Chapter 35 — Another Idea of God

Deism and the profound difference between the possibility of a creator and the personal, interventionist deity I was taught to fear.

Another Question Entirely

Once I stopped assuming that the Christian God I had been taught about was the only possible meaning of the word God, another question became available.

What if some form of creator existed without being the personality described to me by religion?

That was a very different proposition.

It did not require Hell.

It did not require Satan.

It did not require priests.

It did not require churches.

It did not require a sacred book.

It did not require divine anger.

It did not require eternal punishment.

And it did not require me to accept that one particular group of human beings possessed privileged access to the mind of the creator.

Deism

That is one reason I found deism interesting.

Deism is not one single doctrine, and people have used the word in different ways.

But the basic idea I found useful was simple.

There might be some originating intelligence, cause or creative principle behind existence without that being intervening constantly in human life.

Such a creator would not necessarily dictate books.

It would not necessarily appoint priests.

It would not necessarily perform miracles.

It would not necessarily punish disbelief.

It would not necessarily answer prayers.

It might simply be responsible, in some sense, for the existence of the universe.

That possibility could be considered separately from Christianity.

Creator Does Not Mean Christian

This became one of the most important distinctions for me.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that tomorrow somebody produced convincing evidence that the universe had been deliberately created.

That would be extraordinary.

But it would not automatically prove Christianity.

It would not prove Judaism.

It would not prove Islam.

It would not prove Hinduism.

It would not prove any particular scripture.

It would establish one thing:

that some form of creator existed.

Everything else would still require evidence.

The Missing Step

Religious arguments often seemed to me to move too quickly across that gap.

The universe exists.

Therefore there must be a creator.

Therefore that creator is God.

Therefore that God is the God of this particular religion.

Therefore this particular book contains his wishes.

Therefore this particular institution may interpret those wishes.

Therefore this particular person may tell another human being what God requires.

That is not one conclusion.

It is a chain of conclusions.

Each step requires support.

The Universe Is Bigger Than the Argument

My interest in geology made this increasingly obvious to me.

The Earth itself is unimaginably old compared with a human life.

Continents move.

Oceans open and close.

Mountain ranges rise and erode.

Species appear and disappear.

Rock preserves evidence of environments which existed before any human being had language.

Then astronomy enlarges the scale again.

Our planet becomes one world orbiting one ordinary star among an extraordinary number of stars and galaxies.

Against that scale, many of the religious disputes of my childhood became strangely small.

A Creator of Everything

If something created all of that, I would expect its concerns to be at least as large as its creation.

That does not prove anything about a creator.

It simply affects what I find plausible.

I found it increasingly difficult to imagine an intelligence capable of creating galaxies being preoccupied with the local hierarchies, dress codes, sexual anxieties and denominational disputes of particular human societies.

The scale did not fit comfortably for me.

Why Would a Creator Need Representatives?

Another question followed.

Why would an all-powerful creator need human representatives?

If communication with humanity mattered, direct communication would seem possible.

Yet religions repeatedly depend upon intermediaries.

Prophets.

Priests.

Clergy.

Theologians.

Institutions.

Translators.

Interpreters.

Committees.

Councils.

Each additional human layer introduces another possibility of error.

Or ambition.

Or prejudice.

Or misunderstanding.

Or power.

If the Message Matters

The more important the message, the less sense that arrangement made to me.

If eternal consequences truly depended upon understanding God's wishes, clarity should be extraordinary.

The message should not depend upon being born in the correct country.

Or century.

Or family.

Or language.

Or denomination.

It should not depend upon whether the local priest interpreted an ancient text correctly.

A God capable of creating a universe should be capable of communicating without leaving billions of people arguing over what was meant.

Geography

Religion is also profoundly geographical.

Children commonly inherit the beliefs surrounding them.

A child born into one family may be raised Christian.

Another may be raised Muslim.

Another Hindu.

Another Buddhist.

Another without religion.

The child did not choose the birthplace.

The child did not choose the parents.

The child did not select the surrounding culture after comparing all available metaphysical systems.

Yet many religions have historically attached enormous consequences to what people believe.

That always struck me as a strange basis for divine justice.

An Accident of Birth

If salvation or damnation depended heavily upon accepting the correct religious claims, then birthplace could become one of the most important events in a person's supposed eternal future.

