Pandeism

The following is based on, “Why Pandeism is Better than Theism: an Essay” by K.M. is posted on www.koilas.org.

Part 3 – Religion

So, why religion at all? Human beings, it seems, have intuitively used religious ideas to express what is essentially inexpressible. Through pre-history, a far longer period than that of recorded history, it appears mankind speculated on metaphysical matters.

Recorded history is a worldwide litany of spiritual visions, encounters with god(s) and divine communications. These became culturally modulated into a variety of faiths and formal expressions, usually spawning a priesthood as guardians and interpreters of religion.

The sceptical reductionist would dismiss all such notions as being the product of pre-scientific understanding; that revelations only occur in the minds of recipients, apparently answered prayers being grossly outnumbered by those unanswered and miracles are either delusion, coincidence or fraudulent.

Evolutionary biology may concede that past religious belief may have conferred some competitive advantage, while insisting they are expressions, ultimately, of fear. Such reductionism, though, demands that every religious event or notion in the entire history of humanity is an error or a fraud.

It has to be accepted that the wide variety of metaphysical or religious claims often conflict, supposedly eternal truths become modified to incorporate new factors and that a significant number of people have not and do not have religious experiences or sensibilities.

Religions and religious affiliations are undoubtedly culturally determined. Any one particular faith is largely made up of those born into it. Nuanced varieties do develop within a given faith and people do convert, while those who fall out if faith become apostates and atheists who continue to hold at least the moral and cultural precepts of their former faith.

An alternative explanation for the multitudinous and often conflicting mutually exclusive faiths is that they are the imperfect partial reflection of a greater, perhaps ineffable, truth. Humanity has an intuitive, subconscious awareness of what is an undefined and undefinable divine creator and creation.

A religious manifestation that is cross-cultural is mysticism. Through meditation and even mind-expanding/altering drugs there seems to be a common replicable observation of oneness with the universe that has a spiritual nature bound up within its very fabric.

It maybe the concept of religion has become so tainted by its inflexible and exclusive expressions that now it is more alienating than attractive to many, perhaps most, people. Deism may be able to buck this trend or maybe needs to transcend religion(s) and present itself as the rational philosophy it actually is.

Pandeism in particular can appeal to both the materialist and idealist as neither is refuted by the notion that the universe is the creation and only expression of the divine. Whether as a religion or a philosophy Pandeism can accommodate people from all religious backgrounds and none, while transcending previous religious expressions.

Religion and War

 

There is a popular conception that if religion could be abolished a primary cause of conflict and war would go with it. Current belligerence in the name of Islam is often cited, or the historical religious wars of Christianity, still with current echoes, are raised.

This, though, ducks the issue, which is human culpability. It’s along the lines of the childish excuse, “He made me do it”, to blame another, in this case God, and so shirk taking responsibility. Religion can be used to recruit the blindly faithful to the flag, but so can nationalism or a political cause.

Religion can be very effective in this as it purports to transmit the actual will of God, when in reality it is very much a human construct. Religious traditions develop and consolidate over many generations and can appear to be the timeless commands of God.

For instance, during a recent radio interview concerning extreme temperatures in Pakistan, a Moslem woman explained the difficulty this posed during Ramadan. From sunrise to sunset fasting requires abstinence from drinking even water.

While this is an impressive display of personal disciple it nonetheless remains a human originated stricture. Religious scriptures can no doubt be quoted, but they, Koran, Bible or Talmud, are of human authorship.

Deists would point out that the created universe works according to identifiable laws, with inherent mechanisms. On a hot day, thirst is the natural trigger to drink and doing so is not a sin or breaking some divine ordinance. Not imbibing a glass of water is a human choice not a divine one.

Similarly, perpetrating violence comes from motivations that are all too human. Newsreel footage from the First World War exists of priests showering paraded troops with holy water from essentially a bucket with a broad paintbrush. However, there can be little doubt that that conflict arose from political and economic causes, not by celestial direction.

Frederick the Great described himself as a philosopher, which in the 18^th century meant a declaration of atheism. He acquired the epithet “the Great” due to his embarking on military campaigns for the expansion of Prussia. Man requires no help or sanction from God to wage war.

