I was marvelling at a tree the other day. What a splendid thing it is in and of itself, I mused. Quite pleasing to the eye and functional. It can make oxygen, provide shade, be lived in by birds and insects, bear fruit, be scampered up by possums, hung off by bats and it holds the soil together so it doesn’t blow away. It doesn’t take much to run them either, a bit of water and some nutrients; otherwise, completely solar powered. Now, I can’t make a tree but I can make sense of one. I understand how a tree works from books and Wikipedia but that does not, in any way, make me marvel at it less. In fact, it’s even more impressive that it does what it does and is what it is, given how complicated the operation is.

But because we can’t physically make a tree, we are, as children, often taught to assume that there must be a supernatural being in our image that can. And because there is such a being that is so much more clever and powerful than we are, we need to worship it lest it get cross and deny us that tree upon which we rely for air, food, shade and so on; for this supernatural being can suspend the laws of physics and biology that we read about in books and on Wikipedia, so we had better watch out. But I’m not at all sure it necessarily follows that because there is such a thing as a tree, that someone or something needed to create it. Maybe trees just are and always were—or came to be, as we did, from something else. Maybe things just come into being and cease to be on their way from having been one thing to being something else. In other words, if we’re going to worship anything, why not cut out the middleman and just worship the tree.