About six years ago Carol Strayhorn Keaton got herself into a bit of a muddle. A new Unitarian Universalist Church in Texas submitted its Act of Incorporation papers to be recognized as a religious organization in our fair State. Ms. Keaton, in her role as State Comptroller, rejected the submission on the grounds that the new congregation did not include the phrase “worship of God” in its statement of purpose. As far as she was concerned, the worship of God phrase was key to distinguishing churches from social clubs or other non-profit organizations.

This rejection allowed Unitarian Universalists a few moments of glorious high dudgeon. Oh, how dare she! Attorneys from the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston quickly intervened and gave her a bit of an education about Unitarian Universalism. Wouldn’t you just love to have heard that conversation? Rarely does one get such a winning hand. “Yes, Ms. Keaton, Unitarian Universalism is a religious community that has been in existence in the United States since the late 1700s. Oh, did you know that several Presidents of the United States, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, were Unitarian Universalists?” They pointed out that there were already 48 other Unitarian Universalist Churches in Texas, at least one dating its history back to the late 1800s. And if she was going to refuse to recognize the latest addition, she would have to revoke the incorporation of all of them. And were that to happen she would face a legal mess the likes of which it would perhaps be prudent for her to avoid. Since elected officials in Austin just live for the day when they can receive advice from attorneys in Boston the submission for incorporation was quietly accepted.

But in a sense, Ms. Keaton, aside from the legal issue, had inadvertently tripped over a raw Unitarian Universalists nerve. We do have a “god problem.” A great many in the congregation like religion, like the morality religion often implies, like some of the practices that are common in religion. Some are devoted to reading scripture, others to meditation. Some imagine that poetry is scripture, still others that the natural world and all its wonders is scripture enough. Some believe that music is their principle religious expression. Others believe that doing justice is a religious act, still others simply want to be part of a thoughtful community. But all of that religious “stuff” can be accomplished without ever bumping into the “god” issue. As for god, most are agnostic; a few are convinced theists, probably matched by as many atheists. But because “god” is such a squirrelly reality most prefer to not think about it very much. So does the god thingy matter? Well, it does cut right to the heart of the difference between being knowledgeable about religion, and being religious.

A couple of decades ago the Unitarian Universalist Association received some national news coverage which was not entirely welcome. At a General Assembly, the annual meeting of representatives from Unitarian Universalist congregations in the United States, we were considering the earliest version of the Purposes and Principles statement. Some of the discussion got rather heated over the issue about “god” being a misogynist concept. The way the debate got reported? “Unitarian Universalist Debate the Existence of God!” I wonder, if we had taken a vote and the god side lost, would that mean that god didn’t exist? It sure was a close call. God’s existence was tabled. Those in churches, temples, mosques and prayers houses around the globe undoubtedly heaved a sigh of relief.

Three weeks ago I concluded my sermon by saying, “Here you are, framed by a hunger that will not be satisfied by things which just don’t add up. We can begin a new kind of accounting by first admitting that all religious traditions have something significant to offer, that all religious traditions have introduced important insights. But we also realize that learning about all these different aspects of religion is not an effective substitute for being religious. Religious communities must have good information, but that information is gathered for the purpose of addressing life problems. Being religious requires that we understand what elements we have at our disposal that will form, not just a cobbled together mixture, but a true life giving compound.

Typically religions have addressed life problems by formulating a hodgepodge, a new compound made up of formerly discreet elements from already existing religious traditions which can bond well in the presence of a catalyst. I compared that hodgepodge with a mishmash, a loose collection of thoughts and feelings that are not that cohesive, do not possess a kind of inner integrity. As you might suspect, mishmashes are not nearly as helpful at addressing life problems as are hodgepodges.