There may be myriad reasons for, and causes of, war which might involve massive armies and prolonged fighting, or individual acts of violence. However, justifiable or otherwise those reasons and causes may be, perpetrators are responsible for them, not religion, not God.

It would be quite possible for deists to become instigators of war; after all, Frederick the Great regarded himself as a citizen of the Enlightenment who applied reason to his belligerent rule. This demonstrates deism or atheism are no guarantors of peace. The difference being neither can use God as an excuse.

Man must accept and bear the responsibility for his or her actions.

 

What’s in the Word?

When the word is God, rather a lot. That the universe is of divine creation, that there is God, or Gods, are notions that humanity has nurtured since pre-history. The problem has been, and still affects the world’s religions, is that the concept of the divine has been limited to reflect society at any given moment.

Indeed, ideas about God often seem to lag behind social changes and should be obviously anachronistic to those who continue to espouse them, For example, the Christian Church still refers to God as King of creation: this suffers from the twin difficulties of being anthropomorphic and outdated.

The theist God is very human, all be it on a grander scale. In fact, king is not a bad epithet for a deity that is jealous, ruthless, angry, demanding of praise and fealty, loving the subservient, dispensing favour or punishment according to the divine whim. A despot indeed.

According to religious teaching, God created man in His own image. It would surely be more accurate to reverse that, man creates God in his own image. This is reflected in recent times by feminist theologians who insist on the female nature of God, as if this makes any real difference to such a limited concept.

If God is demonstrably a human creation rather than the other way around, why persist with the notion? Strip away all the cultural and religious accretions and religions have one element in common, God. It seems humans have an a priori knowledge that the universe in which we all exist was created, and continues to be created, by something way beyond our ken.

It is because this ineffable something lies way beyond our very partial understanding that it has become repeatedly dressed up in human attire. The word God allows us to indicate this mysterious something, to consider and speculate about, even have vague intimations of, the divine.

Deists celebrate reason because it enables us to have insights into creation and see in all the wonders science reveals laws and purpose. We know from human experience that creation requires a creator.

From the first primitive log role to the very latest automobile there has been conscious choices made by numerous people down the centuries. Even chance would have contributed, but a fortunate accident would require someone to choose to learn from and incorporate it into the process of development. This is evidence of human being.

On the very much grander scale creation requires a creator, divine being. That our view is limited doesn’t prevent us appreciating the significance of that of which we are a part.

Analogies are always flawed, so accepting this consider: Actors are filmed scene by scene in no particular narrative sequence. Often, they have little or no idea as to the story being made. Indeed, the director in the editing suit cuts the film and makes the story. We are like those actors, only we may never get to see the whole production.

Some deists choose to use the Latin Deus rather than God, considering the word God has too many cultural and religious associations. There are deists who argue they are not religious at all, rather they subscribe to a philosophy not a religion.

So, what’s in the word? An awful lot, it seems, but language is a living not a fixed entity, discarding outmoded meanings and adopting new ones. For the word God deists offer new definitions appropriate for our times, a word that can open thinking to new concepts and understandings that transcend religious boundaries. We might be defined by God, but we cannot define God.

Deism and Science

For all the progress science has made it may well be there is a vast amount that is not, and may never be, known. It seems highly presumptuous to believe that humanity has the capacity to know everything, which does not mean that should inhibit science from working towards such an ultimate goal.

Science is not antithetical to deism if only because it strays beyond its remit when employed to deny something it is not equipped to comment on. In a recent interview in the Radio Times magazine, professor Brian Cox observed that while not being in any sense religious, neither is he atheist or agnostic.

The only time he considers religion at all is when he’s asked about it. However, he does not accept the view of Richard Dawkins that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible.

He would have to take issue with creationists insisting on the age of the earth being a mere 6,000 years old, but such thinking is really a form of biblical literalism. Religion can be rather more profound than that.

Cox gives the example of the 17th century mathematician Gottfried Leibniz who insisted nothing comes into existence without a cause. This notion, Cox says, is logical; indeed, to posit an eternal presence as being the ultimate cause is itself logical.

While the laws of nature explain how the universe came about and developed, this does not preclude such an eternal presence as being the first cause or source of all. If the eternal multiverse proves to be correct Cox thinks that could raise interesting theological questions.

