“Universal Reason, which governs everything, knows its own characteristics, and what it creates, and the material on which it works.” (Marcus Aurelius)*
The difficulty with the word “God” is that it triggers many preconceived ideas, or at least ideas formed in childhood through formal and informal religious education. These ideas tend to bear the cultural imprint of the society in which a person is raised.
Even a professed atheist has been influenced in this way and for him or her, the rejected “God” bears many of the characteristics inculcated through the formative years.
Gnostics portray such an anthropomorphic figure as a demi-urge, a semi-divine figure responsible for creating this world with all its fallibilities, reflecting those of that less than divine deity. God remains so much greater and beyond personification.
Stoicism has taken a rather more pragmatic view, representing the divine according to characteristics relevant to a particular circumstance. Zeus, or God, or Gods or Providence are invoked, the implication being that humans can but glimpse the partial while unable to comprehend the whole.
For a Deist, Universal Reason is a property that can be divined through observation and experience of nature. There is no suggestion of supernatural intervention, indeed, reason is discernable in people. It is, therefore, at the very least demonstrably property of the universe.
Why shouldn’t Reason be an intrinsic feature of the universe, beyond embodiment in our rather limited and limiting lives? There are those who argue the universe is without purpose, yet a purpose can be found for everything however obscure that might appear.
Natural selection is an example of a process acting with a purpose, survival at the very least. It can even accommodate the random by adapting to take it into account. This is not to infer some super being in control; rather that Universal Reason imbues nature.
That there is a universe rather than nothing is due to Universal Reason initiating and working through it: God the Propagator and the on-going process.
* “The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius.” Edited by Mark Forstater.
Hodder & Stoughton, 2000.
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