IS GOD DEAD?
Why Nietzsche and Time Magazine Were Wrong
God is dead.
—Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead.
—God
Somewhere, on some long-forgotten bathroom wall, a wag scrawled the above graffito. Though it may be too clever by half, it is a telling remark about our times that despite the fact God has been declared dead numerous times, He seems always to have the final word.
It was barely more than a century ago that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche penned the words for which he has become so famous in a book considered by philosophers to be his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. After ten years in mountainous solitude, Zarathustra descends to mingle among men and there discovers a holy man who tells him, “I make songs and sing them, and when I make songs I laugh, I cry and I hum: in this way I praise God.” He then inquires of Zarathustra: “But what gift do you bring us?” Zarathustra replies: “What have I to give you? Nay, let me go, lest I take something away from you!”
And so they separated, the old one and the man, laughing as two boys laugh. But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: Is it possible that the holy old man in his forest has not yet heard the news that God is dead?
Reflecting Nietzsche’s pronouncement nearly a century later on its April 8, 1966, cover, Time magazine brazenly inquired of its readers in stark, red type on a black background: IS GOD DEAD? The cover story by John T. Elson (although oddly no byline was given in the article itself) was entitled “Theology: Toward a Hidden God,” but in hindsight it was really more of a mirror held up to what appeared at the time to be our godless culture. By 1966 the most turbulent decade in memory was in full rage as the baby-boomer generation flexed its moral (and immoral) muscles against the conservative establishment’s vision of America as a God-fearing nation. Political assassinations, campus rebellions, inner-city riots, mass demonstrations, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and especially the Vietnam War led many disillusioned Americans down a nihilistic path into existential angst.
At the height of the cold war, most unsettling of all was perhaps the military/political strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. Reflecting the feeling of the day, Barry McGuire’s 1965 guttural rock song, “Eve of Destruction,” warned, “If the button is pushed, there’s no running away / There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave.” What happened to the savior of old? He died. In like manner, the characters in Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, On the Beach, struggle to find meaning in a world made meaningless after total nuclear war results in a slow but ineluctable end of life. If there is no next year, what will you do tomorrow? Oddly, the characters continue to work and love and live in the face of imminent death for a future that will not come. The American captain of the submarine Scorpion, observing Australia as the last outpost of survivors, discovers from one of them that she is taking shorthand, typing, and bookkeeping classes. “I’ll be able to get a good job next year,” she explains, knowing that there is not going to be a next year. “It’s the same at the university. There are many more enrollments now than there were a few months ago.” Why? What else is there to do but to pretend that the world has meaning? After all (and this was one of the deeper messages of the book), what Shute’s doomed survivors face is what all of us face; the only difference is that we do not know how or when our end will come, so the fiction of purpose is preserved. The epigraph from T. S. Eliot on the title page of Shute’s book expresses this poetically:
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Similar cultural images of God’s death bestudded the cultural landscape in this period. Five years after the Time article, John Lennon’s song “Imagine” asked us to project ourselves into a godless future in the hope that we might help bring it about. But this was only the exclamation mark on a statement Lennon made in the very same year as the Time cover story, when he prophesied God’s demise (and nearly caused the Beatles’): “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that, I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus Christ right now.” God may have died, but his fans outvoiced Lennon’s, resulting in mass bonfires of Beatles’ records and Lennon’s public apology.
Other examples from the era abound. Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, opens with ape-men being given the spark of humanity—not from God but from an advanced alien race. Moon-Watcher learns to kill with tools, a gift from the secular gods that would turn out to be more powerful than any they had known before: “Now he was master of the world, and he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” At the end the story comes full circle with Star-Child being given God-like powers to prevent humanity from taking the leap into nuclear annihilation. After harmlessly detonating a space-based nuclear missile, Star-Child contemplated his newfound powers, also a gift from the alien gods: “Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” Certainly he was not thinking about God.