None of this is to claim professor Cox as a deist, indeed in the article Cox says of religion, “I almost don’t have an opinion on it.” The point is that deism is not in contravention of the principles of science.

Indeed, deism embraces science as giving tremendous insights into how the creator’s creation works. It does not require deists to hold as matters of faith anything that runs contrary to scientific understanding.

And like science, good science, deism is not dogmatic, always open to new insights. The universe is the deist gospel, and unlike most supposedly holy scripture, the possibility of new readings and interpretations is welcomed.

Source: Radio Times, 4-10 October, 2014.

Proud Man

Being an apostle of Pyrron
A certain man must insist
Religion is quite redundant,
God can safely be dismissed.

Faith is so terribly passé,
What can’t be proved isn’t there,
Those deluded who say otherwise,
Well, they haven’t got a payer.

All the wars and atrocities
To which religions incline,
Man can manage perfectly well
Without needing the divine.

Pity feeble-minded believers,
Let churches crumble and fall,
Gather scriptures up and burn them,
For atheists know it all.

Celebrate mankind’s accession,
With God dethroned it must be
Man is now the supreme being,
The universe’s apogee.

For the self-proclaimed free thinker,
It comes as a great relief
To be so certain he believes
He’s not blinded by belief.

A Short History of Deism

“Deism” is the Latin form of the Greek “Theism”, with both meaning a belief in one God, contrasting with polytheism (many Gods) and Atheism (no God). However, language is ever changing.

During the latter part of the 17th and into the 18th centuries, science and rationalism began to systematically emerge, challenging prevailing religious notions. This new thinking began to permeate religious ideas, resulting in a radical Christianity.

This new theology (or should that be deology?) subjected the scriptures and creeds to forensic examination, applying scientific rigor to what had traditionally been accepted on faith.

Such critical Christianity rejected concepts such as revelations, miracles and the infallibility of the bible. Requiring a convenient name to differentiate it from conventional Theism, this developing religious view adopted Deism.

Deism quickly became influential amongst leading philosophers, politicians and scientists of the day, spreading through Britain, France, Germany and America. It embraced advances in physics, chemistry and astronomy, and leading figures such as Bacon, Copernicus and Galileo.

It was a logical progression to apply the techniques for the rational study of nature to religion. Indeed, nature became the starting point, the “gospel” Deists drew upon as inspiration for their promotion of God.

God was no longer an anthropomorphic figure rewarding the faithful few and damning the rest to the torments of Hell. Indeed the concept of God became rather less definite, a First Cause in the chain of cause and effect creating, and constantly recreating, the universe.

These early Deists contended the Bible did hold important truths while maintaining it was not divinely inspired and, therefore, beyond error. Bible study became a branch of history.

An early Deist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury in his book “De Veritate” (1624) suggested “Five Articles” for Deism to observe:
i. Belief in the existence of a single supreme God.
ii. Humanity’s duty to revere God.
iii. Link worship with mortality.
iv. God will forgive if sins are repented and abandoned.
v. Good works and evil will receive their due reward or punishment in this life and after.

The influence of 1500 years of Christianity is still clear in Herbert’s “Articles” and over time, as Deist thinking advanced, they were superseded. In fact, the notion that Deism required “Articles” or a creed was eventually dismissed and such terms would come to be used only figuratively, not literally.

Deist thinking was advanced by such as Anthony Collins (1676-1729), Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), FMA de Voltaire (1694-1778) and JJ Rousseau (1712-1778).

Many of the founding fathers of the USA were Deists, including Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. English born Thomas Paine, author of the hugely influential Deist book “The Age of Reason”, was involved in the revolutions of the US and France.

Deists advocated the important principle of separating the church and state, along with religious freedom, which was incorporated in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the USA.

Today, Deism largely does not associate itself with any of the Abrahamic religions and is often very critical of them, while recognising a basic idea in common, advocacy of God.

Really, Deism is no longer a religious movement in any conventional sense. There are no Deist places of worship, no priests, no holy books or scriptures and no hierarchy wielding authority.

Many Deists regard Deism as transcending religion, a philosophy recognising that while there are intimations of the divine, ultimately God is ineffable.

