On Atheism
Reading by Robert Lewis

Lejtenyi explains that in The God Delusion, “Dawkins carefully lays out his reasons for not believing in a higher power – let alone an interventionist, personal saviour – and his loathing of religion in general. First and foremost, there’s no scientific proof for the existence of a supreme being. All the laws of probability, he argues, are weighed against such an intelligence, while there are a number of [factors] involved in the creation of complex life that have nothing whatsoever to do with mysticism or the supernatural.”

Dawkins, we are told, takes issue with two things: religion and “God.” Like many before him, most notably Nietzsche, Dawkins seeks to repudiate what he finds most distasteful, irrational, and ultimately harmful to our best endeavours as a race – namely, religion – by making a case for the absence of “God” from the universe. In every respect, I am in agreement with Dawkins’s disbelief in a “higher power” or a “supreme being.” I also understand that he is correct when he states that we need not resort to either “mysticism or the supernatural” when explaining the complexity of the natural world.

However, Dawkins’s arguments can apply only to “God” as conceived by the monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Like most atheists, and like Nietzsche before him, Dawkins is attacking the idea of “God” as an individual who stands apart from “His” creation. This is the “higher power” with which he rightly dispenses. This “God,” declared Nietzsche, is dead.

Strikingly, Dawkins’s arguments do not apply to “God” as conceived by the pantheistic religions: Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In these religions, there is no “higher power,” only the single all-pervasive universal power in which we all partake. There is simply a “power.” And every physical manifestation of this power is not “supernatural” but “natural,” being all that exists. This understanding of “God” is entirely consistent with Dawkins’s recognition that the natural processes of evolution amply explain the complexity of creation. As a pantheist, my response is that of course they do because God/Universe is organic. Evolution is part of the process by which God/Universe evolves from the one into the many, from an extremely dense point of matter before the Big Bang into the numerous life forms that now participate in the grandeur of God/Universe’s physical manifestation.

If Dawkins is to refute the pantheistic “God” with the same success that he refutes the monotheistic “God,” he will have to broach a subject that few have managed to address with any success: consciousness. From what did the faculty of mind evolve? As a pantheist, I understand consciousness to be God/Universe’s defining quality. “God” evolves from the one into the many precisely to afford itself context for self-conscious experience. We are the universe self-experiencing. Nothing that Dawkins argues implies that this is not entirely likely. Moreover, a pantheistic understanding of God/Universe is consistent with the nature of the universe as explained by quantum physics, which reveals the nondivisibility of the universe. All in the universe is interconnected and in contact all the time – as though the universe is a single entity in which we all partake, a pantheistic God.

Finally, in staking his claim to atheism, Dawkins risks aligning himself with the monotheists on one crucial point: an erroneous belief in the divisibility of creation. Just as the monotheists’ belief that “God” is separate from creation suggests a divisible universe, Dawkins’s belief that “God” is absent from creation may blind him to the holistic nature of reality, to an awareness that we are subject not to a “higher power” but to a “shared power.” As a pantheist, I call this shared power “God,” and because I recognize that its life processes are organic, I see no incompatibility between evolutionary biology and belief in this “God.”

3 November 2006