God is a very human way of looking at and dealing with what I think is ultimately an uncaring universe. I am an atheist, although when I say I'm a Jewish atheist people look at me a little strangely sometimes. And the reason I say that is because God is almost everything that we want him or her to be, and it's almost too good to be true. In some ways, God is a little bit like a Nigerian spam message. No, I'm pretty sure I don't have a couple million dollars in a bank account somewhere in Africa. In the same way, I'm pretty sure that all this is not just waiting for me.
I first started thinking about this when ... well, a number of books that I started reading. One of them was the works of a man named Richard Feynman. He was a scientist. He worked on the Manhattan Project. One of his last things was he was one of the people who came up É he put together what went wrong with the Challenger mission. He was a very, I think, a very wise man. In referring to the sciences, one of his quotes, and this is one I'm very fond of, "The first rule is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." Now, I actually am a scientist. In my work, it's very easy to come up with some results, you work all day, you have something, you say, ok, I think I've found something, I think I've proven something, the way everything works. But then you always, always have to take a step back and say do I want this too much. Is this too much what I would really like to be? And you need to be as impartial as you can. And the reason for that is that you end up with better results if you can look at things from that impartial point of view. So I look at God, and I realize just how much God is everything that we as human beings dream of. But when you look at the way the world works, and it's a world that has a lot of beauty but it has a lot of cruelty and a lot of suffering, and I just think that odds are there's not a God over that. There could be. I could be dead wrong. In some ways, I hope I am. But I don't think so. I think that what we see is what we have. And it's our job as both Jews and as human beings to do the best we can with that, to treat others as best we can, because we're not going to get a second chance at this.
