Ian On The Red Dot

My friend asked this question on his blog and my answer is reproduced below.
———————————————-

I didn’t read your blog for a while. Too busy trying to figure out what next to do for our game. I am stuck. Pass, get new tiles or just go for a below ten points word. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

I think I shared with you that I am a practical atheist. I believe that there is a God(god) but live my life like he doesn’t exist.

One question which I have always asked myself is why I believe he/she/it (for convenience, I will use ‘he’ for the rest of this comment) exists.

And I have come to believe that it is because I grew up with Christian parents. Indoctrination. Brainwashing. Even with my training as an engineer and grounding in science I cannot let go of that belief. It isn’t easy. Part of the reason is the fear of hell. Seriously, you would need to grow up in a Christian family to really understand how deeply ingrained that fear is. Of course, some people would claim that they want to experience the goodness of Heaven, but I find it hard if not impossible to separate these two reasons in the Christian doctrine.

I would like to point out there is actually a difference in being religious and believing in the existence of a god. For example, I am most definitely not religious by whatever standards a church might have. There is a term for people like me. Backslider. But I do believe in a god.

I bring this distinction up because I think the questions why you are religious and why you believe in the existence of a god(s) have two different answers.

The reason why a person might be religious is because they see the benefits it brings or fear the consequences of not believing. These benefits and consequences play to needs some of us have and we use Religion to meet that need. Some people are comfortable with using religion to meet that needs through what seems like suspension of logic and other aren’t. People like you might meet the same needs in different ways.

Of course, there are people who want the best of both worlds. They want to believe in a god and also want to reconcile that belief with science. I am one such person. Personally, I don’t believe there is any contradiction between Creationism and Darwinism because I do not subscribe to the notion that the Bible is a complete work that contains the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Like how a plant grows through the planting of the seed by the gardener, god could have created us by laying that seed which through the process of evolution, things have come to be.

Which of course goes back to the question. Why do you believe in a god? Partly like I said above is because I grew up in a Christian family. But another reason is my mind cannot wrap around the notion that all these laws (e.g Law of Gravity) and processes (e.g Evolution) just came to exist. I see order in the physical world and cannot fathom how order could be established unless some sort of engineering was in place. However, this reason betrays me because by subscribing to it I am already believing the very thing I want to refute. Which is how did god even come into being? How did god even come to exist? Now how do you explain that. You can’t. It is by faith.

The faith stems from the notion that there needs to be a starting point. Some point that you can pin down in the narrative of the universe and the human species. Scientists have their Big Bang, people like me have our gods. The question about a starting point is interesting, because even if you talk about the Big Bang, where was the original mass and energy from if energy cannot be created or destroyed (I think scientists are working on this)? Where is the starting point?

So why do I believe in a god? Because my human mind is linear. I need to see a start and an end in this narrative and it is by sheer chance of circumstance (I was born in a Christian family), selective reading (I read more books that support the existence of a god then books that don’t) and mental convenience (using god as a starting point is easier than using the big bang theory or equivalent because you need to explain those by the standards of science while I can just say faith for the former).

Of course I would like to justify my faith by saying that I have been touched by his presence. But seriously…
———————————————-

In related stuff, why does God hate amputees?