Ricky Gervais’s Series of Unfortunate Assumptions
Like most comedians, British actor, producer, and performer Ricky Gervais uses humor to toy with society’s assumptions, exposing the absurdity in ordinary life and pop-culture—a joke about George Bush here, an assertion about the oddity of cough drops there. For all the work Gervais does exposing assumptions, this former star of the BBC’s The Office seems trapped in a series of unfortunate assumptions of his own atheist philosophy.
It is, indeed, funny that so many atheism-espousing comedians (from American podcaster Adam Carrola to television personality Bill Maher) fail to recognize their own assumptions; for atheism is often built upon assumptions that are, in their own right, laughable. Since humor is often used to direct attention toward matters that, though humorously portrayed, are gravely serious in nature—from modern wars to celebrity scandal—I propose that we use humor to shine a spotlight on some of the presumptuous foundations of atheism itself, acknowledging and questioning this popular mindset to better understand the seriousness of the “God Debate.”
In his comedy career, Gervais has discussed his atheism honestly and directly, but despite the directness, he seems unable to perceive the logical jumps and assumptions he makes. In one interview, he recounts how, as a child, he admired Jesus, but had his beliefs questioned one cheery British day by his elder brother. “Well, I worked it out, and I was an atheist in about an hour,” Gervais recalls. Though an hour seems an inadequate window of time for consideration of the world’s oldest questions, perhaps Gervais knows something we don’t. After all, he did earn a degree in philosophy from University College, London (that is, by the way, a joke—Gervais’ philosophy degree alone does not grant him special knowledge). In the same interview, Gervais goes on to give what he believes to be a convincing witticism for why God does not exist: “If God did exist,” Gervais queries, “why did he make me an atheist?”
I’ll tell you what, Ricky. I’ll take your witticism and raise you one more: If it only took your childhood self an hour to conclude that atheism is true, why is the majority of the global populace religious?
Though one may be tempted to respond that “the majority of people don’t think hard enough,” Gervais provides his own answer to why religion is so appealing in the film he starred in and produced: The Invention of Lying, a thinly veiled satire of organized religion, Judeo-Christian theism in particular. The film envisions a world in which no one can tell a lie, not about one’s weight, not about the historically accurate movie script one is writing (there is no fiction in the film’s fictionalized world), not about one’s impressions of other people. No one knows how (or has the need) to doubt. Yet Gervais’s character shatters this painfully straight-faced sincerity with the world’s first fib. The result? A religion in which he claims the dead live in mansions and a man in the sky watches all that we do.
The film is, of course, a comedy, and it does well to point out what many find appealing in organized religion: a comforting answer for what follows after death and a benevolent entity dictating outcomes for the better. Yet, the film reveals some of the presuppositions with which Gervais and others approach religion, thereby exposing the shaky foundation of the religiously skeptical and devotedly atheistic.
The series of unfortunate assumptions goes as follows: In the film, Gervais assumes that death is “a land of eternal nothingness” for which we require some preventative panacea—an afterlife of mansions and happiness. Yet, it does not follow from our own experience that death is the annihilative nothingness proposed by Gervais. Questions of the relation of mind and body, the existence of souls, and the continuity of information all remain to be answered. Gervais’ premise about death is an assumption.
The next of Gervais’s assumptions is that religion serves merely as an ad hoc explanation for death and a system to force the newly converted to behave. As he said in the interview mentioned above, “Jesus is great baby sitter for working class mums.” This view is echoed by Carrola in a chapter entitled “God, Religious Tolerance, and Other Shit that Doesn’t Exist,” a humorous, though poorly reasoned section of his book In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks: “I understand why we invented God and why we cling to him with both hands—because we’re the only species on the planet that’s aware it’s going to die.” In both cases, the assumptions are twofold; (1) that religions even are ad hoc explanations for death, (2) and that something humans ‘invented’ is necessarily false.
