Last week's order of service said that I would speak this week about my personal “theology”. While its true that, in the broadest sense, that word can apply to any religious topic, it does have “god” at its root. Now, as some of you may have noticed, the deep bellow that passes for my singing voice drops out whenever “god” shows up in one of our hymns. I am an atheist born and bred. I was raised in an atheist household. I can not remember a single moment in my life when I have seriously entertained the notion that god exists.

A few years ago, a visiting minister at Wy'east asked the question of atheists: What god is it you don't believe in? I don't want to spend too much time speaking about what I do not believe. However, this culture, indeed, our species, is so convinced of god's existence, that I think it is useful to give this question a moment.

So. I don't believe in god as an old man with a white beard. I don't believe in Jesus as god. I don't believe in Shiva or Zeus or any other god in human form. I do not believe in one god, or three, or the innumerable spirits of animists or druids. No great earth mother, no spirit of the wind or rain. I don't believe in god as an overarching spirit, or universal consciousness.

I want to speak, just for a moment, about language, about the words we use in our religious community. I have heard some of us speak of trying stretch religious words, sometimes far beyond their common meanings, in order that we might speak of our beliefs in terms that make sense to others. We can then have conversations where we appear to speaking about the same things – but I'm not sure we are speaking about the same things, and I'm not sure we're doing either ourselves or those we speak with any favors.

I could, for instance, use the word “soul”, but for me it would only be a metaphor for the complex electrobiochemical workings of the human nervous system. I believe that our consciousness is physically based, and has no life outside of our body. My version of “soul”, if you will, arises some time after our conception, when our neural system is sufficiently developed, and it ends with our death.

Therefore, I believe, there is no heaven or hell, and no reincarnation. My meaning is different, and it leads to vastly different conclusions than those of people who think of the soul as having an existence separate from our physical selves.

When I  try to define the basic minimum characteristics of what “god” would be, I can come up with three: consciousness, intentional action, and existence outside the physical realm we inhabit. And I don't believe that exists.

What I do believe is that our entire universe is a single physical system, that every phenomenon in the universe is governed by one system of rules. Science is a process, using repeated hypothesis and testing, for learning what these laws are. We have, using the tools and methods of science, learned a great deal about the way this system works – descriptions, if you will, of the physical rules governing the universe. Science has not been completely successful - there are many phenomena we have yet to understand - but it has made spectacular progress in a myriad of directions, and continues to do so.

If we observe something that does not fit the rules as we understand them, then we don't understand the rules correctly or completely. In essence, therefore, I think that there is no such thing as the supernatural. All phenomena are natural phenomena. I believe that the word “natural” can be used to describe our entire universe – that there is nothing in the universe that is “other".

I also think that the distinction between humanity and nature is, ultimately, false. It may be a useful distinction in discussing the effects we, as a species, have had on the ecosystems we inhabit – but we are ourselves natural phenomena.

Now, at this point, some people might be asking “What is this guy doing in church?” I would answer that the absence of god does not necessarily mean an absence of religious thought, and that a belief in science and the scientific method need not be held in opposition to religion.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times a couple of months ago, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14^th Dalai Lama, discussed his views regarding the relationship of science and religion. He wrote of playing with a telescope, as a boy, and of discovering, to his surprise, that there were shadows on the moon. He said:

“...this was contrary to the ancient version of cosmology I had been taught, which held that the moon was a heavenly body that emitted its own light.

“ But through my telescope the moon was clearly just a barren rock, pocked with craters. If the author of that fourth-century treatise were writing today, I'm sure he would write the chapter on cosmology differently.

“ If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.”

Religion arose as stories to explain, in human terms, what people could not understand about our world. As our knowledge of the world, of the universe, has expanded, religion has necessarily given ground.

It is a measure of the march of scientific advance that many defenders of traditional religion now try to claim that science supports their beliefs. Many Christian fundamentalists are not satisfied by merely stating that their understanding of Genesis contradicts the theory of evolution. They go on to try to show how the fossil record supports their belief, or argue about punctuated equilibrium and other fine points of evolutionary theory. If you try to research evolution on the Internet, you'll find their sites all over the place. Science has become the standard of truth.

One of my favorite manifestations of this is the chrome decoration, seen on many cars, depicting the “Jesus Fish” swallowing the word “Darwin”. It implies that Christianity will survive Darwinism - in the very Darwinian struggle they claim to refute!

Just as religion must, I think, cede to science the workings of the physical universe, there are realms where science must give way. Ultimately, science is descriptive. It explores how the universe works, and can explain in exacting detail forces and processes - but cannot, in the end tell us Why.

I said earlier that the  absence of god does not necessarily mean the absence of religious thought. I do have a certain fondness for Taoism. Taoism concerns itself with the Tao, or Way. Written about 25 hundred years ago, the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching, Taoism's primary text, neatly express this part of my understanding of the world:

The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;
the name that can be named is not the eternal name.

