In my book, What God Can Do For You Now: For Seekers Who Want To Believe, written to help people overcome the obstacles to God-belief as well as refute the atheists who shift the subject away from God, I respond:

GOD IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THAT PEOPLE DO IN THE NAME OF GOD.

RELIGION IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT PEOPLE DO IN THE NAME OF RELIGION.

Another superstar atheist, Sam Harris, spills his ink marrying God to Islamic terrorists: "We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the world’s Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God amid ‘Rivers of Purist Water.’"

When atheists deign to talk about God, they paint a picture of a deity no one would want to embrace. A third comrade in arms, Richard Dawkins, creates this subtle portrait:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist and infanticidal, genocidal, malevolent bully.(R. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006)

Don’t you wish Dawkins would tell us how he really feels? He’s real subtle. Even those atheists who do talk about God and are a little less vituperative present this irony: they have the exact same view of God as the fundamentalists: a control freak, an ogre who tells people what they must think, believe and do, who punishes those who stray and who leaves no room for women input or dissent.

I firmly believe that one of the reasons some people have trouble believing in God is that they inadvertently buy into their God concept which is extremist and which is a false picture of the Bible’s viewpoint. According to the Bible God seeks a covenant, a relationship which is a two-sided agreement. God expects our input and, moreover, needs us as a partner to do together what neither of us can do alone.

Don’t take my word for it. Many authoritative figures have their own concept of God. To Maimonides, anticipating modern physics, God is the unmoved mover who set the universe in motion. To Martin Buber, God is an Eternal Thou, always available in personal relationship. For Mordechai Kaplan God is not a transcendent power, but a naturalist force in the universe inspiring us toward the good.

Don’t be defeated in your spiritual search by false information. Judaism offers a broad range of theological views to draw from. If you tell me that you are not sure you believe in God I will show you a God concept you will find compelling. My best advice is never to buy your God concept from an atheist. They spend too much time not telling you what they do not believe.

Rabbi Robert Levine, author of What God Can Do for You Now, spent the past week guest-blogging on Jewcy. Want more? Buy his book!

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Invariably, I answer, "That’s interesting, so do I." This is what I mean by that statement.

Some time around 13.7 billion years ago, our universe began as an infinitesimally small, incredibly hot, dense "something." The term often used for this something is singularity. How is this singularity defined? No one really knows. Where did it come from? No one knows. Why did it appear? Again, no one has a clue.

Yet, as support for those who believe in the Big Bang, most scientists now believe that there was a beginning. This singularity appeared rather suddenly, apparently expanded, then cooled, turning into the universe as we know it today. Notice I didn’t say anything about an actual "bang" because, apparently, no such explosion occurred. Think of a balloon that started to expand and never popped.

My question is why did the universe not completely self-annihilate an instant after the Big Bang? Given the wide swings in temperature, how did Earth come to have an environment hospitable to life? Even the slightest variation of temperature would have made any biological existence on this planet impossible.

Just think what had to happen within seconds of the Big Bang. Nuclear forces were needed to bind proteins and neutrons to the nuclei of atoms. Electromagnetism was needed to keep atoms and molecules together, and gravity was needed to keep all the ingredients for life anchored to the surface of Earth.

In the creation story at the beginning of the Torah, God sends forth energy in the form of sound (God speaks) and light, which generates heat. In the subsequent cooling process, the earth congealed, discrete bodies of water emerged, and the slow process of life began. Evolution of countless species developed over the course of time, millions of years, with a crescendo into humankind. The only way that the biblical story and the Darwinian theory seemingly part company is that the latter sees all this coming about through random mutation and natural selection. Thus, man appears on the world stage as a survivor.

In the Bible, man appears as a God-ordained miracle to be a partner in the ongoing work of creation. In the religious worldview, we don’t have dominion over Earth because we are still standing, survival of the fittest. Rather, we have dominion because we were created in God’s image, and, therefore, our power must be mitigated by moral responsibility for the stewardship of the Earth.

So there’s a remarkable confluence between these two stories. We need to recognize that religion and science need each other now more than ever.Religion needs science to understand how all that God put into place actually operates in the world, to understand the rational basis for what many still regard only with awe and wonder.