The catalyst is key—that’s how one turns a mishmash into a hodgepodge, turns a mixture into a compound. And again, the god thingy has something to do with the catalyst. But where do you get one of those? There’s certainly no shortage of people who claim to know a mighty God and I can understand the appeal but I have been unconvinced. Too often the assertion reminds me of the child who says, “Oh yeah, well my Dad can take your Dad!” The thought of having an amazing all purpose deity type ally in life is very comforting but I think it is very important to distinguish between wanting an ally, and, having an ally.

In fact, the mighty ally type God is a habit we had best leave behind. The hope is so empty of useful empirical data that the hope inevitably gets filled with whatever content the faithful wish to insert. This was the point that John Robinson the theologian made several years ago. Of what positive use, he asked, is a God that is simply a reflection of what you want God to be? Doesn’t that turn god into a mere sidekick, a cosmic “yes man” who is at your bidding? Suspiciously, too often this kind of God seems to be best at supporting prejudices that would otherwise have no justification.

For precisely this reason more than a few have chosen to dispense with the god thingy altogether. And I would too, were it not for the fact that as Emerson put it, “I am constrained to find some higher origins of things other than the will I call my own.” While we must be honest about our doubts about god, a true honesty would also recognize that the universe is immense and we are by comparison rather tiny. Somehow I suspect my itty bitty consciousness is not in charge of all of that. But if I am not, and if you are not - then what is this immense otherness out there?

Earlier generations of Unitarian Universalists were also curious about that immensity. They felt they had an excellent resource for discerning the reality of god. Technically the god detection device they used was called “natural law.” Natural law in theology is the counterpoint to “revealed” law.

Revealed law is thought to be heard by, say, enchanted priestesses or perhaps it is written in some holy book. Revealed law is special because it cannot be known by “natural” means such as ordinary perception. Theoretically it consists of those utterances and those words that reveal the will of God for us puny earthlings. It has never been spelled out how an ordinary human being could ever know a purely supernatural message - but never mind. Neither has anyone been able to determine if the feeling of being possessed isn’t itself a purely, if rare, natural state. Just the fact of some experience being extraordinary does not imply some supernatural reality. After all, Tiger Wood’s golf swing is even rarer than human beings experiencing “otherworldly” possession. Tiger Wood’s may be, metaphorically speaking, “God’s gift” to golf but he is not going to apply to the Texas Comptroller for incorporation as a religious organization. In any case, Unitarian Universalists have routinely insisted that it is impossible to get the human mind out of the search for understand the realm of the sacred. Words do not ever get spoken or written by themselves. They are always spoken and written by human beings who have been known to be just a teensy bit fallible.

The earliest Unitarian Universalists felt that the only hope in distinguishing what was true from what was false regarding God lay in the systematic application of what was considered to be the supreme gift of god—human reasoning. Human reason, they believed, could elicit from the universe the true workings of God. God, they felt, would not have given us this remarkable ability of a reasoning mind just to toy with us. It was considered to be the spark of divinity within each and every person. These earliest Unitarian Universalists launched a great project in which all spoken and written pronouncements about things divine would be judged by the extent to which things made sense to human reason. At that time this application of reason seemed like a real upgrade in the religious operating system. And in those earliest decades of Unitarian Universalism a lot of religious dogma got left in the dustbin. No more trinity—doesn’t make sense. No more virgin birth—oh please. When it came to exotic doctrines like transubstantiation and consubstantiation (purporting to “describe” how the communion wafer is only Jesus’ body or is both a wafer and Jesus’ body) we followed the Frankie Goes to Hollywood school of theological thought, “Relax, don’t do it.” And over the ensuing decades more and more of what had been thought to be perfectly acceptable religious doctrine was whittled away until we were left with very little.

There is a very good reason, entirely unforeseen, why we were left with little. It turns out that natural law theory, as it had been understood, does not actually work. Natural law theory proposed that spiritual and moral beliefs can be gleaned from observation of the natural world. That which could not be “naturally understood” by human reasoning would be expunged and what would be left was the true useful residue of guidance for conducting our lives. But it has become apparent to us that the natural world does not really offer the kind of guidance we seek. Rather, the natural world appears to be rather heartless. Whereas it is important for human beings to create sentiments such as “treat your neighbor as yourself,” in the world of nature that sentiment most commonly appears to be “treat your neighbor as your next meal.”

