2: PANTHEISM
I felt guilty about offering myself for confirmation in the Christian Anglican faith during the time that I was at Eton. I had in fact obtained a Distinction for Divinity when I matriculated in the (old-fashioned) School Certificate. But my doubts concerning the validity of Messianic claims, no matter which religion I might examine, rendered me sceptical concerning the nature of the God(s) whose worship they proclaimed. I also respected my father's atheism, much vaunted at the time - although he was to become a follower of Bagwhan in his latter years. Then at Oxford I became acquainted with Humanism, which impressed me for its greater reverence for truth (as disclosed by science), and for setting squarely upon man's shoulders the responsibility for sorting out the world's problems. But I retained some doubt as to whether the human race might really have any right to assume that it is the highest form of life within the universe, nor even that it will necessarily remain pre-eminent here on Earth. I saw that we might engineer our nuclear extinction, leaving this planet for the exploitation (or wiser control) by some other species, be they dolphins or cockroaches.
The solution as I perceived it was to evolve my thoughts from humanist doctrine, to reintroduce the concept of Deity, by formulating the means of venerating the universe (which contains all imaginable species) to the point of worshipping it. So within this faith, it is the Totality of the Universe - the Cosmos - which emerges as our Deity; or as God, no matter whichever religious doctrine we may choose to study. God didn't create the Universe; God is the Universe.
The tradition of identifying God in this light, (looking back at least as far as Greek philosophers, if not to Syria and Egypt before that,) belongs to Pantheism. Their worship of `the All' might originally have been more closely identified with Nature, but during the 18th century it was the Totality of the Universe which became the object of reverence for European writers. Even here however there was dissent between Pantheists and Panentheists, with the latter proclaiming there was still a distinction to be drawn between God and the Universe which he created. But my own line is more strictly Pantheistic in disclaiming that there can be any such dichotomy.
What my position requires for its validity is a concept of the Universe as finite, and existing within circuited dimensions of both space and time, so that it is perceived as self-sufficient, with no need for the postulation of any extraneous deity; no requirement for a Creator, a Regulator, nor Intermediator, since the Universe itself can be shown to accommodate its own such situations, although not always with pleasing results.
The Cosmology I have adopted runs as follows. The Universe came into existence from the singularity of a Monoblock, which comprised all matter within the universe, under such compression that even its atomic structure was eliminated. This triggered the Big Bang, with matter (in the eventual form of galaxies) exploding outwards on their widening trajectories through space. But the initial premise for a universe of circuited dimensions is that if a straight line is extended through space, it will eventually extend to the point of its departure, from which we must conclude that all the departing galaxies will extend their trajectories until they reach the point of universal gravitational collapse. Travellers with the galaxy at that point in time could perceive, ahead of them, an imploding wall which would in fact be their vision of the Monoblock from time past. All matter within the universe will then coalesce (for a second time) into the Monoblock, which itself must trigger a second Big Bang and a second identical history of the universe, which must inevitably include the identical life histories of all the individual people who populated (or will populate) our existing one.
This pattern should be accepted as what the universe is - in all its permanence and perpetual repetition. In that there is no valid distinction to be drawn between the first, second (or any other) repetition of the universe, we should regard them as the same event, with nothing more than a numerical distinction to be discerned between any of them. The whole notion of infinite extension through either space or time is thus eliminated. Even in mathematical terms, where infinite is defined as (n+1), the notion can be rendered absurd by positing a value for n which represents the Totality of the Universe as a whole - the great All. It then becomes an oxymoron (or a contradiction in terms) to start talking about `All plus one'!
Some problems do remain for potential discussion, like the apparent contradiction between the concepts of free will, and fate, within the established bounds of such a universe. But these are issues that might best be investigated under the heading of semantics, and resolved according to whether the definition for free will, or for fate, be given precedence in the subsequent discussion.
Broadly speaking however, I have now indicated what I understand by the nature of God, in that the Universe itself commands a veneration that amounts to such worship. What I have described might be regarded as the outline for a religion of the future, or more probably as a monotheistic umbrella faith which, over the course of the coming century, could serve to unite the existing religions of the world into a closer form of union than has been the case hitherto, with the common ground being in our identification of God (Allah, Jehovah or whatever) as the Universe itself. In this future era there will be a new spirit of tolerance between opposing creeds, with each of them continuing its practice in the same tradition as before, but at last with a sense of recognition that we are all involved in the same act of worship. It will mark a gradual coming together of our world's different cultures within the same spirit of communion. That is what I might hope constitutes Tomorrow's World, where all of us (no matter what our cultural origins) may have a significant role to play.