A passage from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Naval Treaty” – in which Sherlock Holmes spots a rose in an interviewee’s apartment and waxes theological – prompts John Horgan to wonder if the detective believed in God:
“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from flowers.”
Holmes is alluding to what I call the problem of beauty. As I have explained previously, the problem of evil prevents me from believing in God, or at least an all-powerful God who gives a damn about us. But the problem of beauty keeps me from being an adamant atheist. If reality results from sheer coincidence, why is it often so heartbreakingly lovely? As the great physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist if ever there was one, once wrote, sometimes nature “seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.”
My guess is that the hyper-empirical Holmes, if pressed, would say that he is an agnostic, because there is insufficient evidence for either belief or disbelief in a Creator. (Holmes is more rational than his own creator, Conan Doyle, who after the death of his wife and other loved ones consoled himself by believing in ghosts.)
Previous Dish on Doyle and Sherlock Holmes here, here, and here. The recent Dish thread on the varieties of atheism is here.
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