Deism and Religious Observance

“Common folk have no great need for the services of religious officials.”* So wrote Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Islamic scholar who was blessed with this insight despite his own spiritual tradition.

The three Abrahamic religions have always insisted on religious observance: praising God and asking for His favour, protection and forgiveness of sins. Failure to do so is to invite eternal damnation, or the opprobrium of the religious authorities at least.

Synagogue, church and mosque have been presented as the portals through which the faithful pass from the profane world to the sacred. Even amidst the venal temptations of everyday life there is the imperative to pray. God must have His veneration.

Not that Sabbath day observances have always been piously adhered to. It seems that in medieval times services might well last all day, but while the priest was intoning at the front of the church, market trading and gaming occupied the back.

That the Church, backed by the state, resorted to compulsion suggests many “common folk” were perhaps not as keen as they might have been on regular Sunday attendance. In more recent times non-attendance has become the norm.

Not that this is a new phenomenon. With the move from the rural to urban communities following industrialisation in the nineteenth century so there appears to have been a waning of the Church’s hold over “common folk”.

Friedrich Engels, in his “The Condition of the Working Class in England” noted the absence of religious influences in many working class communities. Where religion did exercise a measure of authority it was revivalist non-conformist chapels, many of which were destined to become the designer dwellings of today.

The recent national census in Britain has revealed a falling off in the number of people claiming even nominal religious affiliation and it is more likely the shopping mall rather then the pew draws people to it on a Sunday.

The victory of Mammon and the vanquishing of God? Actually, it is just a more open and honest expression of what was going on anyway in the medieval churches. It also a demonstration of how correctness of Ibn Khaldun’s observation.

Khaldun was not being pejorative in his use of the word “common” in this context and it is, in any case, a translation. This is “common folk” in the sense of the generality of people as opposed to a specific group such as a priestly caste. He recognised that unless coerced by fear of the wrath of God, religious authorities, the state or a combination of all three, people are not so keen on formalised religious observance.

For Deists this is positive. God, as the ineffable originator of all creation, surely does not require to be repeatedly reminded of this by a miniscule element of that creation. People have been blessed with intellect and reason with which to grasp some understanding of the universe, appreciating the divine nature of it.

Humanity has evolved a moral sensibility and while how that is expressed is culturally determined, the concepts of Right and Wrong seem fundamental. Therefore, it is for people to work out their moral code and the facility of conscience supports external social enforcement.

This is creation working through human beings; so God is the ultimate source of the process by which what is considered morally acceptable is determined, not the enforcer. Morality, like all of creation, is not fixed, but changes and evolves: what was once a sin becomes acceptable through conscious human choice. “God’s will” expresses itself through our will.

For the universe to be as it is its dynamism has to be objective. If certain parts could be privileged and granted favours then the universe would be very different. If God could be appealed to and grant special dispensations then a faithful person might well be able to step from a very tall building in the sure knowledge angels would gently bear him safely to the ground.

This would remove any requirement for personal responsibility; all that would be needed for a near perfect existence would be faith and piety. It does not require a great deal of experience to realise this is not how creation works, there are laws operating, which means the faithful plummet from great heights as readily and as quickly, as the faithless.

That there are such identifiable laws, rather than a chaos of random chance, leads Deists to their assertion of there being a prime cause, God or Deus or what you will. There is no need for religious officials to bring the “common folk” into pious observance for the divine creation to continue on its way.

Indeed, the universe produced the human species, which will have its time then creation will move on without us. That God does not require our image can be seen from the absolutely minute amount of time of our existence.

This does not mean religious observance is totally vacuous. People will gather to ask profound questions, speculate on meaning (or the absence of meaning), share the appreciation of the wonder of creation, consider what is meant by such a word as “God”. They may also do all of this individually through meditation.

Will God be listening? Is God even aware of our presence? Could God actually be cognisant of every last particle in the universe? No one knows and Deists certainly don’t claim to know, but that does not prevent us from being aware of the divine nature of creation, of God.

*”The Muqaddimah” by Ibn Khaldun, 14th century Islamic scholar.

Deist Epistle 1

It is no small task to become free from superstition. In infancy children are exposed to prevailing religious ideas. Often before they can comprehend such an the event, baptism is performed and they are inducted, however nominally, into a church.

