Unbelief isn’t the born enemy of faith. In modern times, in fact, unbelief is a reasonable starting point. But it’s a poor end point. The most virulent protests against God can be used to clear the mind of false beliefs, paving the way for stronger faith. In that way Richard Dawkins, an avowed enemy of God, becomes God’s tacit ally.
When The God Delusion appeared in 2006 and became a major bestseller, Dawkins gave militant atheism its polemical stance. Dawkins does not just reject God; he shows contempt for spirituality altogether. He mocks our aspirations to connect with a higher reality, basing his argument on the most simplistic grounds: that the physical world is all there is. He portrays religion as a deluded state, with no basis in reality.
There is no denying the power of The God Delusion when it indicts religion in its most fanatical forms. At one point, Dawkins co-opts John Lennon’s gentle song “Imagine” and turns it to his own purposes.
Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ killers,” no Northern Ireland “troubles,” no “honor killings,” no shiny-suited, bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (“God wants you to give until it hurts”).
As the horrific examples pile up, Dawkins’s confidence builds; he isn’t offering hope or sympathy here. He’s venting his contempt.
Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.
You would think, after hearing this litany of horrors, that converts would flock to join the atheist cause, but they haven’t. The decline of organized religion in America, along with Western Europe, began in the 1950s and hasn’t reversed. The unchecked catastrophes of the twentieth century emptied the pews at a steady pace. But there hasn’t been a mass embrace of Dawkins-style unbelief, which cannot abide God and must attack anyone who is a believer. Why have people deserted religion without deserting God? This is an important question that Dawkins remains blind to.
Let’s go back to when Time magazine ran a cover story in 1966 asking the question “Is God Dead?” A rift was opened, in which people dared to ask the question, once unthinkable, and in the four decades since, the rift has only grown wider. Dawkins threw a bomb into the rift. (Time put him on the cover for his efforts in 2007.) He called the God of the Old Testament an “appalling role model” in no uncertain terms—Jehovah is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” A Godless world, Dawkins claimed, would be better in every way.
Moving on to the New Testament, Dawkins wrote, “The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal.” If such evidence ever emerged, then the evidence would indicate that Jesus might have been mad; at best he was “honestly mistaken.” The only plausible reason that religion ever took hold, Dawkins tells us, is that our ancestors heard fairy tales and, like “gullible children,” believed they were true. Being duped was good enough for primitive brains, but we need to grow up. If Dawkins can convince us once and for all that God is a worthless holdover from the age of superstition, the Holy Ghost won’t stand a ghost of a chance.
Dawkins prides himself on being the absolute atheist, capable of pulling stunts like the one involving the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the U.K. in the fall of 2010. It was the first official state visit to Great Britain by any pontiff and was deemed controversial on a number of grounds, including the Church’s position on contraception and the ongoing scandal of sexual abuse among the priesthood. Dawkins’s participation in a “Protest the Pope” rally was far more extreme. No accusation was too inflammatory or reckless. He had previously backed the notion that a warrant should be issued for the pope’s arrest for “crimes against humanity.” At the rally Dawkins gave a speech that brought up Benedict’s association with Hitler Youth in the 1930s, not mentioning that this was required of all German youths at the time—the pope’s father actually spoke out against Hitler. Dawkins accused the Church of supporting Nazism, called Hitler a Roman Catholic (the dictator was born into a Catholic family but stopped practicing the faith after childhood), and repeated the denunciation that the pope was “an enemy of humanity.”
Anti-Catholicism in this virulent vein—a prominent Catholic newspaper editor called the attack “lunatic”—has never been acceptable in civilized society. It fosters discord and religious prejudice. Dawkins had already become a public celebrity for The God Delusion, and his academic prestige masked attitudes that would have been found disgraceful in an ordinary citizen—and that should have disgraced him. He wrongly appropriated the authority of being a professor and biologist at Oxford University. In his own field, Dawkins’s previous writings on evolution and genes had made him perhaps the most respected explainer of science in his generation—his official Oxford title is not about any specific field of scientific expertise and has nothing to do with research; he is Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. Moving on to the public misunderstanding of God was a perverse step.
