Stephen:

Thanks for the comments. Of course I think. (Ergo sum, as somebody once observed.) And so do you. But I don’t think the universe thinks. I think it’s just you who think it thinks. As I said in my piece, this whole Great Cosmic Mind business is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection. Our puny minds can’t conceive a reality different from our own, like Xenophanes’ horses and lions.

Sure, mind—consciousness, subjective experience, qualia—exists in the universe. That’s an irreducible fact of our own being; it’s what Descartes meant by his famous maxim. But it’s simply part of the natural universe, an emergent phenomenon exhibited by a particularly complex arrangement and behavior of matter. It’s we, creatures within the universe, doing the thinking, not the universe itself.

Are there conscious minds elsewhere in the universe? Undoubtedly; it’s inconceivable that this phenomenon could have arisen just once among all those 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You might even imagine some unknown interaction among the stars and galaxies, or the interstellar dust, producing an emergent consciousness on the cosmic scale like the one generated by our brains. I think it’s highly unlikely, but even if true it would just be another natural entity within the realm of Being, not the ultimate source of Being itself.

You say “the One God IS the mechanisms and natural laws in action.” That’s really Spinoza’s take, as my friend Martin points out elsewhere on this thread. I’m more sympathetic to that one, but I still don’t think it’s quite right. The God I’m talking about, the one I say I believe in as an atheist, is deeper, subtler, more fundamental than that. Not only why these particular “mechanisms and natural laws” and not some others, but why are there natural laws at all? Why is there nature? Why are there laws? Why is there Existence?