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

By Terry Pratchett


As a child, Terry Pratchett questioned everything, but didn't always get the answers he craved. The best-selling fantasy author grew up not believing in a supreme deity - until the day the universe opened up to him as he was preparing for another spell on a chat-show.

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should.

It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this.
Terry Pratchett

Revelation: Terry Pratchett, pictured at the March premiere of The Colour of Magic, a screen version of the first Discworld novel

As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book (I'm rather pleased with Annoia, the goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Drawers, whose temple is hung about with the bent remains of bent egg whisks and spatulas. She actually appears to work in this world, too).

But since contracting Alzheimer's disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe.

I read the Old Testament all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read The Origin Of Species, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

As soon as I was allowed out again I borrowed the sequel and even then it struck me that Darwin had missed a trick with the title. If only a good publicist had pointed out to him that The Ascent Of Man had more reader appeal perhaps there wouldn't have been quite as much fuss.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
Enlarge David Jason in The Colour of Magic

Enchantment: David Jason in Pratchett's The Colour of Magic

The New Testament, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

But I could never see the two testaments as one coherent narrative. Besides, by then I was reading mythology for fun, and had run into Sir James G. Frazer's Folklore In The Old Testament, a velvet-gloved hatchet job if ever there were one.

By the time I was 14 I was too smart for my own God.

I could never find the answers, you see. Perhaps I asked the wrong kind of question, or was the wrong kind of kid, even back in primary school.

I was puzzled by the fact that according to the hymn, there was a green hill far away 'without a city wall'. What was so unusual about a hill not having a wall? If only someone had explained ...

And that is how it went - there was never the explanation.

I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of God.

You shouldn't say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories.

But I'd asked the question because my mother had told me about two families she knew in the East End of London. They lived in a pair of semi-detached houses. The daughter of one was due to get married to the son of the other and on the night before the wedding a German bomb destroyed the members of both families who were staying in those houses in one go, except for the sailor brother of the groom, who arrived in time to help scrabble through the wreckage with his bare hands.

Like many of the stories she told me, this had an enormous effect on me. I thought it was a miracle. It was exactly the same shape as a miracle. It was just ... reversed.

Did the sailor thank his god that the bomb had missed him? Or did he curse because it had not missed his family? If the sailor had given thanks, wouldn't he be betraying his family?

If God saved one, He could have saved the rest, couldn't He? After all, isn't God in charge? Why does He act as if He isn't? Does He want us to act as if He isn't, too?

As a boy I had a clear image of the Almighty: He had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair and an aquiline nose.

On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I'd met a decent theologian when I was nine.

About five years ago that child rose up in me again and I began work on a book, soon to see the light of day as Nation. It came to me overnight, in all but the fine detail.

It is set on a world very like this one, at the time of an explosion very like that of Krakatoa, and in the centre of my book, a 13-year-old boy, now orphaned, screams at his gods for answers when he hasn't fully understood what the questions are.

He hates them too much not to believe. He has had to bury his own family; he is not going to give thanks to anyone. And I watched him try to build a new nation and a new philosophy.

'The creator gave us the brains to prove he doesn't exist,' he says as an old man. 'It is better to build a seismograph than to worship the volcano.'

I agree. I don't believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky.

But I was brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family's plans for the Sabbath, practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed.

Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example.

Possibly because of this, I have never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution.

I don't have much truck with the ' religion is the cause of most of our wars' school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.

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.

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