Letters to the Editor
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This is fascinating
First, kudos to 95% of the folks posting here. It seems this issue brings out some of the most thoughtful, lucid, balance people reading Salon. Bravo to you and your rational, intelligent disagreements on mathematics and metaphysics.
Being a writer with very little grasp of physics or higher mathematics, my point relates to the bigger question no one has asked (though one late poster touched on it): why does a spiritual/metaphysical/noncorporeal aspect to human existence need to have a God involved?
To me, it does not. I reject the idea of a personal God; it seems transparently obvious this infantile concept exists largely to give the fearful comfort in the face of uncertain life and certain mortality. Set a personal Deity aside, however, and you still have mountains of evidence--some anecdotal, some scientific but as yet poorly pursued--that there is some sort of metaphysical level to human existence, ranging from such things as energy healing (which I have experienced) to Chinese chi manipulation to the manifestations of unseen beings that exhibit characteristics uncannily like deceased loved ones (which I have also experienced) to near-death experiences.
Future science may explain or disprove all of these and myriad other so-called spiritual phenomena, but the fact remains that no ginned-up God is necessary for them to exist. If some of the many metaphysical phenomena that have been observed over thousands of years do exist and are not just wishful figments of the human imagination, then they are likely PART of the NATURAL world. A part that has been either denied by religion or absorbed by it ("Energy healing? That's God, case closed."), and rejected by science because of the taint of religion and illogic that comes with it.
Certain? No. Possible? Yes. And no God required. What if God didn't need to exist, but was simply something we invented to explain an unseen realm of reality that we could not otherwise grasp? I think that is far more likely than an angry Deity of any stripe.