When you pray to God, what are you praying to?

Science is now in the position to tell us what praying to "God the Creator" means.  It means praying to evolution!

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that evolution, and nothing else, created all living things. For a refutation of creationist claims, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html  Or read, Why Evolution is True

Praying to evolution is hopeless.   Evolution is a blind, uncaring process, not a being.  Evolution is not the kind of thing that could "hear" our prayers, or care about our prayers, or do anything about our prayers.

Otoh, mindfulness meditation, something that could be called a form of prayer (but not a prayer to anything or for anything) is, in my experience, quite valuable.  The reason is straightforward: mindfulness meditation requires no intellectual baggage.

Equating evolution with God immediately clears away massive amounts of confusion:

1. All theological debates become moot. For example, the question of why "evil" exists is transformed.  As theology, the question disappears.  As a topic for inquiry in the biological sciences it has great interest.  It leads to the notion of  Evolutionary Stable Strategy which is well worth a separate blog post.

2. All concerns about "what God wants us to do" disappear.  All morality, or lack thereof, comes from us (by way of our evolutionary makeup)!

3. The belief that "everything has a purpose" or "everything is for the best" is seen as the risible nonsense that it is.  Evolution has no purpose!

Before any of you despairs, I would like to point out one not-so-obvious consequence of evolution as designer: namely that our understanding of evolution does not directly affect the world as it is in any way!  That is, the world we inhabit, in which love, morality, purpose, truth, beauty exist, is not affected by the theory of evolution.  They still exist, just as they have always existed.  The only difference is that we are seen as the authors of love, morality, purpose, truth and beauty, not some non-existent God!

When we rid ourselves of childish, pre-scientific notions of God, we free ourselves to ask much more interesting questions, such as, "what evolutionary forces act on us and societies so as to affect our choices?"