Synopsis "Science As Natural Theology (in English)"
Imagine a list of all the gods and goddesses worshipped over the centuries. The list would include the following: Anuket, Astarte, Atlas, Dyeus, Freyja, Gaia, Isis, Ixcacao, Izanagi, Kali, Kichigonai, Lakshmi, Mat Zemlya, Olorun, Pangu, Quetzalcoatl, Ra, Tengri, Thor, Toci, Venus, Viracocha, Xi Wangmu, and Zeus. And more. Thousands more. Unless we believe all those gods and goddesses genuinely exist, we must regard at least some of them as fictions. Such a prolific invention of gods and goddesses might cause us to wonder if we should regard the various gods and goddesses worshiped today as fictions, too. But it might also lead us to wonder if an obscure intuition of some reality motivates those inventions. We want to construct an accurate picture of that reality. So we start with what we know, with solid fact; we begin with the knowledge we've collected, refined and repeatedly verified over the centuries. In other words, we attempt to dispassionately infer the theological consequences, if any, of science.