The Secret-Agent Fallacy

 At the dawn of man, about a million years ago, our Homo erectus ancestors were starting to develop primitive technologies, such as:

 • clothing (mainly from animal hides)

 • shelters (lean-tos, huts)

 • cordage (rope and twine, also sewing)

 • containers (gourds, baskets)

 • traps and snares

 • hafting tools (axes, knives, hammers)

 • food processing (grinding and pounding stones)

Each of these enhanced the chances of their inventors to live, thrive, and reproduce (which is the basic underlying mechanism of evolution). The most important invention of all was language, which meant that it wasn’t only the inventor of a new technology who benefitted from it, it was also everyone else in his or her tribe or vicinity who could be told about it.

These inventions and their benefits were the reward for intelligence and curiosity, traits which were likewise reinforced by their enhanced survival value. Thus it was that human beings evolved a deep-down desire to figure out how things work, a “need to know” that was almost a compulsion.

Most often this was a good thing, but it had a downside when it came to the workings of nature. All human experience showed that things like the foregoing (and later developments such as boats, nets, harnesses, plows, etc.) were the products of intelligences, minds, actors, intentional beings — in a word, agents. And so it didn’t take a huge leap to think that natural phenomena like sunshine, phases of the Moon, crop growth, weather, floods and droughts, animal migration, dreams and visions, birth and death, etc. were likewise caused by agents. It’s just that nobody could observe those agents in action, so they couldn’t figure out how they were getting their respective jobs done. Thus they were secret agents.

Anthropomorphically, they got names and job duties. Ceres made the crops grow. Poseidon ruled the waves. Jupiter Pluvius was the rain-bringer, and Thor’s hammer was what delivered the thunder to go with it. Heket (or Lucina) oversaw birth, while Hades (AKA Pluto) ruled the underworld as the god of death. The most diligent and reliable of all was Apollo, who every morning would hop in his chariot and drive the Sun across the sky.

These days we recognize all of the above as fictional creations of primitive people genetically programmed to hunger for explanations but not having the scientific inclination to investigate more deeply. If they’d been more adept at observation and analysis (in particular hypothesis testing), they would’ve seen that those things were just the ordinary workings of nature, nothing supernatural about them at all. As science advanced and became more sophisticated, we eventually did figure that out and were able to discard all the gods of old as superfluous. Now we can even laff about how gullible people were to believe in those super-powerful but super-shy secret agents.

With one notable exception, of course: “Where did everything come from in the first place?” That’s a question about the nature of nature which today is just as unanswered as “What makes it rain?” was 3000 years ago. And there is no dearth of people today who have the same answer for such questions: Some actor, some intelligence, some mind, some being, someone, some agent is behind it. Can we see this agent? No. Can we detect his hand in operation to see how it’s done? No. Can we leave a voice mail and get a later response? No. In short, it’s yet another secret agent.

People who are pleased to adhere to this hypothesis have chosen the name “God” (as preferable to “007”, “Agent 86”, “The Saint”, or “Number 6”) for their own fictional behind-the-scenes manipulator. Insistently programmed by their DNA to require explanations of things they can’t understand, and too arrogant to simply admit what all honest scientists are perfectly willing to concede (“nobody knows”), they apparently care not one whit that they are just the final chapter in the long, long story of failed victims of the secret-agent fallacy.