How I Think: Debate with Richard Dawkins

Here is a photo of Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and well known proponent of atheism.

I agree with Dawkins on so many things---natural selection, the preponderance of religious myth and its destructive role in American intellectual life, particularly with Christianity. It is simply anti-intellectual.

I am also anti-religious and I agree with Christopher Hitchens as well as Dawkins that the world would be a much saner and safer place without religion, especially Christianity. However, I am still a theist in that I understand that the entire universe is based upon a 'god' particle, if you will.

I say 'god particle' because I do not want to mythologize 'god' as the great religions have done. To my way of thinking, the essential point about god is that god is incommunicable, ineffable and radically mysterious in a natural sense. That is to say of all the natural species, there is a species which is not natural which makes possible for the coming to into being of other species---it resembles Aristotle's 'unmoved mover(s)'.

This god species or particle is entirely simple and underlies every complexity in the universe---for example if a physicist discovered the most simple particle that composes the material universe, this is the direction we are looking in. Even though the universe may have begun in a simple unified singularity and then moved in a direction of complexity, this point is unchanging, always the same. As in music, a wonderful chord from which all complexity (nature) springs forth and into which all nature falls home. Further this integral is continuously present to every point in the universe as its origin.

There is more to write but I leave it for another day...