My grandson sent me a Youtube link to a debate between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens with a "Wadayathink?" So I responded (probably at greater length than he hoped.)
Here's what I wrote to him.
Hitchens and a couple others made a big splash two years ago when they each wrote a book that was anti-religion. In each case they were countering conservative religion. Every major religion has some factions. There are the "fundamentalists" who believe that their conception of God is the only correct one. There are also the conservative group which while believing in their understanding of God, will at least accept that others have a different one. They still tend to be certain that they are right. Then there are the "modernists" who see that there can be a variety of concepts of God and that these all have some validity. Finally, there are the "post-modernists", like myself, who envision all God-language as just metaphor. Most of us do not believe in some transcendental God, in some assumed heaven, but rather find God in our world, in everything and everyone. We tend to be called "panentheists" (Not pantheists. A pantheist is one who believes that each creature is a god. A panentheist feels a larger spiritual sense of the universe in which we all live.)
The various faiths are in different places about all this. I think that Buddhism (Which really does not believe in a god, or believes that "god" is irrelevant.), and Christianity have a larger panentheist percentage. Hindu and Islam have more fundamentalist and conservative ideas. But it is not that clear-cut. The Buddhist Sokkagakkai group is fundamentalist, while the Sufi branch of Islam is more toward the modernist perspective.
I consider anyone who is absolutely convinced that they have the only truth about anything to be fundamentalist.
Hitchens' argument in the Sharpton debate and in his book sounds like a religious argument. In fact it sounds like a fundamentalist atheism; just as "religious" as a fundamentalist Christian.
Scientists do not, generally, believe that they have the final and absolute truth. Science is, by nature, always open to new evidence. Further, science, it seems to me, is asking a different question than spirituality. Science is asking "How, What, Where" questions. Spirituality is asking the question "Why." They only clash when they stray from their appropriate questions. For example, when religion insists that the world is only 6,000 years old, or that man came to be in a certain "Biblical" fashion, then it has strayed into the realm of science. When scientists insist that the only reality is the physical sense experience--as it did in the mid-19th century with the philosophy of "Positivism", it has also strayed beyond it realm of expertise.
When cosmological physicists like Brian Green and many others contemplate their work in quantum mechanics, GUT (Grand Unifying Theory combining the four known forces, Gravity, Electromagnetic force, Strong nuclear force and Weak nuclear force.), dark matter, etc. they often become more spiritual rather than less. It is not conventional religion, but it is still spiritual.
Another approach to this question is the existential approach. I don't know if you have read any of the novels of Albert Camus, the French existential philosopher, but I do recommend his work. Camus was an agnostic with atheist leanings. He was also a resistance fighter during WWII. He fought alongside Christian resistance fighters and came to admire their Christianity, but could not himself go there. One of Camus' works is The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, you may remember was condemned by the Greek gods to push a rock up the hill to the top only to see it roll back down. This went on for eternity. Camus saw this as symbolizing the absurdity of life. Camus' statement was that, "The only important question is the question of suicide." If life is absurd, then it has no purpose, why not end it? His answer was that we can choose to create our own meaning in life. Another of his works was "The Stranger" in which he demonstrates this.
But all this is spiritual because in creating the meaning of our lives, we create the foundation for existence and this is what keeps us alive and becomes our God (I tend to only use the word God when speaking with religious people. For myself, I use words like "The Sacred" because they don't carry as strong a connotation of the old man with the beard who has a throne in the sky.)
All spiritual language is metaphor. Whenever we speak of our own spiritual experiences, like love, awe, etc. we can only use words and the words we use can never fully express the experience. That's why there are thousands of different love-songs. So the word "God" is only a metaphor; an attempt to express the inexpressible. What is really weird about this is that it is not just spiritual words that are metaphor. All language is, to some degree, metaphoric. Every word carries a different meaning to each person. Words are like maps. You point to a place on a map and tell your friend that there will be a party at that location. The map point is not the location. Another example is that I am in a strange town and a river flows through. There are several bridges across the river. On the map they all pretty much look alike. When I drive to one of the actual bridges it turns out to be a bridge, but for freight trains, not cars. Another bridge may be only a footbridge. Some time, when you have the time, read Alfred Korzybski's book, Science and Sanity--or read a summary.
When I was in seminary, my Hebrew Bible professor--a leading international scholar--used to jokingly say that "God speaks Hebrew" because the bible was written in Hebrew. But I have come to believe that "God" really speaks mathematics. Only the language of mathematics comes close to being non-metaphorical enough to describe the universe.
If my previous response was too short, I'm afraid I've been too verbose in this one. But I hope it shows that the debate between Sharpton, a conservative Christian and Hitchens a fundamentalist atheist, is far off the mark. I would even say that it is irrelevant to spirituality. The God that Hitchens doesn't like is not the God of most modern faith communities.
Now that you are graduating, I hope you will have more time to pursue your photography. You have a lot of talent for the photographic art.
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