Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God — imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant — and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? A love of nature, or what the great entomologist E. O. Wilson has called Biophilia?

Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. Historically, religion aspired to explain our own existence and the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. In this role it is now completely superseded by science, and I have dealt with it in Chapter 4. By exhortation I mean moral instruction on how we ought to behave, and I covered that in Chapters 6 and 7. I have not so far done justice to consolation and inspiration, and this final chapter will briefly deal with them. As a preliminary to consolation itself, I want to begin with the childhood phenomenon of the 'imaginary friend', which I believe has affinities with religious belief.

Christopher Robin, I presume, did not believe that Piglet and Winnie the Pooh really spoke to him. But was Binker different?

A. A. MILNE, NOW We Are Six

(Reproduced by permission of the A. A. Milne Estate.)

Is the imaginary-friend phenomenon a higher illusion, in a different category from ordinary childhood make-believe? My own experience is not much help here. Like many parents, my mother kept a notebook of my childish sayings. In addition to simple pretendings (now I'm the man in the moon… an accelerator… a Babylonian) I was evidently fond of second-order pretendings (now I'm an owl pretending to be a waterwheel) which might be reflexive (now I'm a little boy pretending to be Richard). I never once believed I really was any of those things, and I think that is normally true of childhood make-believe games. But I didn't have a Binker. If the testimony of their adult selves is to be believed, at least some of those normal children who have imaginary friends really do believe they exist, and, in some cases, see them as clear and vivid hallucinations. I suspect that the Binker phenomenon of childhood may be a good model for understanding theistic belief in adults. I do not know whether psychologists have studied it from this point of view, but it would be a worthwhile piece of research. Companion and confidant, a Binker for life: that is surely one role that God plays — one gap that might be left if God were to go.

Another child, a girl, had a 'little purple man', who seemed to her a real and visible presence, and who would manifest himself, sparkling out of the air, with a gentle tinkling sound. He visited her regularly, especially when she felt lonely, but with decreasing frequency as she grew older. On a particular day just before she went to kindergarten, the little purple man came to her, heralded by his usual tinkling fanfare, and announced that he would not be visiting her any more. This saddened her, but the little purple man told her that she was getting bigger now and wouldn't need him in the future. He must leave her now, so that he could look after other children. He promised her that he would come back to her if ever she really needed him. He did return to her, many years later in a dream, when she had a personal crisis and was trying to decide what to do with her life. The door of her bedroom opened and a cartload of books appeared, pushed into the room by… the little purple man. She interpreted this as advice that she should go to university — advice that she took and later judged to be good. The story makes me almost tearful, and it brings me as close as I shall probably come to understanding the consoling and counselling role of imaginary gods in people's lives. A being may exist only in the imagination, yet still seem completely real to the child, and still give real comfort and good advice. Perhaps even better: imaginary friends — and imaginary gods — have the time and patience to devote all their attention to the sufferer. And they are much cheaper than psychiatrists or professional counsellors.

Did gods, in their role as consolers and counsellors, evolve from binkers, by a sort of psychological 'paedomorphosis'? Paedomorphosis is the retention into adulthood of childhood characteristics. Pekinese dogs have paedomorphic faces: the adults look like puppies. It is a well-known pattern in evolution, widely accepted as important for the development of such human characteristics as our bulbous forehead and short jaws. Evolutionists have described us as juvenile apes, and it is certainly true that juvenile chimpanzees and gorillas look more like humans than adult ones do. Could religions have evolved originally by gradual postponement, over generations, of the moment in life when children gave up their binkers — just as we slowed down, during evolution, the flattening of our foreheads and the protrusion of our jaws?

I suppose, for completeness, we should consider the reverse possibility. Rather than gods evolving from ancestral binkers, could binkers have evolved from ancestral gods? This seems to me less likely. I was led to think about it while reading the American psychologist Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book that is as strange as its title suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.