Divine Neutrality

I am thinking about the functions of religion. What does organized religion give to people that drives them to suspend reason. What is the nature of man that religion exists?

I conclude that people need guided ceremony. And they need prayer: something to offer consolation in times of despair and celebration in times of joy. There exist organizations that offer prayers. Besides the prayers of traditional religions, there are many groups offering non-denominational prayers. Unitarians do this. I googled non-denominational prayers and was led here:

theGreenBelt blogspot, Non-denominational prayer

This site gives some examples of non-denominational prayers. I find them quite poetic. What disturbs the rather astute writer of that excellent greenbelt blog is the futility of the prayer not so much the references to deity, God and Creator.

Let us pray. We meditate on the transcendental Glory of the Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the Heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds.

I am not a believer. But when I read these words, I put myself into this state of mind - the state of someone else - one peculiarly sensitive to imagery. For him a phrase like ‘the creator’ is an embraceable metaphore for some ultimate grandness in the scheme of existence in which we partake. ‘Creator’ can be a word of poetry to which an artistic temperament can respond. For such a person any text such as “for some ultimate .. . we partake” is cumbersome - and even belittling.

The significance of a single supreme deity (as opposed to myriads of them - primitive demons - or even a sprinkling of them - say a pantheon of gods) is the simple poetic recognition of some single ultimate mystery:

Why is there anything?

Physics has an answer to this question! It arises from the idea of quantum fluctuations. By the laws of physics a vacuum cannot exist. Particle - antiparticle pairs appear out of the vacuum. So nothingness, as an everlasting state of the universe, is not possible according to the laws of physics.

Another way to see it is this: the ground state of the universe is not nothingness. There is always a zero point of activity. Here’s an elemental analogy: The ground state of an atom is not annihilation. (This finding by Rutherford in 1910 and which Niels Bohr explained in 1912 was the founding event of modern quantum mechanics.) The ground state of an atom has a persistent cloud of electrons hovering over a massive nucleus attracting those electrons. The uncertainty principle - a law of physics - does not allow collapse.  It forbids both zero position and zero motion at the same time.

Does this explain why there is anything? The explanation is this, “Because the laws of physics demand it. The laws of physics say there cannot be just nothing.”

That there are such laws is surely awesome.
They govern the universe.
They reign supreme.

God!

Physics turns the question, “Why is there anything?” into the question, “Why do laws of physics exist?”

In either case it’s an ultimate question. And surely unanswerable. It translates metaphorically into a single mystery - a single ‘god’.

Now, one comes to the idea of prayer. Why pray to the laws of physics?