The God Delusion

Evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins believes but cannot prove that:

• Evolution is true all over the universe, wherever life may exist.
• All intelligence and creativity, anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of a cumulative process equivalent to what we here call Darwinian Natural Selection.
• Design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution.
• Design cannot precede evolution
• Creative intelligence, being evolved, necessarily arrives late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
• God, in the sense defined, is a delusion.

Such are the Darwinian arguments. I do not think that they would beget faith, but they may well support a faith that is already there. When I say, however, he believes this but cannot prove it, I don’t mean that it is a matter of blind faith or even an idiosyncratic hunch. There is more here than the “political agenda” of a profane biologist. Dawkins has hit upon a profound truth, though perhaps again for the wrong reasons. Sometimes a scientific is in the position of getting the wrong solution, even though it ends up nudging Sci/religion toward the right one – or at least a more right one.

By coincidence (a condition that is ineluctably joined to Science history), Tau Malachi, author of the Cosmic Christ, would agree with Dawkins: “The God of orthodox and fundamental religion has never made sense to me, he said, but has always seemed more like the projection of the egoistic self upon the universe and the Divine.”

Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Gnostic Christianity and the other enlightened scientists and philosophers like Albert Einstein, George Santayana and Espinoza. They have had God as their source and object; Santayana is surely right, therefore, to insist that his “atheism, like that of Espinoza is true piety towards the universe” and denies “only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.”

The question for Dawkins is finding a proper image of what it means to speak of God in the postmodern era – how do we judge which image is more or less desirable, authentic, or sustainable? He acknowledges a God who “reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.” He is not talking about a supernatural Creator – Cosmic lawgiver of some kind. To borrow Einstein’s phrase, he does not believe in a personal God, who concerns himself with human affairs.

Dawkins’ logic is merciless but compelling. Delusion is a major part of religion, but what is delusion? Buddhist teacher Dzigar Kongtrul describes it as “seeing what is not really there.” A supernatural creator that is “appropriate for us to worship” is a misconception of our own natural ignorance. How are we to understand Dawkins telling us that God is a delusion and yet it seems that he is seeking for God though in secret? It is not a contradiction if we attend to the question from whom the visibility f God is to be kept hidden. It is impossible to speak meaningfully about God as it is about Love – in other words, God is the reality determining all else.

Then, what does it mean to speak of God in Science? God is not something external in respect of which it is possible either to act and speak or to refrain from acting and speaking. For every “speaking about God” presupposes a standpoint external to that which is being talked about. But there cannot be standpoint, which is external to God. So, therefore, you cannot speak about God in universal truths, because any universal truth is not valid without references to the concrete, existential position of the speaker.

Another good alternative to the God Delusion: would have been the Everlasting God.: It sounds paradoxically opposite, but a central part of the book argues for a Guiding Principle, which did not arise in the evolutionary process as the universe unfolds, and is functioning within inner or metaphysical dimensions, throughout “the process, says Malachi, from the very beginning of the cosmic cycle to its fruition.” In a world designed for relatedness, the mystical religious mind is in no way opposed to science, but rather seeks to encompass it. To both, reality not only exists but is knowable and the knowledge as knowledge is absolute. Given the fact that truth varies as the reference point varies, an event from any single point of view can be known truly only as it is known to be seen from this point of view and not another.

For some time – that is, in the time often identified as modern – Scientists and non-Scientists alike have thought that belief in God primarily depends on whether you think the universe had a personal: or an impersonal: beginning. If the universe had an impersonal beginning, the evolvement of human personality is a meaningless event. There is no satisfactory explanation giving meaning to thinking, acting, communicating, loving, having ideas, choosing, being full of creativity, and responding to airless universe; the longings and aspirations of personality drown without fulfillment. If the universe had a personal beginning God, therefore, becomes an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow.

So says Dawkins: “A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without.” However, the God that must exist in order to show that what exists has a beginning too often, due to our scientific objectivity, is not a “joy-loving Father”, who comes to us in Jesus Christ.

Richard Dawkins is a straightforward, deeply religious non-believer. What is true scientifically is evident throughout the chapters and ideas of The God Delusion.:

• The pre-eminent mystery is why anything exists at all.
• The existence of God as a scientific hypothesis is, at least in principle, investigable.
• What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable.
• What breathes life into the equation and actualized them in a real cosmos?
• If the question of God lies beyond science, it certainly lies beyond the province of theologians and philosophers as well.

