God and the Atheist
Albert Weinstein
Mt. Vernon Unitarian Church
December 7, 1997
See Kenn Hurto's response:
Please turn to the Covenant in the back of the hymnal and read with me the second sentence that begins with the words “the quest for truth.”
The quest for truth is its daily task.
I proposed that we pursue that quest this morning.
Several months ago, our minister, Kenn Hurto, commented on the front page of the Windmill that someone had said “Only idiots believe in God.”
Not only was I not that someone, but I don’t think that way nor do I believe that statement. It is not true.
Professor Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist and author of the book The Blind Watchmaker, while not condemning all those who believer in God to be idiots does maintain that people who believe that life came into being for a purpose are not only mistaken but ignorant. He goes on to say “Only the scientifically illiterate accept the ‘why’ question where living creatures are concerned. There is no evidence to support religions and nowadays the better educated admit it.
Dawkins, too, is obviously guilty of an overstatement.
In a survey of 1,000 randomly selected scientists listed in the reference book, American Men and Women of Science, the University of Georgia historian Edward J. Larson found that today 70% of physicists and astronomers, a group to which I belong, have no use for a God or an afterlife. But that leaves 30%, a very significant fraction, that do believe. From a rational view, I find such belief difficult to understand. As Yul Bruyner cried in exasperation in The Kind and I, when trying to understand the English schoolteacher, “It is a puzzlement.”
Clearly, those who do believe are neither idiots nor scientifically illiterate. Significantly among the believers is Dr. Charles Townes who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theories that led to the invention of the now ubiquitous laser. I was privileged to briefly provide some staff support to Dr. Townes in the early 1960’s. Surely, it is not necessary for me to attest to his being both very literate and of unquestioned superior intelligence. He is a non-doctrinaire churchgoer, accepts the Bible as a record of history, and sees “no strong conflict with contemporary science unless you insist on taking the Scripture literally.”
Occasionally I am asked what event might have made me an atheist. In response, I usually reply that, unlike Saul on the road to Damascus, I did not have a sudden vision of the truth.
Although my grandmother was very orthodox, my parents were not. They did go to the synagogue on the high holy days, dragging my brother and me with them. I do recall being strongly influenced in reading of the epic struggle between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan during the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1923. I was especially impressed with the dramatic exchange during which Darrow asked Bryan whether he would believe it if the Bible said that Jonah swallowed the whale in stead of the other way around. When Bryan, a literal adherent of the Bible, indicate that he would, my uncontrolled laughter put me in Darrow’s court. During that trial, Darrow was derisively described as the “great agnostic,” consequently I identified myself with him and became one of his many disciples. Many years later, it was the carnage of WW II in which I participated, whose “day of infamy” was 56 years ago today, and the subsequent knowledge of the horrors of the holocaust that resolved all doubt in my mind.
Faith is the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion. The true believers have the answers to the eternal questions of how the world and life were created. The answers are simple, understandable and complete. Especially for the fundamentalists of all religions, the answers are absolute and passionately held. For them, there is no need to search further.
But faith is also the beginning of science. It is the scientist’s faith in his hypothesis that inspires him to proceed with his observations and experiments and motivates him to continue to do so despite many disappointments and setbacks. His answers are never complete and always subject to challenge, test and revision. Although as it evolves, science provides many answers, many questions still remain. For many people, the answers seem preposterous, indeed as preposterous as the idea of a round earth was to our ancient ancestors. Especially in the area of cosmology there is much mystery. But mystery is the stimulus that drives the search for knowledge and results in increased understanding.
Albert Einstein said, “The fairest thing that we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science.” Stephen Hawking, the British physicist, wrote “One of the beauties of the undiscovered is that it is undiscovered.”
Throughout past years, repeated surveys in this church have determined that approximately six percent of its members identify themselves as atheists. Perhaps foremost among them is Alan Searle, one of those who had the courage and optimism to found the Mt. Vernon Unitarian Church. If the truth were known, I suspect that there are many more members who are non-believers but who for various reasons hesitate to be so identified. Perhaps it is the unjustified negative implications of being an atheist that makes them consider it to be—well—not quite kosher. The number of atheists in the survey was balanced by an approximately equal number of theists, those that believed in the supernatural. In these surveys, the preponderance of the members considered themselves to be humanists, which also included the atheists and theists.
From an historical perspective, it is interesting to recall that the early Christians were considered to be atheists by the Romans because they did not believe in their Gods.
Being an atheist is not without it financial penalties.
Alan Bligh, a former member of the Board of Trustees of this church was my colleague and closest friend. Before his death almost six years ago, he and I jointly owned a sailboat that we raced for twenty years on the Chesapeake Bay. One day as we were tied up in our berth in Annapolis doing some repairs, Alan, who we naturally called Captain Bligh, was down in the open cabin while I was up above in the cockpit. At one point I noticed him picking something up from the deck. Holding it in his hands he looked up at me and asked, “Al, whose money is this?” Before I could respond, he said “It can’t be yours—it says in God We Trust” and quickly pocketed the money.
