To my mind, Darwin didn’t kill God. To the contrary, he and Alfred Russel Wallace offered the first glimpse of the REAL Creator behind and beyond the world’s myriad mythic portrayals of the divine.

As Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and other 20st century scholars of mythology and world religions remind us, we simply cannot understand religion and religious differences if we don’t understand how the human mind instinctually relationalizes—that is, personifies—reality. (Recall the movie “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks. The personified soccer ball, Wilson, was the only thing that kept Hank’s isolated character relatively sane.)

Evidence from a wide range of disciplines, from cognitive neuroscience to anthropology to cross-cultural study of the world’s myths and religions, all support the claim that God is a personification, not a person, and our brains are programmed to forget this. More, there is no counter-evidence. This fact alone makes sense of the hundreds of competing stories around the world as to what God supposedly said or did. “God” is a mythic name for Reality in all its sublime fullness. Any so-called God that is imagined as less than this is unworthy of our devotion and deserves to be mocked, as the New Atheists so readily and do.

Poseidon was not the god of the oceans, as if some supernatural entity separate from water was looking down from on high or rising from the deep. Poseidon was the personification of the incomprehensibly powerful and capricious seas!

Sol was not the spirit of the sun, as if there were a separation between the two. Sol was a sacred name for that seemingly eternal, life-giving source of heat and light—and occasionally life-taking source in times of desperate drought. By saying “Sol,” “Helios,” or some other proper name, our ancestors experienced that reality as a “Thou” to be related to.

Today most of us have a starkly different subjective experience. We look up and say “the sun” and think of “it” in a depersonalized way: not as the God “Helios” but as the generator of elemental helium through stellar nucleosynthesis.

Whenever any story or any scriptural passage claims, “God said this” or “God did that,” what follows is always, necessarily, an interpretation. It’s an interpretation of what some person or group of people thought or felt or sensed or wished Reality was saying or doing, and almost always as justification after the fact or to make a theological point. Such subjectively meaningful claims are never objective, measurable truth. In other words, had CNN or ABC News been there to record the moment of “divine revelation,” there would have been nothing out of the ordinary (nothing miraculous) to report on the evening news—nothing other than what was coming out of someone’s mouth, or pen, or whatever folks wrote with back then. If we fail to grasp this, not only will we trivialize the divine but, more tragically still, we will miss what Reality (e.g., God), is up to today.

From supernovas to plate tectonics to brain scans, science has given us belief-busting revelations about how we got here and why we are the way we are. Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. It is also a time of smart bombs, collapsing economies, and exploding oil platforms. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers.

We must take seriously scientists’ prophetic warnings about issues such as climate change and the overall health of our world and life on Earth. Like everything else under the sun, religions will either evolve or go extinct. “Getting right with God,” means coming into right relationship with our planet and all its gloriously diverse species and cultures.

The New Atheists, by speaking boldly on behalf of our best collective intelligence about the nature of reality, and in condemning superstitious, otherworldly religiosity, are, paradoxically, fulfilling the traditional role of prophets. Historically, religious prophets were those on the leading edge—those who issued a warning that typically went something like this: “Align with reality—or perish.” Prophets in this way facilitate cultural evolution. To use religious language, they do God’s work.

Thus my central point: Few things are more important at this time in history than for religious peoples of all backgrounds and orientations to heed what the New Atheists are saying. To be clear: I thank God for the New Atheists not because I want everyone to be like them or think like them, nor because I consider them perfect vessels of divine wisdom. Rather, I am grateful because of how they are prodding religion and humanity to mature and because of how they are goading religious people (like me!) to get real about God.

I foresee a time when religious leaders get their guidance and inspiration from humanity’s common creation story and teach and preach the discoveries of science as God’s word. When that day comes, our faith traditions will thrive and many of us will look back and exclaim, “Thank God for the New Atheists!”