Even when Evolution is the “only game in town,” Richard Dawkins recognizes it does not have a ready answer to every moral question posed today. I agreed with Dawkins that natural selection and other scientific theories are superior to a “God hypothesis” in explaining the living world and perhaps even the cosmos. And this is consonant with Thomas Aquinas’ assumption that there is a principle behind evolution when he insists that God’s work must not be taken as the work of a craftsman who makes “a box and then leaves it. For God continues to give being.” In itself, the evolutionary process is the greatest proof of a divine energy at work in our world. Diversity reigns in the universe because God has the right to change his style and make things different as time goes on. Thus, Divine imagination is not only expansive but also evolves itself.

Tau Malachi’s judgment that “God also exists outside of space and time” is, therefore, sobering for those who wish to redefine God: “…the entire discussion of “when” creative intelligences emerge does not apply, at least not from the perspective of the eternal realm.” This is true both literally and figuratively: Creation is sustained from within, not from without. “If eternity is within every point in space-time, and the root of creative intelligence is in the eternal realm, then all the while, within and behind, the creative intelligence, Divine Intelligence, is present and functions as the Ordering Principle.”

If you carefully track this experience of the universe as originating in and sustained by a primordial ordering principle immanent in the laws of physics and if your mind operate in a world without arbitrary categories, you will notice that the Ordering Principle finds expression in the intimate bound between Jesus and “his” God. To Jesus belongs the example most beautiful of addressing God as Abba, a loving diminutive similar to “Daddy” in English – but the relation of God-Jesus as Father-Son is the essential character of a natural phenomenon. The relation therefore appears as a special case of a natural process. Where the relationship really exists, it cannot be viewed from outside. Then, what shape should Christianity take to be presented to the scientific community?

We can use a method of non-contradiction. God created all things in such a way that they are not outside himself as ignorant people falsely imagine about the world of science. Rather, they remain within God, although Dawkins would not call it “religious.” This is why he is “positive” that science is incompatible with religion, but he “waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe.” For while everything is truly in God and God is truly in everything, this is not always evident to our experience; our pressing, tough inarticulate, need is not for the God of the ancient Hebrews, nor the God of the early Church, nor the God of Victorian England, but the God of the Atomic Age – the God of Energy and Wisdom and Love today.

What God is Not

It is interesting to ask what it that Dawkins intends is. What he is really stating is the rather obvious conclusion that our entire world “is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. He comes to the experience of a great mysterious tremendous that manifests itself so impersonally that one cannot even pray to it, one can only be in awe of it. His position does not consist in a denial of the reality of God, but it would be equally atheistic if, as a scientific, he affirms that reality. For the significance of scientific propositions is the universal validity of what they are proposing, that is, general truths, a validity which is not related to the concrete situation of the Speaker. But we must never speak of God in this sense. It is not only error and without meaning – it is sin.

If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as scientists or atheists, find the problem of defining Who God Is: just so hard. Indeed, God is the more difficult choice to justify in terms of provable results. First of all, keep yourself within your human realm; then you will be able to find God everywhere. Like any other word, the word “God” can be given any meaning we like: If you want to say that “God is energy”, then you can find God in a lump of coal. But why is Dawkins so hostile? If Religion is all harmless nonsense, why we should actively fight against it? Says, anthropologist Melvin J. Konner: “The viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

We love the Science of Things. Scientific theories have been so successful in the last few hundred years because they take us progressively closer to the truth about reality as it really is, but science can only show us that God is intelligent. Indeed, there is no way for science to prove that the universe is friendly or that the force behind it all personally cares about his creation. It is a scientific conviction, a conviction shaped by the emptiness of the Universe, which does not want you, or where our spirit has not place, that modern scientific disciplines can say nothing about human beings or how we should live. They aim to provide scientific accuracy, not meaning.

The First problem of all of us, Scientific and atheists, is not to redefine God, but to redefine our place in the universe. Our position as discoverers is humble. We are essentially a channel of God’s creativity. As the deeper spiritual being, Einstein was consulted regularly on religious issues; he kept raising the unsetting question of whether God would dare to play dice with the universe. “I could not conceive a God, who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.”