To the star-children of the 1960s it appeared as if God had died, as Time magazine suggested He had—if only by daring to pose the question in the first place. Even for some theologians this appeared to be the case. Noted Time:
Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence. No longer is the question the taunting jest of skeptics for whom unbelief is the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who gave the right answer a century ago. Even within Christianity. now confidently renewing itself in spirit as well as form, a small band of radical theologians has seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of God’s death, and get along without him.
Drawing on the results of more than 300 interviews conducted over the course of a year by thirty-two Time correspondents around the world, Elson revealed the existence of a new breed of radical theologians known as “Christian atheists” (an oxymoron if there ever was one), to be contrasted with straightforward Nietzschean atheists: “Nietzsche’s thesis was that striving, self-centered man had killed God, and that settled that. The current death-of-God group believes that God is indeed absolutely dead, but proposers to carry on and write a theology without theos. without God.” In addition to these Christian atheists were the existentialist atheists, mostly literary types such as Simone de Beauvoir. who suggested: “It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.” Yet another brand were the “distracted atheists,” or “people who are just ‘too damn busy’ to worry about God at all.” “Practical atheists” rounded out the field—the folks who fill the pews on Sunday but in reality are “disguised nonbelievers who behave during the rest of the week as if God did not exist.” Philosopher Michael Novak was quoted to represent the general spiritual dolor that was sweeping America: “I do not understand God, nor the way in which he works. If, occasionally, I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see, or hear, or feel. It is to a God in as cold and obscure a polar night as any nonbeliever has known.”
The reasons Time gave for God’s death are telling for the age. An obituary for God published in the Methodist student magazine Motive, for example, was chosen as an emblem of this new throwaway theology: “ATLANTA, Ga., Nov. 9—God, creator of the universe, principal deity of the world’s Jews, ultimate reality of Christians, and most eminent of all divinities, died late yesterday during major surgery undertaken to correct a massive diminishing influence.” The cause of this declining impact was attributed to “secularization, science, urbanization—all have made it comparatively easy for the modern man to ask where God is, and hard for the man of faith to give a convincing answer, even to himself.” Particularly with the rise of modern science, “slowly but surely, it dawned on men that they did not need God to explain, govern or justify certain areas of life.” Even the old standby threat of eternal punishment in hell was impotent. “Unlike in earlier centuries, there is no way for churches to threaten or compel men to face that leap; after Dachau’s mass sadism and Hiroshima’s instant death, there were all too many real possibilities of hell on earth.”
Reader reactions to what is arguably the most famous and controversial cover story in Time’s seventy-five-year history (generating more letters—3,430—than any issue before or since) were at once amusing and instructive (April 15, 1966, 13). “No,” said a Chicago reader. “Yes,” proclaimed a Notre Dame professor. “Not only is God dead—he never was,” pronounced the president of the Freethinkers of America. Equally vehement was this letter from a reader in Mount Vernon, New York: “Your ugly cover is a blasphemous outrage and, appearing as it does during Passover and Easter week, an affront to every believing Jew and Christian.” A more measured response came from a ministerial student at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis: “God is dead to those who wish him so; he lives for those who hope in him.” The most accurate, however, came from a rather unexpected source—Jay North, best known as television’s Dennis the Menace (May 6, 1966, 9): “In sending you my views I realize I have two strikes against me: I am a teen-ager, and I am in show business. In neither category does much religious thought go on, according to the public … . I have found, too, that the citizens of Hollywood are as strong in their devotion as are their priests and ministers and rabbis. This God-is-dead premise seems to me merely a fad; religion will live through it.” How right the menacing Mr. North would turn out to be.
