Our church recently surveyed people from within and without as to the most pressing questions they’d like to ask Christians. We received a rich pot pourri of responses—the existence of aliens, the Christian understanding of gender, the failures of the Church, will my dog be in heaven and so forth. However, the number one question was surprising in that it was surprisingly classical—Does God exist and how would you know?

Last night Professor Richard Dawkins kicked off the Australian leg of his Science in the Soultour here in Perth. I secured my tickets as soon as I knew he was coming. As someone whose education since high school has been in the humanities and not the sciences, I was looking forward to hearing from a teacher of science as well-versed and eloquent as Dawkins.

It was fun to see Dawkins in person. And John Safran was an inspired host after Lawrence Krauss had to withdraw. Dawkins was, as ever, engaging and erudite. The night had something of a greatest hits tour vibe to it. I’ve read The God Delusion more than once and heard Dawkins many times in podcasts and on YouTube. I didn’t hear anything I had not already heard. I assume the same was true for most in the audience. The palpable enthusiasm of the crowd came more from a desire to pay homage to a honoured teacher and not because anyone was learning anything they didn’t already know.

Given the title (Science in the Soul) I was a little surprised how much the night was about atheism and religion and how little it was about science. Never mind. I can always buy the book. God, I guess, is just too interesting to ignore.

Our church recently surveyed people from within and without as to the most pressing questions they’d like to ask Christians. We received a rich pot pourri of responses—the existence of aliens, the Christian understanding of gender, the failures of the Church, will my dog be in heaven and so forth. However, the number one question was surprising in that it was surprisingly classical—Does God exist and how would you know?

The question reflects the shift of onus that comes with cultural change. If we’d been born 200 years ago, nearly all of us would have believed in God. We may or may not have been particularly religious. Our attendance at church or synagogue may have been patchy. But we would have thought that God existed.

As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has demonstrated, this belief would not likely have been the result of a particularly rigorous investigation of evidence or arguments for God. It just would have seemed obvious. Everybody around us believed and that made it easy.

This social aspect of belief is often produced as evidence against religion. But it’s true both ways. Secularism today is sustained much as religious belief once was—by a vast network of reinforcing practices, cultural narratives and belief-conditions that make the views we hold feel self-evident and simply the way things are.

Which God?

Dawkins treated us to a satirical reading from his Science in the Soul book. In the passage, Dawkins substitutes belief in God for belief in Thor, thus demonstrating how absurd the claims of theologians and believers look when applied to a god in which they do not believe. It was amusing. As a parlour game, it works well. As a serious argument it does not.

In 2016 the theologian David Bentley Hart published his brilliant, grumpy book, The Experience of God because he was frustrated precisely by this sort of thing.

Historically, Hart demonstrates, humans have believed in gods—powerful, non-human, personal agents active in our world. Even in secular Australia the average citizen could generate a list of dozens of such gods—Thor, Zeus, Neptune; Baal, Marduk, Ra; Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Our language is littered with memory of their existence and worship. Thursday is Thor’s day. Wednesday is Woden’s day and so on.

These gods no longer receive our prayers or command our loyalties: victims of their own lack of evidence, or the forgetfulness and impiety of their worshippers. And atheists like Dawkins see themselves as simply continuing the tradition—doing to Allah, HaShem or Jesus Christ what has already been done to all those other gods.

But, as Hart points out, this isn’t what Christians (or, for that matter Aristotle, Maimonides, Avicenna, Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Keith Ward or any serious theist) means by the word “God.” “God” isn’t on the list of stuff that exists. He’s the ground and source of all existence.

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