It’s rare for a book about science to polarize the general public, but when such a book takes on religious questions, the combination is highly combustible. Richard Dawkins, already reputed as a contentious writer in the ongoing debate about evolution, has no problem striking a match. In his bestseller this fall, The God Delusion (no subtitle necessary because no quarter is given) he assaults the proposition that there is, or ever has been, any value in the idea of God.

Dawkins’ position is absolute, drawing a line in the sand between science (rational, progressive, verifiable, and tied to physical laws) and religion (archaic, primitive, irrational, and tied to little more than emotional need). If The God Delusion only existed to draw this line, it would hardly be worth notice. Science is triumphant and has been for many generations. What could be the use of a scathing attack on religion post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Einstein? The answer (leaving aside Dawkins’ delight in a war of words) is timely: fundamentalism. In the wake of Intelligent Design as a defense of creationism and the rise of religious-inspired terrorism, in the face of the Bush administration’s thwarting of stem-cell research on religious grounds, among other benighted positions (Bush has nice words to say about Intelligent Design and dismissive ones about global warming), many scientists feel that reason itself is under siege.

The God Delusion is a reflexive counterpunch, a derisive, often entertaining polemic against unreason. It’s hard not to admire Dawkins’ skill when he compares the narrow spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies that our senses can detect to the slit in a burka worn by Muslim women. In both instances one’s vision becomes very limited. As with any good debater, Dawkins relishes unfairness in a good cause. To implicitly lump all believers into the same bag as Jerry Falwell and mullahs in Iran ignores a thousand divisions of faith. To portray God as an anthropomorphic patriarch sitting above the sky ignores thousands of years of theology and philosophy. Allah isn’t personified, neither is Yahweh in the Old Testament or Brahman in Hinduism, not to mention belief systems like Taoism and Buddhism that dispense with God but retain a transcendent dimension .

Dawkins sweeps aside some of the greatest minds in history who took God seriously (Plato, Socrates, Hegel, Kant, Aquinas, Newton) because they haven’t kept up with the latest issue of Scientific American, as he has. His book has been widely excoriated for its unfairness and its “paint everybody with the same brush” tactics. The brush has a clean side, since he also neglects to condemn the atom bomb, poison gas, biological weapons, and other diabolical creations of science as he busily condemns religion for its sins in the name of God.

But I want to be cognizant of my audience. I presume that any reader of Skeptic magazine will root for Dawkins and cheer his attack on pseudo-science, mysticism, religious superstition, and all things supernatural. Which by implication means that there is no rational rebuttal to such an argument as The God Delusion presents.

Actually, there is.

A considerable number of scientists have worked hard to merge the two worldviews of science and religion. Some do this in order to preserve a cherished notion of God, usually inherited from childhood (I once went to a university debate between an erudite philosopher and a Jesuit priest. The philosopher stood up and delivered an hour’s worth of arguments for why God didn’t exist. The Jesuit stood up and said, “My mother told me He did, and I believe her.” The audience gave him a loud round of applause). But the vast majority of physicists, systems theorists, information theorists, and biologists who remain intrigued by the God hypothesis have looked far beyond Dawkins. The slit in his burka may be wider than a jihadist’s, but it’s narrow by comparison to real forward thinkers.

In such limited space I must assume that my readers understand the basics of Darwinian evolution and its description of how life evolved. The key terms are random mutation, competition, adaptation, and survival. Once the argument became focused on genetics, Darwin’s theory was enormously bolstered, because DNA offered material evidence both for how life changes and how it remains the same. But DNA is a molecule, and that fact opened Pandora’s box, because to be truly viable, genetics has to be consistent with quantum physics, our current best theory of physical reality and the nature of the universe.

Dawkins gives a passing nod to physics, largely as a rhetorical flourish about the ‘wonder’ of the universe and how little we still comprehend it. But his main aim is much simpler, to decry the notion of a Creator God, to support a materialist explanation for life, and to assure everyone that bit by bit the fields of genetics and neurology will explain such age-old mysteries as mind, consciousness, and intelligence. It’s to these enigmas that we must look. The point isn’t that religion is right, but that arch materialism isn’t, either.

What we observe once we get over the superstition of materialism (a superstition Dawkins defends to the last degree) is that random chance is one of the worst ways to explain how the universe evolved.

--The various constants in nature, such as gravity and the speed of light, are too precisely fitted with each other for this to happen by chance.
--If any one of six constants had been off by less than a millionth of 1 percent, the material universe couldn't exist.
--Events at opposite ends of the universe are paired with each other, so that a change in the spin of one electron immediately produces a twin effect in another electron. This ability to communicate instantly across millions of light years cannot be explained by materialism. It defies all notions of cause and effect. it defies chance.
--Every electron in the universe exists as a wave function that is everywhere at once. When this wave function collapses, we observe a specific isolated electron. Before the wave collapses, however, matter is non-local.

The ability of objects and events to be everywhere at once seems like an attribute of God--omnipresence. The ability of electrons separated by millions of light years to 'talk' to each other seems like another attribute of God--omniscience. This doesn't mean that God explains the universe. It means that there may be governing forces at work which allow the existence of universal consciousness. The self-aware universe is a plausible theory. Many writers have described it, although Dawkins disdains such theories. If the universe is self-aware, it would explain the formation of a self-replicating molecule like DNA far more elegantly than the clumsy, crude mechanism of random chance. (Dawkins argues vociferously that natural selection isn’t random–the better adapted species is the one that survives–but he is equally vociferous that genetic mutation is random, not to mention the underlying interaction of atoms and molecules.)