From Nietzsche’s pronouncement to Time’s declaration that he was right took eighty years. Another thirty should have buried him for good, no? No. A Gallup poll of American adults published in the Wall Street Journal on January 30, 1996, reported that 96 percent believe in God, 90 percent believe in heaven, 79 percent believe in miracles, 73 percent believe there is a hell, 72 percent believe there are angels, and 65 percent believe the devil is real. A gender gap was evident for two beliefs: Women outnumbered men in belief in miracles (86 percent women versus 71 percent men) and angels (78 percent women versus 65 percent men). Not surprisingly, education makes a difference, but not as much as one might think. Belief in heaven, for example, breaks down as follows: college postgraduates: 75 percent; college graduates: 80 percent; some college: 90 percent; no college: 94 percent. The 20 percent range gap deflects from the reality that three out of four people with master’s and doctorate degrees believe in heaven. Who says God is dead?
Other polls corroborate God’s vitality, such as George Barna’s 1996 Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators, which reported a 93 percent figure of belief, and his 1995 poll revealing that 87 percent say their religious faith is very important in their lives. (Interestingly, the 1996 poll also showed that 30 percent of believers described “God” as a deity other than the biblical God: 11 percent saw God as a higher consciousness; 8 percent said God is the total realization of personal human potential; 3 percent voiced a belief in many gods each with his or her own power and authority; and 3 percent reported that everyone is his or her own god.) While some believers occasionally have doubts, a 1997 Pew Research Center survey reported that a remarkable 71 percent of Americans say that they “never doubt the existence of God” (up from 60 percent in a 1987 survey). Even in Southern California, that bastion of New Age spiritualism, God is alive and well, as noted in a 1991 Los Angeles Times poll in which 91 percent of respondents reported believing in “God or a universal spirit,” 67 percent believing in “life after death,” and 67 percent believing in heaven.
At the beginning of the twentieth century social scientists predicted that with the advent of universal public education and the rise of science and technology, culture would become secularized and religiosity would dramatically decrease. This “secularization” thesis has been thoroughly refuted, as religiosity continues to increase at the end of and into the next century. The question is, why?
According to the University of Chicago sociologist of religion, Andrew Greeley, in an economic explanation, one of the reasons is that as the century progressed a free market of religious competition increased and diversified, causing religions and churches to compete with one another for customers. In a paper delivered to the 1997 American Sociological Association meeting in Toronto, entitled “Pie in the Sky While You’re Alive: Life after Death and Supply Side Religion,” Greeley demonstrated that belief in an afterlife rose from 65 percent to 84 percent among Catholics, and from 24 percent to 40 percent among Jews; the latter statistic is surprising because belief in life after death normally decreases proportionally with education, and Jews are among the most educated of all religious groups. (Protestants remained steady at 80 percent.) Even those with no religious affiliation showed an increase in belief in life after death, from 31 percent to 50 percent. These statistics, says Greeley, fly in the face of our intuitive thoughts about the rise of science and the decline of religion: “A furious battle is raging in social science about religion. Traditional theories have emphasized the decline of religion as part of an inevitable process of ‘secularization.’ In the face of scientific progress, the growth of rationality, and the elimination of superstition, religion is seen retreating, as Durkheim said it would, to the periphery of society.” But Greeley’s data, along with the polls cited above, show that Durkheim, along with Time and Nietzsche, were wrong. Why? Greeley tests an interesting theory of supply-side religion:
They argue that the “demand” for religion is relatively constant since the need of “compensation” because of death and suffering is a given in society and that the different levels of religious behavior that one can observe in various regions of a country like the United States and in various countries are the result of the available “supply” of religious services. In a controlled religious marketplace, they assert, religion becomes a lazy monopoly because the Established Church (or Established Churches as in Germany) need not compete for “customers.” On the other hand, when there is no legal monopoly various “firms” must compete for “customers” and hence provide more industrious personnel and more services. In such situations religious activity increases.