It is not long before Christmas begins to inculcate some basic notions. Perhaps twinkling lights, glitter and presents are what fascinate the most, but angels, stables wise men and mangers also start to appear. Then there’s the central figure.

The baby Jesus is something a young child can relate to as being very like themselves, only extra-special in some ill-defined way. At nursery simple carols are learned and sung and then on into school and religious education.

Even children raised in secular households are not immune from such religious influence. Modern society, having arisen from Christendom, is infused with its ideas and values so they appear to be a natural part of even an atheist’s personal ideology.

Atheists tend to be those who have made a conscious effort to liberate themselves from outmoded religious concepts. The bible has proven to be not the infallible word of God, but the all too fallible tale telling of man.

Science split not only the atom, but also heaven wide open, revealing great mysteries though ones susceptible to human interrogation and comprehension. However influential culturally Christendom might remain, its cosmic monarch has been toppled as surely as Byzantium.

God is dead! Nietzsche wrote the obituary almost a century and a half ago, and yet religion refuses to emulate Judas by slinking away and quietly perishing. Certainly, with notable exceptions, pews continue to be polished more regularly by aging volunteers with dusters, rather than the bums of believers.

The recent census demonstrated a decreasing number who laid claim, however tenuously, to religious observance of any sort. Regularly society is declared secular through the organs of the media; while celebrity atheists, some scientists, others stand up comedians, make mock of the few remaining deluded fools.

However, it is on the ship of fools many take passage against this rising tide of scepticism. Perhaps humanity should not consider itself so clever that it alone can now walk on water. Tides have a way of turning unexpectedly, catching out those who considered themselves safe on the moral high ground.

Reason is the faculty that has promoted humanity to its present lofty position. The world is no longer taken on faith; its ways and enigmas are challenges for reasoned investigation.

Science makes manifest the natural laws by which it is possible for there to be sentient life capable of such a task. Everyday experience confirms generally what science defines precisely.

Such thinking has been applied to religion for as long as science has been rising to its dominant position. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of Deism, the application of reason to religious and sceptical thinking.

If the universe operates according rational laws, then what is the source of such reason? God as the creator, the prime mover, emerged, transcending previous theistic revealed religion and confounding those promoting Man through their declared absence of God.

God is a concept of unfathomable depths, ultimately beyond human comprehension. As a word it is little more than a convenience, a sign allowing conversation to take place.

Perhaps “God” as a word is dead, due to the accumulated burden of all its previous associations. If the word has had its meaning crushed from it, then another will take its place. Deus is favoured by many Deists.

The word is not ultimately important; it is not in itself holy. Language has limitations that do not allow for direct and precise definition, which is why physicists use mathematics.

But, Deism is at least true in the sense that a poem is true, or a painting, or a piece of music. Nietzsche was aware that with the interment of Christendom’s God science, of itself, was not suitable to fill the vacant throne.

In “The Birth of Tragedy” he looked back to ancient Greece for indications of what might hold the key to human flourishing. In the Stoics he could have found the early development of thinking that has re-emerged in modern times as Deism.

Like all religions and philosophies, Deism is man made and as such will have its moment and then pass away. However, when it does so there will arise a new manner of thinking in which the timeless precepts of Deism will be inculcated, just as those of value from previous religions have echoes in the Deist heart.

Deist Christmas

Deism rejects the notion of Divine revelation; the claims of revealed religions are, therefore, considered counterfeit. For Deists, all religions, including Deism, are man-made: God is the object, not the founder, of Deism.

As a human belief system, Deism appeals to reason in fathoming the laws and evident patterns in creation, positing God as the ultimate source. As such, God is beyond our partial understanding, so while we can have intimations of the Divine it is beyond our ken to define.

Revealed religions claim the direct word of God is recorded in Holy Scriptures, which the faithful must acknowledge, even if they defy reason. This is a dangerous concept as it relegates reason, the source of science and learning, in favour of unreasoned faith.