One can say that two broad rivers of human experience have run into each other. One river carries science and objective observation of the world. The other river carries subjective experience and our craving for meaning, beauty, love, and truth. There is no reason why these two rivers need to be separated, and what we are seeing---despite Dawkins' hysterical defense of materialism---is a merging. With a generation there will be accepted theories that integrate the world 'out there' with the world 'in here.’

Dawkins argues, as any arch materialist must, that the universe isn’t conscious. He holds that humans are conscious because chemicals complexly collide in the brain to produce a phantom we ignorantly call the mind. This is a fashionable view, held without equivocation among evolutionary biologists and neurologists alike, and in fact is the logical outcome of materialism. Where else could mind come from if not molecules, assuming that molecules are the basis of the brain and therefore of reality itself? Common sense finds it hard to take this argument seriously, however, because it leads to nonsense. The brain contains an enormous amount of water and salt. Are we to assume that water is intelligent, or salt is conscious? If they aren't, then we must assume that throwing water and salt together--along with about six other basic building blocks of organic chemicals--suddenly makes them intelligent. The bald fact is that Dawkins defends an absurd position because he can't make the leap to a different set of assumptions.

--Consciousness is part of existence. It wasn't created by molecules.
--Intelligence is an aspect of consciousness.
--Intelligence grows as life grows. Both evolve from within.
--The universe evolved along intelligent lines.

I realize that I've dropped a bomb into the discussion. The instant the word 'intelligent' comes up, skeptics rush in to shout that one is defending Intelligent Design, which is a stalking horse for creationism, which is a stalking horse for fundamentalist Christianity, which is a stalking horse for Jesus as the one and only Son of God. Such is the heated climate of debate at the moment, and Dawkins takes full (often unfair) advantage of it. Only Jesus freaks, one would surmise, could possibly believe in an intelligent universe.

However, if consciousness is innate in the universe, so is intelligence. This hypothesis has nothing to do with God sitting on a throne in heaven creating Adam and Eve. If we remain sane and clear-headed, the reason to assume that consciousness exists is simple. There's no other way to account for it. Without a doubt there is enormous design, complexity, organization, and interc-onnectedness everywhere in Nature. You can either say "I see it, let me explain it" or you can say "Ignore it, it's just a byproduct of randomness." Consciousness isn't just plausible as part of Nature, it's totally necessary. Not just to keep God around but to keep science around.

There are many philosophical ways to cast doubt on materialism and it’s a priori assumption that the material world exists, when in fact the universe we must come to terms with is “a radically ambiguous, ceaselessly flowing quantum soup,” to quote physicist Nick Herbert. Since science believes in experiments over philosophy, however, here is one. It's a thought experiment. Einstein came up with the theory of relativity through a thought experiment, so it's completely valid to do experiments in your head.

Think of a yellow flower. Can you see it? Are you sure of the color and the fact that it's a flower and not a fish? If so, then the experiment has been successful. You have made a major strike at the root of materialism. When you see a flower in your mind, there is no flower inside your brain. That seems simple enough. But where is the flower? There's no picture of it in your cerebrum, because your brain contains no light. How about the color yellow? Is there a patch of yellow inside your brain's gray matter? Obviously not.

Yet you assume--as do all who fall for the superstition of materialism--that flowers and the color yellow exist 'out there' in the world and are photographically reproduced by the brain, acting as a camera made of organic tissue. But here is the eminent Australian neurologist and Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles: “I want you to realize that there is no color in the natural world and no sounds–nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.”

In fact, the existence of a flower shifts mysteriously once it is closely examined. The experience of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell is created in consciousness. Molecules don't assemble in your head to make the sound of a trumpet blaring in a brass band, for example. The brain is silent. So where does the world of sights and sounds come from?

Materialists cannot offer any reasonable explanation. The fact is that an enormous gap exists between any physical, measurable event and our perception. If I talk to you, all I am doing is vibrating air with my vocal cords. Every aspect of that event can be seen and measured, but turning those vibrating air molecules into meaningful words has never been seen or measured. It can't be. That's why Dawkins will never find God. He's looking in the wrong place.

Materialism can't deliver God, not because God doesn't exist, but because the solid, physical world is an illusion--as quantum physics proved long ago. Religion to my mind has one undeniable truth on its side: one must look inside consciousness itself to find God. If God is a universal intelligence, that will turn out to be a fact but of a strange kind that we aren’t yet used to.

When you get to the primal state of the universe, what is it? A universal field that encloses all matter and energy. This field is everywhere, but it also localizes itself. A molecule in the brain is one expression of the field, so is a thought. If a molecule isn't an object but a collapsed quantum wave, then that holds true for the whole brain. The field turns out to be the common ground of both the inner and outer world. When Einstein said that he wanted to know the mind of God, he was pointing us toward the field, which quantum physics continues to explore. Crude skeptics like Dawkins lag far behind.

My time is up. There are countless ramifications to these lines of inquiry. Fortunately, as the two worlds of inner and outer begin to merge, we won't be plagued by either the superstition of religion or the superstition of materialism. New concepts will explain how the color yellow exists in our brain as the same phenomenon as a yellow flower in the meadow. Both are experiences in consciousness.

Contrary to what Dawkins thinks, design in the universe isn't a blueprint set down by a fictitious God. It's a vital, ever-evolving, imaginative, dramatic process. Strangely enough, so is human existence. The similarity isn't a coincidence--there is nothing we call human that isn't, quite literally, transcendent. Beyond the physical world lies the womb of creation, and whether we call it God is irrelevant. We came from a source, we are forever in contact with our source, and we are constantly returning to our source. This is the real mystery of existence that Dawkins trivializes with his over-heated skepticism. Far more profound are the words of T.S. Eliot:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled.

Source :  http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2007/09/deepaks_article.html