Assuming one of the religions in this world is correct, how would I find that out? Where would I begin my search? Without any a priori judgment as to which religion is correct – which is, after all, what I am presumably trying to determine – it seems the only thing to do would be to select and examine them randomly, but this is clearly unsatisfactory. Even if one of the religions in this world was the true one, I would probably never find it by this method. As “The Cosmic Shell Game” argues, there are so many religions on this planet that one lifetime would not be enough to examine all or even most of them in any acceptable level of detail.
Nevertheless, of the ones I have studied so far, my preliminary conclusion is that they are all incorrect; I have examined them and found them wanting. Most religions championed by people were obviously invented by people, and the tenets of their belief betray their origins. Their gods are just like human beings, only slightly larger. They become angry and then forgive, they show jealousy and favoritism, they can be surprised, disgusted, grieved or dismayed, they bear grudges and love those who stroke their egos, and they are capable of both tremendous good and terrible evil. The way most religions reflect the prejudices of their creators is all too obvious: what these people imagine to be a window through which they can see God is in truth a mirror held up to their own faces. …
What if there is something out there, something that no one has discovered yet, something we have all overlooked simply because it is too vast and too unlike us? Beyond the savagery and the madness, beyond the fervent hopes and hot-headed delusions, beyond the pretenses and the postures – beyond the human-created religions that are above all else too small, viewing this world, this dust speck, this pale blue dot – or even one small local region of it – as the all-important stage on which the cosmic drama is played out, while the entire inconceivable vastness of the rest of the universe is simply a backdrop – beyond all this, could there be a much greater god? Could there be an entity “whose dreams are constellations”, as Robert Ingersoll put it, and whose individual flashing neurons are suns? When we look into the night sky, could we be viewing the latticework of thought on a scale beyond our comprehension? Could the entire universe be merely a fleeting idea in the mind of a being so vast we could not recognize it for what it is any more than an ant could recognize a skyscraper as the product of design? …
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