Having been written in Chinese a few millennia back, the Tao Te Ching has had a fair number of English translations. Another is:

The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name.

And again,

The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant way.

While researching the various translations on the Internet a few weeks ago, I came across a page of Taoist thought which included a link to the Tao Te Ching itself. When I clicked on it, I got the error message “the page cannot be displayed”...

So now I can add my own line:

The page which can be displayed is not the eternal page.”

Seriously, though, the Tao Te Ching speaks about the mystery, indeed embraces the mystery, of the universe.

I believe there will be things that we will never, can never, know. We are limited, physical, creatures, and we are not, I think, built to understand the infinite. If we think we know the age of the universe, that only leads us to the question: what came before? If we think we know the physical limits of the universe, then we immediately wonder: What lies beyond the last star?

One of the reasons I don't believe in god-as-creator-of-the-universe is that such a belief takes the first step in an infinite regression: if god created the universe, what (who) created god? It has always seemed simpler to take the existence of the universe as the basic mystery it is.

We may understand the forces at work in the universe – may someday come up with the Unified Theory which will explain all the forces in a single framework. Will we ever know why the forces, why the entire framework, came to be the way it is? I doubt it.

What then, is our place in the universe?

We live on a planet orbiting a middling star part way out one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy – about 25,000 light years from its center. Most, if not all, life on this planet exists in a layer only 12 or 13 miles thick – a mere slick on the planet's surface. Within that bit of slime, we are one of several thousand mammalian species, one of tens of million of species overall.

We are made of the same amino acids and organized by essentially the same DNA as similar species. We share our design, with only a few minor variations, with the other great apes, and our genetic material uses the same principles as does that of most, if not all, of the life on our planet.

I don't believe we can claim to be at the apex of evolution, even on this planet. Every species on the planet has evolved, and continues to evolve, to fit its niche in the overall biosphere. We are, every species, all at the same stage evolutionarily – the stage called “now”.

By NASA estimates, our galaxy has 100 billion stars, and there are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. If our galaxy is of average size, there are about 10 sextillion stars in the universe. (That is a 'one' with 22 zeros after it.) If only one in a billion has a life-supporting planet, and one in a billion of those has a civilization, (and I'd guess the odds in both cases are considerably higher) then there are ten thousand civilizations out there. (Which is not to say that I believe that aliens have visited earth, or conducted medical experiments...)

Our species spends a good bit of energy trying to define what makes us different from the other animals. We use tools – but so, we've discovered, do chimps, and some birds, and even some dolphins. We use language – but it appears now that other species do as well. We transmit our knowledge between generations – but again, so do the chimps and dolphins.

To be sure, we do all these things with more complexity and variety than the other species do – at least so far as we know right now. But our difference is one of degree. We are not separate from them. We are merely more sophisticated in some aspects of our abilities. And they are more capable than we in other regards.

I have read, for instance, that dogs used for tracking have such an acute sense of smell that they are essentially genotyping – smelling the individual down to the genetic level. I know I can't do that...

I do think there is one way we can differentiate our species – we are (again, so far as we know...) the only one on earth that spends time trying to define our difference from the others.

My point is that we are far, far, from the center of the universe, far from unique as a species – essentially inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. To assume that the universe somehow cares about us is monstrously egotistical. By almost any measure, we do not matter.

By almost any measure. Because, of course, we do matter – we matter to each other. (To be fair, we also matter to the other species with which we share our earth - mostly because we are doing our best to eliminate them.)

We humans are a social species – we depend on each other in just about every aspect of our lives. Even though we each experience the world as an individual, in truth we live as community. From our most basic physical needs to the most complex parts of our emotional and intellectual lives, we cannot survive alone.

One of the uses to which “god” has been put is the maintenance of the social order. God teaches us right from wrong – or rather, those people who claim to have a mandate from god choose what is right and wrong. Coincidentally, they seem to find they are right...

In the absence of god, we need to find a basis for defining ethical behavior. One place to start is in the relationship between individual and society. Our own seven principles can be seen as  an attempt to balance those needs. We can define right and wrong in terms of the effect of our actions on the community as a whole – but this is, obviously, not a simple thing.

In fact, there are many ways in which life without god is harder than life with. Certainly the notion that there is an all-powerful being looking out for you can be more comforting than “the universe just is”.  An afterlife is easier to accept than the unimaginable end to ones self.

Being human has its burdens. Our lives are full of strife and striving. More than most species on this earth, we are aware of time, aware of our limited time. We search for certainty in a universe where none is given. Religion, and religious community, can help remind us that the world is as full of beauty as it is of terror, and that, absent the mystery, we would also be left bereft of wonder.