The Mormon Monk

Since I've been thinking about the relationship between divinity and creation recently, I thought I'd share a gem of my recent reading in old newspapers. I found this anonymously authored poem in the August 6, 1747 edition of Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette : The Deity A God there is, the whole Creation tells, Th' imprest Idea on our Reason dwells. In vain the Atheist, with his florid Lines, Dazzles the Crowd, and with th' Unthinking shines: His Proofs, like Bubbles on a rainy Day, That o'er the Waters trembling Surface play, On the least Touch their Emptiness explose, And shew'd on Air their slender Convex rose. Avaunt, ye Slaves, vile lumber of the Land, Offspring of Night, an inauspicious Band, Fly far from us, and there your Rites maintain, Where Darkness, Chance, and Elder Chaos reign: Reverse of Sense, and to Religion Foes, Let these for you a Trinity compose; With Hymns infernal let your Altars ring, And to these darling ...

The great trouble with atheism is that it is, by definition, a lack of belief. Individual atheists may believe a great number of things, but the one thing that binds them together as a group is a lack of belief in God. The problem in trying to unite such a group lies in the fact that human beings, on the whole, are much better at rallying around positive beliefs than they are in coalescing around the absence of belief. Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams have done a wonderful job of trying to fill that void, to provide those who do not believe in God with what you might call a scientific theology--a set of common beliefs for atheists to rally around. Their book, The View from the Center of the Universe , is truly fascinating and, more importantly for me, provides lots of food for the Mormon thought that swirls around in my brain. Abrams and Primack (AP) begin by noting both the virtues and the potential shortcomings of religion and science: "Traditional cultures' cosmologies wer...