That does not look like a fair examination.

It looks like an accident of geography.

A genuinely universal God should not need a child to be born into the right household in order to have a reasonable chance of understanding reality.

The Problem of Exclusive Truth

Many religious traditions contain people who are certain that theirs is the true account.

The difficulty is that certainty exists on more than one side.

Sincerity does not resolve the contradiction.

Two people can sincerely hold incompatible beliefs.

At least one must be mistaken about some part of the disagreement.

That is why belief itself cannot be the evidence.

The strength of conviction tells me how strongly somebody believes.

It does not automatically tell me whether the belief is true.

A Creator Without Threat

The concept of a creator became easier for me to consider once punishment was removed from it.

A creator would not need me to be frightened.

It would not need to threaten me with Hell.

It would not need to punish questions.

It would not need to demand loyalty.

It would not need me to flatter it.

It would not need worship in order to remain powerful.

Those seemed like human needs.

Not divine ones.

But What About Love?

There was another question which appeared surprisingly often when I questioned religion.

“What about love?”

It was sometimes presented as though love itself were evidence of something supernatural.

I understand why.

Love can feel enormous.

It can reorganise a person's life.

It can produce loyalty, sacrifice, grief, attachment and extraordinary acts of care.

But the emotional power of an experience does not, by itself, tell us where that experience came from.

One way I found useful to think about it was to strip away some of the romantic language.

We are bipedal hominids.

We pair bond.

We form attachments.

We cooperate in raising the next generation.

We protect offspring.

We form families and social groups.

None of those capacities is uniquely human.

Pair bonding, parental attachment and cooperative care occur elsewhere in the animal world as well, including beyond mammals.

That does not make human love unimportant.

It makes it natural.

Natural Does Not Mean Meaningless

This distinction mattered to me.

Explaining something biologically does not remove its value.

Understanding hunger does not make food meaningless.

Understanding vision does not make a sunset less beautiful.

Understanding attachment does not make affection unreal.

Understanding pair bonding does not prevent two people from building a life together.

The mechanism and the experience are not enemies.

Love can be biologically understandable and still matter enormously to the people experiencing it.

The Word Carries a Great Deal

Part of the difficulty is that the word love is used to describe many different things.

Sexual attraction.

Pair bonding.

Parental attachment.

Friendship.

Loyalty.

Compassion.

Care for a child.

Attachment to a place.

Grief for someone who has died.

And sometimes an idealised religious concept in which God is described as love itself.

Those things overlap, but they are not identical.

Using one word for all of them can make an argument emotionally powerful while leaving the underlying proposition surprisingly unclear.

Love Is Not Evidence of God

For me, the existence of love never became evidence that a particular God existed.

It demonstrated that human beings are capable of attachment.

That is already remarkable.

It does not require another explanation merely because the experience is important.

If somebody wishes to argue that love was placed within us by a creator, that becomes another claim.

The claim requires evidence of its own.

The feeling cannot be used as proof of the explanation attached to it.

Love and Reproduction

There is also an evolutionary practicality beneath some of what humans call romantic love.

Our species produces unusually dependent young.

Keeping those young alive requires enormous investment.

Attachment between adults, attachment to children and cooperation within groups can all contribute to survival.

That does not mean every human relationship exists merely to reproduce.

It does not mean people who do not have children love less.

It does not reduce friendship, compassion or lifelong attachment to one biological purpose.

It simply means we should not be surprised that evolution has produced powerful mechanisms which hold social animals together.

The Emotional Lever

Thinking about love this way helped me with another problem.

The word can carry tremendous emotional leverage.

If somebody says:

“Without God, how can there be love?”

the question can make rejecting the religious explanation sound as though one is rejecting love itself.

I did not accept that choice.

I could reject the supernatural explanation and keep the human experience.

I could love my son.

I could care about another person.

I could grieve.

I could become attached.

I could act compassionately.

None of those things required me to accept the theology which another person attached to the word.

Love Does Not Excuse Harm

There was another reason I became cautious about the word.

Adults can say:

“I did it because I love you.”

Parents can say it.

Partners can say it.

Religious institutions can say it.

God is also frequently described as acting from love.

But calling an action loving does not establish that the action was good.

The conduct still has to be examined.

Did it respect the other person?

Did it preserve consent?

Did it cause unnecessary harm?

