all to vanish, money would simply vanish too. Money has no meaning outside ourselves; it is something we have created that has a powerful shaping effect on the world, because it’s something we all subscribe to.

I would like somebody to write an evolutionary history of religion, because the way in which it has developed seems to me to show all kinds of evolutionary strategies. Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living in the same environment—for example, the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee, and the more silica in the reed, the stronger and bigger the manatee’s teeth get. One side does one thing and the other counters it. As we know, throughout evolution and history, arms races are something that drive evolution in the most powerful ways, and in the world of ideas you can see similar kinds of things happening.

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack, then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? Because you’re not!” If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument, but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down, you are free to have an argument about it, but if on the other hand somebody says, “I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday,” you say, “Fine, I respect that.” The odd thing is, even as I am saying that, I am thinking, “Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?” but I wouldn’t have thought, “Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics,” when I was making the other points. I just think, “Fine, we have different opinions.” But the moment I say something that something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say, “No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief, but no, we respect it.”