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 worshipped 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.