Did it allow the other person freedom?

Did it protect the weaker person?

Love should not become another word which prevents scrutiny.

Something Can Be Natural and Still Be Wonderful

Perhaps that is where I eventually arrived.

I did not need love to be supernatural in order for it to matter.

The fact that a pair of bipedal hominids can become profoundly attached to one another does not diminish the experience.

If anything, I find it more interesting.

Matter organised itself into life.

Life developed nervous systems.

Some of those organisms developed attachment, memory and social bonds.

And eventually creatures capable of thinking about those bonds began writing poetry about them.

That seems remarkable enough without requiring me to place a supernatural explanation behind it.

Why Would God Need Praise?

This was another question I found difficult.

Why would a perfect being require praise?

Human beings often seek recognition because we are insecure.

We want approval.

We want status.

We want our achievements acknowledged.

But a perfect being would presumably lack nothing.

It would not need reassurance.

It would not need a congregation repeatedly telling it how great it was.

It would already know.

The demand for worship therefore looked increasingly human to me.

Worship and Power

Worship also has a political effect.

It establishes hierarchy.

One being is above.

Everybody else is below.

When human beings claim authority as representatives of the being above, that hierarchy can continue downward.

God over clergy.

Clergy over adults.

Adults over children.

The theological hierarchy can become a social hierarchy.

That does not prove that religion was invented for that purpose.

It does mean that the structure can be used that way.

A God Who Does Not Need Obedience

The more I thought about it, the less I could imagine a genuinely all-powerful being needing obedience for its own sake.

Human rulers demand obedience because their authority can be challenged.

Governments enforce laws because people may refuse them.

Armies demand discipline because coordinated obedience is necessary.

Parents sometimes demand obedience because children can do things which are dangerous.

But an omnipotent being cannot be threatened by disobedience.

Nothing I could do would reduce its power.

That made divine anger at disbelief increasingly difficult for me to understand.

Disbelief Is Not an Injury

If I do not believe another person exists, that does not injure them.

If God exists, my uncertainty does not reduce God's existence.

If God is all-powerful, my disbelief cannot threaten God.

So why would honest doubt deserve punishment?

A truthful investigation might lead one person toward belief and another away from it.

If a God valued truth, I would expect honest inquiry to matter more than forced agreement.

The Freedom to Be Wrong

A mature idea of freedom must include the possibility of being wrong.

If people are genuinely free to think, some will reach conclusions which others reject.

That includes conclusions about religion.

Freedom of religion therefore seems incomplete to me unless it also contains freedom not to believe.

And freedom to change one's mind.

And freedom to say:

“I do not know.”

I Do Not Know

Those three words became increasingly important.

I do not know.

I do not know why there is something rather than nothing.

I do not know whether existence ultimately requires an originating intelligence.

I do not know whether consciousness tells us anything fundamental about the universe.

I do not know whether there are aspects of reality which human beings are not equipped to perceive.

Not knowing does not frighten me in the way it once did.

It is simply an honest description of the available evidence.

Not Knowing Is Not Failure

Religion had often presented certainty as a virtue.

Faith meant believing.

Doubt could be weakness.

For me, the opposite eventually became possible.

Uncertainty could be intellectual honesty.

A question did not need an immediate answer.

A gap did not need to be filled.

That principle became important in my understanding of memory as well.

I could say:

“I don't remember.”

I could also say:

“I don't know whether there is a God.”

Neither statement required me to invent an answer.

The Same Discipline

In that sense, the method I eventually used with memory and the method I used with religion became surprisingly similar.

Separate what I know from what I have been told.

Separate evidence from interpretation.

Identify where a claim came from.

Ask whether it can be tested.

Preserve uncertainty.

Do not fill gaps merely because an empty space feels uncomfortable.

Do not increase certainty beyond the evidence.

Think for Yourself, Question Authority

Somewhere during those years another small piece of language entered my life and stayed there.

TFYQA.

Think for yourself.

Question authority.

I first encountered the words while I was reading the science and ideas magazines which had become a regular part of my life.

I was reading publications such as OMNI, Scientific American, Longevity and others which took me into science, psychology, technology and ideas well beyond the world in which I had grown up.

For a long time I could remember the words more clearly than I could remember the person who had said them.

Looking back now, the person appears to have been Timothy Leary.