Economic theories of religion date back at least as far as Adam Smith’s 1776 publication The Wealth of Nations, in which he observed that market forces govern churches no differently than they do secular firms. But Greeley looks to a deeper cause that he thinks can be found in two fundamental principles of human biology and psychology, which together form the beginning of our answer to the question of how we believe: “Humankind is born with two incurable diseases, life from which it inevitably dies and hope which hints that death may not be the end. A conviction that life does not end with death is a tentative endorsement of the validity of hope.” The “product” sold by these religious “corporations” competing in the spiritual “marketplace” is life after death. Sales are on the rise. All market indicators are positive. Indeed, Greeley found that only 0.8 percent of Americans call themselves “hard-core atheists” (who believe there is no God or life after death), and a mere 3.4 percent “soft-core” atheists (who are at least “open” to the possibility of God and life after death, but do not presently believe).
Greeley, and his colleague Wolfgang Jagodzinski from the University of Cologne, based their findings on data gathered from 19,381 respondents interviewed from 1973 to 1994 in the General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. They found a statistically significant increase in belief in life after death across generations, especially in the immigrant shift from old-world monopolies to the new-world open marketplace. Greeley explained the demographics of his study:
Unnoticed by scholars at the time or since that time, American society and its open marketplace of religious firms was exercising substantial influence on the religious belief of immigrants since the turn of the century. Among other things this influence increased dramatically across generations belief in life after death. This discovery simply cannot be explained by the “secularization” theory and is quite compatible with the “supply side” theory:religious competition does seem to generate and increase hope.
This message is not lost on religious leaders who must compete for members of the various religious beliefs and congregations in this supply-side model. As Greeley concluded: “In a competitive religious marketplace like the United States the clergy must work hard at what they are supposed to be doing: preaching a message of hope in the face of the tragedies of life.” Clearly religion plays an important role in society that has not been filled by secular institutions, and since none has ever offered a “product” competitive with life after death, belief in God and religiosity has increased as a market response.
Contrary to the rhetoric of modern conservative fundamentalists—who proclaim that Americans have turned away from God and that we need to return to that “old-time religion”—as a people we have never been so religious. In a revealimg book, The Churchiring
of
America, 1776
1990, the authors point out that for the past two centuries American church membership rates have risen from a paltry 17 percent at the time of the Revolution (!), to 34 percent by the middle of the nineteenth century, to over 60 percent today. Bully-pulpit preachers who remind us regularly that we are slouching ever further toward cultural depravity and godless hedonism could not be more wrong. “New-time” religion far outstrips our forebears’ religiosity. Proof of that can be found in any number of cultural signposts.
1990, the authors point out that for the past two centuries American church membership rates have risen from a paltry 17 percent at the time of the Revolution (!), to 34 percent by the middle of the nineteenth century, to over 60 percent today. Bully-pulpit preachers who remind us regularly that we are slouching ever further toward cultural depravity and godless hedonism could not be more wrong. “New-time” religion far outstrips our forebears’ religiosity. Proof of that can be found in any number of cultural signposts.Consider a spate of Time magazine cover stories over the past decade: June 10, 1991: “Evil: Does It Exist—Or Do Bad Things Just Happen?” April 10, 1995: “Can We Still Believe in Miracles?” December 18, 1995: “Is the Bible Fact or Fiction?” October 28, 1996: “And God Said … Betrayal. Jealousy. Careerism. They’re All in the Bible’s First Book. Now There’s a Spirited New Debate over the Meaning of Genesis.” March 24, 1997: “Does Heaven Exist’?”
Not to be outdone, Newsweek’s March 31, 1997, issue addresses “The Mystery of Prayer: Does God Play Favorites?” U.S. News and World Report countered the same week with “Life after Death: Science’s Search for Meaning in Near-Death Experiences.” An earlier, December 19, 1994, cover reads: “Waiting for the Messiah: The New Clash over the Bible’s Millennial Prophecies.”
Religiosity is more than just belief in God, of course. It is the full package that includes heaven and life after death. In a poll of 1,018 adult Americans conducted on March 11 and 12, 1997, Time reported that belief in heaven is still quite strong, with 81 percent reporting belief, and 88 percent looking forward to meeting “friends and family members in heaven” when they die. Newsweek’s feature article title asked: “Is God Listening?” According to their poll, conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Associates on March 20 to 21, 1997, 87 percent of Americans believe the answer is “yes,” with 29 percent reporting that they pray more than once a day and 25 percent at least once a day.
