Nancy Abrams - A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet

For Joel,
who expands my universe

I must begin by acknowledging that I do not agree with everything that Nancy Abrams says about a scientific understanding of God. I dare say many religious believers will be deeply challenged by this book, but they will come away better for having read it, as we all do when our most cherished views are explored more deeply. Abrams presents a fascinating tour of the universe and interrogates our understanding of God with the skill of a gifted lawyer and historian of science. One is exhilarated to see that there are human beings who are as smart as she clearly is, and I am grateful that she shares her lifelong study so generously and honestly with us.

For centuries we have been stuck in a futile battle between believers and atheists, with each lampooning and denouncing each others beliefs. It is my hope that Abramss book can be part of a new revival of true cultural dialogue, debate, and exploration. We must move beyond the polemics and polarization that have come to characterize so much scientific-religious and interfaith discourse in our time.

The God that I worship is not one that sits in Heaven apprehensively worrying that humanity will discover his (or her) secrets. No, not at all. The God that I believe in commands us to love God with all our mind and wants us to keep learning and discovering and exploring every inch or millimeter (or nanometer) of creation. Over time, we graduate from more simplistic understandings of God to richer and more complex ones.

Far too often God is a God of the gapswhere we fill our lack of knowledge with a belief that there must be a God. For many centuries, when our understanding of the universe extended just to the planets and heavenly stars, we thought God resided just beyond. Then, as our knowledge of the universe expanded, we have pushed God farther and farther out in space and time. God must be much more than just a placeholder for what we do not yet know.

This book will help you clarify your own personal understanding of God. Whether you believe in the biblical interpretation of God, as I do, or in the view that Nancy presents here, or in any other view of God, you will find that your beliefs are enriched by reading Abramss book. I am thrilled that we have the creativity and originality that is exhibited in this book, and I recommend it highly to all, religious or secular, believer or atheist, who are ready to explore honestly their understanding of the divine in our beautiful, expanding universe.

DESMOND TUTU was an archbishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa until he retired in 1996. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. President Nelson Mandela chose him to chair South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which brought to light the atrocities of apartheid, achieved racial reconciliation, and avoided civil war. He continues to be one of the worlds moral leaders and an activist for social and human rights.

Over the past two decades a largely sterile dispute has raged between two diametrically opposing camps: atheists and religious fundamentalists. It is surely time to move on and elevate the discussion to a higher intellectual level. This ambitious and thought-provoking book by Nancy Abrams on the interface of science and religion is a timely and welcome contribution to a more productive discussion of the topic.

The problem that many scientists have with religion is well illustrated by a debate in which I took part many years ago in London at the Royal Society, Britains scientific academy. The panelists included the atheists Herman Bondi and Richard Dawkins. Bondi observed that some people proclaim God is nature. I have nothing against nature, he said. Others assert that God is love. I have nothing against love. What really upset Bondi was the absolute certainty that many religious believers profess to have in a sort of private hot-line to an all-knowing, all-powerful being.

Religion occupies a curious place in the world. For millions of people, following religious practice or belonging to a religious organization frames their lives in important ways and shapes, or even dominates, the structure of their societies. But for millions more, especially in the secular societies of the West, religion is regarded as at best an anachronism, at worst a threat to rational thought and intercultural tolerance. In these post-religious countries, which include most of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser degree, the United States, organized religion has been reduced to a largely ceremonial role. Serious interest in theology is confined to priests and academics. Yet when questioned, most nonreligious people profess to still believe in something, although they are not quite sure what. And this is no surprise. Anthropologists maintain that all ancient cultures had some form of belief in gods or a spiritual realm or an afterlife. Clearly some deeply rooted aspect of the human psyche, presumably a product of evolution, compels us to yearn for something that transcends the daily toil and hurly-burly of modern living, a desire to position our lives in something deeper, even cosmic. We like to feel that we mere mortals are part of a grander scheme of things.

The history of religion over the past three centuries is very much a retreat in the face of scientific advancement to the point where science and atheism tend to go hand-in-hand. Yet many scientists share with Einstein a reverence for the beauty and intelligibility of nature, what Einstein himself called a cosmic religious feeling. Can these vague notions and feelings be sharpened into a concept of God that is thoroughly consistent with science but nevertheless serve what we might call the innate spiritual dimension of human nature?

For adherents of the monotheistic religions, the word God traditionally had a very specific meaning, referring to a sort of Cosmic Magician who has always existed, who brought the universe into being from nothing at some specific moment in the past by a supernatural act, and who intervenes from time to time in the great sweep of history and perhaps in day-to-day affairs. Indeed, the Cosmic Magician is still the image of God in much of popular religion today. Needless to say, invoking a miracle-working deity to explain the world does not play out well with scientists. For that matter, it does not play out well with many serious theologians either, whose concept of God is much more abstract but also more remote. In the words of John Robinson, the Anglican bishop of Woolwich in the 1960s and author of Honest to God, Christian theologians have shifted their belief from a God up there to a God out there to what Paul Tillich calls the ground of beingthat which timelessly sustains physical existence and transcends time and space.

Physicists and cosmologists, familiar as we are with abstract mathematical laws and subtle concepts of reality, have little quarrel with a God that is simply a guarantor of physical laws, considered by many scientists as the ontological soil in which the order found in nature is rooted. Indeed, one can argue that the abstract transcendent God that emerged from classical Christian theology is a natural completion of the reductionist program begun by science.