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Machiavelli, on his death bed, was visited by the Pope who said, "Machiavelli, will you now renounce the devil and all his works?" Machiavelli scarcely opened his eyes. So the Pope repeated, "Will you now renounce the devil and all his works?" Opening one eye, Machiavelli responded, "This is no time to make enemies." Wrong question, wrong time.

When Henry Thoreau's aunt asked him on his deathbed whether he had made peace with his god, he replied that he did not know that they had quarrelled. Gertrude Stein said: "It is better to ask the right questions than to give answers, even good answers."

In his book River Out Of Eden Richard Dawkins tells of getting a letter from an American minister of religion who had been an atheist but was converted by reading an article in the National Geographic on wasps. It was a very special wasp which fertilises a special orchid. The flower of the orchid resembled very closely the female of the species of wasp. The male wasp, thinking the flower to be a female, tries to copulate with it by reaching down an appropriate opening and in so doing gets covered with pollen. Flying to the next flower the wasp repeats the process and cross-pollinates the orchid.

What makes the flower attractive to the wasp in the first place? The flower emits a pheromone attractant identical to that produced by the female wasp.

Dawkin's correspondent then said that with a terrific sense of shock he realized that in order for the reproductive strategy to work it had to be perfect to work at all. The flower had to look like a wasp. It had to produce the right chemical pheromone. It had to have a hole in the right place for the wasp to enter. Here was a wonderful design. It must have a designer. "I came", he said, "to believe that the designer must be God."

Orchids were amongst Charles Darwin's favourite examples of wonderful adaptations. He started asking the question: did God design them all as a man might design a watch? This he found to be the wrong question. He came to explain such adaptations by putting other questions to the facts and developing his theory of evolution by natural selection of chance variations. In so doing he devoted a whole book to the subject of the adaptation of orchids.

Dawkins wanted to ask the minister, "How can you be sure that the wasp-mimicking orchid would not work unless every part of it was perfectly in place? And how can you assert that the wasps are so hard to fool that the orchid's resemblance would have to be perfect in order to work?" These were the precise questions Darwin asked not only about orchids but about complex organs such as the human eye. The minister hadn't asked, you see, enough questions before arriving at his conclusion. Or to put it another way, he asked the wrong question about orchids and wasps.

In typical fashion Dawkins begins his next chapter this way. "My clerical correspondent of the previous chapter found faith through a wasp. Charles Darwin lost his with the help of another."

"I cannot persuade myself", wrote Darwin, "that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars". Their macabre habits are shared by their cousin the Digger Wasp. The female not only lays her eggs in a caterpillar so that her larvae can feed on it but she carefully guides her sting into each ganglion of the prey's central nervous system so as to paralyse but not kill it. In this way she keeps the meat fresh. Maybe the prey is aware of being eaten alive from inside yet unable to move a muscle to do anything about it.

Darwin asked the right question about the Ichneumonidae. Could a kind God deliberately create this? He said no. His challenge led many after him to question their pre-scientific understanding of God.

Darwin was aware of the importance of asking the right questions. "Looking back", he said, "I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them." He was saying that he found it more difficult to ask the right questions than to find the answers once the right questions had been asked. Interestingly enough Darwin asked many questions about God but he never got any answers that seemed reasonable. 

Even so Darwin was very important for theology as he pointed out quite clearly concepts of God that were no longer credible. This enabled others to think in different directions. I have right now a manuscript on my table from a Jesuit theologian entitled Darwin's Gift To Theology. Darwin, he argues, was a winnowing wind for theology.

Dawkins, in his rather perverse way, asks the following question about God. What is God's "utility function"?

Utility function is a term in economics meaning "That which is maximised". His question becomes, "What is God maximising in evolution?" So he looks at the cheetah. It appears to be well designed for killing antelopes. The cheetah is precisely what we would expect if God's purpose in designing the cheetah was to maximise the death rate of antelopes. Conversely if we ask the same question of antelopes we would conclude that they are designed for the opposite end: the survival of antelopes. It is, says Dawkins, as though cheetahs were designed by one deity and antelopes by a rival deity.

Alternatively, if there is only one creator who made both the cheetah and the antelope, what is he playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator sports? No, these are wrong questions. We should ask what is the utility function of life in general? Dawkins then proceeds to tell us that it is the of survival of DNA. He proceeds to tell us that if this be so it is not a recipe for happiness. Indeed, it leads us to expect the suffering of the caterpillar and the antelope and much more because the minimising of suffering is not the utility function of life. 

I happen to think that Dawkin's question was OK but he got off the rails in attempting to answer it. Life is more than DNA molecules replicating themselves.

A common retort that Dawkins finds from his audiences goes like this: "You scientists are very good at answering how questions but you're powerless when it comes to why questions."

Now I agree with Dawkins that this is a stupid division of labour to say that science deals with "how" and religion with "why". I say it is stupid because it implies that religion should have nothing to say about what is the nature of nature. You leave that to the scientist. This was the harmful divide made of knowledge at the time of the scientific revolution in a sort of gentleman's agreement as to how to carve up the territory. Furthermore science is always asking "why" questions. The biologist asks why cicadas have reproductive cycles that are prime-numbered years long, 13 or 17 but never 15 or l6.