Leary was a psychologist who became internationally associated with psychedelic drugs and with challenging conventional authority.

The phrase was simple:

Think for yourself.

Question authority.

Five letters became almost a word to me.

TFYQA.

I did not value the phrase because I thought every authority was wrong.

That was never what it meant to me.

It meant that authority did not relieve me of the responsibility to think.

A doctor could be right.

A scientist could be right.

A priest could be right.

A government could be right.

A book could be right.

But the title held by the person making the statement was not itself evidence that the statement was true.

Alice Miller

At around the same period I encountered another interview which stayed with me for very different reasons.

It was with Alice Miller.

Miller had trained and worked for many years as a psychoanalyst.

What struck me was her recognition that even prolonged analysis and the professional theories surrounding it had failed to bring her directly to the reality of her own childhood.

She eventually became deeply critical of theories which, in her view, could obscure what had actually happened to children.

That interested me enormously.

Here was somebody from inside the profession saying that professional knowledge itself could become an obstacle.

A theory could be so powerful that the person looking through it might fail to see what was directly in front of them.

That idea stayed with me too.

Try to Prove Yourself Wrong

There was another idea which became just as important to me.

Richard Feynman's description of scientific thinking was wonderfully uncomplicated.

Make your best guess.

Work out what should follow if the guess is correct.

Then compare it with what actually happens.

If reality disagrees with the idea, the idea is wrong.

It does not matter how attractive the idea is.

It does not matter how much work went into it.

It does not matter how eminent the person was who proposed it.

Reality gets the final vote.

Another part of that approach mattered just as much to me.

Do not merely collect the things which support your conclusion.

Look for what could prove it wrong.

Make a real effort to expose the weaknesses in your own explanation.

That became a practical method for me.

Take my best explanation.

Write it down as clearly and convincingly as I can.

Then stop defending it.

Come back to it from another direction and try to destroy it.

What have I overlooked?

What else could explain the same facts?

What evidence does not fit?

What assumption have I quietly treated as fact?

What would have to be true for my explanation to be wrong?

And, where possible, let somebody else attack it as well.

Another person may see the weakness I have become unable to see because the idea is mine.

If the explanation survives serious attempts to disprove it, then perhaps I am onto something.

Not certainty.

Something worth investigating further.

A Method I Still Use

I still try to do that with questions which matter to me.

It is particularly important when I already have an emotional investment in the answer.

That includes questions about my own life.

A recovered memory can feel convincing.

A document can appear to confirm it.

A pattern can suddenly seem obvious.

That is precisely the point at which I need to ask what could make the conclusion wrong.

Is there another date?

Another document?

Another interpretation?

Am I joining two events which may have been separate?

Did somebody tell me something which later became entangled with what I remember directly?

Does a record contradict me?

And if it does, is the record more reliable, or does the record itself contain an error?

The purpose is not to destroy my own account.

It is to make it earn the confidence I eventually place in it.

We Did Not Arrive as Blank Slates

Other writers later helped me think about the same questions from the biology of human behaviour.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate was important to me because it challenged the idea that human beings begin as infinitely malleable minds upon which society simply writes whatever eventually appears.

We come with biology.

We come with an evolutionary history.

We arrive with capacities, tendencies, emotional systems and ways of responding which did not begin with the first lesson somebody taught us.

Culture matters enormously.

Experience matters enormously.

Childhood matters enormously.

But none of them is writing upon an empty surface.

There is already an organism there.

Biology Is Not Destiny

That did not mean that everything was predetermined in the simple sense that nothing could ever change.

The human organism which evolved tendencies towards aggression also evolved attachment, empathy, cooperation, reasoning and self-control.

Learning is itself something our biology allows us to do.

Environment changes us because we are biological organisms capable of being changed by environments.

The old argument between nature and nurture increasingly looked false to me.

Nature responds to nurture.

Nurture acts upon nature.

They are not competing explanations for two different human beings.

Sapolsky and the Moment Before

Robert Sapolsky took that way of thinking much further for me.

When a person does something, he asks us to look at what happened in the brain immediately beforehand.

Then what happened minutes before that.

Hours before.

Days before.

Years before.

What happened during childhood?

What happened during development?

What hormones were acting?

What genes were present?

What environment acted upon those genes?

What culture shaped the environment?

What happened generations before the person was born?

