By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Mon, 15 May 2006 23:00:00 UTC

An Anglican clergyman, one of my teachers of whom I was fond, told me of the never-forgotten instant that triggered his own calling. As a boy, he was lying prone in a field, his face buried in the grass. He suddenly became preternaturally aware of the tangled stems and roots as a whole new world, the world of ants and beetles and, though he may not have been aware of them, soil bacteria and other micro-organisms by the billions. At that moment the micro-world of the soil seemed to swell and become one with the universe as a whole, and with the soul of the boy contemplating them. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it eventually led him to the priesthood.

Much the same mystic feeling is common among scientists such as Loren Eisely, Lewis Thomas, Carl Sagan and, above all, Albert Einstein. In his boyhood at least, my clergyman was probably not aware of the closing lines of The Origin of Species, the famous 'entangled bank' passage '. . . with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth'. Had he been, he would certainly have empathized with it and, instead of the priesthood, might have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting around us . . .'

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Carl Sagan, in his inspiring book Pale Blue Dot, wrote:

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."

All Sagan's books and, I would like to think, my own, touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder which religion monopolised in past times. I hear myself often described as a deeply religious person. But is religious the right word to use? I don't think so.

Much unfortunate misunderstanding is caused by failure to distinguish what might be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. The last words of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, "For then we should know the mind of God", are notoriously misunderstood. Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature clearly shows that she is just as much of an atheist as I am. Yet she goes to church regularly, and there are numerous passages in her book which seem to be almost begging to be taken out of context and used as ammunition for supernaturalist religion. The present Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, goes to church as an 'unbelieving Anglican', 'out of loyalty to the tribe'. He does not have any supernatural beliefs, but shares exactly the sense of wonder which the universe provokes in the other scientists I have mentioned. There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews, and observe Jewish rites, mostly out of loyalty to an ancient tradition but also because of a confusing (in my view) willingness to label as 'religion' the pantheistic sense of wonder which many of us share.

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 mined for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No. By 'religion' Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant. That is why I am making a distinction between Einsteinian religion and supernatural religion. 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."

"I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it."

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

Einstein, then, was certainly not a theist. He was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion. Was he a deist? Or a pantheist? Let's remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who does some combination of the following: answers prayers; forgives (or punishes) sins; frets about right and wrong, and knows when we do them (or even think them); intervenes in the world by performing miracles. A deist is one who believes in a supernatural intelligence whose activities are confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter. Pantheists use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs the workings of the universe.

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 above all does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence who set up the laws of the universe, 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.

The quotations I gave all suggest that Einstein was a pantheist, and this is what I mean by Einsteinian religion. It is summarised in yet another quotation:

"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.

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 than the way in which it did begin?" Einstein was using 'God' here 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 won the Templeton Prize).

To some people, the difference between pantheism and deism is trivial. Not to me. This is because, as an evolutionary biologist, I am fascinated by creative intelligence as something that needs explaining in its own right. Darwinian evolution provides an explanation ? the only workable explanation so far suggested ? for the existence of intelligence. Creative intelligence comes into the world late, as the product of a long process of gradual change: the slow evolution of nervous systems, or some other kind of computational machinery (which may be secondarily designed by evolved nervous systems). In this respect, deism is as bad as theism: creative intelligence had some sort of prior existence, and is responsible for designing the universe, with the laws and constants that eventually, through evolution, brought into being our kind of creative intelligence. This wasteful and unparsimonious view is radically different from the pantheistic use of 'God' as a poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. A universe that begins with creative intelligence is a very different kind of universe from a universe in which creative intelligence emerges after millions of years of evolution.

In the Einsteinian sense I am religious. But I prefer not to call myself religious because I think it is destructively misleading. It is misleading because, for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies supernatural. For the same reason, I would have preferred it if physicists such as Einstein, Hawking and others would refrain from using the word God in their special physicists' metaphorical sense. The metaphorical God of the physicists is light-years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the theists and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

TAGGED: RELIGION, RICHARD DAWKINS