That Dawkins Guy!

Here I am writing again about why I am not an atheist.  It's kind of a default topic since I'm
sick of whinging about president-elect Dump.  Basic Serenity Prayer 101: Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Funny, thinking of the Serenity Prayer, which I first encountered at the tender age of fifteen or so.  I had a friend, named Sandra, twenty-eight years old (not that kind of friendship, so please get your head out of the gutter).  She was a really cool lady, and not at all embarrassed to have a fifteen year old kid for a pal and she was one of my many mentors during my rather strange and tumultuous adolescence.  I found her so refreshingly sane.  She had two little signs up at her cash till where she worked at a budget department store (I sometimes visited her at work).  One was the Serenity Prayer, already mentioned.  The other said: When I get out of here today I am going to have a nervous breakdown.  I worked hard for it, I earned it, and no one is going to deprive me of it!  She had a really cool, ironic kind of humour.

Sandra and I were both Christians.  We were involved in the same church, where we met, and in our different ways we both had dedicated our lives to Christ.  It was really phenomenal, I thought, and still think, how God in his love would draw so many different people together in his love in friendship and community.  And so was the undergirding theme, the very glue of our relationships.  Love.  Holy, accepting, healing and nurturing love.  Unconditional love.  It did exist, if only for a while.  And we flourished.

By the same token I simply cannot relate to a fundamentalist atheist such as Richard Dawkins.  With his hyper-scientific mind of evidence overdrive, I can`t help but get the impression that he has no time or appreciation for the fine, invisible details that undergird our human existence.  Such as love.  Such as a sense and appreciation of art, music and beauty.  Such as the innate spirituality that makes us so uniquely human.  His cacophonous and strident assertions that everything has to be empirically and evidence based leaves me cold, bored and uninterested.  And this is not because I don`t believe in science.  I do.  But I don`t believe only in science.  If there are any questions, here, Gentle Reader, about my intelligence, by the way, my IQ has been measured and I occupy the top two percentile. 

Science is inherently and purely rational.  Humans are not.  We are partly rational.  We are many other things: we are primal, spiritual, creative, romantic.  The scientific grid is in itself not sufficient to fit the whole matrix of human experience.  There are many features of our experience as humans that can never be measured by a scientific scale based only on research, experiment and measurable evidence.

Neither is the theory of evolution in itself conclusive as the exclusive explanation for the existence of life.  I believe in evolution, by the way, but I often doubt that scientists have the complete story or the evidence to be able to accurately read or measure the progress of development of life on earth.  Neither do I accept the binary of evolution versus creationism.  I do believe that there is a divine influence and plan inherent in what is known and unknown of the scientific process.  Sadly, many scientists are rather arrogant and proud of their intelligence and it would seem that only a few have enough humility to accept and admit that they do not have the answers, they will never have all the answers, and that at its very best, the whole scientific process is going to be one everlasting journey into the unknown and towards an ever growing state of unceasing wonder and bafflement.

In other words, Gentle Reader, please don`t expect me to know how we all got here.  I wasn`t there when it happened.  Neither were you.

I think where that Dawkins guy really slips off the rail is in his arrogant conceit when he makes some ridiculous sweeping generalizations about spiritual and religious experience.  As if he would know.  First of all, we are not afraid of hell nor of extinction.  We come into faith through many and very individual journeys that lead us to an experience, perhaps one could say, revelation, of the divine.  This cannot be measured or explained.  It involves a completely distinct organ of the human being from the rational process.  To explain it accurately to someone who hasn't undergone this experience would be quite like trying to describe the colour green to someone who is blind.

Secondly, we do not solicit an invisible, nonexistent God to answer our prayers and make our decisions for us, except perhaps in the very early and immature stages of faith.  Rather we grow into a deepening awareness of the divine presence inhabiting the entire universe, the earth, ourselves and in one another.  We nurture this awareness and we seek a closer communion with God, not out of fear and not out of mental laziness, but because of a spiritual hunger fueled by love and the desire to love and the urge to become better and more complete human beings.

Neither do we ask nor accept easy answers about such trying questions as why is there so much misery and evil in the world if truly there exists a loving God.  Rather, we accept that we live in a broken world, corrupted by sin, of our own doing as human beings.  We acknowledge that this is our mess, not God`s.  He has given us free will, and because of human sin and rebellion we have often abused this gift of free will, polluting our world and now we are going to have to live with some of the most grievous results of our rejection of God`s love: climate change from global warming and all the horrible fallout that could happen to us and our planet.

In other words, Gentle Reader, God created us to be adults.  As adults we cannot fairly expect him to go on wiping our ass for us but it is for us to accept responsibility for our actions and do everything we can to clean up and heal the mess we have made of our humanity and this earth.

So then, the whole process of prayer, of spirituality, lies not in venting our selfish and childish desires by nagging God to do this and that for us or to give us that or this; but to make us more like him, to fill our hearts with love, to transform us into channels of his peace and empower us to become agents of warning and healing and restoration to this broken world in which we live.

Dawkins has it all wrong, but there is no point in confusing him with facts.  His mind is already made up.