The Magic of Atheism?

[mediamogul]

Here's my take on it. Throughout history there have been many things that were held to be manifestations of gods, or at least under thair direct control. Thunder and lightning, day and night, the changing seasons, the tides, the motions of the planets, eclipses, rainbows - you name it and a god was behind it. Or if you're of the montheistic persuasion, one god to rule them all (as long as we don't count all the angels and saints etc that are essentially gods in all but name). The ancient Greeks were the first to realise that if we are to make any real progress in understanding the world, we must examine the natural forces controlling these things. Thus humanity has dispelled the darkness of superstition with the piercing light of knowledge, one by one revealing the principles of the natural world. Now we know how and why things work, and what we don't yet fully understand, we have the tools to investigate. One by one the gods have fallen out of the picture, replaced by natural forces obeying natural laws which can be understood.

Just about the only gap left for a god to hide in is the microsecond at the point of the Big Bang. Certainly science hasn't yet been able to probe that spot. However, given that naturalistic explanations have a modest track record of 100% success, there doesn't seem to be much justification for painting a face on whatever lurks there.

It still sounds like the First Cause and Argument from Design to me. Why couldn't the universe have caused itself to exist in some way we don't yet understand. I just recently watched the episode of Cosmos where Carl Sagan explains how a 3D object would look to a person stuck in 2D and couldn't help but think that we don't know much about our universe. Maybe it would be obvious if we could actually view the world in its multitude of dimensions. The fact that the world needed a "cause" in the classical sense just screams loaded question which, when discussing religion, few are not.