Scientists are involved in a lot of what the engineer calls reverse engineering. A new sort of bomb was dropped in England by the Nazis. What was it designed to do? Why this bit of insulation here? Why a thick wire there? and so on. By persisting in asking "why" questions the engineer can discover how it works and what it is designed to do.

Dawkins correctly makes the point that the mere fact that it is possible to frame a question does not make it legitimate to do so. It is legitimate to ask what is the temperature of the sea. But you may not ask what is the temperature of prayer. You can ask in a scientific spirit "why" questions such as the purpose of mudguards on a bicycle but it is not reasonable to ask the "why" question of, say, a boulder on Mount Everest.

Unlike Dawkins I do think it is legitimate to ask. "What is it that God seeks to maximise?" But I have a different view of God than the one he demolishes. More anon on that.

It is not necessary for a theology that accepts the fact of evolution by natural selection of chance variations to begin by attempting to safeguard the emaciated idea of God that Dawkins and more recently Daniel Dennett consider to have been debunked by Darwin.

I accept that debunking. Darwin debunked the argument for God from the design of nature as though nature were like a watch and God was the watchmaker. There was some excuse for arguing like this prior to Darwin but not after. The tiger was not made with its stripes to camouflage it as we might make a camouflaged tank. There must have been all sorts of patterns but only the one which helped it to survive persisted. This is the principle of chance variation and natural selection. 

It would be a round-about way of doing things for a designer who was all-powerful. Moreover we know that such adaptations were forged in a struggle for existence-nature red in tooth and claw. It was one of Darwin's contemporaries, the Anglican vicar Charles Kingsley, who wrote to him and said, "Now they have got rid of an interfering God (a master-magician as I call it) they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident and a living, immanent, ever-working God."

So much of the discussion about God then, and even now, has assumed a notion of divine power arbitrarily capable of intervening in and interrupting natural processes, but which for some obscure reason decides not to do so.

Charles Hartshorne wrote a book called Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes in which he wrote, "Let us give up the destructive notion of divine omnipotence that plagues so much of Christian theology ... no worse falsehood was ever perpetuated than the traditional concept of omnipotence." If God is all powerful then why does he allow volcanoes to destroy villages and their inhabitants, why all the evil and suffering in the world, why Hitler, why the holocaust? Where was the God of omnipotence then? I heard philosopher John Passmore of the Australian National University recently say on radio that if there is a supreme being in charge of the world then his name is Satan.

God's power is not the power to do anything at all. God does not manipulate things and people. Why do I say this? Because there is no evidence for such a God. Yet this notion of God has been and still is a cause of much suffering and agony as poignantly portrayed in Kushner's When Bad Things Happen To Good People. There are things a God of love cannot do. The God of love could not change the decision of the rich young ruler to whom Jesus spoke. When persuasion failed, coercion did not take over.

People who pray for God to intervene in the world need to bring their prayers under scrutiny. Indeed I would say that of most prayers said in churches.

For nearly 2000 years European theology staked its fortunes upon a certain conception of divinity. In spite of a seeming variety of doctrines and creeds, one basic concept was accepted by most theologians. Only in the last several decades has a genuinely alternative theology been at all widely considered - so unobtrusively, however, that many opponents of theism, even most distinguished ones such as Dawkins and Dennett, are still fighting the old conception exclusively, convinced that if they dispose of it they have disposed of the theological question.

And these days many of those who find the idea of a godless universe incredible suppose that it is to traditional theology that they must turn, for example those who turn to fundamentalism.

Before I turn to that alternative perspective I want to indicate to you how I got to the alternative myself. I originated as a low church evangelical Anglican in the city of Melbourne when I was a schoolboy. Sin, saving souls, a literal interpretation of the Bible and miracles were the order of the day. I accepted the lot. But the rough terrain came during adolescence. I quite suddenly came to an awareness that I was not good enough. Even my righteousness, such as I might have had, I was told was "but as filthy rags." I believed I was very sinful. I read the confessions of Saint Augustine and said, "There am I". In reality I was probably lily-white compared with him. 

My self diagnosis was supported by a fundamentalist group called the "Crusader Movement" which I got involved in at my school. I must say I never felt at home with that group but I thought that was because I was so bad. They pleaded with me to "break the ice", meaning, I think, take the first hurdle on the road to being born again and the rest will follow smoothly.

In the long hours of the night I pondered on all this. But I felt that life was a burden and I was unworthy. There was a picture in my copy of Pilgrim's Progress of Christian walking on his long journey with a huge bundle on his back. Later in the book was another picture of Christian having reached the foot of the cross and behold, the bundle falls off his back to the ground. That is what I wanted to happen to me. Why didn't it?

Then quite suddenly (I remember the time and the place) I asked myself, "Why am I so burdened with a sense of sin when Jesus says your sins are forgiven? Does that really mean the past is the past, that I can begin again right now with a clean slate, that I don't have to carry that burden on my back any more?" So I prayed a fervent prayer that the burden be lifted. It was. I considered myself saved.

I was then an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, convinced I had the answer to life's meaning. I became a Sunday school teacher. Poor kids, I now think. I went to evangelical meetings. For four undergraduate years that was where I was. My biology classes emphasised the fact of evolution but that was of little concern. The Bible taught otherwise and creationism was what I had to believe. I had a religious faith, a sort of package that encompassed the whole truth about the world. Looking back I realize that I didn't learn to think when I was an undergraduate. 

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