Worship of nature may not seem to make any more sense than worship of alleged gods, but nature has something over gods: we can verify and know that nature is responsible for our origins and continued existence. At the very least, then, this would justify a bit of a respectful attitude towards nature and certainly justifies the feelings of awe and inspiration people experience when contemplating the natural order.
In Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, Ronald Aronson writes:
[S]cientific facts contain immense philosophical significance. At the very least, the structures and processes studied by science make it unseemly to thank a personal God for intervening to cause the pleasures of my hike, and my feeling of well-being makes a mockery of the notion of cosmic absurdity.
Astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology tell us that my moment of gratitude while hiking opens a window of awareness into some of our most intimate yet impersonal relationships with the cosmic and natural forces and processes that make us possible.
Our (or Meursault's) subjective reasons for taking pleasure in the sun are linked to objective facts: the life-giving properties of its precise range of warmth and its exact amount of light. It is near enough to Earth but not too near, far enough from it but not too far. Any greater or lesser distance would make it too cold or too hot to sustain life.
The sun is an objective fact. What the sun does for us is an objective fact. Our dependence on the sun is an objective fact. There are a lot more fact surrounding our relationship with the sun than there are surrounding any alleged gods from any of the myriad of cultures that have existed.
What's more, those facts arguably contradict claims of the existence of gods because they reveal that our existence is dependent upon the operation of natural forces, not the will of any supernatural beings. It makes far more sense to focus on the facts of nature and our dependence upon nature than fairy tales of gods and other supernatural forces.
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