God is Personal

You have carved out an interesting position in the debate over science and religion. You are critical of atheists like Dawkins and Dennett, who believe evolutionary theory leads to atheism. Yet you testified at the 2005 Dover trial against intelligent design. What's wrong with intelligent design?
I testified against it because, first of all, teaching it in public schools is a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. There is something irremediably religious about the idea. Try to deny it though they might, advocates of intelligent design are really proposing a kind of watered-down version of natural theology. That's the attempt to explain what's going on in nature's order and design by appealing to a nonnatural source. So it's not science. I agree with all the scientists who say intelligent design should not be made part of science. It's not a valid scientific alternative to Darwinian ideas. It should not be taught in classrooms and public schools. It's also extremely poor theology. What intelligent design tries to do -- and the great theologians have always resisted this idea -- is to place the divine, the Creator, within the continuum of natural causes. And this amounts to an extreme demotion of the transcendence of God, by making God just one cause in a series of natural causes.
This becomes the "God of the gaps." When you can't explain something by science, you say God did it.
Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, said that kind of thinking was the foundation of modern atheism. Careless Christian thinkers wanted to make a place for God within the physical system that Newton and others had elaborated. That, in effect, demoted the deity as being just one link in a chain of causes that brought the transcendent into the realm of complete secular immanence. The atheists quite rightly said this God is unnecessary.
The debate over evolution has entered the presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee, the former evangelical pastor, calls himself a "Christian leader" and says intelligent design should be one of the theories taught in public schools. But he says his personal views about evolution don't matter because education is a matter for states to decide. Should we be alarmed by his comments?
I think so. To admit that he "personally" rejects evolution may sound harmless enough at first sight. But when any Christians reject evolution these days, one may presume that they usually, though not always, do so on the basis of a literalist style of biblical interpretation. It's this that concerns me. Combined with the principle of private interpretation of Scripture, biblical literalism can end up short-circuiting the process of public debate, justifying almost any domestic and international policies one finds convenient. I don't know for sure that this is the case with Huckabee, but I'm still worried.




It seems to me that we need to be clear about what we mean by "religion." You have used that word in various ways. You've suggested that some scientists are inherently religious because of their quest to understand ultimate causes, even though they may not believe in God. What is your definition of religion?
There are thousands of different definitions of religion. But I like to think of three main ways of understanding it. The first way -- and I think almost all of us are religious in this sense -- is to define religion as concern about something of ultimate importance. This was Tillich's broad definition: Religion is ultimate concern. Even the atheist who says that science is the only reliable road to truth, and nature is all there is, is setting up something that's ultimate. It's like the top stone of a pyramid that conditions everything else in the pyramid. In our own lives, we all have something like a top stone. If it were suddenly removed, it would cause our lives to fall apart. So we're all religious in that sense. In a narrower sense, religion is simply a sense of mystery. Einstein, for example, was someone who couldn't conceive of people -- especially scientists -- living without a sense of mystery. There are many scientists -- sometimes they're called "religious naturalists" -- who are deeply satisfied with the scientific universe that has given us an exhilarating sense of new horizons. That sense can fulfill a person's life.
They want to reclaim the word "religion." And they say hardcore atheists are missing out on the sacred. But they don't want any part of God.
Yeah, but there's a deep division among scientific atheists on this question. People like Dawkins and Weinberg are reluctant to go along with that idea of sacredness. But let me get to my third understanding of religion. That's a belief that this ultimate reality is at heart personal, by which we mean it is intelligent and is capable of love and making promises. This is the fundamental thinking about God in the Quran and the Bible -- God is personal. Theologically speaking, personality is a symbol, like everything else in religion. Like all symbols, "personality" doesn't adequately capture the full depth of ultimate reality. But the conviction of the Abrahamic religions is that if ultimate reality were not at least personal -- at least capable of everything that humans are capable of -- then we could not surrender ourselves fully to it. It would be an "it" rather than a "thou" and therefore would not reach us in the depth of our being.
But why? There are many people who lead profound spiritual lives who don't accept the idea of a personal God. And there are entire religious traditions, like Buddhism, which don't have a concept of God, and certainly not a personal God.
I'm not denying that they're religious. They certainly would fit into the second, and sometimes the first, understanding of religion. Nor am I denying that they are capable of living with deep morality and compassion. I'm just delineating three understandings of faith. It's when you come to the belief in a personal God that the question of science and religion becomes most acute.
Einstein is certainly relevant in this context. He called himself a "deeply religious nonbeliever." He talked about having genuine religious feelings when he marveled at the inherent order and harmony in the universe. But he thought the idea of a personal God was preposterous. He couldn't believe in a God who interfered with natural events or intervened in the lives of people.
Let's look at why Einstein found that idea of God objectionable. Einstein was a man who thought the laws of physics have to be completely inviolable. Nature is a closed continuum of deterministic causes and effects, and if anything interrupted that, it would violate the fundamental scientific worldview that he had. So the idea of a responsive God -- a God who answers prayers -- would have to violate the laws of physics, the laws of nature. This is why Einstein said the problem of science and religion is caused by the belief in a personal God. But it's not inevitable that a responsive God violates the laws of physics and chemistry. I don't think God does violate those laws.




Let's take the example of prayer. You are a Christian. Do you believe God answers your prayers?
Yes, but I have to go along with Martin Gardner here and ask, what if God answered everybody's prayers? What kind of world would we have? I also have to think of what Jesus said when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. What he told them, in effect, was to pray for something really big. He called it "the kingdom of God." What that means is praying for the ultimate fulfillment of all being, of all the universe. So when we pray, we're asking that the world might have a future. I believe God is answering our prayers but not always in the ways we want. In the final analysis, we hope and trust that God will show or reveal himself as one who has been accompanying our prayers and responding to the world all along, but not necessarily in the narrow way that the human mind is able to conjure up.
What do you make of the miracles in the Bible -- most importantly, the Resurrection? Do you think that happened in the literal sense?
I don't think theology is being responsible if it ever takes anything with completely literal understanding. What we have in the New Testament is a story that's trying to awaken us to trust that our lives make sense, that in the end, everything works out for the best. In a pre-scientific age, this is done in a way in which unlettered and scientifically illiterate people can be challenged by this Resurrection. But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.
So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?
If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it. I'm not the only one to say this. Even conservative Catholic theologians say that. Faith means taking the risk of being vulnerable and opening your heart to that which is most important. We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable? Science is simply not equipped to deal with the dimensions of purposefulness, love, compassion, forgiveness -- all the feelings and experiences that accompanied the early community's belief that Jesus is still alive. Science is simply not equipped to deal with that. We have to learn to read the universe at different levels. That means we have to overcome literalism not just in the Christian or Jewish or Islamic interpretations of scripture but also in the scientific exploration of the universe. There are levels of depth in the cosmos that science simply cannot reach by itself.