How do we search for the truth?
We cannot use the lantern that Demosthenes did in his futile attempt to find an honest man. The most effective instrument available to each of us is the mind and its reasoning capability. That is what Einstein used; he had no telescopes or spacecraft. His was the laboratory of the mind. Based on knowledge and experience we too can separate facts from myths. When we do so we find that there is no supernatural entity called God that exists somewhere in the heavens or outer space that crated the universe and determines its destiny, that listens to and answers prayers, that rewards our good acts and punishes our transgressions. The man-made God of the orthodox Hebrews, Christians, and Muslims does not exist despite the incantations of the Pope, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and the televangelists.
Up to this point, I believe that our minister, Kenn Hurto, are in complete agreement.
Where then is the difference?
Although I reject orthodox religions, I am very orthodox in the use of the English language; as the late Senator Sam Erwin said during the Watergate hearing, “it is my mother tongue.” It is a very good language capable of expressing almost every thought.
Dictionaries define the meaning of words. Webster’s defines God as “the Being perfect in power, wisdom and goodness whom men worship as creator and ruler of the Universe.” That is what the word God means to more than 95% of this nation’s population. Nowhere in the dictionary does it say that God is love or that God is within each of us. And yet those are the phrases that I keep hearing from this pulpit. It is, I believe a symptom of the desperate desire to hold onto the word, if not its meaning, that motivates many Unitarians to redefine God. Often they say God when they mean nature because by dong so they can avoid being classified as an atheist. Incidentally that is not true for all of this Church’s previous ministers. We had one that explicitly classified herself/himself as an atheist.
There is no need to redefine nature. Just as the Unitarian Minister Fulgham wrote, we learned its meaning in kindergarten.
Nature is all encompassing, beautiful and magnificent. Nothing is more awe inspiring than the sight of stars sparkling in splendor overhead on a clear and moonless night. Since early times humans have wondered about its meaning and interpreted the apparent patterns among the stars in religious terms. In 134 BC, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus organized them into a catalog of forty-eight constellations. Since then, the number of perceived patterns has almost doubled to eight-eight. On a winder night, I love to see Orion the Hunter stride across the sky followed by his loyal dog star, Sirius, the brightest star visible to the naked eye. Large telescopes and more recently the Hubble space telescope have extended our vision to about one hundred billion trillion miles to the horizon of the observable universe.
Although the cosmos is not conscious of our existence we have come to know many of her secrets very well. As revealed by the Hubble pictures of the Eagle and Orion Nebula, it is somewhat breathtaking to see stars in the process of being born. For me at least there is more religion in trying to understand nature’s natural majesty than all the artificial religions made by man. It is the most fundamental of religions. Those who practice it can be as passionate in describing the grandeur of the Universe as any evangelist.
The Reverend A. Powell Davies, who died in 1957, was undoubtedly the most famous Unitarian minister in the Washington area during the past half century. He not only served as the minister of the All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington from the mid 1940’s to the late 1950’s but in fact, by means of a telephone line, the first minister of this church. Part of his fame came from his publicly standing up to Joe McCarthy during the latter’s infamous smear and rear campaign.
Among the many classic sermons delivered by A. Powell Davies was “The Right to Disbelieve.” In it he tells of the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who refused to allow a statue of Thomas Paine to be located in that city claiming that Paine was a non-believer and therefore too controversial to be honored by the devout citizens of his city. Paine was the pamphleteer who during the American Revolution published the tracts that gave renewed heart to the soldiers, including George Washington, who were often suffering in deep despair and devoid of hope. Indeed many historians credit Paine with having save the revolution. He is regarded by them as one of this nation’s finest patriots. Davies goes on to note that the right not only to believe but to disbelieve, as Paine did, is embedded in the Constitution. Furthermore, he argues, disbelievers are not expected to be quiet about it. Obviously I practice what Davies preached.
Let me conclude today’s quest for truth by admitting that I actually like the idea of an all powerful God who created everything within six days. It is much more understandable than believing that some billions of years ago all of the universe including the sun, the zillions of stars, the planets and you and I were contained within a volume very much less than that of a pea, that as you sit here, seemingly at rest, in fact you are spinning around at more than a million miles per hour, that all the atoms in our bodies were once inside a star, and that there are many other universes of which ours, through a process of cosmological natural selection, has just the correct characteristics to allow us to exist.
The God concept is good and simple. My principal lament is that it is not true and that no redefinition can change that.
Nature is not God and God is not nature. Nature is what it has always been from the beginning and will be to the end of time. It is awesome, mysterious and magnificent.
Now, ain’t that the truth!