For some people, they know there is an afterlife Because they have experienced it through a “near-death experience.” A U.S. News and World Report poll, for example, notes that of the nearly 18 percent of Americans who claimed to “have been on the verge of dying, many researchers estimate that a third have had unusual experiences while straddling the line between life and death—perhaps as many as 15 million Americans. A small percentage recall vivid images of an afterlife—including tunnels of light, peaceful meadows, and angelic figures clad in white.” Pediatric oncologist Diane Komp, who has talked to more than a few children about such experiences, concludes: “I came away convinced that these are real spiritual experiences.” Everyone seems to agree that near-death experiences are genuine “experiences,” in the sense that the individuals have had something happen to them, which they report as being life changing. Floating out of the body, passing through some sort of tunnel, hallway, or canyon, the white light at the end of the tunnel, seeing your lost loved ones on the “other side,” are common elements reported by many. Whether the near-death experience represents a bridge to the “other side” is another matter, but those who experience it often treat it as a religious or spiritual awakening.
In addition to God and the afterlife, miracles are staging a comeback. A recent Canadian poll reveals that more than half the respondents reported a belief in angels, and nearly as many said they had personally experienced a miracle or divine intervention (again, women were almost twice as likely to believe as men). Some miracles involved petitionary prayer, such as asking for a loved one to be saved from a serious illness, while other miracles were attributed to chance encounters and good fortune. One person noted that he had stopped his car to take a photograph, thereby missing a fatal accident by three minutes. Another reported: “My aunt was on a life support system and the doctors told my family that she was dead and they were going to turn off the life support system. They forgot to turn it off and the next morning they found her alive, breathing, and talking.” Other miracles were more mundane: “I was talking to somebody telling them I was broke and someone heard me talking about it and they came to my door and took me shopping for groceries.” Still others held rather low standards for what constitutes the miraculous: “I went to someone’s house and got a good deal on a power tool that I wanted for a long time.”
Perhaps the most significant religious cultural phenomenon of the 1990s was the Promise Keepers, a well-organized group of men who “promise” to take responsibility for their lives through the Seven Promises of (1) “honoring Jesus Christ,” (2) “pursuing vital relationships with a few other men,” (3) “practicing spiritual, moral, ethical, and sexual purity,” (4) “building strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values,” (5) “supporting [the] church by honoring and praying for [one’s own] pastor,” (6) “reaching beyond any racial and denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity,” and (7) “influencing His world, being obedient to the great commandment (Mark 12: 3031) and the great commission (Matthew 28: 1920).” Openly antigay, antiabortion, and antifeminist, Promise Keepers members rally against the standard targets the Christian right loves to hate: atheism and evolution, and the perceived moral degradation of America that comes with them. Begun in 1991 with a fledgling 4,200 members, by late 1997 the group had grown to 1.25 million, with an annual revenue of $87 million and a paid staff of 452 working out of its Denver headquarters. Expanding their ranks (Promise Keepers often speak in military terms, such as the “army of God” and “wake-up calls,” and they have even hired retired military officers), founder Bill McCartney explains their long-term plan: “The goal is to go into every church whether they like us or not.” McCartney told 39,000 pastors in Atlanta to “take this nation for Jesus … whoever stands with the messiah will rule with him.” When half a million men blanketed the Washington, D.C., Mall on October 4, 1997, it was the largest religious rally in American history.