The philosopher Daniel Dennet describes a useful mutation in the biosphere as a “good trick.” And once a species masters that “good trick” it will exploit it ad nauseum. So, for instance, a finch that is born with a mutated crossed bill has an increased bio-mechanical strength that allows it to pry apart pine cones to get the seeds within. As long as there are plenty of pine cones, that new beak will soon spread out widely in that population of finches. Now most human mutation occurs, not within our biological make up, our phenotype, but within our mental constructions. The mind is the place where we spawn a great many “good tricks” that help us make our way through our world. But it is important to understand that “good tricks” in the natural world which cease being useful disappear rather quickly. If a pine bark beetle infests the pine trees and kills them all, the finch with a crossed bill had better find a new source of food or it will quickly follow the demise of the pine trees whose seeds it once ate. There is, however, no such robust check on human mental “good tricks.” The reverse is true in that human beings are infamous for continuing to believe things long after they have ceased being accurate. The checks and balances in the natural world are quite severe. The checks and balances in our mental world are far more elastic. If anything we tend to punish innovators and those who point out the fallacies in our most cherished ideas.

I have wondered long and hard, are we Unitarian Universalists guilty of using our “good trick” about natural law theory long after it had proven to be unfounded? This question has given me a lifetime of spiritual heartburn. It is for Unitarian Universalists the equivalent of rabbinic scholars discovering that the Torah was written by a couple of 2^nd century BCE Greeks in Alexandria (Egypt) who were only looking for ways to make Jews miserable, “Yeah, let’s add piles of arcane and unpleasant instructions. We’ll call it, h’mm, Leviticus. Brilliant!”

And so Becky and I have been doing a lot of studying about evolution, not because it is an interesting subject, but because if there was to be a way of securing our foundation upon any of kind of insights that were “natural” as against “supernatural,” such a foundation could only be constructed with evolutionary theory. That is a bit unfortunate. Evolution as a biological reality is not that difficult to understand. But evolution as a world view is far more complex. To highlight that difficulty, just think about the common term, “adaptation.” We speak about species “adapting” but that preferred understanding reveals our common misunderstanding about how the world works. No creature “adapts” in evolution. What does happen is that creatures mutate. Or think about the evolutionary phrase “natural selection.” Just as with “adaptation,” “selection” implies volition, as if something is doing the selecting. But in truth, no creature selects any capacity. Some new capacity only arrives because of a mutation - something which creatures cannot select.

The upshot of this research about evolutionary theory as a world view points out how often our understanding of evolution gets it exactly backwards. The way we commonly describe evolution reveals our preference for a reverse image of how it really works. That insight led me to a mutation of thought—that perhaps natural law theory is not wrong after all. The problem is that we have been using it backwards. What can that possibly mean?

Unitarian Universalist have been searching the natural world for clues about what is sacred, what is holy, what is God’s true domain. But if that search is getting it backwards it would mean that we could not find God or what is holy and sacred that way. Indeed, it has occurred to me that as far as our search for God’s identity is concerned, we could best understand our difficulty with this example: If we were fish, our question about God’s reality would be, “Where’s the water?” As I’ve said before, if we cannot sense something called “not God” we also cannot sense God. That is, we possess no means of getting outside of the God system. Perhaps, we could metaphorically describe it as the heart of the universe, the thingy that makes it go. That “going,” I would suggest, is not simply a matter for particle physicists to uncover. Particle physicists do not have a good means of describing how it is that we got from a big bang and supernova explosions to something as striking as a giraffe or a platypus. And it is a fundamental misunderstanding to believe that some kind of God outside of the universe intervened or intervenes so that we get giraffes and platypuses. Rather, it is the natural way of the universe to create such things; which seem to us astonishing—but which, in fact, the universe does all the time. Our problem is not discovering why such astonishing things exist, but why we resist seeing that there is not one particle of the whole shebang which is not astonishing.

