PLAYBOY: Assume there is a god and you were given the chance to ask him one question. What would it be?

DAWKINS: I’d ask, “Why did you go to such lengths to hide yourself?”

PLAYBOY: Do you have any deeply religious friends?

DAWKINS: No. It’s not that I shun them; it’s that the circles I move in tend to be educated, intelligent circles, and there aren’t any religious people among them that I know of. I’m friendly with some bishops and vicars who kind of believe in something and enjoy the music and the stained glass.

PLAYBOY: Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking reference God in their writings. Are they using the word in the sense of an intelligent designer?

DAWKINS: Certainly not. They use god in a poetic, metaphorical sense. Einstein in particular loved using the word to convey an idea of mystery, which I think all decent scientists do. But nowadays we’ve learned better than to use the word god because it will be willfully misunderstood, as Einstein was. And poor Einstein got quite cross about it. “I do not believe in a personal god,” he said over and over again. In a way he was asking for it. Hawking uses it in a similar way in A Brief History of Time. In his famous last line he says that if we understood the universe, “then we would know the mind of God.” Once again he is using god in the Einsteinian, not the religious sense.