Prometheus 6

No, it's not about politics ...your conception of the universe is safe.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

This does not mean I'm endorsing his speculation on the merger of science and mysticism, nor will I be practicing any lyric religions. For the most part, to me, God is "the anthropomorphization of everything I don't know." It's the "all else" that must be equal in our "all else being equal" arguments.

I don't see anyone else taking that position, though. Language is so central to out neural processing that it actually shapes out perceptions...all you actually ever perceive is the state of your brain. And you can't go anywhere without running into that God concept because we can't think a thing without naming it...the unknown needs a name and for quite a while that name has been God.