31) and the great commission (Matthew 28: 1920).” Openly antigay, antiabortion, and antifeminist, Promise Keepers members rally against the standard targets the Christian right loves to hate: atheism and evolution, and the perceived moral degradation of America that comes with them. Begun in 1991 with a fledgling 4,200 members, by late 1997 the group had grown to 1.25 million, with an annual revenue of $87 million and a paid staff of 452 working out of its Denver headquarters. Expanding their ranks (Promise Keepers often speak in military terms, such as the “army of God” and “wake-up calls,” and they have even hired retired military officers), founder Bill McCartney explains their long-term plan: “The goal is to go into every church whether they like us or not.” McCartney told 39,000 pastors in Atlanta to “take this nation for Jesus … whoever stands with the messiah will rule with him.” When half a million men blanketed the Washington, D.C., Mall on October 4, 1997, it was the largest religious rally in American history.Even television, that quintessential morass of moral decay, has been heeding this trend. At the start of the 1997 season, viewers, accustomed to the likes of such sinfully tantalizing shows as Baywatch and Melrose Place, were treated to an unprecedented eight programs with religious or spiritual themes. According to a March 1997 TV Guide poll, 61 percent of those surveyed indicated they wanted to see more references to God in prime time. And according to a Parents Television Council survey, since 1993 the depiction of religious symbols and spiritualism on national television increased 400 percent.
Book sales also reflect these trends. The American Booksellers Association (ABA), for example, reported that books on religion and spirituality rose 112 percent between 1991 and 1996. And from 1996 to 1997 books on religion were the only type of adult nonfiction whose sales were steadily rising. In 1997, for example, among national bestseller lists such as in the New York Times and Publishers Weekly, religion and spirituality titles averaged five spots among the top fifteen. Examples included Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code, Neale Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God, and Billy Graham’s autobiography. James Van Praagh’s Talking to Heaven had a remarkable run of over three consecutive months as the number-one bestselling book in America, with sales approaching a million copies. According to the ABA, publishers are calling for books that bridge the gap between scholarly depth and everyday spirituality. The mantra is “make it popular and serious.” Today’s readers, while skeptical of easy answers and shallow summaries of complex problems, still desire a sense of the sacred, or what is called “lived religion.” ABA’s Willard Dickerson says the trend highlights a “growing hunger in the public reading market for answers that go past the secular or materialistic cultures.”
One deeper motive contributing to the search for God comes from the fact that the Hebrew Bible has God’s influence slowly but ineluctably fading as the story unfolds, so that by the end God’s face is almost completely hidden and humans are left to fend for themselves. Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman documents this phenomenon in his 1995 work, The Disappearance of God:
The Bible begins, as nearly everybody knows, with a world in which God is actively and visibly involved, but it does not end that way. Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament, Holy Scriptures, or tanak), the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less. Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease. In the last portions of the Hebrew Bible, God is not present in the well-known apparent ways of the earlier books. Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” (Deut. 31:17, 18; 32:20). By the end of the story God does just that. The consequences and development of this phenomenon in the New Testament and in post-biblical Judaism are extraordinary as well.
Extraordinary indeed! Where did God go and, more importantly, why did He choose to disappear? Friedman explores these questions and provides some intriguing answers. He closes his exploration with a discussion of the relationship of science and religion, and a comparison of Kabbalah and cosmology, concluding: “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” This depends, of course, on how one defines God, but I am more interested in the search than the disappearance. Is the New Age resurgence in spirituality an attempt to uncover the hidden face? Perhaps the face is to be found in a mirror. In her splendid little book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, biologist Ursula Goodenough explores this possibility in what she calls “religious naturalism”: “If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reality—and I believe that they can—then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate.” In any case, this longing and search tells us something very deep about the need in the human psyche for the spiritual and sacred aspects of life not often found in the sciences or humanities. Yet they are there if you know where to look.
Scientists and skeptics must address the fact that God is alive and well at the end of the second millennium—and likely will be at the end of the third. It would appear that news of God’s death will always be premature. Atheists, humanists, skeptics, and freethinkers who envision the day when the world will be free of God and religion are about as likely to realize their dream as are the anarcho-capitalists who foresee the end of all government and the privatization of the entire world. Such beliefs, in fact, are themselves a type of secular religion, like those that sprang from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century—Marxism, Freudianism, and social Darwinism. Even scientism, in some extreme circles, turns into a type of secular faith where all things come to those who believe.
