Lately, I have been giving a lot of thought to belief: what I believe and why I believe it. Since I have recently decided to fully explore and express my beliefs, I decided to share my thoughts with the community at large.
Around fifteen years ago, I became disillusioned with organized religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular. Ironically, these thoughts started to develop while attending one of my church’s youth mission trips to a small camp for underprivileged children. This was not my first time to go on this mission trip, but this time something just did not feel right. The expectation that we, as teenagers, would evangelize to the children — a scant seven or eight years younger than us — attending the camp did not sit right we me. After we returned from the camp, the youth group would generally hold a “Mission Night” where we were expected to share our experiences and how we influenced the lives of these children. I never felt comfortable attending these sessions but, that year, one of our seventh graders shared what was, to him, a profound experience. I came away from that night thinking that he was entirely too young to have felt like that and it really disturbed me. Let me clarify just a bit: I believe that we did some real good at the camp. However, I felt like I was helping more by maintaining and improving the campgrounds than by witnessing to the children. After this last mission trip that I attended, organized religion was never the same for me.
As I graduated high school and moved on into college, my religious views changed dramatically. As I became more focused on science and technology, I began to see the beauty of the cosmos as something that could stand on its own instead of being created for the sole use of humanity. With the thoughts and dreams of other worlds took hold, I strongly doubted the Christian mythos because, why with all of the worlds in the universe, would Earth be specially set aside with a Savior? After reading Gregory Benford’s COSM
College was not the end of my spiritual and religious thinking, though. As time moved on, I started to believe that, given my thoughts on the nature of the universe and how a deity would be forced to behave given that nature, that the universe did not need a deity at all. Any deity that started the universe and could not interfere would be, by definition, outside of the universe. If the deity was outside of the universe and unable to interact with the universe then it may as well not exist. I had completed my transformation to a full-blown atheist.
I want to close with a quote from Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithrus, Baal, Thor, Wotan, The Golden Calf, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
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If you assume the minimal set of beliefs that would qualify as a theism – that there’s a deity, and it created the universe – then it has to follow that examining said universe will reveal something about the deity’s methods and intentions regarding it. That’s something more primal than any scriptures layered on top. It’s doubtful that even the creator of a universe could falsify or repudiate the universal principles that it authored – though maybe it could obfuscate them… I think I’ve invented the field of divine cryptanalysis. Anyway, what I don’t follow is how a lawful universe necessarily requires divine non-interference. If events proceed deterministically, everything can be arranged in finely tuned initial conditions. If there’s unresolvable indeterminacy at the quantum level, that leaves room for spooky action. Either way, it would not be detectable by the inmates, unless if maybe God were sloppy and left statistical anomalies in data people were paying attention to. And all of the above is assuming time and causality actually exist.