Why atheism? This universe, billions of light years vast, still ain't big enough for both an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity and the Third Reich. Yes, since you ask, I've read the Book of Job. Such a happy ending, what with him getting new children to replace the ones that were killed to test his faith.

Most of the steps from nothingness to us are explained by modern science as being happenstance and the result of purely physical processes. The history of science, and of it's conflict with religion, leads me to believe that other steps, currently not understood, will be similarly explained. The more we learn about the world around us, the less reason we have to believe we are anything but a lucky accident.

Lucky? Well, I sure think so. I'm glad to be alive. That leads into ...

Why spirituality? What do I mean why? Why am I thinking about this? Why do I want spirituality? Why do I think spirituality is compatible with my disbelief in the Great Spirit?

I'm thinking about this because my dear friend Carol, to whom I dedicate this, asked me to pray for her father. The very same Carol who prayed for my father's recovery from a nasty case of kidney cancer compounded by a bad artery to his good kidney. Carol, please forgive my disbelief, my intellect cannot come up with the least shred of connection between your prayers and my father's remarkable recovery. I am nevertheless, from the bottom of my heart and throughout my entire being, deeply grateful for those prayers. Thank you Carol.

Carol's youngest brother died yesterday. Friday he was alive and healthy. Saturday, dead. The sort of meaningless death that reinforces my belief that the universe has no purpose, or at least no good one. The sort of meaningless death that David, my own youngest brother, died.

The very first thing Carol asked was that I pray for her father, who is in poor health and taking his son's death very hard indeed. I have no idea to whom I'm praying, but I am praying. I am praying for Carol's father to have the strength he's going to need. I'm praying for her mother, and for her other brothers. And while I'm about it, I'm praying for good weather at the five airports Carol will pass through tomorrow to reach her family.

So, how do I reconcile all this prayer with my undiminished atheism? Gimme a minute, I'm working on it.

Physics explains chemistry, which explains biology, which explains psychology. Yeah, right. In one sense, that's all true. I have no doubt that we are the result of purely physical processes.

For whatever that's worth, which is damn little because ...

We are barely able, with the aid of supercomputers, to explain the details of the behaviour of the simplest atom based on the laws of physics. Maybe a few years down the road we'll cover middling complex atoms, or even simple molecules. Most of the science of chemistry is derived from observation, constrained to be consistent with, but not derived from, physics.

The same, only more so, applies to the transition from chemistry to biology, and from biology to psychology, and from psychology to love. Knowing that I love and am loved tells me that there is much more than the scientific facts. Not, as many would have it, more above. Rather, there is more between. Between every step on the path from particle physics to love, there is more mystery than we can ever unravel. There is room for spirituality, not above science but permeating it's every nook and cranny.

So, physics made me pray, but physics is not the reason I pray. Evolutionary biology explains my first baby's first smile, but not how it felt to watch it, nor why I remember it thirty years later. The random but orderly motion of waves/particles/both causes, but does not explain, how it feels to lay on my back watching pine trees in the breeze while holding the woman I love.

I can say there is no God, and I can say may God be with you, and I can mean both at the same time.