Albert Einstein's declaration that, "I am a deeply religious nonbeliever." is one of my favorites. Perhaps, it's a bit of personal hubris, but I've always felt a strong sense of identification with this quote. I love its paradox and hopefulness. How can one be deeply religious and yet a nonbeliever? Einstein was very clear about his non-belief in a personal God. Yet he also said that, "Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all." He saw God in the same light that Spinoza had, as a magnificent, beautiful, and awe inducing order and harmony that is the essence of our universe. The astronomer Carl Sagan observed that Einstein "more or less," viewed, "God as the sum total of the laws of physics." This is not a very appealing vision of the divine for most people.
I'm afraid that where I fall short in Einstein's view is that while a personal God has no meaning for me, I've never yet been able to discover a concept of the divine that I could latch onto as both meaningful and consistent. So, if you want to label me an atheist—I prefer nontheist if a label be needed—I'm a very odd kind of atheist, one who keeps looking for God.
In Robert Wright's book, The Evolution of God, which provided our first reading this morning, we heard Wright say he hoped that his concept of God would become clear by the end of the book. While I agree with a reviewer who called this book brilliant, I also have to say that Wright's conception of the divine even after his nearly 500 pages have run their course remains fairly muddy to me. What Wright's concept seems to say is that in examining the history of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Chrisianity, and Islam) one can grasp a sense of progress in human morality and behavior. This leads Wright to make what seems to me to be a gigantic leap of faith and declare that moral order is an external reality, that it has an objective existence. Based on these premises Wright then proposes an abstract conception of God as the source of moral order in the universe.
First, is Wright correct when he asserts that there has been moral progress? Perhaps is the closest that I could come to agreeing with this proposition. Wright's own analysis seems to point to political, economic, and social forces as drivers for spreading acceptance and tolerance to others. Even more fundamental, it seems to me, are the interconnected phenomena of population growth and technology as drivers of human moral perceptions. Recall Newberg and Waldman's finding in the second reading that a person, who focuses on a vindictive God to justify harming others, can actually damage his brain in the process. This can lead to a permanent loss of concern for others or a propensity for aggressive acts. Newberg and Waldman further speculate that fear based religions may produce symptoms that mimic post-traumatic stress disorder. Since all the Abrahamic scriptures contain these damaging images of the divine, they provide a potential unmitigated source of moral backsliding. Moral progress then becomes a contingent perception, to the extent that it has any reality.
Second, Wright shares with Einstein the idea of a deity based on order in the universe - physical order in Einstein's case and moral order on Wright's part. Einstein would seem to have some objective claim for an order in nature, but where is the evidence for a moral order? Einstein was of the opinion that morality was important for human beings not for God. I think that's closer to the truth. The universe to me seems neutral about good and bad, leaving the possibility for either. Speaking in terms of the traditional personal God the physicist, Steven Weinberg put this issue as, "... the God of birds and trees would also have to be the God of birth defects and cancer."
Perhaps, now I should let some theologians get a foot in the door here. In the 20th century Paul Tillich developed a theology based on a meld of existentialist philosophy and Christian revelation. What emerged from this was an abstract view of God as the ground of being. More recently Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong has argued that, "Christianity must reinvent itself and that 'theism as a way of defining God is dead." While many theologians were enthusiastic about these approaches, popular opinion seems generally as unmoved by these conceptions as they were with Einstein and will be with Wright's ideas too in my opinion
But why, that's the question? Here's my answer in a word: evolution. Evolution has given us brains that are attuned to survival by interacting with other humans. We're brilliant at reading emotion, intent, and purpose in others. And it leads us to personify all kinds of objects where it's not appropriate: cars, computers, telephones, cameras, even chairs when we stub our toe. Last, and perhaps most important on this list, is personification of the universe itself. This is at least some explanation for the human difficulty in doing science and goes a long way to explaining why as Aristotle put it, "men create gods after their own image." Science is, in part, a discipline for overcoming such problems. Perhaps a future religion might take a page from scientific methodology.
So, if a personal God is untenable and abstract concepts of God are unappealing, where should we turn? Well, I think perhaps a religious humanism as espoused by the UU theologian William Murry might fill the bill. If providential care is not to come from the divine, don't we owe it to ourselves and humanity in general to see that it comes through human agency? Even if you're a theist could this be a bad thing? Beyond that I think that if we could concentrate on human wants and needs, on what humanity is and can be, on our science, our art, and our music we could make astonishing progress in human knowledge and affairs. Such knowledge might one day enable us to understand with a new clarity both our humanity and our reaching for the divine.
In our second reading today, Andrew Newberg says that, "... the moment God is introduced to the human brain, the neurological concept will not go away." Oh, how true that is even for this oddball atheist. But this summer is waning. So let's give it a rest, relax, and enjoy some easy livin' from now through Labor Day. If God could trust our Unitarian forbears to be on their own for a whole summer, won't we be okay if we have a few weeks without theologizing? Enjoy yourselves, and I won't say, "Don't go near the water." Sometimes the past is just that: past. It's the future we must look to: the future of religion with or without God. May it be so.