September 15th, 2008

Ashley did it in the kitchen with the cellphone.
- A possible murder in the New Clue (online version)

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I'm just getting on the board here. Bring on the criticism:

I believe that there are definite physical rules governing the creation of the universe—and, in fact governing the evolution of life. It may be that we may never understand them whether through lack of enough evidence of how they work, or perhaps they are somehow "too complicated" for us to fully understand (something I don't personally believe), but the Personal God ... you know, the guy who either runs the Universe (theist God) or set it all up, clicked OK, and now sits back and watches it unfold (deist God) is, in my opinion, a load of baloney.

I think that all atheists who nevertheless think that a set of physical laws exist to determine how Things shape up all tend to gravitate towards a pantheistic view. I know I do. We may even sometimes use the term "God" to describe it—as Richard Dawkins argues Einstein did—but we just don't buy the kind of god most people think of (the old dude with the beard who reads our minds).

But there is a comfort in joining that God community. Apart from giving you a framework to hang your lazy morality in, it also provides you with some company of like-minded people. It satisfies our primal need to belong to a tribe. But there are other ways to belong to tribes that don't involve old men in flowing robes presiding over Heaven.

And so, that is why I think there should be the New Church of Pantheism. We should all attend services wearing our Sunday Best just like other flavours of faith, and we should all have tithes—though, since Nature is our "god" the tithes and offering money should go to improve the environment. That would give us our community feeling, but it would also keep the atheists happy, since Nature is the kind of God we can believe in ... there is more than enough evidence to satisfy our scientific minds that Nature exists, after all.

And if we really need faith about something, we can have faith about the unknown physical laws governing how the Universe formed and life evolved: We can believe those laws exist, even if we have no clue about what they are and how they work. Hmm ... and we can continue to investigate them anyhow.

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