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> The seemingly random, yet beautiful grain, in wood. Or the way tree leaves rustle in the wind.. etc etc, you can see an immense beauty and goodness, not possible without a divine, all-giving power.

That is quite the statement on the nature of reality, yet it’s entirely based on personal opinion. You don’t know from observation if the “beauty and goodness” of the world is impossible without a divine power, you choose to believe so.

I also pay close attention to the natural world and my relationships, yet don’t feel the slightest inclination to believe in a higher power. If anything, I share Richard Feynman’s view that being analytical about the world makes its beauty shine more, not less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

> not possible without a divine, all-giving power.

I would say the atheist view is actually the same as yours with the exception that "god" isn't a man in the sky.

The way I see religion is as a coping mechanism for dealing with emotion.

When things get hard or tough who can you turn to? What can help ease emotional pain, give you hope when there is none or look out for you when noone else will?

It's simple, let's create an imaginary figure that always has your best interest at heart => God.

Let's now utilise this to help drive the behaviours we want in our tribe => Religious scripture / Church.

Personally I find it much more satisfying to simply admit that we don't know what's out there. Noone on earth has the answers because we're still learning, and we're also stuck in our bubble which we call the universe. Death is just a part of life and a way to recycle our bodies, we're not all that special and that's OK.

Anyone that finds it emotionally helpful to believe in fairytales is free to do so, but I feel like you're missing something even more magical if you can bring yourself to search for it, which is reality itself.

Mathematicians I personally know well are stoutly religious. They describe the world of number and form and structure with the same kind of language the clergy describe God, and so there is some sense in which these are felt as aspects of the same thing.

I also know a number of engineers who are deeply religious, perhaps encouraged by recognizing "design" in nature, seemingly requiring a designer.

In my conversations with these people, their faith, while socially speaking is Christian, the specifics have hardly anything to do with traditional or orthodox theology. It's, as I perceive this, the only acceptable social structure available to them to live out these deep feelings of beauty and harmony in community.

I always found Donald Knuth’s professed Christianity somewhat curious. Then I watched a small bit of his interview with Lex Fridman, and happened to catch the part where he speculates that maybe God is a big computer. So, OK.

Knuth had serious doubts in his college days, but ultimately decided it was "OK to believe in something unprovable." Which to me speaks to his humility.

> where he speculates that maybe God is a big computer.

I cringe at phrases like that. It's empty theologically and technologically. It represents a complete inability in imagining what God could be, and a naive, childish pride in our little creations, these computers. While in his internal driven world view it might make sense, to me it has no more or less truth than "maybe God is a big steam engine"

Please don’t judge DEK based on my hasty summary; check out the interview for the context. My only point was that the Christianity in the head of someone like Knuth is probably a bit more fluid and creative than whatever’s in the heads of the people who come to your door on Sunday morning to save your soul.

Yeah - indeed I probably was a little hasty and uncharitable. I have a ton of respect for Knuth both as a computer scientist and as a religious believer. I will try to look up the interview, because I am curious to get the context around the quote.

> It represents a complete inability in imagining what God could be, and a naive, childish pride in our little creations [...]

Aren't all religious statements just like that?

Hey, nice comment, just offering the opposite view here: Disagreeing with faith is the point for many of us atheists, not out of arrogance about knowing the truth about the world, but skepticism about what it means to know a thing for certain, and how far away we are from that certainty.

Others find belief in the “goodness” of a supernatural creator impossible because of their knowledge of the natural world:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/494183-i-don-t-know-why-we-...

And here I am thinking the exact opposite. I think that religion comes from the experience of man made reality, and it is very limited precisely because of that.

The mandate of 'controlling the creation'. The parent-child relationship with the deity. The excessive focus on sexual and parental relationships between humans. All these are human activities, and religion seems to care too much about humans and too little about the rest of the species living on the planet.

Reality is different from religion. It is indifferent to us. Any meaning is just some myth in our heads to try and explain it.

I am still in awe at what time and nature is capable of producing and whenever I look at beauty or get contemplative and just take in what is in my surroundings. It's just that there are really great explanations for all of it without requiring the supernatural.

I bet you anything that you read those 2 books back to back and it will shake the foundation of your worldview to the core... of course that's if you actually feel like it can be challenged.

> The seemingly random, yet beautiful grain, in wood.

Fractals, my friend.

Which God ? As someone who grew up with the choice of believe or not believe, one of the reason that I stayed atheist was because there was no religion that looks more right than any of the other dozen ones (and thousands when we count branches)

I choose atheism when 16 and rediscovered religion at 35. How? whats the difference between a religion and believing in atheism, psychology, social science? in this sense i overcame atheism and started looking at the interesting concepts of religions, introduced geografically and sequentially in time. naturally i decided to dig deeper in my cultures religion at hand instead of idealising the grass is greener far away. my conclusion is that sciences and religions is just a approach to understand and model the world. it would be stupid to ignore the knowledge embeeded in both and there are wrong conclusions embedded that are not easy to identify in both. maybe it seems easier to identify them with! science but still social "science" nowadays seems to me not much more like a new cult trying new approaches challenging thousand year old cults and knowledge embedded in their religion. Like a kid who challenges the parents. In the end it's a natural selection process that will decide what knowledge / models survive through time. Isn't it a beautiful creation process. No need to condemn either approach. The Bible teaches, you shouldnt use gods name in vain. Exodus 20:7. Isnt it true for science, too?

Most of the great mathematicians were religious. As to why is that, we can only speculate. I personally think that while exploring the beautiful worlds of numbers they discovered order and perfection and that got them thinking about Divinity.

I think it's because they hadn't heard of evolution or big bang theory yet. There are probably way less religious scientist today than there were in the previous centuries.