By Peter Bolland

Atheism isn't really new. It's as old as the idea of God itself. At the dawn of history, the first time someone said, “There is a God,” the guy standing next to him said, “No, there isn't.” And we've been arguing about it ever since.

In the 10 years since 9/11, a raft of writers have published best-selling books championing the well-worn idea that God is an invention of our overactive collective imagination, an invention humanity would be a lot better off without.

At the head of the pack of the so-called “new atheists” is Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion, published in 2006, spent 51 weeks on The New York Times best-sellers list and has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and has little patience for any claim that cannot be supported by empirical evidence. For him, belief in the virgin birth, Creationism and the existence of an invisible cosmic overlord is utterly groundless—or worse. “Religion,” said Dawkins in a recent New York Times interview, “teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers.”

Dawkins is not alone in his critique of the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. He joins a brilliant and esteemed list of philosophers including David Hume, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nagarjuna, John Stuart Mill, Noam Chomsky, George Santayana and Michel Foucault.

Other famous atheists range from the not-at-all surprising (Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud) to the unexpected (Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller). Thoughtful, inventive, creative and courageous people throughout history have, sometimes at great personal and professional risk, dared to question the central paradigm of Western civilization—that the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad is real.

Answers, Not Just Questions
But atheism doesn't just ask questions—it asserts answers. By making a specific truth claim, namely, that there is no God, atheism is vulnerable to the same criticism it levies against theism. Whether or not you claim there is a God, you still have to supply evidence to support your claim and present that evidence in a framework we can all accept. The devil is always in the details.

Where Dawkins' brand of atheism falls short is in its misestimation of the human capacity to know. For Dawkins, religion is a failed science—a science utterly without evidence or sound hypotheses. What he is unwilling to consider is the possibility that religion and science do not share a common epistemology. The process by which one establishes knowledge or certainty in science is different from the process by which one establishes knowledge or certainty in religion. Scientific certainty is founded solely on empirical (sensory) evidence, whereas religious conviction is founded on externally unverifiable inner experience. Religious claims are therefore prone to a host of criticisms from an empirical epistemological stance. To scientists like Dawkins, religion is nothing more than a long list of misunderstandings amplified through time and concretized by tradition. Gone from even the realm of consideration is the possibility that there are ways of apprehending reality other than through sensory data and conceptual thought. What if nonsensory awareness or direct, unmediated experience carries its own epistemological weight? As Native American philosopher Vine Deloria puts it, “We may misunderstand, but we do not mis-experience.” Learning to humbly trust the authority of our own inner awareness gives birth to an epistemology unbound by intellect and the limiting mechanics of logic.
   
The Changing God-Concept
Ironically, atheism does religion a great favor by laying bare the absurdities inherent in any attempt to conceptualize the ground of being. If the formless ground of being that we commonly personify as God is the source of all reality (including our conceptual minds), then of course any mere concept of God falls woefully short of the reality it purports to describe, leaving all such concepts susceptible to ridicule.

Whether we like Dawkins' conclusion or not, we can understand and appreciate the importance of his inquiry. Throughout history, the God idea has done as much harm as good. Religious wars, oppression, conquests and crusades have left us battered and bloodied. Given the rise in popularity of atheism in the post-9/11 world, it is clear that a great number of people are frustrated by religion, especially fundamentalism in its many forms.

Atheists like Dawkins capture a wide audience because they deftly skewer outdated and outmoded God-concepts. The God-concept attacked by atheism is a God-concept many of us have already left behind—the angry, judgmental, anthropomorphic God who commands unquestioning obedience to an endless list of confusing and often conflicting dictates administered by an authoritarian church. However, in their haste to abandon religion many people have cut ties with their innate spirituality as well.

A genuinely scientific, open-minded approach to the God question would allow for the possibility that while the existence of God cannot be proven within the bounds of empirical science, God may still exist. In this sense Dawkins does not disappoint. He believes that evolution is progressive and inherently leads to increasingly complex forms. The emergence of conscious beings from the primordial ooze strongly suggests the possibility of significant future evolutionary development. If there was no God “in the beginning,” could there be one now or in the future? “Yes,” says Dawkins, “it is highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures,” and if there aren't, there could be someday. Such is the power and potential of evolution. Admittedly, these are not the sort of gods that populate creation myths the world over but are rather the result of a long, unguided process of mutation and natural selection of desirable traits—the culmination of evolution, not its genesis.

What Dawkins is unwilling to concede, despite eons of experiential evidence, is that God-consciousness is not just a future possibility, the end-point of eons of evolutionary progress, but the starting point of it all. If God-consciousness is the source of everything as well as the essential nature of everything, then it is impossible to turn God into a mere concept let alone a logically sound one. Trying to define God is like trying to see your own eyes.

“The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness,” said Nisargadatta Maharaj in his classic of Vedanta philosophy I Am That. “To know the source is to be the source.” We cannot turn God into a thought because God is the very act of thinking itself. Asking us to explain God is like asking a fish to explain water. We cannot point to a disembodied thing called God because God is what everything is. This brand of religious philosophy, dismissively called pantheism by mainstream theologians, offers an alternative to the tired theism/atheism debate.

By challenging an outmoded concept of God and the crippling propensity of mainstream religious doctrine to jettison rational thought, Dawson is performing an invaluable service. Arguably, he is helping us all move forward out of millennia of dogmatic authoritarian hearsay and toward a spirituality grounded in experiential knowing. As Carl Jung famously remarked, “Religion is a defense against the experience of God,” and as such ought to be critically examined by all who wish to deepen their authentic spiritual practice. Dawkins' well-reasoned attack on traditional religious belief is pushing us away from the shallow end of the pool and into deeper waters. From here we can see the other side.
   
Satisfaction Not Guaranteed
In any debate, theological and otherwise, the goal is not to eliminate dissension and compress the baffling complexity of reality into a single, simplistic proposition. No matter how deep our longing, humanity's search for meaning cannot be reduced to an up-or-down vote on the existence of God. The purpose of thoughtful discourse is to allow conflicting truth claims to polish each other to a shining luster in the rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of rigorous yet mutually beneficial dialogue. And in the great sorting, the chaff is left on the granary floor, laying bare the wheat that nourishes us on the long road to wisdom. Moving past simple scenarios of this or that, we finally begin to appreciate the need to grow beyond slavish attachment to rigid opinions or positions. Maybe the question of God's existence can never be answered to everyone's satisfaction.  “The great and most important problems in life are utterly unsolvable,” said Jung. “They can never be solved, but only outgrown.” Instead of regarding the new atheism as either true or false, we might do well to consider it yet another facet of the unfolding of evolutionary consciousness, a welcome corrective to our natural tendency to cling to old narratives and conceptual frameworks that no longer serve our highest good.