richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

118 T H E G O D D E L U S I O N
cosmic explosion. Geology reminds us of our brief existence both
as individuals and as a species. It raised John Ruskin's consciousness
and provoked his memorable heart cry of 1851: 'If only the
Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those
dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every
cadence of the Bible verses.' Evolution does the same thing for our
sense of time - not surprisingly, since it works on the geological
timescale. But Darwinian evolution, specifically natural selection,
does something more. It shatters the illusion of design within the
domain of biology, and teaches us to be suspicious of any kind of
design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as well. I think the
physicist Leonard Susskind had this in mind when he wrote, 'I'm
not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern cosmology
really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them,
they provided explanations of our existence that completely
rejected supernatural agents . . . Darwin and Wallace set a standard
not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well.' 61 Other
physical scientists who are far above needing any such
consciousness-raising are Victor Stenger, whose book Has Science
Found God? (the answer is no) I strongly recommend, and Peter
Atkins, whose Creation Revisited is my favourite work of scientific
prose poetry.
I am continually astonished by those theists who, far from
having their consciousness raised in the way that I propose, seem to
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, in the book just mentioned, takes
this line of thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he
postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as
little as possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins's
lazy God is even lazier than the deist God of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment: deus otiosus - literally God at leisure, unoccupied,
unemployed, superfluous, useless. Step by step, Atkins succeeds in
reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally
ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist.
My memory vividly hears Woody Allen's perceptive whine: 'If it
turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the