Ethan Allen, in “Reason: The Only Oracle of Man”, wrote, “Such people as can be prevailed upon to believe, that their reason is depraved, may easily be led by the nose, and duped into superstition…”

So, with reason being central to Deism, what are Deists to make of Christmas? A virgin pregnancy and birth, angels, shepherds and Magi, an immobile star, the stable and manger, ox and ass, all the stuff of school nativity plays. Reason, at the very least, questions all of this.

Or it would if there is a requirement to accept it all without question because it’s written in the bible. However, reason does rather more than challenge such assertions to declare them false. There is the metaphorical and the mythic to be considered.

In the northern hemisphere, especially in the more northerly regions, December has been a time to mark the dying of the old year around the winter solstice, and the rebirth of hope and the new year. Christendom simply appropriated such festivities.

The annual fuss in the media over some hapless local authority opting to call its celebrations a “Winter Festival” rather than Christmas is actually misplaced: such a council is actually recognising a venerable truth. This is what has been celebrated in a variety of forms over thousands of years.

An advantage of a “Winter Festival” is no one is excluded; those of all religions and none can participate and enjoy proceedings without having to compromise their own beliefs or, worse, pretend to subscribe to the prevailing orthodoxy.

Thomas Paine in his “Age of Reason” wrote, “Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.” How many participate in church carol services and yet have little or nothing to do with Christianity for the rest of the year?

Much of what constitutes the Christmas nativity story can be found in a variety of other religions and cultures. Visitation by celestial beings (angels), miraculous birth, the appearance of a God-King on earth who will ultimately be killed and then reborn (resurrected), the bringing of gifts by the humble and the highborn, an occasion marked astrologically.

Gospel writers were not historians, they were charged with propagating an idea. It was the custom of the time to achieve this by including apparently biographical details that were in fact traditional memes indicating the special nature of the person being written about.

Such memes predate Christianity by thousands of years repeatedly reappearing dressed in the guise of the prevailing culture. This is no different to how our society has adapted Christmas to include Santa Claus and fir trees, neither of which appear in the New Testament accounts.

Sceptics occasionally compare God and Santa Claus: a comforting idea, but not real. This is to confuse an image with the essence. Santa Claus is an idea, or a bundle of ideas, personified. Children identify with the personification, but as they mature they develop a more sophisticated appreciation of the “spirit” of Christmas.

Similarly, God has, historically, been presented as a figure in tangible form, but this is reductive, no more than an idealised extension of a human being. Deists understand any meaningful use of the word God is in the way of the “spirit” of creation.

The use of “” around the spirit is to denote that it is a problematic word and could be taken to indicate a supernatural association. This is not the case: the usage is more analogous to games being played in the correct SPIRIT, that is, sportingly.

Christmas can be a celebration of the miraculous, the natural miracle, that is, of a coherent universe giving birth to sentient life with reason enough to appreciate and even to come to some understanding of it.

The essence of the nativity is that a baby is created spontaneously, in that no actual cause and effect conception was involved, rather in the way the universe appeared from not-being, a void made pregnant with potential. As Deists cite God as the source of the latter, they can relate to the former as a personification of the process.

So, sing the carols, attend the school nativity plays and know that, while they may not be factual they do contain truth in the way art does.

And behind the Christian façade, and that of other religions, there is an underlying point of agreement, belief in God. Potentially, Deism can reach out to people of all the varying faiths and identify the principle that unites, rather than divides, them. Look beyond the bible and learn to read the natural gospel of creation.

Deism may have been born small, but wise men, and women, seek out this lone star shining through the darkness of superstition and dogma, bringing the gift of their reason. The flock desert the shepherds who’ve kept them penned for centuries and find their way individually to God.

Happy Christmas from Deism.

Man Eating Fish: Deism and Christianity

In the 1960s BBC Radio regularly broadcast a panel game called “My Word”. Each week the final round had two of the panellists, comedy scriptwriters Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, delivering humorous monologues.

A conceit regularly employed by Norden was a pseudo-psychological condition he termed Literalism. The supposed sufferer took everything literally, with no sense of the idiomatic: “Man eating fish” would be a sea-borne terror rather than some chap enjoying his battered cod.

Literalism describes the consideration of religious texts as being infallible revelations of God’s truth. The gospel truth claims to be the narrative and teachings of Jesus, events initially orally transmitted.

