The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Caught this via Neil Gaiman’s journal.
Terry Pratchett has been talking to the Daily Mail (someone has to I suppose) about his ideas on faith, God and why he doesn’t believe. So of course this headline is:

I create gods all the time – now I think one might exist, says fantasy author Terry Pratchett.

Uh, no he doesn’t. What he does say is well thought out, honest and a genuine reflection of his faith and life following his revelation that he has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. To cut to the chase, he beautifully sums it all up thus:

I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I’m happy they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet.

So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?

More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?

Me, actually – the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis’s Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it’s what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.

It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

I don’t think I’ve found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.

It’s a great article, but please, please, read past the headline.