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Can a Smart Person Believe in God? is the provocative title of a book by Michael Guillen, theoretical physicist and former science correspondent for ABC News (he has a Ph. D. in three disciplines, physics, mathematics and astronomy, from Cornell). His answer is, of course, yes, and naturally I concur.

Scientists (40%) Believe in a Personal God

It is possible that the rejection of God by mainstream scientists has been overstated. An article in Nature cited by Guillen showed that about 40 percent of American physical scientists believe in a personal God.

The strident atheists who grab the public limelight are not representative of all scientists. And they are not acting scientifically in any event, because they are asserting iron-clad belief in something that cannot be proven: that there is no God. That is certainly a matter of faith.

What Kind of God Do You Not Believe In?

The issue is what kind of God one believes in, or indeed what kind of God one does not believe in. I recall the story of a scientist visiting Northern Ireland in the 1970s who was confronted by a group demanding to know whether he was Catholic or Protestant. He replied that he was an atheist, whereupon he was asked: "All well and good, sir, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?"

Walt Whitman famously said: God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.

That is a terrible picture of a creator. I certainly do not find fault with non-believers for not believing in absurd ideas about what God was conceived to be in eras long gone… or that should be long gone. I too reject the following gods.

• Any god who hates or is vindictive. 

• Any god who is pleased by cruelty or slaughter in his name. 

• Any god needing groveling subservience or slavish worship from mortals. (The really great do not need to be constantly told that they are great.)

• Any god who is jealous of other gods springing from the human imagination. 

• Any god who is made of matter. (Then who made the matter?)

• Any god who lives in a heaven somewhere "up there" in our Universe. (Then who or what made the Universe?)

If this sounds irreverent that's as it should be. I believe that a real God delights in irreverence. Perhaps what the world needs is a book of favorite God jokes, not to ridicule God but to laugh with him.

Science Cannot Discern Beauty

There is no doubt that science does a superb job of explaining the workings of nature. But I maintain that the human experience cannot be captured in the same way by science. No scientific experiment can discern good from evil, nor what is beautiful. Writing about the objective investigation of science Schroedinger said:

It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near our heart, that really matters to us. ...it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. (Nature and the Greeks, 1951)

There are no generally accepted laws and theories by which to understand God, nothing corresponding to the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism or the general theory of relativity on the side of religion. Institutional religions disagree with each other. Sometimes, alas, they even hate each other.

What Is The Key?

The key is to understand our own nature. Remember: "Thou art that." Your essence (atman or soul or Christ within) is the same as God's. The simple recognition of that opens the door to a spiritual perspective that does not need the trappings and dogmas of organized religion.

Our origin and ultimate destiny are straightforward. Like a cup full of water from the ocean, there is no difference between the contents of the cup (us) and the ocean (God). And when this creation comes to an end, the water in the cup is poured back into the ocean. But in the meantime we are on a free will trip living an adventure in physical reality.

We even have the freedom to do things that are destructive, although that is not such a good idea and must ultimately be balanced by the workings of karma, which is likely to be unpleasant. And it is somehow part of the creation plan that the water in the cup is altered by the experience, so that when it is poured back even the infinite consciousness that is God is enriched by our experience, which is, of course, really his experience all along, disguised as us.

Experiencing Reality in a Meaningful Way

The experiencing of reality in a meaningful way requires a certain amount of forgetfulness about what we truly are. For most of us in a given lifetime that forgetfulness is almost complete. Add to that the religious misinterpretations about who we are and what God is, or on the other hand the simplistic "you are nothing but a pack of neurons" explanation, and it becomes very difficult to access the deepest truth within our own consciousness: "Thou are that."

I believe that we live in a purpose-guided universe governed by the laws of science. There is no conflict between a universe of matter and forces and a universe of purpose, because the purpose is what went into the laws. In order for God to let himself experience a part of his potential, he imagined into existence just the right characteristics that a universe needed to have in order for life to originate and then to evolve into complex beings, such as you and I. His consciousness caused this and it is his consciousness that we share and that is our essence. But the arena in which all this takes place is fully governed by the laws of nature including Darwinian evolution.

Hence there is ample reason to believe in Einstein, Darwin, and God.

This article is excerpted with permission from the book:

The Purpose-Guided Universe
by Bernard Haisch.

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from THE PURPOSE GUIDED UNIVERSE ©2010 Bernard Haisch.  Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ.  800-227-3371.  All rights reserved.

Click here for more info and/or to order this book on Amazon.

About the Author

Bernard Haisch, PhD is an astrophysicist and author of The God Theory and more than 130 scientific publications. He was a scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for 10 years. His professional positions include deputy director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at U.C.-Berkeley; and visiting scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute für Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. He was also editor in chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Prior to his career in astrophysics, Haisch attended the St. Meinrad Seminary as a student for the Catholic priesthood. Visit his website atwww.thegodtheory.com/

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