The behaviour at the end of that chain does not suddenly appear from nowhere.

It has a history.

Free Will

Sapolsky eventually took that argument to a conclusion which many people find uncomfortable.

He argues that there is no separate free will sitting outside those causal processes and stepping in at the final moment to create a decision.

I found that proposition useful even without needing to turn it into another belief which could never be questioned.

It forces me to ask a much better question than:

“Why did this person simply choose to be like this?”

I can ask:

“What produced this behaviour?”

That question opens a much larger field of investigation.

Sapolsky Was About Much More Than Free Will

Robert Sapolsky became important to me for reasons which went well beyond his later arguments about free will.

Long before that debate became prominent, I had encountered his work on stress, primates, biology and human behaviour.

There was something immediately different about the way he approached a human being.

He did not begin with sin.

He did not begin with evil.

He did not begin with supernatural temptation.

He began with an organism.

A brain.

A nervous system.

Hormones.

Genes.

Development.

Environment.

Social structure.

History.

And what happened immediately before the behaviour we were trying to understand.

The Baboons

One of Sapolsky's shortest presentations about baboons made an impression which was completely disproportionate to its length.

It was only a few minutes.

People who have lived with abuse can recognise something in those animals almost immediately.

A baboon higher in the hierarchy has a bad experience.

It cannot necessarily attack the animal above it.

So aggression moves somewhere safer.

Downward.

A weaker animal is attacked.

That animal may then turn on someone weaker again.

The original cause and the eventual victim may have had nothing whatever to do with one another.

The victim can simply be the individual upon whom it is safe to discharge the aggression.

There was something brutally recognisable in that.

Not because human families and institutions are baboon troops.

They are not.

But hierarchy, power, unpredictability and displaced aggression are not ideas which require religion to explain them.

They can be observed.

The Innocent Bystander

Sapolsky described aggression among baboons being displaced onto third parties.

An animal can be sitting there doing nothing and still become the target because another animal higher in the hierarchy has had a bad day.

That simple observation helped me understand something which moral labels often obscure.

The person receiving aggression does not necessarily contain the explanation for the aggression.

Sometimes the explanation lies somewhere else in the system.

That is a particularly important idea for a child.

A child can spend years asking:

“What is wrong with me?”

when a much better question may be:

“What was happening to the adults around me?”

Or:

“What kind of hierarchy allowed this person to do that to somebody with less power?”

Being Human

Sapolsky's Stanford lectures on Human Behavioral Biology went much further.

There were dozens of hours of them.

I watched them more than once.

On later viewings I heard things I had missed the first time.

The lectures moved through evolution, genetics, the brain, hormones, development, aggression, sexual behaviour, social behaviour and mental illness.

Instead of explaining a person from one direction, Sapolsky kept moving between levels.

What happened in the previous second?

What happened minutes earlier?

What hormones were acting?

What happened during childhood?

What happened during development?

What genes were involved?

What environment acted upon those genes?

What culture shaped that environment?

What happened generations before this particular person existed?

The behaviour at the end of that chain did not arrive from nowhere.

Watching Them Again

I returned to those lectures repeatedly.

That mattered.

The first viewing gave me information.

Later viewings gave me relationships between the information.

Something about stress connected with something about hierarchy.

Something about development connected with something about adult behaviour.

Genetics ceased to mean destiny.

Environment ceased to mean that biology did not matter.

Behaviour became the end result of many interacting layers.

That way of thinking fitted me.

It was much closer to geology than theology.

Layer upon layer.

Each one affecting what came next.

A Different Explanation of Being Human

For me, that body of knowledge did more than teach biology.

It progressively removed the need for many of the unsupported religious claims with which I had been raised.

Human aggression did not require Satan.

Sexual behaviour did not require sin as a biological explanation.

Fear did not require demons.

Traumatic responses did not require possession.

Attachment did not require a supernatural source of love.

Changes in behaviour did not require divine intervention.

There were mechanisms.

They could be investigated.

They could interact.

They could sometimes be measured.

And when an explanation was wrong, new evidence could change it.

That last difference mattered enormously.

Science did not require the explanation to remain true because an authority had declared it true centuries earlier.

The Better Explanation Won

I did not need to make a philosophical decision one morning to replace religion with biology.

Something quieter happened.

