My beliefs have changed drastically throughout the course of my life. I’ve been the average Christian bystander, bordered on raving fundamentalist, quasi-fluffy Wiccan, non-fluffy Pagan, and pretty much every shade in between and then some. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a “religion of the week” kind of person. These changes have been gradual, a spiritual journey, without a road map, and, I admit, at times beset with the metaphysical version of ADHD.

I have recently come to a new point in this journey. As I’ve done with a number of things in my life, I’ve decided to quantify exactly what it is I believe. This hasn’t been easy, and I’ve had to ask myself a lot of uncomfortable questions and justify a number of things to myself.

In this quantification, I realized that there were two options: Reason and Faith. I could either attempt to explain my entire spirituality rationally, or I could do it on faith. You’d think that quantifying one’s spirituality on faith would be the logical path… right? But, wouldn’t doing that imply reason? So, I abandoned the notion of saying “I believe this because I believe it”, and decided to go with “I believe in Y because X”. Now, I just had to come up with X.

This internal conversation wasn’t nearly this structured.

So, we have Y, that is, what I believe, and X, that is, why I believe Y. Let’s cover the Y. It’s pretty straightforward.

I don’t believe in the supernatural. At all. Nothing supernatural exists.

Yes, I know I just explained a positive with a negative, but it’s far easier to concisely define what I don’t believe in, because the converse to that explains what I do believe in. So, here’s X:

I believe in the natural. Everything is natural. Science can explain everything. Scientists just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

This is my grand indictment of all religions: Science and Reason can explain anything. Miracles? Science and Reason can explain them (either they’re hearsay and fabrications, or there’s a scientific explanation for them). Ghosts? Science and Reason can explain them.

Here’s where I’m going to cop out of a complete explanation: Dark Energy. Physical cosmology posits that 22% of the universe is comprised of dark matter, 74% is dark energy, and only 4% is ordinary matter. Scientists admit that 96% of the universe exists in a state that they simply don’t understand. I don’t need to believe in an all-powerful deity, because Science tells me that I still don’t understand practically anything. I don’t see that as a reason to fill that void with a god.

Let’s take Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

That last one is the driving force in my personal spirituality.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re in the basement, changing a blown fuse, and suddenly you and your flashlight are whisked off to the year 1387. You meet a villager, who marvels over your flashlight. You explain to them that it’s simply two batteries and a light bulb. Do they, even after years of explanation, accept your simple explanation?

Nope, they burn you at the stake for harnessing demons in little metal cylinders.

We stopped burning people at the stake in the early 1800’s, but the concept is still there. Claiming to be able to explain the afterlife? Don’t try getting that paper published. But why can’t science explain the afterlife? Like I said, 96% of the Universe is a mystery.

So, does your god exist? Maybe, but at some point, science will be able to measure, quantify and categorize it to the point that while it’ll be powerful, it won’t be, well… godly. Not any more than a man is to an ant.

So where does all that other stuff from the title fit in? Let’s tackle prayer. People have posited that prayer has power. That their deity answers prayers. There’s scientific evidence that people in surgery that are prayed for fare better than those that aren’t.

Science can explain it, and it doesn’t need to use E=MC^God to do it. It’s a basic matter of energy transference. It is the same thing as magic: the willful manipulation of reality. “God” just becomes the focus, the conduit. Prayer, in my mind, is the biggest argument against an all-powerful deity. Why would an all-powerful deity even need lowly humans to pray for anything? Wouldn’t he/she/it just do it? “Please save my dog, God!” “Well, I wasn’t going to, but now that you’ve asked!”

Prayer is a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I prayed, nothing happened, God has a plan”. “I prayed, it was answered, God is looking out for me”. I reject that. Prayer is magic. It’s the willful manipulation of reality. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Eventually, I am confident that science will be able to explain it. When that happens, prayer will become more powerful, because then we’ll know exactly how to do it right.

And finally, the Druidism. That’s the path I’m on right now. How, exactly, do I reconcile a pagan religion with everything I’ve just said? Simple: I don’t have to believe in my deity’s actual existence to use them as I’ve already described. I believe that every deity is simply a manifestation of the universe, an aspect of something we desire. A creation, if you will, of the human subconscious that acts as a conduit to the greater untapped power that surrounds us. Do I need to call the Great Bear of the North to watch over my rites? No, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. The Great Bear of the North only exists due to the will that is put into its existence. Is it going to watch over my rites? Who knows. Who cares? It’s a personal choice that adds to what I get out of my particular religion.

And that is the core, the argument in favor of religion: Regardless of what form it takes, if it refreshes the spirit, lifts the mind and energizes the soul, it’s serving its purpose. It’s the point that it turns from that to demanding exclusivity and claiming a monopoly on truth that it becomes malevolent. It ceases to serve the purpose that faith and spirituality are there to serve. The Universe, as a whole, is divine, at least to us, just as an individual cell would see the whole of our bodies as divine. It doesn’t really care about us or watch over us, but it provides for us and contains a vast well of power that we can tap. We just don’t understand nearly all of it. The closer we come to explaining it all, the more powerful we’ll become. The closer we’ll come to the divine.

That’s where science and reason have lead me.

-pb