In fact, science is a type of myth, if we think of myths as stories about ourselves and our origins (and not in the pejorative sense of myths as things “untrue”). Many gain considerable emotional, even “spiritual,” satisfaction from reading scientific articles and books by geologists about the creation of the Earth, by paleontologists about the evolution of life, by paleoanthropologists about human origins, by archeologists about the genesis of civilization, by historians about the development of culture, and especially by cosmologists about the origins of the universe. Tens of millions of people watched Carl Sagan’s 1980 Cosmos series with rapt attention. In 1997 the PBS series Stephen Hawking’s Universe gripped viewers every Monday night. Books on evolution by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Donald Johanson, and Edward O. Wilson are eagerly sought by readers and often find themselves on bestseller lists. Why? Because at these boundaries of scientific knowledge the lines between science, myth, and religion begin to blur as we ask ultimate questions about ourselves, our origins, and our place in the cosmos.
In 1998 I witnessed a sublime example of the scientific sacred when Stephen Hawking visited the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), as he does nearly every year in meeting with Kip Thorne, John Preskill, and other cosmologists. During his visits he often agrees to deliver a public address via his now-familiar voice synthesizer that has an almost surrealistic, otherworldly resonance. Hawking was slated for the largest venue on campus—Beckman Auditorium—which holds 1,100 people. When that hall filled, the staff piped a video feed into Remo Hall, filling another 400 seats. This was not enough, so large theater speakers were pointed out toward the quad area where hundreds more sat on the grass, rock-concert style, listening to a scientific superstar. When he rolled into Beckman Auditorium and down the aisle in his motorized wheelchair, Hawking received a standing ovation, as he did upon his departure. He delivered his standard lecture about the Big Bang, black holes, time, and the universe, all covered in his bestselling book A
Brief History of Time, which broke all records for the number of weeks any science book has been on a bestseller list. There followed an illustrated version of the book, as well as a documentary also entitled A Brief History
of
Time, followed by a documentary about the making of the documentary!
The mythical nature of science, however, was not as obvious in Hawking’s lecture as it was in the subsequent question-and-answer period. The majority of the audience was not especially interested in the minutiae of quantum mechanics or the nuances of cosmological theories. What people wanted were The Answers to the Big Questions: “How did time begin?” “What was there before the universe?” “Why does the universe bother to exist at all?” There are no Final Answers to these Big Questions, of course, but this does not stop people from asking. Here the public was given an opportunity to inquire of a physically disabled but cognitively brilliant man the biggest question of all: “Is there a God?”
Stephen Hawking’s lectures are delivered at normal speed because he writes them ahead of time and the computer feeds the words to the voice synthesizer at a staccato pace. But answering questions is another thing altogether. Hawking must construct his sentences word by word, at a glacially slow meter. During this process his colleagues talk to the audience until the answer comes. For this final question, however, the effect was one of unbearable anticipation. Asked an essentially unanswerable question, Hawking sat there in his chair, rigid and stone quiet, only his eyes darting back and forth across the computer screen. One had the feeling of having traveled to Delphi or Mecca, now forced to wait in bursting expectation of The Answer to the Biggest Question. A minute or two went by as cosmologist Kip Thorne politely explained how Stephen’s computer works. Finally it came. With humor and politeness Hawking, wisely, explained: “I do not answer God questions.”
It did not matter, because the answers themselves do not matter as much as the process of thinking about the questions and contemplating their ultimate meaning. God is not dead because God represents these ultimate concepts that have been with us as long as we have been human. It is the concepts themselves that reach into the deepest parts of our minds. To contemplate them is not the exclusive domain of either science or religion. It belongs to all of humanity. To that end science too is sacred in the sense of pondering these majestic and timeless issues. What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one’s hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe’s creation and did not blink? That is deep and sacred science.