The God Delusion is aimed at a specific target audience, the author tells us: all the doubters who remain in the religion of their parents but don’t believe in it anymore, and who worry about the evils done in the name of God. A multitude of people want to flee from religion, he writes, but they “don’t realize that leaving is an option.” The motto for The God Delusion, in fact, is “I didn’t know I could.” Dawkins believes that he is advancing the human spirit; he presents himself as a freedom fighter. As he declares on the very first page, “Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon.”
The God Delusion received some scathing reviews for its extremist tactics. There is more to religion than the terrible acts committed by fanatics, but not in Dawkins’s argument, where he explicitly says that moderate religion should be condemned equally with the most intolerant fundamentalism. (One chapter is titled “How ‘Moderation’ in Faith Fosters Fanaticism.”) Militant atheism equates absolutism with certainty. Once branded as “very evil,” believing in God makes a saint as guilty as Osama bin Laden.
The multitudes of doubters just waiting to be liberated by the message of The God Delusion don’t exist. They are Dawkins’s delusion.
None of his flaws, mistakes, and shifty tactics are difficult to spot. But many readers gave The God Delusion a free pass, I think. It proclaims to uphold rationality over irrationality; it flatters secular society for being superior to religious society. But I suspect that the major reason is psychological. Dawkins is telling troubled doubters that they have no reason to be guilty, confused, lost, or lonely. They are on the cusp of a new world that is brighter and better than anything to be offered by spirituality. He offers atheism as comfort and reassurance—which it may be for some.
But if the possibility of God is so backward that any rational mind would reject it, why did Einstein devote a considerable amount of time trying to fit God into the new universe he pioneered? It’s a question worth pursuing, because the stark contrast between reason and unreason dominates The God Delusion on every page. If the twentieth century’s greatest mind didn’t accept that science is the enemy of religion, he might have seen deeper than Dawkins. Which guide to the future should we trust, after all?
Einstein wasn’t a conventional believer, but he was compassionate enough to realize that loss of faith can be devastating, all the more if God has been central in your life. At first his story conforms to that of many twentieth-century skeptics. As a young man, he rejected religion and his own Judaism on logical grounds, unable to accept the literal truth of events recounted in the Old Testament. Creation in seven days, God speaking to Moses from a burning bush, Jacob wrestling with the angel: Many turn-of-the-century Jews couldn’t reasonably support the miracle world of ancient Judaism. (Later in life Einstein said, “The idea of a personal God is alien to me and seems even naïve.”) Einstein moved beyond orthodox faith while still struggling personally with his Jewishness. He could have followed the easy trajectory of a Dawkins, using science as a weapon to combat the vestiges of faith. The God Delusion has a short section on Einstein, gathering him into the fold as an “atheist scientist.” Certainly Einstein wasn’t a mystic. But Dawkins discounts a personal journey that actually points where spirituality is headed, even today.
Einstein was interested in the essence of religion, which he thought was completely genuine. An anecdote stands out in Walter Isaacson’s recent biography. At a dinner party in Berlin in 1929, where Einstein was in attendance, the conversation turned to astrology, which the guests dismissed as superstitious and unbelievable. When someone said that God fell into the same category, the host tried to silence him, pointing out that even Einstein believed in God. “That isn’t possible!” the guest exclaimed. In reply, Einstein gave one of his subtlest and most consistent reasons for believing:
“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”
This comment is rich with possibilities. It reinforces the idea that a modern search for God shouldn’t be pursuing the old image of a patriarch sitting on his throne. Einstein wasn’t after that. He was looking for God behind the curtain of material appearances. The key here is subtlety. Like all scientists, Einstein explored the material world, but he perceived a subtler region of existence. Notice that he didn’t claim that his religious belief was based on faith. Perception was involved, and discovery through the mind.
