The GOD Delusion (3 page)

Human
thoughts and emotions
emerge
from exceedingly
complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An
atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who
believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no
supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable
universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles - except in
the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand. If there
is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now
imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace
it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not
become less wonderful.

Great
scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be
so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is certainly true
of Einstein and Hawking. The present Astronomer Royal and President of
the Royal Society, Martin Rees, told me that he goes to church as an
'unbelieving Anglican . . . out of loyalty to the tribe'. He has no
theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos
provokes in the other scientists I have mentioned. In the course of a
recently televised conversation, I challenged my friend the
obstetrician Robert Winston, a respected pillar of British Jewry, to
admit that his Judaism was of exactly this character and that he didn't
really believe in anything supernatural. He came close to admitting it
but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was supposed to be
interviewing me, not the other way around).
³
When
I pressed him, he said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline
to help him structure his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does;
but that, of course, has not the smallest bearing on the truth value of
any of its supernatural claims. There are many intellectual atheists
who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out
of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also
because of a confused and confusing willingness to label as 'religion'
the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most
distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to
borrow Dan Dennett's phrase, they 'believe in belief'.
⁴

One
of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks is 'Science without religion
is lame, religion without science is blind.' But Einstein also said,

It
was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a
lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a
personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it
clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is
the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our
science can reveal it.

Does
it seem that Einstein contradicted himself? That his words can be
cherry-picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No. By
'religion' Einstein meant something entirely different from what is
conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between
supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the
other, bear in mind that I am calling only
supernatural
gods
delusional.

Here
are some more quotations from Einstein, to give a flavour of
Einsteinian religion.

I am
a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.

I
have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that
could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a
magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and
that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a
genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

The
idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.

In
greater numbers since his death, religious apologists understandably
try to claim Einstein as one of their own. Some of his religious
contemporaries saw him very differently. In 1940 Einstein wrote
a famous paper justifying his statement 'I do not believe in a personal
God.' This and similar statements provoked a storm of letters from the
religiously orthodox, many of them alluding to Einstein's Jewish
origins. The extracts that follow are taken from Max Jammer's book
Einstein
and Religion
(which is also my main source of quotations
from Einstein himself on religious matters). The Roman Catholic Bishop
of Kansas City said: 'It is sad to see a man, who comes from the race
of the Old Testament and its teaching, deny the great tradition of that
race.' Other Catholic clergymen chimed in: 'There is no other God but a
personal God . . . Einstein does not know what he is talking about. He
is all wrong. Some men think that because they have achieved a high
degree of learning in some field, they are qualified to express
opinions in all.' The notion that religion is a proper
field,
in which one might claim
expertise,
is
one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would
not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed 'fairyologist' on the
exact shape and colour of fairy wings. Both he and the bishop thought
that Einstein, being theologically untrained, had misunderstood the
nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein understood very well exactly
what he was denying.

An
American Roman Catholic lawyer, working on behalf of an ecumenical
coalition, wrote to Einstein:

We
deeply regret that you made your statement ... in which you ridicule
the idea of a personal God. In the past ten years nothing has been so
calculated to make people think that Hitler had some reason to expel
the Jews from Germany as your statement. Conceding your right to free
speech, I still say that your statement constitutes you as one of the
greatest sources of discord in America.

A
New York rabbi said: 'Einstein is unquestionably a great scientist, but
his religious views are diametrically opposed to Judaism.'

'But'?
'But'?
Why not 'and'?

The
president of a historical society in New Jersey wrote a letter that so
damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind, it is worth
reading twice:

We
respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but there is one thing you do not
seem to have learned: that God is a spirit and cannot be found through
the telescope or microscope, no more than human thought or emotion can
be found by analyzing the brain. As everyone knows, religion is based
on Faith, not knowledge. Every thinking person, perhaps, is assailed at
times with religious doubt. My own faith has wavered many a time. But I
never told anyone of my spiritual aberrations for two reasons: (1) I
feared that I might, by mere suggestion, disturb and damage the life
and hopes of some fellow being; (2) because I agree with the writer who
said, 'There is a mean streak in anyone who will destroy another's
faith.' ... I hope, Dr Einstein, that you were misquoted and that you
will yet say something more pleasing to the vast number of the American
people who delight to do you honor.

What
a devastatingly revealing letter! Every sentence drips with
intellectual and moral cowardice.

Less
abject but more shocking was the letter from the Founder of the Calvary
Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma:

Professor
Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you,
'We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ,
but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of
this nation, to go back where you came from.' I have done everything in
my power to be a blessing to Israel, and then you come along and with
one statement from your blasphemous tongue, do more to hurt the cause
of your people than all the efforts of the Christians who love Israel
can do to stamp out anti-Semitism in our land. Professor Einstein,
every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your
crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you
came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave
you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.'

The
one thing all his theistic critics got right was that Einstein was not
one of them. He was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion that he was
a theist. So, was he a deist, like Voltaire and Diderot? Or a
pantheist, like Spinoza, whose philosophy he admired: 'I believe in
Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what
exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of
human beings'?

Let's
remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a
supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating
the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and
influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic
belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He
answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by
performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we
do them (or even
think
of doing them). A deist,
too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities
were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the
first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly
has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in
a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural
synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that
governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does
not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not
read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles.
Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of
cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic
synonym
for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.
Deism is watered-down theism.

There
is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like 'God is subtle
but he is not malicious' or 'He does not play dice' or 'Did God have a
choice in creating the Universe?' are pantheistic, not deistic, and
certainly not theistic. 'God does not play dice' should be translated
as 'Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.' 'Did God have
a choice in creating the Universe?' means 'Could the universe have
begun in any other way?' Einstein was using 'God' in a purely
metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of
those physicists who occasionally slip into
the language of religious metaphor. Paul Davies's
The Mind of
God
seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism
and an obscure form of deism - for which he was rewarded with the
Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the
Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say
something nice about religion).

Let
me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein
himself: 'To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there
is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and
sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this
is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.' In this sense I too am
religious, with the reservation that 'cannot grasp' does not have to
mean 'forever ungraspable'. But I prefer not to call myself religious
because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for
the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural'. Carl
Sagan put it well: '. . . if by "God" one means the set of physical
laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This
God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray
to the law of gravity.'

Amusingly,
Sagan's last point was foreshadowed by the Reverend Dr Fulton J. Sheen,
a professor at the Catholic University of America, as part of a fierce
attack upon Einstein's 1940 disavowal of a personal God. Sheen
sarcastically asked whether anyone would be prepared to lay down his
life for the Milky Way. He seemed to think he was making a point
against Einstein, rather than for him, for he added: 'There is only one
fault with his cosmical religion: he put an extra letter in the word -
the letter "s".' There is nothing comical about Einstein's beliefs.
Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word
God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or
pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the
interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing,
prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and
of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my
opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

My
title,
The God Delusion,
does not refer to the God
of Einstein and the other enlightened scientists of the previous
section. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the
way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. In the rest of
this book I am talking only about
supernatural
gods,
of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be
Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. I shall come to him in a moment.
But before leaving this preliminary chapter I need to deal with one
more matter that would otherwise bedevil the whole book. This time it
is a matter of etiquette. It is possible that religious readers will be
offended by what I have to say, and will find in these pages
insufficient
respect
for their own particular
beliefs (if not the beliefs that others treasure). It would be a shame
if such offence prevented them from reading on, so I want to sort it
out here, at the outset.

A
widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts -
the non-religious included - is that religious faith is especially
vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick
wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human
being should pay to any other. Douglas Adams put it so well, in an
impromptu speech made in Cambridge shortly before his death,
⁵
that I never tire of sharing his words: