This is Dawkins at his most mellow, which is not a bad thing. But what a leap he makes from his measured 'can't know' statement at the opening to 'lie,' 'falsehood,' 'delusion.'

That leap allows him to shift to "The truth matters to me. . .and I resent the deep questions being hijacked by religion...science has an awful lot to teach us and we ought to think rationally and skeptically."

Some of us value thinking rationally and skeptically and also imaginatively, affectively, intuitively, contemplatively, and finally, lovingly. Is truth ultimately about objective facts or about relationship?

I just finished reading NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty's Fingerprints of God. It's an excellent read, a skeptical, open-minded believer engaging a wide range of scientists, researchers, and ordinary people in the emerging scientific study of spirituality. One fascinating observation she makes is how many younger scientists are quietly but passionately interested in this research that philosophically can't prove God, but can demonstrate that prayer discipline and faith actually change the human personality, and where the faith is open-hearted and forgiving, can make people freer, braver, and kinder. Is that God? No, we don't know. But might it be worth it (like Pascal) to bet it is?

Excellent post, Ann! I agree with Dawkins that atheists are labeled strident or dogmatic for saying there is no God. Religious types don't get labeled as such if they say they believe God exists, however. I love the way he points out that sophisticated believers can accommodate just about anything. Their religion is unfalsifiable because, like Job, whatever happens, they will go on believing.

It is clear from the interview that his main object of critique was Bush's America, in which fundamentalism became more and more respectable. That situation has not changed much under the new administration.

My own approach is to say the word "God" is used to express comfort and that there is nothing wrong with speaking this way as long one does not deny facts. Dawkins, would, no doubt, find me a sophisticated believer or unbeliever who is impossible to pin down.

Gary Paul Gilbert

I agree with Dawkins that atheists are labeled strident or dogmatic for saying there is no God.

NOT true, GPG.

Many of us in the Episcopal blogosphere are familiar with "IT" (e.g., see Friends of Jake). She is a forthright atheist who is emphatically not "labeled strident or dogmatic" (Mainly because she isn't! ;-p).

Atheists, like theists, come in many flavors. Dawkins doesn't like paying the price . . . for being Richard Dawkins: that's not the same as merely being a public "atheist".

JC Fisher

Scientists can demonstrate that prayer discipline and faith actually change the human personality, and where the faith is open-hearted and forgiving, can make people freer, braver, and kinder. Is that God? No, we don't know.

Murdoch Matthew
husband of Gary

Murdoch,

You quote me accurately, "Is that God? No, we don't know." The ask the useful question, "Why think this has anything to do with God?" but then, a startling leap, suggest that somehow I'm seeking the 'certainty of "proof" with God..."

I'm not seeking that certainty. Our mystical tradition and the best of our theological thinking brings us to your conclusion, that any god we could prove wouldn't be God.

I'm responding to the interview and to Richard Dawkins. He's a noisy voice to whom media have given a great deal of power to define public debate. In the video clip Dawkins suggests that contemporary Christians are slippery and evasive in their interpretation of the Bible and tradition. He admires modern progressive believers' benign intent but also suggests we're dishonest. But what we're talking about here - the Cloud of Unknowing, the divine darkness, the utter unknowabiity of God in essence IS solid Christian teaching. In early Christian thought it's a commonplace to hear 'every image of God is an idol.' When the Jesuit Antony de Mello would say, 'There IS NO God,' he was continuing that tradition. God who is wholly other doesn't "exist" because what we mean by "existence" is something we can know among other things we can know. That's why a completely Orthodox theologian like Christos Yannaros can write "De l'absence et de l'inconaissance de Dieu," - on the absence and unknowability of God.

Our currently problematic Archbishop of Canterbury in his more graceful guise as theologian writes about this well: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1176

Back to Dawkins - well into Barbara Hagerty's book she describes a telling moment in a Temple sponsored forum at Cambridge University (a gathering something like the Pew Forum she's posted on her website:
http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=217)

At the Templeton sponsored event she recounts in her book, as John Barrow, a Cambridge mathematician completes his argument exploring probabilities of life in a universe with an aside, "I'm quite happy with a traditional theistic view of the universe." Hagerty continues:

"He might as well have dropped an anvil on Richard Dawkins's foot...Two days earlier, Dawkins had delivered a talk that he believed would prove the impossibility of God which would later be published as *The God Delusion*. He had remained in Cambridge to hear the lectures of other researchers, particularly the world-class John Barrow. When Barrow, who turned out to be an Anglican, mentioned his belief in God, Dawkins began roiling with frustration like a teakettle about to blow.
"Why on earth do you believe in God" Dawkins blurted. All heads turned to Barrow.
"If you want to look for divine action, physicists look at the rationality of the universe and the mathematical structure of the world."
"Yes, but why do you want to look for divine action?" Dawkins demanded.
"For the same reason that someone might not want to," Barrow responded with a smile.

Of course neurological phenomena don't prove the existence of God. Nor does stimulation of the optic nerve prove the existence of light (and in fact the brain can 'see' light' when the nerve fires in response to a non-light stimulus).

Why would anyone want to believe in God and ask if something in our experience witnesses to the possibility of encounter with God? For the same reason someone might want to believe in love, friendship, or beauty and be fascinated with evidence that (whether love, friendship, and beauty "exist" or not) believing in them appears to make an observable behavioural and neurological difference in human persons.

Dawkins is quite genial in the interview, but it's argument that's slippery. Beginning with an acknowledgment that one can't prove (or disprove God) he concludes with claiming that it's his passion of the Truth and desire to deliver people from Delusion that makes him hostile to religion.

Unknowing is unknowing. Listen to what he says and test it against the concern for truth claims that you and Gary regularly (and I think usefully) raise.

Sorry, Donald. I realized it was too much of a leap after I posted. The point was, the fact that prayer can have physical effects is no sign of supernatural influence. Mental disciplines can gain control of what are usually unconscious processes. Why even ask, "Is that God?" unless you're looking for evidence to back up your intuitions?

After a lifetime of religious involvement, I find myself immersed in a story, never directed by a spirit. But people talk so freely and confidently about knowing "God." I must, along with Don Cupitt and Adrian Worsfold, wonder whether this is a culturally determined interpretation of their experience. Since there is no evidence for religious opinions, only conflicting traditions, I suspect religious people should move on to explore the benefits of meditation (which is what you hint at) and community, and leave the tendentious doctrines behind.

Murdoch

Murdoch,

thanks for hearing what I offered and taking it as a request for clarification. Obviously, I think, the intuition you speak of matters to me, and I think the way it matters has something to do with loving (or at least longing for) mystery and feeling a small self need for big Self - valuing startling moments when the whole I or we have offered less than what we experience or receive, moments of grace (with the humility and patience I find in them).

that said, I was grateful for all the years I was a parish priest to have a handful of declared agnostics, unbelievers and an occasional atheist who participated regularly in congregations I was privileged to serve. "I value and believe in what we are together" proved a useful and in itself graceful voice in the conversation and shared work. Sometimes the most determined skeptics proved the most committed community-builders.

Donald, If the Episcopal Church were more like the Unitarians, we could easily have different emphases: liberal Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, nontheist, etc., and it would not be a problem. Dawkins would fit in and no doubt we would find other issues to fight over, such as if and when one can use the word "God."

My only problem with mysticism is that in some cases it, too, makes implicit knowledge claims. To say that God is unknowable is to claim one has seen the other side of thought. One can draw a limit to expressions of meaning, as Wittgenstein did in The Tractatus, but one cannot draw a limit to the knowable.

I read the mystical claim of unknowability as a way of saying that one's language has broken down or, as Wittgenstein says, gone on a holiday.

Here the "holy" in holiday is joined to a linguistic breakdown. So my problem with mysticism is that it still would make sense. It also is dualistic in that it posits some other world where perfection exists.

Gary Paul Gilbert