Einstein took the bolder step of trying to understand whether a single reality encompasses both the drive to believe in a higher reality and the drive to explain nature in terms of laws and processes that operate independently of spirit. Time, space, and gravity don’t need God, yet without God the universe seems random and meaningless. Einstein expressed this dichotomy in his famous saying: “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
Another of his famous quotes touches on the mind again: “The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness, that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.” The main thought here is about the orderliness of nature. Einstein could not believe that the kind of intricate beauty that surrounds us was accidental. He fought his whole life against the random universe explained by quantum mechanics. Without really understanding what he meant, the public was on Einstein’s side when he said that God doesn’t play dice with the universe.
But what stands out for me in this quote is a passing phrase: “all nature, including the humans in it.” Lesser scientists, including the popular skeptics like Dawkins, make the mistake of believing that humans can stand outside nature and look into its workings like children pressing their noses against a bakery shop window. They presume objectivity of the kind that quantum physics totally abolished almost a hundred years ago. The observer plays an active part in what he observes. We live in a participatory universe.
Beyond a purely scientific argument, Einstein understood the ambiguity of the human situation. Our “dim consciousness” of something beyond the observable universe puts us in a strange position. Which should we trust, consciousness or objective facts? Science itself was born in “dim consciousness,” if you think about it. Instead of accepting the world of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, the scientific mind transcends appearances. It thinks, “Perhaps there are invisible laws at work here. God’s creation may obey these laws. He might even want his children to discover them, as part of their reverence for Creation.”
We need to remember that Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had to wrestle with the age of faith personally; they were men of that age as well as pioneers of a new age. Religion defined how everyone participated in the universe. The first rule was that God transcends the visible world. It took inner struggle to switch this over and say that mathematics transcends the visible world, because once you elevate mathematics, you elevate the laws of nature that operate according to mathematics. It’s a slippery slope. Suddenly undreamed-of thoughts enter your head. Perhaps God is subject to the same laws. He can’t overturn gravity. Or is God just playing at being powerless? Having decided to let Creation run mechanically, as if ruled by mathematical precision, he could topple the whole machine if he wanted to.
Einstein’s search moved in much the same shadowy world. He couldn’t explain what lay beyond time and space—he had pushed the mathematics of time and space as far as it could go—but he didn’t make the crude mistake of dismissing his “dim consciousness” of higher reality as a throwback to superstition. This kind of ambiguity frustrated many people at the time. Dawkins is right to point out in The God Delusion that believers and atheists both like to cherry-pick Einstein’s contradictory statements about God. They want the greatest thinker in the world to give definitive answers.
A prominent rabbi sent Einstein an exasperated telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. Fifty words.” Einstein replied, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” Influenced by the freethinking Dutch philosopher Spinoza, he became fascinated by the possibility that matter and mind form one reality, and that God is the supreme intelligence suffusing that reality. He praised Spinoza as “the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.”
By middle age, Einstein had rejected a personal God, putting himself beyond the confines of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But not entirely: When he was fifty, an interviewer asked Einstein if he had been influenced by Christianity, to which he replied, “I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.” Clearly surprised, the interviewer asked if Einstein believed that Jesus had actually existed. “Unquestionably. No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”
Even so, Einstein was progressing personally toward a spirituality far more secular than this comment suggests. Secular spirituality looks at the wholeness of existence without prejudice. God and reason are allowed to coexist without fighting. How? The link is at the level of mind. Einstein’s ultimate goal, he said, was to understand God’s mind. But to do that, the human mind must be explained first. After all, our minds are the filter through which we perceive reality, and if this filter is distorted and misunderstood, we have no possibility of grasping God’s mind. Either we think like him or he thinks like us. If neither is true, there can be no connection.
Einstein surpasses Dawkins in every way as a guide to both religion and science. Without a shadow of arrogance, Einstein wrote, “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.” (The God Delusion relates nothing about Einstein’s actual spiritual journey, in keeping with Dawkins’s loose relation to the truth.) For me, the most inspiring trait is Einstein’s fascination with a level of creation just out of reach. It’s the unseen place where wonder begins. In his 1930 credo, “What I Believe,” we find this sentence: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly, this is religiousness.” Statements like these open the way for a broad, tolerant view of the spiritual quest. In that regard, Einstein outshines the rigidity of current scientific skeptics, who throw out a personal God but leave a vacuous sterility in his place.