I think it's time for him to make a comeback. Get back in the ring, Stormbringer. You've rested long enough.

So let's take a look at our two competitors. First up, the reigning champion, meteorology.

Meteorology holds that all weather is based on specific patterns, namely natural laws. Meteorologists and other scientists are presently hard at work discovering those laws. More accurately, they are busy building models which describe what weather does, and why, ever more accurately. There are a zillion factors that go into shaping weather, and gradually scientists are discovering more and more of those factors and how they interact.

By discovering those factors, and what patterns they make, scientists can predict how the weather will change based on what is going on at any given moment. For now, they are notoriously bad at it compared to other branches of science, but that's because weather is ridiculously complex and taking everything into account isn't easy.

Now, in the other corner we have Zeus and the religion of ancient Greece. Zeus is master of the skies and thus responsible for weather. If he is wrathful, you get thunderstorms. If he is in a good mood, hopefully you'll get clear skies. Presumably, other shades of moods will result in other kinds of weather (ignoring for now the place of other gods, who also have some influence on the matter).

The problem with Zeus's activity as an explanation of the weather is that it really isn't that helpful. A very skilled priest might be able to decipher the omens that precede a given meteorological phenomenon, but he will still look like a clever child next to a meteorologist when it comes to weather prediction.

So Zeus has had no choice but to stay in retirement. If he were to come out, he'd just be a laughing stock in a world where science can explain the natural world so much better than religion (which has pretty much given up even on trying).

But now it's time for a change. Prepare for Meteorology vs. Zeus II: This Time It's Impersonal.

What got Zeus knocked out of the championship the first time round was the belief in free will. If Zeus is responsible for the weather, and the weather is in theory completely predictable, then Zeus's actions must also be completely predictable. Meaning Zeus has no free will.

But if a god has no free will and humans do, that makes gods inferior to humans. Religion says that can't happen. So Zeus must have free will and it can't be true that the weather follows predictable patterns.

An instant K.O., I'm sure you'll agree. The success of meteorology, limited though it may be, demonstrates that the weather follows predictable patterns. If a religion says otherwise, that religion must be wrong.

So how can Zeus recover from such a humiliating defeat?

Using the truth. The truth is that humans have no free will because they have no selves. There is no self that stands outside reality and says "even though the sum of past and present environmental influences should cause me to do X, I will do Y instead". You can confirm this for yourself by observing your choices - can you see an entity that makes them in reality, or do they just happen?

And if humans don't have free will, then the gods are not inferior to them when they don't have it either. The wiser of the ancients knew this, and if you dig deep into pagan religions, you will find admissions that the gods are fully as bound by fate as humans. The religions which try to deny this - like Christianity - do so at the cost of a cascade of paradoxes.

How does this bring Zeus back into the ring?

If Zeus has no free will, and we don't either, then his actions are (in theory) fully predictable, without in any way reducing his divine majesty. In other words, if the gods exist, then they and their actions are necessarily part of the clockwork mechanism of the universe just like the rest of us, not spectators who interfere on a whim.

If so, whether you're trying to comprehend the ways in which the will of Zeus works or studying the phenomena which affect the weather, as long as you're applying the same level of scientific rigour, you will get basically the same results.

No-self and its corollaries level the playing field between secularism and theism as models for explaining the natural world. Admittedly, there are still reasons to pick some models over others - wait until meteorology gets back into the ring waving Occam's Razor, for example. 

But now it's a real contest of equally effective models for explaining the world, without being compelled to either give up science, give up belief in superhuman entities or perform ridiculous mental contortions in order to reconcile them.

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