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church on Sunday or synagogue on Saturday, but they no longer believed their faith tradition could make a claim of exclusive truth. They were like witnesses to the same God, but from different angles. Or, think of God as the head of a multinational corporation. He controls several subsidiary companies, each with its own president: Jesus heading up Christianity, Moses overseeing Judaism, Muhammad guiding Islam, the Buddha launching his own belief system, and on and on. But take the elevator up one level, above the religions that try to make sense of the spiritual world, and you find the “Other” or “Light” or “Source”—that is, the CEO who presides over the whole enterprise. Now, I am not saying I agree with the view that all of the world’s great religious traditions hold, at their root, the same view of the nature of reality. I am simply reporting what spiritual adepts told me.11

The “God” of mystical experience fits much more comfortably with the one described by Albert Einstein and other great scientists than the neat deity proclaimed by the average cleric. As I inched my way forward, watching and listening to the stories, I found myself wrestling with my own definition of deity, and in the light of morning I would walk away with a new name for God.

CHAPTER 11

A New Name for God

THE SCIENTISTS WHO HAVE ARRIVED at God’s doorstep have not, on the whole, taken a route illuminated by simple religious faith. They have traveled there by evidence, by looking at very small things, or very large: exploring DNA and quantum particles, or the puzzles of the universe. And in the blueprint they see the hand of God.

I use the word “God” to mean the organizer of the atom and the universe, but other terms fit the description. Albert Einstein, who dismissed a personal God but was persuaded by the evidence to assume there is a cosmic one, concluded there is a transcendent source of rationality in the world. He called this source “a superior mind,” or “illimitable superior spirit,” or a “mysterious force that moves the constellations.”1 When speaking of the order of the universe, Einstein stated, “That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.” Einstein once explained that he did not believe in a supernatural being who answers prayer, but that did not exclude the existence of the Almighty.“Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”2

Einstein’s vision of “God” presaged the words of later scientific luminaries. Consider theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who spoke of “the mind of God.” It is not enough to think of the order of rules and equations that make life possible, he said. One must contemplate “what it is that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.”3 Asked why he believed the universe exists, he responded, “If you like, you can define God to be the answer to that question.”4

The pioneers of quantum physics, who peered into the atom and were astonished at the mysterious world they beheld, saw God in much the same way. “God is a mathematician of very high order,” observed quantum physicist Paul Dirac, “and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”5 They saw no conflict between science and religion. Physicist Max Planck, for example, wrote that religion and science are “fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition,” concluding with an odd sort of rallying cry: “On to God!”6

Even Anthony Flew, a lecturer at Oxford and one of the twentieth century’s most renowned atheist philosophers, was converted in 2004 by the logic of God. Nearing his eightieth birthday, Flew abandoned the atheism on which he had built a career because, he asserted, intelligent life could not arise