Einstein's God

Okay, so I've just finished reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. About a year after the rest of the planet, but never mind.

I have to say, it was better than I was expecting. A lot of hard-core atheists I've met are as bad as religions fanatics. They're so full of fire and brimstone that they can't appreciate for a moment how the other person sees the world. And if your can't do that, you haven't a hope of getting them to change their mind. They degenerate to the standard of the fundamentalist, screaming stupidity and the old "I'm right, you're wrong" line without any attempt to prove it.

Dawkins puts together a rational, well-argued case against believing in God. Any God. He's not picky about which. He does it throughout the book with calm and control, and the willingness to be proved wrong that the best scientists aspire to. Many of his arguments are good ones, ones that I've heard before, and many of the arguments for believing in God that he attacks are bad ones, which I've also heard before. Naturally, there are a few arguments for God that he hasn't attacked, mostly ones that are a bit harder to bring down, but also a bit harder for the layman to grasp, so it's understandable that he hasn't bothered with them. I'm particularly glad that's drawn attention to the religion double-standard. It's aptly summed up by the cartoon. The willingness for society to bend over backwards to stop religious groups being offended, or risk drawing accusations of racism, whilst refusing to give the same standards to those, not of a different religious belief, but of no belief at all!

However, whilst I'm very glad that Dawkins has taken a stand, I do have two criticisms to level at him. The first is that, whilst he presented a very good case for not believing in the existence of God, he presented a very poor case for believing in the nonexistence of God. The two are not the same; not believing in the existence of God means a lack of belief; believing in the nonexistence of God is an active belief that there is no such creature that fills the criteria of God.

To be fair to Dawkins, asking him to provide such a case is quite unreasonable. As any scientist or logician knows, proving the nonexistence of an article is virtually impossible: one would have to examine every article in the universe and conclude that each is not God. And even then, after an exhaustive* search, one could never be sure that one had found every article. By contrast, proving the existence of an article is easy: you simply have to find a single example. However, Dawkins does argue that the absence of any evidence for the existence of God is sufficient to actively believe in his nonexistence, by using the analogy of a celestial teapot. The analogy goes: At the third Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, there is a teapot. It cannot be seen by telescopes, as they have insufficient resolution. Should you believe there is a teapot? Of course not.

However, God is not a teapot, and the lack of any evidence at all for his existence is debatable. Very debatable. Several centuries of debate, in fact. My point here is that God cannot necessarily be treated with the same logic as the teapot. For instance, I have never been to Alpha Centari, though I'd love to visit someday. I have limited evidence for its existence, as it lies in the sky of Southern Hemisphere, and I have never been south of the equator, but people and organizations that I trust assure me of its existence, and I'm prepared to believe in them. People and organizations also assure me of the existence of God. Why should I be prepared to believe one group and not the other? This, however, is a separate debate, which I shall leave to another time. The point is that if Dawkins leaves his opponents just this one leg to stand on, it is quite enough for them to survive on.

My second criticism of Dawkins is that he doesn't seem to realise the futility of his work. He publishes an article of sublime reason and logic. But in it, he admits that reason and logic are not going to work on the faithful! Of course they aren't. Try persuading any churchgoer that there is no God, or even ask him to explain the reasoning behind his belief, and you will never find logic so faulty. The slightly more reasonable will not bother; they will admit that there is no logic to their belief; it is pure faith. I have a modicum of respect for those, but I'm not prepared to accept their surrender without one sacrifice: if they confess that logic cannot explain their belief, then they should not expect or demand their beliefs to be shared by anyone else, or demand respect and understanding for their belief. You may believe in your celestial teapot if you wish, but do not expect anyone to take you seriously, or for people not to challenge and mock your belief. This is not hypocrisy in view of the previous paragraph; I did not write that there is no evidence at all for God, unlike our teapot. But if someone confesses pure faith, then they must be the ones who consider there to be no evidence at all.

In view of this, I'm not sure what Dawkins was trying to achieve. Perhaps draw a few who were already wavering over to his banner? But he cannot honestly expect to have won over anyone who did not already have their doubts, because his sublime logic and reason are not going to work on them!

Overall, I don't think I'll ever be able to take religion seriously. But this doesn't mean that I'm opposed to all religion on principle, in the way that Dawkins is. Every religion has a few skeletons in the closet, such as genocide and indoctrination. Of course they do! The theory of evolution predicts that the religions that survive are not the ones that play nicely, but the evangelical, aggressive survivalists. But that was in the far more simple world of centuries past. Today, where cooperation is forced on us by a far more sophisticated system of sharing precious resources, with the threats of annihilation by nuclear fire or irrevocable climate change, religion will be forced to evolve again into something else. I'm hoping it will start to approach the form of pantheism that Dawkins mentions right at the start of his book, where he describes Einstein's God. This God is still omnipotent and omniscient, but is not a personal God or in any way anthropomorphic. Instead, He is nothing less than Nature itself. This is a form of God that I find far more appealing, a natural rather than supernatural entity. It's also one easily reconcilable with science; His "miracles" are everything you might consider to be utterly mundane. He is also the God that I think most physicists quietly believe in. We go looking for the patterns in the universe, in the belief that there are patterns, rather than just coincidences. It is not a huge step to equate God with those patterns, since they are everything, though it is a colossal step to equate that God with the anthropomorphic, jealous, violent entity that is the Christian, Islamic or Jewish God.

Finally, some of my deeply Christian friends are the nicest people I've ever met. I find it unlikely that the correlation between religion and pleasantness is entirely coincidental.

*Both meanings of exhaustive are appropriate here.