I am currently reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, having been given it as a present. I doubt if I would have bought it myself, but having been given it, one can hardly refuse to read it.
After having read about a quarter of it, I am moved to comment. Dawkins can cite all sorts of examples where religious people have done vile things in the name of their religion. But these are irrelevant to his main theme that there is no God. It boils down to the belief that nothing can exist which cannot be examined by the scientific method. This is a belief system which cannot be dealt with scientifically, simply because it would be impossible to devise a means of falsification of this hypothesis. This central belief of Dawkins is either true or false (a delusion?), but it cannot be examined by the scientific method. For if God is, by definition, beyond this physical universe, outside it as well as able to communicate with it, then there is, also by definition, no way to disprove this, or to prove it.
As a Christian I do not ever try to prove the existence of God to others, though I am aware of all sorts of 'arguments' that have been devised, in the hope of giving intellectual support to a belief in God. Try a Google search on 'ontological' and you will see what I mean.
And the God I believe in has been very explicit about the difference between the physical universe, the things that science can observe and measure, or - to use a Biblical phrase - the 'things that are seen', and that which is beyond the physical universe, the 'things that cannot be seen'. This comes in Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, and it is good to check out the different translations. 'The things that are seen are temporal (AV) / transient (RSV) / temporary (NIV), but the things that are not seen are eternal (AV/RSV/NIV). Which is why Paul urges that we should 'fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.' [2 Cor. 4:18]
I have never seen God, and again the Bible tells us that this is something no one from inside this physical universe has ever done, rather implying that it can never be done. The apostles remind their followers about this: 'Though you have not seen him, you love him.' [1 Peter 1:8]. 'No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us ...' [1 John 4:12]
So I am just one of a vast body of people who experience God in a way that no scientific method could ever examine, or measure. 'We know that we live in him, and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.' [1 John 4:13]
This internal experience is where we Christians come from. In some way which is totally real, but also totally impossible to prove to anyone else, and very hard even to explain to anyone else, we experience God. But there is certainly one condition that I must fulfil for this experience to be possible: I must open myself to God. The Psalmist expressed it thus: 'O Lord you have searched me and you know me ... before a word is on my tongue you know it completely ... search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts ...' [Psalm 139 extracts].
I have written elsewhere how this adventure began for me, how I was challenged to open my heart and innermost being to the Lord. Nearly fifty years later the reality of it all is so familiar that Professor Dawkins' certainties leave me cold, and I think it will take real scientists (and I do not claim to be one) to demonstrate to him where the boundaries of science are.