Religion needs science to help us come to realize our place in this galaxy and amongst so many others. Science must help us answer awesome questions: Does life exist elsewhere, and if so, can we form a relationship with other life? What do we do with the resulting knowledge that our galaxy is one of many?

Religion needs science to help us harvest stem cells so that we can live longer and in greater health and dignity.

Religion needs science to help us continue the sequencing of the human genome to know our genetic tendencies and help us, therefore, combat the diseases that destroy our bodies, our minds, and ultimately our lives.

At the same time, science needs religion to understand why the earth was created from nothingness.

Science needs religion to understand the purpose of evolution, the meaning of the survival of human beings as the dominant species on planet Earth.

Science needs religion to understand the ethical boundaries of scientific inquiry, when does too much knowledge make us less human than we ought to be, than God intends us to be?

Science needs religion to clearly state that God created us to use our minds in order to stretch the frontiers of scientific knowledge as far as they can go and to use that knowledge in the service of all of God’s children.

Science needs science to be science, and God to be God.

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the national Human Genome Institute, has said: "You’ll never understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic observation. You won’t understand why you are here and what the meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions-and are they not the most important questions we ask ourselves?"(Dr. F. Collins, "Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science," New York Times, 23 Aug. 2005)[1]

I hope I made the case my B’nei Mitzvah students. Have I made it with you?

[1] Dr. Francis Collins, "Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science," New York Times, August 23, 2005.

Rabbi Robert Levine, author of What God Can Do for You Now, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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Rabbi Robert Levine, author of What God Can Do for You Now, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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Close to four thousand years ago, God promised that through it all we would be an eternal people. Here we are and that stuns me too. It’s all the proof I need that God lives and cares about us. My new book, What God Can Do for You Now: For Seekers Who Want to Believe, is my story, but it can be your story as well. Keep an open mind and with any luck, you can feel stunned again too.

Rabbi Robert Levine, author of What God Can Do for You Now, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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Governor Palin did a pretty good Tina Fey impersonation on Saturday Night Live this week. Additionally, she also proved that Alaskan female governors definitely have rhythm!

But, when she replaced Tina at the podium and swiftly announced that she was not going to answer anybody’s questions, she reinforced a painful societal message that women have been trying to overcome for centuries: look good but keep your mouth shut. The New York Times front page article featuring "Dudes for Sarah" makes the same point pretty strongly.

In contrast, one of the most important and enduring results of Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid was that she got a lot of people who were never predisposed to seeing women in positions of such authority and leadership – lots of Joe the Plumbers – to take another look and often to fervently support her candidacy. Both men and women were given the opportunity to reassess their culturally reinforced prejudices. Girls could dream differently and, just maybe, boys would be less reticent to stomp on them.

I would like to think that any woman candidate would provide this inspiration, but I have my doubts, partly because of some of the governor’s untenable stances. Responsible politicians can take what is dubbed a "pro-life" position on abortion, but believing that if a woman is the victim of rape or incest, with all the shock and shame that accompanies such a tragic crime, she must bear that child, shows no respect for the life of the mother – hardly pro-life.

Honestly, I can’t believe Governor Palin would force her own child to carry such a baby to term if, God forbid, she were the victim. But wanting to deny women who are too poor the same access to abortion as connected, financially able people, frankly, is immoral.

In the Torah, God commands us to choose life. A true pro-life position does not destroy the life and psychological health of a mother in order to birth an unwanted child. A true pro-life position doesn’t slash the budget on all programs that would give that unwanted child a chance in life.

Such retro views would be a major setback for women everywhere. So, can we go back to having Tina Fey in that role? Saturday Night Live proves that the sequel can be a whole lot better than the original!

About the author:

Rabbi Robert Levine, a leading American clergyman and Chairman of the Catholic-Jewish Dialogue of the Archdiocese of New York, provides down-to-earth, common sense reasons for how faith and prayer can profoundly change the quality of our lives. What God Can Do For You Now confronts the new atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and provides a spiritual answer to finding God in the world.

Rabbi Robert Levine, author of What God Can Do for You Now, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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