In what was for most people a pre-literate time, the verbal passing on of a message does not indicate inaccuracy. It does, though, leave scope for elaboration. As the tale is being told from the lectern of a modern evangelical church the story has been born again many, many times.

Whatever Jesus said he said it in Aramaic, subsequently was filtered through Greek, Latin, the King James Bible and a succession of updates and revisions. The effect can be illustrated simply: when referring to God Jesus used the term “Abba” rendered in English bibles as the patriarchal “Father”.

A more accurate transliteration of “Abba”, though, is the more familiar“Daddy”. So, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” is not quite so formal as, “Our Daddy,…”

The sense of a phrase is contingent on idiomatic understanding. So, Jesus walking on the water sounds miraculous. However, no one considers supernatural agency for Newcastle upon Tyne or Stoke on Trent as neither of them is actually afloat on its river.

The point here is not to explain, or explain away, but demonstrate that reading the bible requires a deep appreciation of the linguistic processes the text has been through. The claim it is the word of God begs the question, in which language and at what time?

Authors of the four gospels were neither historians nor biographers in the modern sense, but purveyors of religious ideas.

Miraculous birth attended by celestial beings, precocious wisdom at an early age, the feeding of many from very little, curing the sick and raising the dead, death, resurrection and assumption by heaven are all memes common to many religions, not just the Abrahamic.

The apparent dichotomy between religion and science is misleading: religion has more in common with the Arts and there are few who would claim scientific advance has proved music to be false. A great work of fiction contains truths and ideas that enhance the reader’s comprehension of the world, of creation. It is not a book of falsehoods.

There has recently been the discovery of a planet a quarter of the galaxy away basking in the radiance of four suns. This has startled astronomers contradicting previous thinking about destructive gravitational effects of such an arrangement. Yet science fiction writers have often envisaged worlds with a multiplicity of suns.

Just because something isn’t literally true doesn’t make it a lie. One factor common to all religions is the reality of the divine; even Buddhists who formally reject God or Gods come as close as makes no difference to deifying the Buddha.

In Socratic Athens there was debate as to whether there were actual gods on Olympus and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his Stoic Meditations raised the question as to the actual existence of gods. His conclusion was it didn’t matter; an individual’s responsibility was to live the good life anyway. Also he often opted for the less well-defined and definable Providence to indicate the divine principle.

Even the most ardent sceptical Darwinist’ insistence on natural selection alone poses a conundrum. Why does natural selection favour the favourable? Why isn’t the cosmos just a seething mass of contending forces incapable of creating anything?

The universe is intelligent and self aware because humans are an intelligence within the universe, aware not only of themselves but increasingly of the wider cosmos. How has humanity advanced? By naturally selecting in a conscious way what has favoured progress. It is hardly a leap to consider intelligence on a grander scale, beyond human limitations or comprehension.

Even if absolutely proven Jesus never existed, the gospels would still have a spiritual value. They would become parables, addressing the ineffable and a pervading sense of purpose within humanity.

A distressing and disastrous form of religious literalism concerns faith healing. On biblical pretexts parents deny children medical procedures in the belief that faith will be rewarded through divine intervention. Children suffer and die.

Humanity is blessed with God given reason, granting the miracle of medical science. Faith in reason enables the sick to seek and accept treatment with confidence. But healing is not just about surgery and medicine, love and attention aids and speeds recovery and in those tragic circumstances where there is no cure, then how much stronger love and attention need to be.

Born in the Enlightenment from which science emerged, Deism offers a religious perspective that does not contradict human progress and understanding. Religious cultures and traditions trying to remain fundamental bastions of revealed truth fall foul of unnecessary literalism.

Evolution is not just about the development of species; it also applies to ideas that, like everything else in the universe, are in constant flux. Christianity has patently changed through the two millennia of its existence and comes in a wide variety of forms.

How many Christians still subscribe unquestioningly to the fundamental literal “truth” of the Pauline version? A Deistic sensibility would mean the drama of its narrative and rituals could be preserved and dedicated to celebrating the universe, its nature and the God of reason whose conception it is.

Becoming a Christian Deist opens Christianity to new exploration and interpretation, just as it emerged from within Judaism. Man eating fish on the beach could be Jesus, preparing a fresh meal to share with the world.