I am an athiest...

So if I were to accept a notion of religion and God I would focus on the concept of humans being linked together outside of just their bodies. The thinking conscience of a person is like a piece of software. While the software must run on some hardware, the wetware of the brain and nervous system, the brain is not the essence of the software. The thoughts and experiences are to the brain like software is to a processor and a hard drive. So the individual is a unique composition of thought and consciousness that can be disassociated from the general design of physical storage and processing systems that are common to all people. In the simplest case this is the difference between the minds of two identical twins born into different cultures. So for that metaphysical network of thoughts in each human I can translate the term more religious people call the soul.

People with these unique souls are not alone and they live in a complex world where many people and ideas surround each person. The ideas are absorbed into some people, rejected by others, and moved on. Every individual has a choice albeit not an absolute choice given predispositions to various vices or habits to accept or reject each idea. The ideas themselves exist in another conceptual plane from the souls. The ideas or memes are transportable and can be timeless transcendent things that exist beyond any single soul because they can be passed like a bible’s wisdom from one generation to the next or even something as simple as a fashion trend or fad.

So the bigger picture from the individual is the network of souls and the ideas that can be shared among them that are selected by each soul. While no intelligent being designs these souls and the network around them they create a collective evolution of ideas in a way similar to how we have an evolution of genes and bodies that transcends the capacity of any individual. The desire in each intelligent soul, man’s real difference from other animals, to live in a better world for themselves when the soul can learn ideas that lead towards this goal can be achieved by following ideas that lead to a more beneficial collective society. This collective world of ideas operating outside of the individual but in the world of everyone is a system greater than the individual and something the individual needs to be aware of, sensitive to, and attend to. The evolution that occurs within this world of memes is real athough not entirely physical and is easy to see including the evolution of products like cars, government constitutions and laws, religious beliefs, languages, and variation in the philosophy of generations.

The evolution of thoughts and ideas does have it’s own apparent moving will just like evolution of a genetic animal appears to have a will to improve the quality of the animal produced by the genes until the animal appears almost perfectly adapted into an ecosystem. This apparent will of selection while not controlled by any single member of society is as real as time moving in only one direction. Cars will get better, religions will evolve to align with science, science will discover mysteries, people will discover better ways to govern themselves, and religions will become more valuable to creating social groups and support for individuals. The collective transcendent and evolving pool of memes being not so randomly selected including both good ones and bad ones is the closest that I come to a conception of what most people call the will of a God.