The most important implication, however, of our getting natural law theory “backwards” is that perhaps the law works, not by revealing God or what is sacred to us, but instead by requiring that we reveal ourselves to God. People have long thought that if they could just develop the right technique they might be able to sneak up on God or force God out of the hidden shadows. But perhaps instead of trying to find God, we should focus on making sure that God can find us— that we can be found by God. That “being found”, in fact, seems to be the process of the universe, this non-stop process of creating and churning out amazing improbable possibilities one on top of another.

You and I, we, are improbable possibilities, and we are not the least bit comfortable with that reality. We do not rest easy in the fact of our vulnerability, our being subject to the large forces at play in the universe. We could be knocked off our blocks in a nanosecond; we know it and hate the fact. So what we typically do is hide from the universe. We imagine that if we are successful in our hiding, the universe will leave us alone and not cause harm to either ourselves or the ones we love. Oh, the many ingenious methods we have for hiding. You think not? Try these:

We routinely create self-contained mental universes, a force shield of intellection that we dare not lower. We hide behind a false front of executive certainty.

We are emotionally shielded, often afraid of telling others what we feel.

We self-censor ourselves all the time.

We want to appear as composed and collected and together as possible at all times.

We all have mental closets in which we keep things we want no one else to see.

We easily imagine that unless we are very careful others, particularly strangers, will take advantage of us, will misunderstand us, will judge us, will make us feel badly about ourselves, will compare us in an unflattering way to others, will hurt us.

I could go on. Perhaps I haven’t listed your favorite means of hiding. But whether listed or not, I think it is useful to ponder this common capacity for hiding. Of course it is true that there are good reasons for hiding. All these hiding techniques are understandable and sometimes justified—but they also happen to subvert the central process of the universe. Imagine if those earliest algae had decided, if they could, to not develop the strange new capacity for photosynthesis. “Oh no, we’re perfectly content being the algae that we already are thank you very much. We are going to remain “hidden” within our existing phenotypic comfort zone. We don’t need oxygen anyway!” Of course, because algae can’t think they couldn’t resist the way the universe works. Our dilemma is that we think that we can. But of course, thinking we can resist never makes it so.

The alternative, revealing ourselves to the world takes a tremendous amount of trust. Willingness to fail spectacularly, willingness to be judged, be harmed, be misunderstood—all of this revelation of oneself requires trust. It does no good to realize that what others think about you most frequently has more to do with their issues than your own—because those others are often not willing to admit their own prejudice. But this capacity for trust is in fact, the god thing in you. That trust is the catalyst by which all the disparate pieces of your life can be forged into a single compound, the elemental reality that is your life. And the truth of that compound, its godliness, resides in the extent to which you can throw open the shutters on your soul and be that amazed astonishment that is your life. The really good news, you do not have to do this by yourself for isolation is itself a form of hiding. Nothing gets created in this world in isolation but as part of the interdependent web of life. But when you are performing these aerial flights of trust in the company of others who are committed to the same revelation of god in you as god in them you will find yourself on the side of all creation. Other will mostly tolerate your periodic distempers and errors in judgment. And others will comfort you when tragedy has come your way. In truth, that’s how evolution works. Not every mutation gets to survive. There has to be a lot of mistakes made if a few good tricks are to be created. But overall, look at the amazing things that go on! Anything that can produce a giraffe, a platypus, you and I—that is a reality I will ever worship.

So you see the real religious question is not, does God exist; but do you exist? It’s not, “Where oh where can I find God—but can God find you!” Are you only pretending to be you? Can you see yourself, and every other human being, in fact all creatures, as part of one holy project? Don’t you feel deep within yourself that insistent urge to continue to uncoil the reality of who you are becoming? We, each and every one, we are god’s amazing dream on the forming edge of time.