For Einstein this universe is a manifestation of a creative intelligence. But the question of a friendly universe remained unanswered for him. In my case, I have never found myself doubting God but to trust in the love of God is a complete different matter. How can we know that the force of creative intelligence responsible for the incredible design of the world is warmth, personal, loving? How can we be sure that the force of creative intelligence cares about you and me? We should not be surprised, therefore, that many of us from both sides, science and religion, try to redefine who God is not.

The Monster in the Sky

Men do not understand God by reason or desire but by the structure of their images. Thus, the God of the Old Testament is a God who requires sacrifice. But the language of sacrifice simply makes no sense to us. Pastor Lee Strobel, a former spiritual skeptic could argue that this is the beauty and uniqueness of Christianity. If we were settled free from the sacrificial system that dominated the lives of the ancient Israelites, it is because Jesus became for us the sacrifice necessary to end our attempts to secure salvation for ourselves on our own terms. Thus Dawkins can describe and disqualifies Yahweh though arguably as the most unpleasant, petty and unjust character in all fiction:

• Unforgiving control-freak
• Vindictive Bloodthirsty
• Ethnic Cleanser
• Misogynistic
• Homophobic Racist
• Infanticidal
• Genocidal
• Filicidal
• Pestilential
• Megalomaniacal
• Sadomasochistic
• Capriciously Malevolent Bully

It is the people of Israel – his people – who made God in their own image, which seems so a projection of human personality and its circumstance, that is not clearly who God really is. The deepest mystery, however, is who wrote the book that three faiths regard as Holy Writ? Jonathan Kirsch, author of King David, asks: “When and where did the biblical authors live and work? And why were they so much at odds with one another on matters of both theology and history?”

Although the diversity of authors is only the confirmation of its Unicity – a Unicity that is the confirmation of the Ineffable – these are questions of central importance for how one sees God, which implies inserting religion into the evolutionary cultural process. The answers to these questions may reveal why the Bible is such a “crazy-making book, so full of flaws and contradictions, so confusing in its depiction of who God is and what God wants that the Almighty comes across as a deity with a multiple-personality disorder.”

Should we trust in a deity with a multiple personality disorder? God as a person represents a cognitively generated, subjective, human conception – not a divine but an absolute entity, which evokes a negative emotional reflex. We have learned that God was a man with a long white beard and a cane, who killed people with germs and bugs (plagues). And would allow his son to be verbally and physically tortured, and ultimately executed. That God is, as Nietzsche suggested, dead.

Let’s go right back and start at the beginning.

The Marker of Light

In the beginning there were two initial powers: the Light and the Dark. The Light became matter and remained with God waiting upon the Darkness. All the matter in the universe was compressed into an extremely small volume and in a yedo second of a time outside time, there was an incredible explosion, and the condensation of matter led to galaxies, stars, planets, and all the living beings throughout the universe. Did God have a choice in creating the Universe? To Richard Dawkins, this question should be translated as “Could the universe have begun in any other way?”

Religion & Science are not as different as Earth from Mars. We used to think that the universe is a random and chaotic sequence of meaningless events; however, randomness does not lie at the heart of all things. There is simply too much design to the universe for it to have been created by accident. Indeed, scientific philosophers”, from Albert Einstein to the genome pioneer Francis Collins sought to formulate the unified field theory that would make sense of creation.

Collins says theistic Evolution is the dominant position of serious biologists who are also serious believers. “To many believers, the Word is synonymous with God, as powerfully and poetically expressed in those majestic opening lines of the gospel of John, “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). “Bio-Logos” expresses the belief that God is the source of all life and that life expresses the will of God.” Logos was therefore present from the beginning, not as a mystery, a ghost, but as the principle of life itself.

In the sixth century B.C., the Chinese philosopher Lao-tse believed the universe moved according to a divine pattern, one reflected in the rhythmic and orderly movements of nature. His manuscript, the Tao Te Ching, became the basis of Taoism; Tao means simply “way” or “way to go.” It is the way the universe moves – a universe to which man is inextricably linked. By putting their lives into harmony with this Way or universal laws, men can unlock their hidden potential and so maintain a perfect harmony and balance.

According to the Tao, it is the way – there is no other. The heavens were made by the Word of the Lord, their starry host by the power of his thought.
Who is God? The Creator of Light.