And More Delusions!

Dawkins is "continually astonished by those theists who ... rejoice in natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't need to do anything at all ... Peter Atkins postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life ... literally God at leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless." (p.118)

Reading those words almost made me feel some fleeting sympathy with the creationist position!

But then I remembered something Brian McClaren put in the mouth of one of the characters in 'The Story We Find Ourselves In:
"There’s a popular story that says the universe came into being by itself, and that everything that has happened since has happened by accident. In this particular story, which arose most forcefully in modern Western civilisation, there is no God, no Being beyond our beings, no Creator. In this story we can be at the top of the food chain and every other chain; no one else is around – as far as we know – to challenge our claim to be the Supreme Beings. There is much in this story to flatter our pride, and it’s the story that has fuelled technological advances more than any other. It seems to explain so much. In fact, you could say that this story explains everything about everything … except ... human experience – joy, sorrow, outrage, grief, hope, longing, wonder, love – the awareness that you’re alive and that you’re going to die and that both of those facts matter to you and mean something to you. And, certainly, you’d have to include overtly spiritual human experiences as well.
So, even though it explains so much, this secular story marginalizes so much of human experience, and in the end, I think that this secular version can become a dangerous perversion of the true story. But, again, it does take seriously how … how real creation is. And as a result, people who follow this story have excelled in seeking to understand creation, to learn its language and discover its deep structures and potentials for development.
There’s another story that says this universe is all an illusion, that Being didn’t actually create beings, but that Being simply dreams or imagines beings. In this version of the story, when beings realise their true situation – they aren’t beings at all, but dreams or emanations of Being; they don’t actually exist outside God’s mind at all, but rather are illusions or thoughts inside the mind of Being – they achieve enlightenment by releasing their distinctiveness as beings into the fullness of Being.
There’s a lot about this ancient Eastern story that we need to hear. These days, it often serves as a corrective to the previous modern Western story, I think, by saying the very opposite. The previous story says there is no God or spirit, and this one says there is nothing but God and spirit. And if I was going to be mistaken, I would rather make the latter mistake than the former, because the former story, that God does not exist, was never true, but the latter story, that nothing but God exists, at least used to be true. In other words, according to the ancient Jewish story, it was true before God created anything. This Eastern version reminds us that we beings cannot exist apart from Being, that we are ultimately connected to God and to all that exists in profound ways, ways that are easy to forget in our modern Western world, where the first story often predominates. This Eastern version of the story is, I believe, one of humanity’s most lofty creations.
For me, the ancient Jewish story lies in between the other two, or maybe it arches over both, you know? The ancient Jewish story embraces both the modern Western story and the ancient Eastern story. It acknowledges the modern Western assertion that the universe is real. The ground we are standing on really exists; it’s not just an illusion or a dream, and nor are we. It acknowledge the modern Western belief that the universe operates on many levels according to patterns we call ‘laws of nature’ – a better metaphor that ‘laws’ would perhaps be ‘language’ or ‘music’ of creation. It treats the stuff of the universe as real stuff, and encourages us to study it, to analyse it scientifically, and to do amazing things with it.
And the ancient Jewish story also acknowledges the ancient Eastern assertion that this universe is not independent, that it depends on the Creator so it can come into existence and stay in existence. It also acknowledges that because of our common connection to the Creator, all that exists is interconnected, related, interwoven. It agrees with the Eastern belief that the universe pulsates with meaning, as one would expect of any universe that was spoken by Being into being. And it sees the universe as an expression of the mind and heart of God, in which God’s breath breathes, and God’s language sings, and God’s fingerprints are detected and felt, and God’s signature is read.