The Sherlockians! discussion

hello everyone.
i am the newest member to the forum and i am happy to meet you.

i have a question that i have just asked in another group, but just in case i will post it here
(don't get me wrong, anything that involves Sherlock Holmes i will be the first to participate in it)
this is my question:

does Sherlock Holmes believe in higher power?

and does he believe in god or in a goddess?
because i heard he was worshiping Athens, the goddess of wisdom.

at the end of "His Last Bow" Sherlock Holmes says
"there is a storm coming, but its God's wind non the less"
and at the end of "the Bascombe valley mystery" he says
"God help us" "Why does fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter's words, and say, 'There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes."
also at the illustrious client he said
"The wages of sin, Watson - the wages of sin" "Sooner or later it will always come. God knows, there was sin enough"

and in "The Naval Treaty" he says:

"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."
does that mean that Sherlock Holmes believed in a higher power ?
and does he believe in god or in a goddess?
because i heard he was worshiping Athens, the goddess of wisdom

I have never heard about Sherlock worshipping Athena. But he does believe in God. The passage you quote from Naval Treaty shows it very plainly.

Another newby here, hi everyone!
There isn't much in the stories to suggest Holmes' beliefs, but it's fairly safe to assume that they would more than likely mirror those of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. ACD had a Catholic upbringing only to foresake it in later life, I would say that likewise Holmes began as a Catholic and ended as a lapsed Catholic.
Phrases like 'God knows' and 'but for the grace of God' don't really suggest much about his outlook - I'd use them in my books and I'm not religious at all.

I can't recall any specific quote which would provide a clear answer to this, never thought about it much. But this is what I think:
Sherlock Holmes believes in things that are visible and that which can be deduced by scientific reasoning. He abhors superstitions and does not believe mythical facts. But also, he does not reject any theory which cannot be conclusively disproved based on such facts or reasoning.
I'm not a Christian, but from what I know, there are things about Jesus Christ which appear to be true and then there are things which are totally mythical and unscientific. There are many people who do not believe that Jesus ever existed. But it is easier to prove something existed, much more difficult to prove that something did not exist.
You can cite just one example and say that if this is true, then obviously Jesus was real. But one will have to disprove all such facts and yet he wouldn't have conclusively proved that Jesus didn't exist at all.
So Sherlock does not go against religious beliefs, but also does not follow them strictly. In The Solitary Cyclist, I suppose there is a woman who is married to a person by force. Sherlock says that such a marriage does not hold good. That means he believes in such things. But I do not remember Sherlock ever having visited a Church or praying to any other god.
So I would say that Holmes respects religion and religious beliefs, but does not follow them.

It's hard to say what Holmes believes as Doyle didn't seem to think about the character so much as the money he would make off the stories. There are tons of inconsistencies throughout the Canon. Characters don't always mirror their creators' beliefs, though. Sometimes authors experiment with ideas by letting their characters "try on" new ways of being. Look at Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. She was very much high church Anglican (and her prejudices towards Jews is kind of notorious), and yet Lord Peter isn't religious at all and may be agnostic if not right out atheistic. He does, however, seem to have inherited her prejudice towards Jews just in terms of how he speaks of them in terms of stereotypes.

But back to Sherlock--I don't know that he's necessarily religious (in terms of accepting a particular creed) as much as acknowledging a kind of Prime Mover. If he went to Oxbridge, depending upon the college he attended, he must have at least publicly avowed some sort of Christian belief as I think the colleges were still closed to Jews and Catholics at this time. (A lot of doctors like Conan Doyle went to school in Scotland or France because as Catholics they weren't able to enter universities in England).