The first assumption seems myopic, since religions offer much more than a ‘get-outta-death-free’ card; the world’s mainstream religions offer a complete systems that understand themselves to be explanations for why the world operates as it does at a deep level, and these systems seem anything but ad hoc. Christian theology took centuries to work out ideas that now seem commonplace— the Trinity, the Canon of Scripture, and the divinity of Christ, to name a few. Furthermore, few religions seem to be directly founded on the pleasing notion of immortality—Orthodox Judaism is certainly not based on ‘getting-out-of-death-free.’ The first chapters of the Pentateuch are devoted to explaining where the world came from, why there is anything at all, and how we ought to behave. These questions Gervais fails to discuss in the film.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, what does Gervais mean when he implies that humans ‘came up with’ God? Does that mean that God does not exist? Humans have ‘come up with’ plenty of concepts to which we adhere with ample reason and justification: consumer society and currency on the one hand, the laws of physics, mathematics, and the scientific process on the other. And even if motivation is the sticking point here, that God is ‘made up’ to help us ‘feel better,’ saying that such a motivation disproves the claim of God’s existence constitutes a simple genetic fallacy: just because a claim was inspired by a particular motivation and came from a particular source is not reason to reject the claim entirely, as Gervais and Carrola do.
Consider the ‘made up’ hypothesis that there is another planet in the universe with life on it. Lacking evidence either way, one cannot deduce that there is no other life-supporting planet in the universe, even if the idea is just ‘made up.’ What’s more, religious beliefs are rarely ad hoc—few are just ‘made-up.’ For example, the Christian belief in Christ’s divinity is not a means to make Christians ‘feel good’ about their God; rather, the divinity of Christ is represented in Scripture as an outgrowth of apostolic tradition, forming an organic rather than ad hoc system of belief (see Raymond Brown’s book on christology).
A third and, in my mind, highly dangerous assumption forwarded by Gervais, et al., is that only religious people (or pseudo-religious people, as Bill Maher, host of ABC’s Politically Incorrect, would say, gesturing at the Soviet Union) make these kind of blatantly presumptuous, unjustified claims characterized by saying “there is a God,” or “there is an afterlife.” As Carrola again writes:
I’m an atheist. There are two kinds of atheists. There’s the Adam-Carrola type atheists, who are logical, reasonable people who don’t believe in anything unless there’s proof provided. . . . [and] the ones who want ‘In God We Trust’ taken off the dollar bill (In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, 144).
Unfortunately for Carrola’s argument, he proceeds in the subsequent pages to demonstrate that he falls short of his own standards. Not only does he term all religions ‘cults’ and claim that of all the most fervent advocates of religion, “none of these idiots really believe {sic} in God,” he also does so while admitting, “I’m certainly not a student of religion, but I am a student of psychology” (150). Despite his own ignorance toward religion and lack of theological knowledgeability, Carrola claims blatantly, boldly, and without justification that all religion is obviously false. Albeit, he does so with humor.
And to humor, I think, we ought to turn, in some capacity, to draw attention to the assumptions of these atheistic comedians. Gervais said it himself (according to his IMdB trivia page): “There’s no line to be drawn in comedy in the sense that there are things you should never joke about. There’s nothing that you should never joke about, but it depends what that joke is.”
The kind of joke—that is the essential component. A joke about atheism, if it is to contribute to our understanding of a serious matter, ought to contain a kernel of seriousness, a core of philosophical self-reflection. The American author David Foster Wallace, known to channel both hilarious wit and provocative seriousness, commented on this kind of humor as it pertained to his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, saying “There are forms of humor that offer escapes from pain, and there are forms of humor that transfigure pain” and that humor and irony can be “both a wakeup call and an anesthetic.” If one can direct humor to confront serious situations like the “God Debate” and issue a ‘wakeup call’ or sorts, perhaps new light can be shed on the assumptions of atheism at the very least.
Is the success of such humor conceivable? I tend to think so. The Welsh-born comedian Rob Brydon and Englishman Steve Coogen utilize such humor in their recent mockumentary The Trip to Italy, which features scenes of Steve and Rob laughing at, but also reflecting on, the morbid nature of Italian catacombs, the debris at Pompeii, and the meaning and direction of their own lives as older men. This humor does not simply deflect serious questions; rather, it recognizes them and perhaps even ‘transfigures’ them, increasing their intelligibility and sufferability both.
If humor really can equip us to better deal with problems, it behooves us as critical thinkers to apply a serious sort of humor less selectively, not only to the assumptions of modern religion, or even to the assumptions of modern skeptics, but to bold accusation of all kinds. The late, great, and eminently self-aware atheist Christopher Hitchens said this to Bill Maher’s very face and his whole group of presumptuous followers on one episode of Politically Incorrect.
Hitchens poked fun at assumptions of all kinds. Why don’t we at least acknowledge the assumptions of modern atheism, its derivatives and subsidiaries, with a little humor in tow?
