The God Delusion

I am reading Richard Dawkins' the 'God Delusion' again. First time I read it, I had a good laugh, at least at the beginning. In fact, there were moments I laughed aloud. You see, he has such a talent in pin-pointing the absurdities of the established religions, beliefs and structures. His acute sarcasm resonated well with my own disappointments and - maybe - sense of betrayal from the time I personally struggled with remnants of my faith. Yet he didn't tell me anything new and the more I read the more disappointed I was. I finished the book with a feeling that he missed a point. I didn't quite know what it was, but I knew that he didn't find a way to 'convert' believers to atheism.

Now, I should probably state my position. I am one of those scorned by both sides - clergy and Richard Dawkins. I am an agnostic.

Well, I haven't started this way. Nobody does. According to J Piaget, we all develop through certain stages and some of us achieve ability to propose and discuss abstract ideas only at the age of 11 (formal operational stage). Some of us, because others remain throughout their life on the previous level of development, that is concrete operational stage.

Richard Dawkins, whose other books on evolution I loved, seems to forget that majority of believers are different from his college and university students. If they were able to consider abstract ideas, weigh pros and cons and make informed decisions about invisible entities, there would be much bigger competition for every available place at the university... And I remember some cries in the media here, in Britain, that they have to close many faculties and colleges of mathematics and physics, because nobody wants (is able) to study it!

On the other hand, Dawkins wants to discuss God as if he was a physical entity. He wants to talk in terms of probability. He rejects NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria). He, a biologist, scorns the idea that theological issues should be left to theologians.

I guess, he never studied theology.

Now, I don't believe he should regret it. I did and it was the most mind-blowing experience in my life. (I used to be a Catholic). You have to forget logic, you have to give up any right to question why and how, to squeeze your mind into this particular way of thinking required by (at least Catholic) dogmatism.

Unlike Dawkins, I studied nuclear physics and not biology before I thrown myself into this miserable affair with theology. I used to think about functions and multi-dimensional space and knew I couldn't expect to see the subject of my experiments. After all, biology even on the lowest level deals with molecular particles that can be visualised under an electron microscope. You cannot visualise a quark or mion. (Therefore we needed this Large Hadron Collider - but we are not expecting to see any hadrons there. We will see their interactions with the matter and test some theories!)

Anyway, studying theology requires completely different set of skills than those expected from a physicist. First you have to forget everything you learnt when studying physics (and biology as well). The closest analogy would be though mathematics.

Take for example field algebra or Hilbert space. You don't expect to find a direct connection to your home and daily experiences. It is a reality in itself. Yes, physicists use some algebraic forms to formulate hypotheses. But they evade common senses. It is a separate magisterium and I don't believe Richard Dawkins would propose weighing probability to establish if a given Hilbert's space really exists. It does exist in the mind of the mathematician and his colleagues if he shares his ideas with them.

And then they are things that we all share (to a point) and yet they cannot be a subject of logical analysis.

We all experience love. We dream of peace. We demand justice. We crave some sense of life. A scientific approach to these internal experiences is vain. We find personal answers and hope that we share them with others.

I am afraid that God belongs to this category. He is your reality if you believe. It doesn't exist if you don't.