As I learned more about human behaviour, more of the things which religion had claimed to explain acquired explanations which required fewer unsupported assumptions.

The supernatural explanation became less necessary.

Not because somebody ordered me to reject it.

Because another explanation did more work.

For me that was important.

I had been raised in a system in which questioning could itself be treated as a failure.

Here I was encountering a method in which an explanation was supposed to be questioned.

If a better explanation appeared, changing your mind was not a sin.

It was the point.

Free Will

Sapolsky eventually carried that causal way of thinking into a proposition which many people find deeply uncomfortable.

He argues that there is no separate free will sitting outside biology, development and environment and stepping in at the final moment to create a decision independently of everything which produced the person making it.

I found the argument valuable even without needing to turn it into another belief which could never be questioned.

It forces the question backwards.

Instead of:

“Why did this person simply choose to be like this?”

I can ask:

“What produced this behaviour?”

Then:

“What produced that?”

And again:

“What came before that?”

That does not make harmful behaviour harmless.

It makes the search for its causes much more serious.

From Blame to Cause

This became particularly relevant to the way I thought about children.

A frightened child does not manufacture fear from nothing.

A traumatised child does not choose the nervous system which was formed by what happened around him.

A child who freezes, fights, runs or fawns is not sitting outside biology selecting a response from a philosophical menu.

Something happened before the behaviour.

That does not make every behaviour acceptable.

It means that if we want to understand it, we have to investigate what came before it.

That is almost the reverse of the religious framework I encountered as a child.

The religious question could be:

“What is wrong with this child?”

The biological question is more likely to be:

“What happened, and what produced this response?”

The Moral Use of Understanding

For me, that shift does not remove morality.

It changes what morality is trying to accomplish.

Punishment alone asks how much suffering somebody deserves after the event.

Understanding causation also asks how another event can be prevented.

What conditions produced the behaviour?

Which of those conditions can be changed?

Who needs protection?

What intervention actually reduces the chance of another person being harmed?

That seems to me a more useful approach than simply attaching words such as evil, wicked or sinful to a human being and imagining that the label has explained anything.

Three Ideas That Stayed

Looking back, three ideas from those years fitted together remarkably well.

Alice Miller raised the possibility that an established professional theory could prevent people from seeing the childhood experience in front of them.

Timothy Leary supplied five letters:

TFYQA.

Think for yourself.

Question authority.

And Feynman added another obligation.

Question yourself as well.

Do not merely ask whether the authority might be wrong.

Ask how you might be wrong.

Try to find the evidence which would defeat your own explanation.

Those principles eventually became part of the way I approached religion, medicine, psychiatry, institutional records, memory and this book itself.

Questioning authority does not mean assuming authority is wrong.

Questioning myself does not mean assuming my memory is wrong.

Both mean that a conclusion should be able to survive examination.

Authority Should Not Increase as Evidence Decreases

That principle became especially important with religion.

A strange reversal can occur with supernatural claims.

The claim becomes less testable.

Yet the authority attached to it becomes greater.

A person says:

“I think this.”

That can be questioned.

A person says:

“God says this.”

Suddenly the claim may be treated as beyond ordinary challenge.

For me, it should work the other way around.

The less a claim can be independently established, the less power it should have over another person's life.

Authority should not increase as evidence decreases.

Claims That Affect Other People

People are entitled to believe extraordinary things privately.

The situation changes when those beliefs are imposed upon somebody else.

The person making an extraordinary claim carries the responsibility for establishing it.

And where that claim is used to control, frighten, punish, exclude or otherwise affect the life of another person, I think that responsibility should be complete.

The greater the consequence imposed upon another person, the stronger the evidence required from the person making the claim.

A child should never carry the burden of disproving an adult's unverifiable supernatural accusation.

A Private Belief and a Public Act

This distinction matters because belief and conduct are not the same.

A person can believe that Hell exists.

That belief belongs to them.

But threatening a child with Hell is an action involving another person.

A person can believe in possession.

But restraining a child because of that belief is an action.

A person can believe that God disapproves of something.

But using public authority to punish another person on that basis is an action.

The moment belief crosses into another person's life, consequences matter.

A Creator Would Not Need My Submission

If some form of creator exists, I cannot see why that creator would need my submission.

It would already possess whatever power belongs to it.

My agreement could add nothing.

My disagreement could remove nothing.

