Garden

Of Gods and gardens

In 1944 John Wisdom, an aptly named British philosopher, wrote a parable about a garden. It took up just a few paragraphs of an intricate essay in a professional journal but it seeded a controversy that ran for a good few years before subsiding into the mulch of abandoned philosophical debates. Th essay was about religion and the parable raised the question of what meaning, if any, could be given to the idea that the world is watched over by a loving God. The parable went like this, "Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to other, 'It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.' The other disagrees... They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer... insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn't agree, and asks how a so-called invisible intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all"
~ Excerpts from Intelligent Life, Winter 2009