richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

154 T H E G O I) D R I, U S I O N
to theologians that their God had to be complex? Scientific
arguments, such as those I was accustomed to deploying in my own
field, were inappropriate since theologians had always maintained
that God lay outside science.
I did not gain the impression that the theologians who mounted
this evasive defence were being wilfully dishonest. I think they were
sincere. Nevertheless, I was irresistibly reminded of Peter
Medawar's comment on Father Teilhard de Chardin's The
Phenomenon of Man, in the course of what is possibly the greatest
negative book review of all time: 'its author can be excused of dishonesty
only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has
taken great pains to deceive himself'. 73 The theologians of my
Cambridge encounter were defining themselves into an
epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach
them because they had declared by fiat that it could not. Who was
I to say that rational argument was the only admissible kind of
argument? There are other ways of knowing besides the scientific,
and it is one of these other ways of knowing that must be deployed
to know God.
The most important of these other ways of knowing turned out
to be personal, subjective experience of God. Several discussants at
Cambridge claimed that God spoke to them, inside their heads, just
as vividly and as personally as another human might. I have dealt
with illusion and hallucination in Chapter 3 ('The argument from
personal experience'), but at the Cambridge conference I added
two points. First, that if God really did communicate with humans
that fact would emphatically not lie outside science. God comes
bursting through from whatever other-worldly domain is his
natural abode, crashing through into our world where his messages
can be intercepted by human brains - and that phenomenon has
nothing to do with science? Second, a God who is capable of sending
intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of
receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be,
whatever else he might be, simple. Such bandwidth! God may not
have a brain made of neurones, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he
has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more
elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or
the largest computer we know.