My praise could enlarge nothing.

My doubt could diminish nothing.

That kind of creator would have no obvious reason to threaten me.

It would not need my fear.

Perhaps Creation Was Enough

One of the ideas I found appealing in deism was the possibility that, if a creator existed, creation itself might be the act.

The universe would then proceed according to the properties it possessed.

Stars would form.

Planets would develop.

Geology would operate.

Life would evolve.

Human beings would emerge with the capacity to think, cooperate, compete, love, harm, build and destroy.

Responsibility for human behaviour would remain largely human.

That seemed to me a more coherent possibility than a God who controlled everything while humans were nevertheless blamed for everything that went wrong.

No Divine Policeman

It also removed the expectation of a divine policeman.

If no supernatural intervention was coming, then justice became our responsibility.

Children needed human protection.

Crime needed human investigation.

Evidence needed human preservation.

Institutions needed human scrutiny.

Peace needed human work.

That did not seem bleak to me.

It seemed clarifying.

Responsibility Returns to Us

One of the dangers of attributing events to divine will is that human responsibility can become blurred.

God has a plan.

God will judge.

God will make things right.

Perhaps.

But a child being harmed cannot safely wait for eternity.

The adult standing nearby has a responsibility now.

The institution has a responsibility now.

The police have a responsibility now.

The health system has a responsibility now.

The community has a responsibility now.

Whatever exists beyond human life, responsibility within human life still belongs to us.

A More Demanding Morality

In some ways, removing divine command made morality more demanding rather than less.

I could no longer say something was right merely because an authority declared it right.

I had to ask what it did to people.

Did it reduce suffering?

Did it preserve freedom?

Did it treat people fairly?

Did it protect the vulnerable?

Did it respect consent?

Could the rule be applied equally?

Would I accept the same rule if I occupied the weaker position?

Those questions required more thought than obedience.

Peace as a Practice

The idea of peace also became simpler.

Peace is not something imposed after sufficient killing.

Peace is something practised.

If peaceful methods are abandoned whenever they become difficult, peace has not become the governing principle.

The same is true of equality.

Equality cannot be reached by permanently assigning one group superior authority.

The method has to contain something of the destination.

Peace must contain peaceful conduct.

Equality must contain equal standing.

Justice must contain fairness.

Freedom must contain the ability to refuse.

A God Worth the Word

If I were ever to use the word God positively, I would expect the concept to meet at least those standards.

A God worth the word would not be diminished by questions.

It would not require fear.

It would not need flattery.

It would not require war to demonstrate power.

It would not establish equality through subordination.

It would not call coercion consent.

It would not demand forgiveness while practising vengeance.

It would not require human beings to lie about what they know.

It would not punish intellectual honesty.

Perhaps There Is No God

There remains another perfectly reasonable possibility.

Perhaps there is no God at all.

Perhaps the universe does not require intention.

Perhaps human beings created gods because we wanted explanations, order, comfort, authority or meaning.

I do not need to settle that question in order to reject claims which do not have sufficient evidence.

Nor do I need certainty that there is no creator in order to reject the God presented to me in childhood.

Those remain separate questions.

No Need to Replace One Certainty With Another

Leaving religion did not require me to replace religious certainty with atheistic certainty.

I could simply stop pretending to know.

I could look at the universe with curiosity.

I could admire geology.

I could study life.

I could wonder about consciousness.

I could consider cosmology.

I could ask why anything exists.

And I could leave the answer open.

What Changed

What changed most was not my answer.

It was who had authority over the question.

As a child, adults answered it for me.

They told me who God was.

They told me what God wanted.

They told me what happened after death.

They told me what would happen if I disobeyed.

As an adult, I took the question back.

I could examine the evidence myself.

I could reject an argument.

I could change my mind.

I could remain uncertain.

Another Idea of God

Deism did not become another church for me.

It was useful because it separated two propositions which had been joined together throughout my childhood.

There may or may not be some originating intelligence behind existence.

That tells me almost nothing, by itself, about Christianity.

It tells me nothing about Hell.

Nothing about Satan.

Nothing about exorcism.

Nothing about clerical authority.

Nothing about whether one ancient text should govern another person's life.

Those are additional claims.

They require their own evidence.

That separation gave me something religion had rarely allowed me as a child.

The freedom to consider the question without being threatened by the answer.